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Comment by einarvollset | Hacker News Reader

Some thoughts:

1. You don't have enough reviews. Your app store search rankings will improve once an actual rating is computed. Give away some apps, or even make it free for a few days. Note that free apps == crap ratings however..

2. The name: Was "dice roller" or "Die roller" taken? With the way the app store search works, the easiest way to get traffic is to have a name that has a high natural search volume. Basically, high search volume on google == high search volume on the app store (in my experience 1/10th-1/20th).

3. Do a free version supported by iAds. The CPM there is still high, I'm seeing $10-$20CPM, and with 5-10 units per day at $1.99, you should be looking at 2-300 units for a free version easily. Might also increase sales of full version.

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Thanks for the feedback.

1. I will try to persuade some of my customers to submit app ratings. Unfortunately the ratio of purchases to review seems to be about 70 to 1, at least for this app.

2. Dice roller was taken although die roller I think is open. I'll try to tailor the name,description, and keywords to more heavily trafficked related search terms. I did include some game names in the description which seems to help with search some.

3. I have a free version with iAds waiting for Apple review now. I'm hoping that will help supplement the revenue and also drive sales to the paid version. $10-20 CPM sounds great. I'm from a web background and traditional website CPM is nowhere near that.

One way I've found to get more app ratings from users is to monitor the number of app launches and after, say, 5 of them, pop up a UIAlertView asking them to rate the app. Saying "OK" opens the App Store URL. Saying "no" prompts them once more later on, and then never prompts them again.

That is genius! I never even considered implementing a suggestion into the app, seems like an easy way to obtain ratings as long as it's not too intrusive. I'm definitely including it in future updates.

If someone is willing to launch your app five times, they probably find it useful, and ought to be pretty willing to rate it highly. Or at least, that's the theory right? :)

This is a bit how Amazon works. I can't recall the last time I went back to review a purchase on my own. That always came from the review reminder e-mail Amazon sends out several days after the order arrives.

I do this, but found it _tons_ more effective to open the "reviews" section of the app itself. Lower friction, etc.

I was actually thinking of releasing some code that does this - essentially it monitor the ratings an app gets and dynamically settle on the best time to ask for a review.

Can you say more about this?

Basically, to open direct to reviews, you want to construct an 'itms-apps://' url.

Then, rather than setting the "check at" interval to something fixed (which also works well), you can have the app check in the background what it should do.

So you can do things like: performSelector:withObject:afterDelay with a custom message after a custom number of starts, or a minimum number of starts after the app has been used for such-and-such a long time.

At the same time, you can monitor the reviews (frequency & stars) and vary over your stats over time. Unfortunately you can't straight A/B test at the same time, as you don't know who wrote which review, but you can A/B test if you separate them by time.

Hope that helps. Feel free to contact me directly: einar@lcrnd.com

here we go: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3374050/url-for-sending-a...

thanks for the pointer!

For games I'd also suggest opening the prompt just after the user has just beaten their high score.

They're still going to be pretty pumped and are far more likely to leave a positive review.

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