Marketing and Revenues - Week 1

I thought I would disclose a warts and all appraisal week by week of my success of each game I launch.  Being that Astavoid was my first game there was little blueprint to work to other than read around and get a sense of what others were doing.

I released Astavoid on the 19th April 2012, a Thursday.  I am led to believe that this is important as far as the Appstore is concerned as this is their changeover day so launching on a thursday allow you to build up downloads, recognition etc over the week so more chance of getting featured the following week.  A wives tale I'm not sure.

I wrote a very basic website to support the launch on my main Parachuting Frog website as well as create a gameplay teaser on YouTube.

To be honest I'm not that happy with it as I don't have anything more than an iPhone 4 and a GorillaMobile tripod so the quality is pretty amateur but heh I'm learning.

For prerelease I also have two twitter accounts mygamingproject and parachutingfrog that help spread the word and keep people you to date.

For launch I released to Google Play, GetJar, Amazon App Store for Android, Amazon Appstore for Kindle, as well as the Appstore for the universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod including Retina support up to IPad 3.  So I had most bases covered apart from Nook Color which I am still waiting on administration.

I started off with a soft launch because there were some key upgrades I wanted released and approved by Apple before telling the world. Alas there review process takes so long (7 days for first version and a further 6 for the update) makes a coordinated multi platform release quite tough.

So on day of launch the only marketing was tweets and the trigger process that kicks in over the internet when new apps are out.  The weekend of 21 and 22 April I did two things.  I submitted my app to about 30 sites android review and probably 20 for Apple.  The frustration I have found with review sites it would appear is that nobody is prepared to write a review for free unless you have connections or prepared to pay for it, or wait a long time for it to become popular.  A little chicken and egg.

The reason I didn't want to pay too much in marketing in the first instance is that my game is free so I needed to understand what the click rates would be and recycle it into marketing.  The exception to this was a PR release I did via prMac.  prMac has various packages but for a reasonable $20 you can release a press release which can be distributed to over 700 press agencies. So I did that and here is my press release.

So now you know my prerelease and marketing efforts lets have a look at what the first week's downloads look like.

	19th April	20th April	21st April	22nd April	23rd April	24th April	25th April
iOS	1130	379	157	130	75	36	18	1925
Android	3	1	1	5	2	5	2	19
Kindle Fire	1	6	2	0	2	4	0	15
	1134	386	160	135	79	45	20

As you can see, and to my surprise, I had a massive launch day surge.  I can only assume this came about from twitter accounts and "watcher" services that broadcast when new games are out.  I have quite an eye catching icon logo and unusual name so seemed to catch the imagination of some.

The interesting thing is that iOS tailed off dramatically after that first day.  Android, however, given the same marketing efforts has had pitiful downloads.

So this is all very interesting but what does this equate to in terms of hard cash.  Well as I mentioned I am doing the first one as free so revenues are purely down to advertising revenues.  I have positioned ads on the front menu screen, pause menu as well as the game over screen.  This should mean that even the shortest of games should put in two ad requests.  The problem however with ad revenues is you get nothing for impressions but only for those that are clicked on.

The next area of analysis of how the people are of my app are engaging with it.  This is where Corona SDK provides a very useful tool called Launchpad that is by default is switched on for pro subscription developers that provide insight into these trends.

The first is the session length.  You will see that from this stat that iPad is by far the most popular device and that most are only playing my game for a maximum of 39 seconds.  The very nature of my game being a quick pick up and play is working against me in making it sticky enough to get those additional ad rotations in and therefore money.

The next is sessions.  The peak of sessions corresponds by day to the downloads and again supporting that the most popular device was iPad.

As for unique users this kinda shows that there isn't a great deal of return visits going on.  In my mind people are playing it, trying it and then deleting.  A concept of course which is well supported by having a free app as they have nothing to lose but ultimately not great for revenues.

So what does this look like for revenues.  As you'd imagine nothing life changing! I have implemented an aggregator into my code which first uses Admob and if this can't fill for whatever reason trickles down to Inneractive.  The reason for these two being used is in some part limited to what Corona SDK supports but also those that are around most countries.

As you can see from the stats again its supporting the the number of downloads to ad requests. But what is important is that there is only about one impression per download.  This means some people may not even be playing the game which seems a little odd.  Most important though I have only made $6 in revenue which is the equivalent of roughly having about 14 paid download apps. As you'll see from the clicks there weren't a great deal despite the reasonable impressions.

The final thing is to look at how the downloads faired across the world.  I am using the excellent Appannie to give me stats.  Also try the excellent Majicrank for realtime stats if your app reaches a rank of 200 or better.

For iPhone I had a reasonable spread across countries if not ranking that high ...

Store	Action		Arcade
# of top 500 stores	6		7
# of top 1000 stores	19		19
Turkey	166	Apr 19, 2012	375	Apr 20, 2012
Mexico	385	Apr 20, 2012	341	Apr 20, 2012
Cyprus	465	Apr 19, 2012	403	Apr 19, 2012
South Korea	479	Apr 20, 2012	394	Apr 20, 2012
Sweden	481	Apr 19, 2012	593	Apr 20, 2012
Spain	485	Apr 20, 2012	437	Apr 20, 2012
France	513	Apr 20, 2012	472	Apr 20, 2012
United Kingdom	599	Apr 20, 2012	380	Apr 19, 2012
China	602	Apr 19, 2012	549	Apr 20, 2012
Netherlands	641	Apr 19, 2012	634	Apr 20, 2012
Brazil	654	Apr 22, 2012	603	Apr 22, 2012
Armenia	705	Apr 21, 2012	599	Apr 21, 2012
Italy	706	Apr 20, 2012	670	Apr 20, 2012
Japan	724	Apr 19, 2012	643	Apr 20, 2012
United States	747	Apr 20, 2012	664	Apr 20, 2012
Germany	759	Apr 20, 2012	611	Apr 19, 2012
Canada	760	Apr 19, 2012	688	Apr 19, 2012
Switzerland	805	Apr 20, 2012	728	Apr 20, 2012
Egypt	945	Apr 19, 2012	844	Apr 19, 2012

and for iPad a little greater success where in 4 countries got into top 100.  This of course is supported by the stats in the other graphs

Store	Action		Arcade
# of top 100 stores	0		4
# of top 500 stores	10		15
# of top 1000 stores	10		15
Turkey	104	Apr 19, 2012	86	Apr 19, 2012
Ireland	104	Apr 20, 2012	88	Apr 20, 2012
Italy	104	Apr 19, 2012	195	Apr 20, 2012
Romania	109	Apr 19, 2012	80	Apr 19, 2012
Denmark	116	Apr 19, 2012	110	Apr 19, 2012
Spain	130	Apr 20, 2012	88	Apr 19, 2012
Japan	172	Apr 19, 2012	-
Brazil	173	Apr 20, 2012	153	Apr 20, 2012
Sweden	187	Apr 19, 2012	171	Apr 19, 2012
Israel	194	Apr 20, 2012	167	Apr 20, 2012
Netherlands	-		170	Apr 19, 2012
Mexico	-		176	Apr 20, 2012
El Salvador	-		177	Apr 24, 2012
France	-		180	Apr 20, 2012
Saudi Arabia	-		190	Apr 21, 2012
Switzerland	-		197	Apr 20, 2012

As I said at the outset this is a warts and all reality of indie development.  I have learnt a lot in this second week about how I could have done it differently for next time but not sure I can retrieve the situation without some investment in a marketing budget.  But that is for another week.