09.12.11fri
Benefits of a Featured App
Yesterday I mentioned the process Craig and I went through when Numbrix (iTunes Link) became a featured iPhone app. Today I wanted to discuss the benefits of being featured and being listed in the “New and Noteworthy” section on the iTunes app store.
As you might expect, you get a significant jump in your sales from being featured. The day the game was featured, it started selling 10 times the volume it was selling prior to the placement. And while – as expected – those numbers didn’t hold once the featured placement was over, the numbers never dropped back to “pre-feature” levels.
Aside from additional sales – which was great, of course – being an iTunes featured app certainly has particular bragging rights associated with it. Being able to tell people that your app was one of the few that got that spot is actually pretty important. As Jeffrey Zeldman recently wrote regarding self-promotion, being able to tout your product obtained this unique position is worthy of being mentioned. You shouldn’t be ashamed to brag about it!
But from a pure sales standpoint, oddly enough, the featured banner is not the best position to be in the iTunes app store. At the time your banner would be one of three banners across the top of the app store. Now there are three that slide down, but the issue is the same. The banners switch, so occasionally your graphic isn’t showing at all. In the iPhone app store, there are only two banners showing, so your banner may never appear.
What Craig and I found was the “New and Noteworthy” section was much more valuable in terms of exposure and sales. Being listed here lasted the entire month of July, as opposed to only the single week. Additionally, our icon showed up in the “New and Noteworthy” section all of the time, unlike the on and off of the banner rotation I mentioned above. The icon showed up all of the time in the iPhone app store as well. As a result, we realized up to 30 times our normal sales volume during these weeks... three times what we got during the week of the featured placement!
We had a couple other fun mentions from Apple as well, and we didn’t expect some of the benefits we gained from these. For example, we were listed under “Staff Favourites” in the UK and Australia. (I thought maybe it would be in Canada too, since they use the extra “U” in words too... but not so much.) This introduced us to a large population of customers that we would not have otherwise reached, since Numbrix primarily only appears in US publications. Now we just have to figure out how to spend these British Pounds!
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