I’m making an application for iOS, I plan to release it in the App Store soon. The question arose - how to promote it correctly? Catch up with the audience? How to form the content initially, given that the application is something like a message board, respectively, if people download it, but it is empty, it does not fit. And is it better to launch it first in one city or in several? If anyone has such experience, I will be very grateful for the advice and answers.
The App Store
Apple’s App Store is a vast and complex ecosystem containing millions of apps across dozens of categories. But this vast selection is only valuable if users are able to find the apps they’re looking for. To that end, Apple has designed the App Store to promote discoverability.
How do people discover apps?
There are two main ways users discover apps in the App Store: by searching for keywords and by browsing featured and top charts. Surveys have shown that between 20 and 50% of users find apps by search, while another 14 to 20% discover them by browsing categories or looking at Apple’s featured selections.
App name and keywords
According to Apple, nearly ⅔ of app downloads result from searching. Therefore, it’s worth spending some time thinking about how to optimize your app for search. Your app’s search relevance is determined mostly by your app name and keywords, so let’s take a look at each of those in turn.
Apple once permitted app names to be more than 200 characters, leading to “names” that were chock full of SEO-gaming keywords, metadata, and the names of rival apps. Today, App Store guidelines limit developers to 50 characters and prohibit terms and descriptions that are not the name of the app.
When it comes to keywords, developers are limited to just 100 characters per app. With so few characters to work with, developers need a deliberate strategy. Ask yourself: What keywords are most important to you, and what are the keywords that will set you apart from your competitors? The best keywords are both relevant to your app and frequently searched, but the former outweighs the latter.
Remember: Users are much more likely to go with the top search results. Therefore, it’s generally better to be ranked #2 or #4 for a keyword that’s searched fifty-thousand times a month than to only be ranked #345 for a keyword that’s searched a million times a month.
Lastly, some brass tacks:
Separate keywords with commas.
Break down phrases into individual words (i.e., “photo, editor” not “photo editor”)
Save characters by not pluralizing your keywords (i.e., “calendar” not “calendars”)
Getting featured
Getting an app featured in the App Store is the dream of many developers. Not only does it confer special recognition on your app, it also gets you more prominent placement in the App Store. To add icing to the cake, getting featured also permits app developers to customize both their app and developer pages, further enabling them to stand out from the crowd.
A survey by Applause found that 40% of awareness of apps comes from browsing the App Store. In raw terms, that means getting featured on one of the dozens of lists, which are themselves created by a combination of popularity and editorial curation by Apple. Since users in general are more likely to trust (and therefore download) an app that they’re already aware of, having a recognized presence in the App Store is a major asset.
So how do you get your app into this elite group?
Obviously, there’s no substitute for quality. The best way to get an app featured is simply to build a great app. Apple’s curators are always looking for new apps that their users will be excited about. To that point, having a world class user experience goes a long way.
Beyond that, it helps to understand how the App Store works. A former App Store manager has revealed that the App Store isn’t a monolithic app supermarket, like Walmart or Target, it’s actually more like a bustling mall with dozens of small stores specializing in different areas. Each of these editorial teams is dedicated to a specific category or region, and each makes its decisions about what apps to feature internally. That said, developers can pitch their apps to Apple’s marketing team, who may then choose to advocate for an app within Apple. Going to events like WWDC and chatting up Apple representatives can also be a good way to raise awareness inside Apple about your work, especially if you’re a small or first-time developer.
Another thing that Apple’s editorial teams consider when choosing what apps to feature is whether an app takes advantage of Apple’s newest and most exciting tech. Remember, promoting an app in the App Store is also about promoting features that set iOS apart. Taking advantage of the newest APIs and functionalities can make your app more timely and relevant when Apple is choosing what apps to feature.
App Store search ads
A relatively new product from Apple allows developers to promote their app at the top of search results. Given that nearly ⅔ of app downloads come from searching, Search Ads can be an effective way to give an app the bump it needs to get found.
Search Ads are built around an automated auction process similar to Google AdWords. Developers set a maximum price they’re willing to spend per tap, which is then compared against the bid of the next most relevant competitor. Developers only pay when a user engages with one of their ads.
As with organic search results, relevance is the main determinant for whether an app is likely to appear on a given page of results, not how much a developer is willing to pay for placement. Relevance is determined by a combination of App Store metadata and user response.
That’s just a broad overview. Search Ads also includes some advanced features, like the ability to target specific groups based on demographic and location data. It also includes services to help you target your ad spend by recommending keywords based on your app’s metadata.
