I saw the same thing. Glad to know it wasn't me. I was wondering how an app with zero reviews got to be #1
It seems to be back in order. We dropped from 19th to 24th almost instantly, and Soosiz and I Dig It completely disappeared from the list (the two other games I remembered).
yeah, before this all Top Paid and Top Free apps listing are gone for each category... now when they came back, they came back with what might seem to be apps recently updated! WTH is going over there Apple???
Curiously it seems to have worked in my favor at the moment. My game, Charmed, shot up from #163 to #27 paid app in US Board Games! Should be interesting to see how this affects sales today and onward. They screwed up my release date when Charmed came out too (it was marked with the submission date as the release date), so I figure they owe me some extra exposure!
We were not featured as a New App on our first release. Oddly enough, when our update was featured as a New App, it had little to no effect on downloads. I'm sure other developers have a counter-story. When we hit What's Hot, that made a difference.
Hey I saw ur ads on some cool sites... does that help sales? I have asked a few other dev friends and they said its kinds hard to get the return back frm sales... PM me to discuss
In general, I don't think banner ads do anything immediately nor indivudually. What they do is provide brand exposure- if you keep seeing the same thing over and over, you kind of get the feeling that it might be a big deal. It requires a lot of time and patience. How many Evony ads have you seen? Aren't they annoying? They seem to work (sorry if you don't know what I am talking about).l
Yeah, I have seen Evony everywhere... you might be right but a small ad in a corner of a website for a limited amount of time might not have enough impact to create any "brand exposure" It also gets quite expensive, I have contacted a lot of websites and price ranges from 200 to 5000 for a month of dedicated ad. Just my two cents
The supposed rule of thumb of advertising is people need to see it 3 times before they recognize it. Of course there are diminishing returns, I think it's after like 10 times people get sick of the ads and it hurts the brand.
The ads I placed made zero difference in sales. In the first few days after the ads went live, I got a good number of click throughs, but that quickly fell off after about 3 days. I think people get used to seeing the same ad over and over, and they ignore it. The clicks did not translate to sales though. I advertised on TA, PocketGamer, and AppModo. I also had a video review on www.dailyappshow.com, but the review was very badly done. He spent over half the video with the game showing the Game Over screen. So far the advertising has all been a waste of money.
Thanks for your quality insight, buddy. Yeah, advertisement is very expensive. I mean a skinning of STP for a day costs 125 bucks. Also,I don't know if you peeps remember that Catch A Mouse app, they bought a skin+ad spots on TA for a few days. The app showed up in the lower strategy and puzzle sections for a while and now it has evaporated from those sections of the US app store. I guess Ads dont really work, even on quality sites like TA. I have monitored a lot of apps, I see their ads (big ones) here on TA/PG/STP but these apps dont show anywhere in the top charts. I have also tried admob, didn't see any drastic increase in sales... What works is Apple putting your app out there in the featured areas
yeah, I would recommend you updating the ad every few days. Change the graphics/content/color/everything. This will get you more clicks since returning users would click again as they will see something different/new
Anybody have any experience with using more "alternative" forms of advertising and have any experiences to share? I'm talking about things like having a Facebook page, a Twitter stream to follow, posting in forums, having a You Tube channel, getting prominent app blogs to review your apps, etc. Essentially, have any of you tried to build momentum for your games by "advertising" them in social media, blogs and forum type channels instead of straight up banner ads? I ask because banner ads are incredibly difficult to make work for you, as some of you have seen. To work effectively, your banner ads not only have to be extremely well made, eye catching, interesting once the eye is caught, but they have to appear at just the right places on just the right web sites that the people most likely to actually purchase the apps are using. And, of course, the other part of that equation is the fact that people just don't trust advertising and tend to ignore it. People DO tend to trust other people and social networking sites (word of mouth). For example, Ken, I never noticed an ad for Charmed until you and I had spoken through email a few times. Then I started noticing the ads, because I was already familiar with the game. That may simply be my own innate ability to filter all advertising out of my way automatically. I tend to only ever see ads for stuff I am already familiar with or for things I have personally worked on (i.e. I always seem to notice my agency's client's banner ads all over the web!). So, anyone have any experience with "alternative marketing" and how that worked for you? Q
The App Store has never been hacked, and the second question is so stupid it doesn't deserve an answer.
