Staying up to date on your apps

[rikschennink]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering, how do you guys stay on top of news or exposure of your apps? I sometimes have strange sales bumps but than can't seem to find the reason why my game is suddenly selling 10 times as much copies as the day before. Maybe we can collect some good practices?

1. I keep up to date by googling "Eve of Impact" for the last couple of days, which most of the time gives me good results.
   
2. Sometimes the above returns zip, and searching the same string on Twitter will give me results before they appear in Google.
   
3. I use AppAnnie to check if my app is featured (Distimo also has a nice featured tracker) but this only updates once in a while and I'm not really confident if it tracks all stores..

At the moment I'm seeing various bumps in my sales chart which I can't explain so I'm looking for more firepower. Anything I'm missing?

[ReignDesign]

To save yourself time, I'd recommend setting up various services to monitor mentions and push them all into an RSS reader, like Google Reader or http://feedafever.com/

1. Set up Google Alerts for your app name. This saves having to manually Google for your app name repeatedly:

http://www.google.com/alerts

Get the results as RSS and add it to your feed reader.

2. You can also get an RSS feed of Twitter results like this: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=flockwork

3. Appcomments.com have an RSS feed of iTunes Store reviews of your apps. Add this too! For example: http://appcomments.com/rss/330072839?country=143441

[rikschennink]

Nice! I'm certainly going to do that, this searching on google and twitter gets old really fast

Do you have any services that keep a close eye on the featured categories?

[xr1337]

One idea is to add some analytics to your game.
Something like Flurry or google analytics.

That way, when you see a spike, try to look at the demographic on the analytics. Maybe your game was reviewed in a foreign blog.