However you promote your app, it’s important to make sure you’re doing it in a cost-effective way. Marketing analysts and SEO experts may be able to help you optimize your marketing spend to ensure that your app gets in front of the right users based on your business objectives.
Related
Currently I have a live iPhone app. I need to convert it to a paid one with territory limitations. That means I need to make my app paid for some territories and free for the rest.
Will apple allow this?
Can I upload 2 separate apps with same features, one is free and other is paid but their no feature changes. Only territory limitations.
First thing is you can not change price of the same Application for different territory. Apple will not allow to do so. In fact there is no such option to set different price for different territory.
So for the second you mentioned i say YES. To do so you to keep few things in mind.
Let say you have created 2 different applications with same features for 2 different countries with different price tags
Make sure the version which you uploaded for Country-A should be only visible to Country-A. And same for Country-B.
Keep Description & keywords localized language.
Make sure there is something different in both app versions. Otherwise Apple team will feel its a similar concept & they might reject the application.
Hope it will guide you.
We already have E commerce app Targeting 3 different countries with 3 different domains. It also uses 3 different DB.
Now we are going for IOS app. So my questions here are:
Can we upload a bundle for specific country only? (Available in that country only, if multiple bundles allowed for single app)
Should we handle JSON based DB request in a single bundle by checking user's location? (so single bundle handled by programming)
Our goal is here our app will allow only specific country's user to place order.
Also prices are different for different countries, prices are from server.
We don't have in app purchase prices.
Please let me know what option is best. Even if new please suggest.
Its a broad question with lots of good answers and unfortunately all of them are opinion based but I will give my two cents.
You can absolutely create multiple apps and target a specific country. You control this by changing the availability preference. (see pic) This will allow the app to be shown only in a certain country.
The advantage of this method is that you can have complete control & customizability specific to a country.
The disadvantage is that you are now maintaining multiple code bases. If you have a code bug in one app then you need to update 3 apps to fix the "same" bug. What if you want to support more countries. Now you have to create that many clones of the app. Think about if you had to add a new feature. Its snowballs pretty quickly doesn't it?
If you make one app then there is only one code base, one place to make all code changes or add features. Its somewhat easy to maintain code wise.
The bad side, well now you have to take care of every possible country specific scenario either within the app e.g. Localizations, currencies etc. or you have to get that information from your servers.
There are ways to find out through apis from which country a user is connecting from without asking the user itself.
In my opinion, creating one app is the way to go. It will save you lots of headaches down the road. But having said that I don't know how UBER or others big international players handle their country specific apps. Do they have one app or many. That I don't know.
I have an application that is very niche and targeted in it's core userbase.
For example sake, leaving the actual application out of the conversation, let's say it's 10 years ago and DVD's are still popular. Let's say we have an iOS app that is all about movie's. Let's say from the application, we have really detailed data on all our users. Such as user10854 has viewed stories related to Arnold Schwarzenegger 313 times, Al Pacino 271 times, and Will Smith 87 times.
I would like to take advantage of this knowledge/data and provide the keywords "Arnold Schwarzenegger" and "Al Pacino" with the intention of serving up a more applicable advertisement. Perhaps an advertisement to buy a copy of The Terminator or The Godfather Trilogy.
Are serving up extremely detailed advertisements like this a pipe dream in my head? (This will be the first time I work with a mobile advertising network).
I also want to serve the up ads as Native ads. My application is a feed, and I'd like to include them as part of the feed to look as unobtrusive as possible.
Does anything like this exist, or is mobile advertising simply not that detailed? Is an advertisement about "movies in general" the most detailed I could hope for vs an add for "play hello kitty island adventure on iOS".
If you're going to provide your own ads (sourced elsewhere), then the logic for displaying them can be as complex as you're willing to make it. If your ads have categories/labels, you can just build up rule sets based on the user metadata to determine which ads will work best (plenty of online ad systems do similar thing based on cookies and so on, Amazon does this heaps).
I'm currently looking for a way to track basic user data for mobile iOS application:
how many times the app was launched
what was the average/by session time spent in total while using app
what was the average/by session time spent on particular screen
Additionally, I'd like the solution to:
display a heatmaps or click/tap/maps (clickstreams), to show how users tried to interact with the interface
generate visit graphs (user started from this screen, then went to this screen, etc.)
The most important requirement is that this is for internal application testing (nothing malicious), and we want to categorize data by user logged in (so that we can gather data per user, not some general average).
Can anyone recommend a suitable tool? Price or paid, doesn't matter. Is Google Analytics up for the job, or do we need something else?
