Holiday App Store Traffic Is Insane, Don't Miss Out
Tips for promoting your app during and after the Christmas holiday shopping season.
Tips for promoting your app during and after the Christmas holiday shopping season.
The season is almost upon us, and the holidays have a huge impact on mobile app traffic. If you want to be joyous at the end of the year, take some advice from expert app marketers.
App Sales Go Crazy During the Holidays
Think about the target audience – teens and kids who have a lot of free time and are on the prowl for entertaining apps. Flurry reported App Store sales in December 2009 grew by 51 percent over November.
Holiday Sales Driven by Kids and Teens With iTunes Gift Cards
My intuition chocked up the spike in holiday app sales to new devices but an app developer advises that gift cards drive post-holiday demand.
So, there is all this App Store traffic during the holidays, what do the App Store marketing experts recommend to claim your share of the Christmas App Store pie?
Here are three tips from Brian Robbins, founder of Riptide Games and chair of the board at IGDA:
Promoting Four Days Prior to the Holiday Increases Visibility and Demand
Since there is a sales peak during the weekend (logically key holiday), strategically running a promotion for four consecutive days prior to the weekend (holiday) takes advantage of the App Store algorithm. “‘The formula for App rankings only accounts for your last four days of sales.’ The formula is 8 times the sales of the current day + 5 times the sales on the 2 proceeding days + 2 times the sales on initial date,” states faberNovel’s Baptiste Benezet.
Image Source: ReadWriteWeb.com
Beware of App Store Holiday Lockdown
Getting in the top rankings of the App Store will pay off even more this year as Apple announced that it will freeze the Top App listings during the Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas lockdown, so beware of the lockdown timing and work it into your promotional strategy.
Holidays Are a Good Time to Launch Entertaining Apps
Michel Kripalani, president of Oceanhouse Media, (whom I interviewed at iPhone/iPad DevCon) won the rights to publish Dr. Seuss stories on cell phones. He launched three Grinch apps just before the holiday season last year. Each of the Grinch apps was featured individually in the App Store for a week or so during the holidays. Grinchmas! made it to number eight overall in the rankings. As daily sales rolled in, Michel said that’s when he knew he had a real business on his hands. Michel advises that quality is still the key to a sustainable app business as well as developing multiple apps.
If you have an app, plan on promoting it aggressively during the holiday season. If you are building an app in the near-term, do everything you can to launch and begin promoting it before the holiday season begins so you can take advantage of frenzied app sales.
Have an Appy Holiday (couldn’t resist)! If you have any additional tips for driving app traffic through the holidays, please comment.