Hi All, Does anyone have any advice on dropping an apps price to free temporarily? Specifically when to do it, best time of day. best day of week. Any big holidays coming up. Who to contact to increase the number of downloads. My aim is to spread the word about my game through word of mouth. People play it, they like it, they tweet/share it. Also hope to get some income, there is a in app purchase to unlock extra characters.
We usually do paid to free promotions on Thursdays or Fridays, and run them through until the following Monday at least. As weekends are the generally the most active in terms of downloads and playtime, that generally will net you the most downloads in the shortest space of time. Consider reviewing where you are at after the weekend though. If you have good momentum and are generating a lot of downloads, you may consider keeping the promotion going in order to ultimately reach a larger number of people.
As far as other services go I don't think the free app a day services are that beneficial anymore, considering the huge rise in free to play. I tried a service in the past (can't remember the name of it at this moment, but if you want it PM me) for about $300 (pretty cheap!) that got me about 30k downloads in 2 days when I dropped to free. However I don't know if this was due to the promotional service, or the fact that it was picked up on appshopper, twitter, and a bunch of other places all at once. It's hard to tell, but if you can find some affordable services with a good track record (ask what other apps they have promoted and use app annie to check their download figures) then I say why not, if exposure is what you are after.
I've done this twice for my game, with the following results. App Store Views and Downloads were single digit or zero prior to being made free so this is from a "standing start" - I did nothing besides change the price. Not big numbers, but you might find them useful as a baseline. First time: free for a week starting 11th May (Monday) Day - App Store Views - Downloads 1 - 3,374 - 2,142 2 - 2,620 - 1,239 3 - 416 - 86 4 - 63 - 27 5 - 13 - 3 6 - 4 - 1 7 - 5 - 0 Vast majority of these came from appturbo.net "App Of The Day". Second time: free permanently on 30th June (Tuesday) Day - App Store Views - Downloads 1 - 73 - 19 2 - 18 - 9 3 - 102 - 49 4 - 40 - 24 5 - 22 - 11 6 - 12 - 8 7 - 7 - 4
So would you say after your promotion, did the number of downloads revert to 'normal'? Thanks for sharing your statistics.
No problem Yeah, downloads went back to zero when the price went up again on day 8 the first time, and have sunk to low single digits since making it free permanently, but perhaps too early to see if this is a 'new normal'.
@pikpok - Thanks for the advice. KickUp King is free now for 24 hours to see what numbers it gets. I have a feeling that your longer free period works because you have games with a bigger audience. For a smaller game, frequent 1 day free giveaways are better. @zewar - thanks for sharing your figures. I expect mine will be similar. I will only do it for 2 days at most though. To keep demand high for the game.