Youve got several options to track the user behavior in the app. You can use frameworks like :
Flurry (http://www.flurry.com/)
Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com/)
Localytics (http://www.localytics.com/)
Google analytics
Im pretty sure there are more. Flurry is free (for now but you have some special paid features) and it´s broadly used. It´s the framework I use the most for my apps in these moments but it will depend of the client and the information you want to track. You can track events, events with information, see the stats of use, how the user has used the application, find dead holes in your app and broadly speaking, have a general idea about how your application has been used. The other frameworks are not free and you have to pay for the services but you can always use a trial version to see if this is what you want or not. Ive used localytics and its nice.
Ive tried all of them, and there are pros and cons, but to get a general idea about your application, everyone serves. Regarding heatmaps, Im not sure about that, I mean if some of the frameworks offer a solution like that, but you can always build your reports with the provided information (I know it´s not a straightforward thing or a 5 minutes thing).
Take a look, compare and decide which one can fit the best for you.
Well these days app analysis is very important and are of great help. There are large number of analytics tools available. Some of them are free some of them are paid.
below are some of them
Flurry
Google Analytics
Heatmaps
These are few which are used most. For most list visit this link
Hope this will help you. happy coding :)
I work for a publishing house and we're discussing different ways to sell our content over digital channels.
Besides the web, we're closely watching the development of content publishing on tablets (e.g. iPad) and smartphones (e.g. iPhone). Right now, it looks like there are four different approaches:
Conventional publishing houses release Apps like The Daily, Wired or Time Magazine. Personally I name them Print-Content-Meets-Offline-Website Magazines. Very nice to look at, but slow, very heavy regarding datasize and often inconsistent on the usability side. Besides that: These magazines don't co-exist well in a world where Facebook and Twitter is where users spend most of their time and share content.
Plain and stupid PDF. More or less lightweight, but as interactive and shareable as a granite block. A model mostly used by conventional publishers and apps like Zinio.
Websites with customized views for different devices (like Die Zeit's tablet-enhanced website). Lightweight, but (at least until now) not able to really exploit a hardware platform as a native app can.
Apps like Flipboard, Reeder or Zite go a different way: Relaying on Twitter-, Facebook- and/or syndication-feeds like RSS and Atom, they give the user a very personalized way to consume news and media. Besides that, the data behind it is as lightweight as possible, the architecture to distribute the data is fast and has proven for years to be reliable.
Personally, I think #4 is the way to go. Unluckily the mentioned Apps only distribute free content and as a publishing house we're also interested in distributing paid content.
I did some research googled around and came to the conclusion, that there is no standardized way to protect and sell individual articles in a syndication feed.
My question:
Do you have any hints or ideas how this could be implemented in a plattform-agnostic way? Or is there an existing solution I just haven't found yet?
Update:
This article explains exactly what we're looking for:
"What publishers and developers need is
a standard API that enables
distribution of content for authorized
purposes, monitors its use, offers
standard advertising units and
subscription requirements, and
provides a way to share revenues."
Just brainstorming, so take it for what it's worth:
Feedreaders can't do buying but most of them have at least let you authenticate to feeds, right? If your free feed was authenticated, you would be able to tie the retrieval of atom entries to a given user account. The retrieval could check the user account against purchased articles and make sure they were populated with fully paid content.
For unpurchased content, the feed gets populated with a link that takes you to a Buy The Article page. You adjust that user account and the next time the feed is updated, the feed gets shows the full content. You could even offer "article tracks" or something like that where someone can by everything written by a given author or everything matching some search criteria. You could adjust rates accordingly.
You also want to be able to allow people to refer articles to others via social media sites and blogs and so forth. To facilitate this, the article URLs (and the atom entry ids) would need to be the same whether they are purchased or not. Only the content of the feed changes depending on the status of the account accessing the feed.
The trick, it seems to me, is providing enough enticement to get people to create an account. Presumably, you'd need interesting things to read and probably some percentage of it free so that it leaves people wanting more.
Another problem is preventing redistribution of paid content to free channels. I don't know that there is a way to completely prevent this. You'd need to monitor the usage of your feeds by account to look for access anomalies, but it's a hard problem.
Solution we're currently following:
We'll use the same Atom feed for paid and free content. A paid content entry in the feed will have no content (besides title, summary, etc.). If a user chooses to buy that content, the missing content is fetched from a webservice and inserted into the feed.
Downside: The buying-process is not implemented in any existing feedreader.
Anyone got a better idea?
I was looking for something else, but I've came across with Flattr RSS plugin for WordPress.
I didn't have time to look it through, but maybe you can find some useful ideas in it.