Insights From the Latest Flurry Industry Pulse
Flurry, the mobile application analytics company, releases a monthly industry newsletter with some analytical goodness culled from a small set of the applications using their platform. In their Industry Pulse this month, they highlight a couple of strange anomalies in sales in the app store. Now that you know, why not use them to your advantage to help drive sales?
Demo Conversions
The most interesting item in their newsletter this month is the reverse correlation between demo/lite/free version downloads and the conversion of the customer to paid versions. Common sense would lead us to believe that the higher the downloads for a free version the higher the conversions would be or that it would at least be fairly even. This may not be the case.
With information in this report, the conversion rate the apps whose demo version has fewer than 100,000 downloads is around 20%. While applications whose demo version has had over 1 million downloads is only a paltry 4%.
If we take those two extremes, an app with 100k and one with 1MM downloads, and assign a paid version price that’s the same to each, the app with 1MM downloads still has a higher revenue. Two times the revenue, actually. But only 2 times the revenue for 10 times the number of demo versions downloaded. This works out to be, for a $1.99 app, $0.28 in conversion revenue per download for an example app with 100k demo downloads but only $0.06 for that same priced example app with 1MM downloads. (Figures take into account the 70/30 split)
There can be a lot of factors figuring into this strange statistic. Could be the more popular a free app, the more free loaders download it. Could be that niche applications have a smaller demo download number and a stronger conversion percentage.
Weekend Sales Quantified
This newsletter was also able to quantify the weekend sales phenomenon. It’s been known for a while that app sales on the weekend are generally higher than weekdays. According to statistics gathered by Flurry, consumers are more than 30% more likely to download an app during the weekend compared to weekdays. Weekend sales for paid game applications can see as high as a 48% increase while paid apps can see a weekend increase of up to 36%.
So with knowing this, it might be best to launch an application either during the weekend or just before. Ideally culminating any advertising and PR to all hit through the weekend might end up paying off best. Of course actually getting PR to hit during a weekend might not be all that easy.
Another simple explanation could be that the segmentation inherent in the applications. A million free-download app may simply be more general-purpose and people may download it to test/experiment and may not like what they see. On the other hand, the under-100K downloads may be specific (photography, database, productivity etc.), yielding a higher conversion rate.
But downloading isn't using it. For free, I'll give quite a few a try, but I might never use it again. The question is how many purchased because of the trial that wouldn't have? And of course how many didn't purchase because they tried it and didn't like it.
The other thing is I feel too many demos give too much away. If it's practically fully-functional why would someone buy the full version? (I personally would to support them). Unless it's against Apple's policy, make the app stop running after 5 minutes, or give them reminders, or make the program expire in a few months.
And when you look in iTunes, there is no decent way (that I know of) to get back to the original description tag, let alone the seller's page to buy other applications from them, I have to do a search to (try) and find them. Itunes search isn't the most helpful of features…
Is there any studies to determine how many of those conversions are prompted by advertising/upsell prompts in the free app, vs. the free users putting in the “effort” to find the paid version on their own?
I can definitely corroborate the strong weekend sales. After nearly a year of having products on the market, it has been our experience that Sunday's are our strongest day, followed by Saturday, followed by Friday. The weakest days tend to be Wednesdays and Mondays, though featuring happens late on Tuesdays, so if you're in that lucky boat, be prepared for an awesome Wednesday.
Having had an app launch on a wednesday, it's for certain that a developer would rather shoot for a target launch of Sunday. But, unfortunately, there's next to nothing you can do to coordinate your launch PR and when the forces that be at Apple actually approve the app. But, that's an issue as old as the app store itself.
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