An effective “hack” to increase your paid downloads up to 800%
“Making an app can be just a matter of time, making money with it is a totally different story.” (Me)
If you are here, you probably backed a cool app, published it on a Store at $x.xx and now you are scratching your head while you wait for the big money to come.
Let me save you some time: this is not going to happen. Why? Because you need an expensive little thing called “visibility”. If none can see your app or get into it, you are not going to profit. Plain and simple.
What can you do?
A. Advertise your app to reach a wider audience
B. Rank up in Store doing some tricks and optimizations (ASO, etc…)
C. Viralize your app through “word of mouth”
Or you can mix these ingredients and prepare a secret sauce that will boost your visibility, downloads and revenues at no cost.
The Secret Sauce
Here is the recipe: the best way to make money from your paid app is to make it free for a while. Yes, it sounds crazy, but it does work and it works very good.
In past, we already saw some good examples of it under the name of “App of the Day”. Is this model dead after the end of AppGratis? Not at all. It is stronger than ever now that even Google decided to let devs set up temporary sales at $0 price.
Why it Works
What you need is visibility and the best place to get it is the Store itself. If your app is well ranked overall (or at least in its own category), downloads and money will follow.
The first 10 apps of each category on app stores are the most downloaded by users because statistics tell us that they are lazy and they hardly scroll down to discover new apps more than 2 or 3 times for each category. In other words: if you are on top, you rule them all.
App Ranking in “Top Paid” category is determined by many factors. If we could write an equation, it would look like this:
Rank = downloads+ app starts + reviews + retention + link
It’s easy to figure out that giving away your app for free for a while can boost your rank significantly if it drives you downloads, reviews and relinks.
But again, the problem is “How to let people know that I am giving candies to everyone for free?”. This is not a real problem.
Let it Swarm
If you giveaway your app at free price, some blogs will talk about it because they often search for deals by themselves using some “store spiders” and write about them. Word of mouth between bloggers and users will do the rest.
If you want to boost the result, you can tip blogs by yourself in advance or you can forward your deals directly to discovery apps. I suggest you to do it because you will double the effect.
I tested it out using both “myAppFree” (my “discovery app”) and “What’s New” (Sony’s “discovery app”) as additional channels. The apps promoted during my tests received 50% organic downloads from Web (blogs + word of mouth) and 50% from my direct sources, hitting even 100,000 downloads per app in a couple of days.
Where is the Money?
Many users will know about your sale and they will get your app for free. But where is the money?
The money comes after this phase. When your app goes back to paid, a magic trick happens… bum! Your app’s top ranked in “paid apps” category and you are generating tons of organic paid downloads and so… tons of money!
The downloads you made and the reviews you got in the “free period” are still valid to determine your rank when your app is paid again, giving you the top position in many countries. People will see your app as soon as they will go in “Top Paid” category and this will multiply your revenues.
Get Alessandro Del Grano’s stories in your inbox
Moreover, if you have additional iAPs inside your app, you can still monetize the “free” users you collected during sales or you can drive them to the other apps you have (if they liked your app, they will buy more from you).
A Real Test
Still not sure? Let’s analyze a test I made using “myAppFree” and “What’s New” as direct viralization channels on 5 selected apps that went free for a couple of days. To not waste your time, I will show you the results achieved by 2 of them.
edjing Pro
Type: Music & Audio App
Downloads: 55,551
New Reviews: 169
Revenues increase: 800%
Star Walk 2
Type: Education App
Downloads: 40,783
New Reviews: 96
Revenues increase: 400%
Awesome, isn’t it? In both cases apps had great results in terms of downloads, reviews, ranking and so… revenues:
- They reached top positions in “Top paid” category in over 75 countries.
- They kept a good ranking after promo as you can see from the “long tail”.
- They increased revenues up to 800%.
- They asked me: “please, let me take another run!”.
Of course, you could think: “Well, considering that my app was priced $2.99 this way I lost 50,000 possible customers and so $150,000 possible revenues”.
Fine, but let’s be clear:
- The most part of those 50,000 new users would not download your app if it was paid and probably they would not even know about it.
- Play Store counts over 1 billion monthly active users. You lost only the 0.005% of the total possible audience.
- If your app contains iAPs you can still monetize those users or you can drive them to your other apps.
- The revenues you “missed” over the period you made your app free, will be recovered the very next day.
How to Make It
How does it take to set this thing up?
Just 5 minutes of your time: you have to follow some golden rules that you can find in the official documentation and guideline and you are ready to go.
Some important things to keep in mind:
- You do not have to change the price of your app from paid to “free” (or you will not be able to restore it to paid). Instead, you have to set up a temporary sale at $0 pricing.
- Every sale can last up to 8 days and you can perform only 1 sale per month.
- Sales will start at 00.00 am GMT of the first day you set and will end at 11.59 pm GMT of the last day you set.
TIL (Today I Learned)
I hope you enjoyed this reading and you learned some good tricks.
Giving your app free for a day can be both fun and awesome for your business: you just have to set everything properly at the right time to get outstanding results.
If you have further questions or if you want assistance and get access to great sources to boost your “App of the Day” promotion, I will be glad to help you.
Just contact me on Twitter, drop me a line via email or submit your app to myAppFree portal to be next app on spotlight on our network.
Did you find this article useful? Follow me on Medium for more “hacks” to grow revenues and userbase of your apps.
