Ask HN: How in the world do you optimize iPhone app promotion? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How in the world do you optimize iPhone app promotion?

10 pointsalex_c6 comments

For the past week or two I've been trying out different methods to promote an iPhone app (I'll probably post it in a "review my startup" thread pretty soon).

The HN mantra is measure, quantify, A/B test, optimize, etc. The problem is that I'm very limited in what data I can actually get.

To some extent I can measure how effective my site is (for example, how many people click the "Download" button). But as soon as they enter the Apple ecosystem, they're gone. I have no idea how many people view the app's store page. I have no idea where they're coming from (other than from my website). I have no idea what the conversion rates in the final stage ("download") are, for users from different sources. I have no idea how effective the app description is - or, if I change it, whether it helps or hurts conversion rates.

I can maybe try to do some IP matching between visits to the website and people who launch the app, but this is very limited - for one, it only applies to users who download the app through my website; for another, there's no guarantee the IP will be the same.

Any ideas? Most of the advice for iPhone app promotion tends to be "get blogs to talk about you", which is fine, but doesn't really help optimize the process. I've found surprisingly little quality information on this topic.

Incidentally, I think this would be a "problem worth solving" - I can't be the only iPhone developer feeling this pain.

At least for measuring clicks/conversions, you can look into Google Analytics for Mobile: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/mobileAp...

This may be stating the obvious, but if your app is not free, obtain promo codes and give them out to people you know. They should give you some helpful feedback, e.g. "the initial screen is confusing" or "I can't figure out how to do X." Unfortunately there's no good way (AFAIK) to know exactly which promo codes have been redeemed.

Last but not least, App Store users could have a very short attention span. Spruce up your screenshots and make them "action-based" -- e.g. "drag here!" If your app's purpose is not immediately obvious, this can help engage them. Users don't always read the description text from my experience.

Thanks for the link to Google Analytics for Mobile, I'll definitely look into it. I get the feeling it might break Apple's latest developer agreement ("the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited."), but what the heck, pretty much everything does nowadays.

Luckily it's a free app, at least that makes some things a lot easier.

And that's a good point about the screenshots - someone else commented earlier today that my screenshots are terrible, I'll have to fix them up.

Yes, this is hard, due to the black-box nature of the App Store. Can't really measure conversions through it. Android is better for this - I've seen some developers release for Android, optimize and test there, and then take their learnings to produce an optimized application for iPhone.

In addition to Google Analytics for Mobile, there's a bunch of companies that have free products that allow measurement within iPhone applications and therefore optimization - Flurry, Motally, Mobclix, Medialets, Localytics, etc. I own a chunk of Flurry and think it's the best, but don't take my obviously biased word for it. None of them, including Google Analytics, measure mobile web to mobile app conversions. All of them are potentially affected by Apple's recent terms of service changes for iPhone 4.0. No one knows just how affected.

When it comes to promotions, the only area where you can reliably measure is app-to-app advertisements. (And again, who knows if this will be supported in iPhone 4.0.) Right now I know AdMob and Burstly offer conversion tracking if you're advertising through them. Flurry offers a cost-per-acquisition product called AppCircle which I think works quite well, but again, I'm biased.

Flurry also has some cross-application tracking (we'll show you how many users on your application A also use application B) but it doesn't quite meet your use case, because it won't show you users who were on application A and touched the ad for application B and then used application B. I don't think any of the other companies mentioned above offer anything better than what Flurry's got - but I'm not certain.

Admob does some awesome things with some special code in your app: adding it will track conversions from Admob ads into downloads.

Other than that there's no good way I know of to track download conversions.

I've put that code in my app a while ago, don't think I ever got it to work... but I didn't spend much time on it. Right now I'm looking at a relatively new ad network, http://www.burstly.com/, they also have some download tracking - just waiting for the app update to get approved.

I wrote about this a while ago,

Apple currently does not offer any in itunes analytics, for instance, how many people view your app page, how long they spend, do they click the images, do they click buy, if they click buy, do they complete the purchase etc. I'm sure they are working on it...aren't they?

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