Luke I see you don't have any more clicks from 3 days ago so how is about your downloads are you doing some thousands per day right now?
Unfortunately I launch my app as free. Now it has been a month and I changed it to paid. Can I get the same exposure if I change it to free again some weeks later?
voodooetc Right now I am seeing about 1k downloads a day. willzeng I'm no expert on the app store but to get the full effect I think you would need to wait 3-4 weeks minimum. I've been told by FAAD that you should wait 3 months, but I am not sure what they based this on. I personally did a little over 3 weeks with Superflick as paid. Which resulted in about 2k downloads over 3 days. Not terribly effective. Without other campaigns I don't think it's worth it, you really need to combine things.
Thanks for your answer and advice. Later I'll study it over. Currently I'm thinking another thing and won't invest anymore (time, effort, money) in any future uncertainties. The very thing is, you spend several months on your app, put it in the most front market, believing it will bring back what worths your effort, or even better, yet surprisingly find that there is just NO reward, not even in the simplest form of some consolatory attentions. There are only attractive offers saying 'give me more money if u don't want your previous endeavors lost', which reminds you of something like the pattern of a trap. Plus you see quit a few not-so-good apps ranked highly in the top lists, which by now only suggests frauds everywhere, you begin to wonder: have I been tricked into something? Is this the not-so-bad ecosystem I once believed in? Time to stay aloof and cool down for a period.
willzeng Don't get down about it dude, it's not easy and if it was there would be no money to go round. Everyone would have an equal share of the pie. The truth is, if you're not in the top 20% you really won't make any money. The app store is all about effective marketing, not about how good the game is. Sure good games are easier to market, but a great game with no marketing will never survive. This just makes things hard for dev's like us that put months of effort into our latest work and then struggle to make a dime :-S It takes time, skill, money, contacts, knowledge and hard bloody work to get things off the ground!
Thanks. Your thread here definitely helps and I'll learn from it. Wish you great success first. However I just worry about the big picture...I wonder if situations today are caused by, yet in turn hungers more for, and finally would become worse due to things like FAAD?
Well think about it this way, things like FAAD would not be used by big publishers if they did not work when used correctly (i.e. combined with other initiatives)
FAAD is total fake We used FAAD to promote our game. We try to give them our own tracking link. They rejected it. They don`t give us any statistics after or online stats. But we decided to run with them because we saw the Appannie stats for other apps promoted with FAAD. So we were with our FTP game on their site, on their push and app, and Twitter, and FB news. And NOTHING! A couple of southands of clicks, no more. Be sure, FAAD is a huge fake. DO NOT USE IT. They have no any life audience. Just look at Xyologic and you will see their montly audience. What did they do when we start to claim? They give us a small banner on their site with 5000 daily users. It was like a joke. We totally lost our money. De aware.
Pro Tip of the day: you can get stats for any bit.ly link by appending a + to the end. Example: I go to FAAD and I pick a random one on the calendar. I pick Call of Mini: Last Stand. I find the bit.ly link is http://bit.ly/HUquqs and i just add a + to the end so I get http://bit.ly/HUquqs+. Fiddling around with it, I see how many clicks in the last 30 days including the day of the promo. I switch to TOTAL and I see they've used FAAD before and it was much more successful the first time. I can see stats for every single app on the site. This is must-do homework for anyone looking to throw a couple of grand that way. It doesn't show everything, but it's a good starting point. Make sure to cross reference against AppAnnie and other data mining sites.
Hi, I just wanted to add my experience on this. A few months ago, I launched my app Ice Math Ninja I was noticed by a service called AppGratis (it is similar to Free App A The Day, but it seems to be more popular overseas (France, Spain, Austria, Brazil, etc)). They asked if they could feature my app, and I said yes. They did not charge me or anything (perhaps you could contact them and submit your app, the email of the main contact is [email protected] ). On the day my app was promoted by AppGratis I got over 23,000 downloads, but when I made the app paid again, it went back down to normal levels. In my experience having the app promoted by a free service, didn't help much. I've heard that people that look for free apps, usually don't like buying apps. I've also heard that people that get apps for free usually leave bad reviews, because they don't really care about your app, they just download anything that is free (in my case, I didn't get negative reviews, but I didn't get any reviews at all from those 23,000). Jorge
Real Stat I just want to add the REAL stat about FAAD. For example recently promoted game Car Toons! with Free App A Day just got only 10 000 clicks. You can see their stat: https://bitly.com/SRVtbt+ So if your landing page CTR is about 10%, you`ll get 1000 downloads. You can see the statidtics for Fragger too: https://bitly.com/GQiucR+ We are watching FAAD about a couple of month but didn`t discover any campaign with more than 20-25K clicks. Most of all do not reach 10K clicks.
Not so good earnings after free promotion We had poor downloads after two relatively big free promotions. We've got $880 in the next week after 205 000 downloads. Next time it was $670 after 316 000 downloads. BUT we have a very good recommendation for MUCH BETTER monetization: use Chartboost, offer your game for other advertisers and you will earn thousands of dollars after promotions like we had. This is far better then to wait how much you will get after switching back to paid.
