So, you’ve just put your killer app on the on the app store. You celebrated with some Schramsberg. You sadly watch your sales asymptotically approach zero when users discover that you haven’t ‘quite’ got it right. Now, you’ve fixed that one outstanding issue and you’re ready to re-invigorate your money machine.
Ok – Not that you no longer have that new-app bump, you have to get your app re-recognized the old fashioned way, through marketing. That’s marketing, with a lower case ‘m’. Probably viral marketing, reviews, and advertising. So, as some rich manager said, “If you can’ measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Measuring advertising efficacy is a problem on Apple’s app store, because you can not, until now, measure the effectiveness of different advertising channels because they only report total sales, and not their referring source. In the 9 months that I’ve been developing iPhone apps (let’s birth this baby!) I’ve focused on executing as many experiments as possible, but I’ve only been able to do one advertising experiment at a time because it was too difficult to distinguish the effects from a particular advertisement from other factors, such as normal weekly fluctuations. Now, the smart guys over at Mobile Orchard has released a clever trick to track effects of individual back to individual sales. Check it out. I’ll update this post with my own results as I get them.
Mobile Orchard also has a good article on getting your app reviewed. Although I haven’t pushed reviews, yet, everthing that I’ve heard does indicate that it is a very personal process process. Although most sites keep a journalistic separation between the money and the review, some do not. And remember, these people are only human. Perhaps a good way to think about this is like getting a job where you have to get your resume recognized and have it stand out apart all of the other resumes.
How do you get your resume to stand out? Well, I think the first step to think beyond the resume. When I was still a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was pretty miffed when I didn’t get a prestigious summer job at the school that I thought I perfectly qualified for. I was perfect on paper. After that job went to the other guy, I went to the decider to figure out what happened. He was too tactful, so I had to read between the lines and finally figured out that I had totally misunderstood, up to that point, the hiring process. You see, up to that point in my life, I had been chosen for things based upon “Who is the most deserving?” School admissions, for example, is, I think, a good example of that. Hiring, in contrast, is based upon “Which one will make my life easier?” It makes sense.
I believe that the getting reviews is sort of the same. The reviewers, deep down, want the most popular site possible with the least amount of work. Don’t be in denial about this reality.
