Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Christmas time


Today is Christmas and I decided to not invest money on a new AdMob campaign as I prefer to see what happens in this particular period of the year. The data I collect now could be useful for the next year.

I was tempted to not change anything in my application to see how the Christmas time affect the number of downloads, but in the last days I discovered something very interesting that made me change mind (and feel a bit stupid).

Normally when I look at the statistics of my app I only check the "Active device installs" that summarizes the situation of the installs; the higher the figure the happier I was. In the last two months the active device installs were not growing as I expected and I put the blame on the lack of visibility of the applications in the market.

Although the visibility is a real problem, there is another aspect that should be taken into consideration to explain a slow active installs increment: the tendency of the user to keep the application installed.

Looking at the daily installs and daily uninstalls I discovered that:
I have a daily average of 78 installs but approximately the same number of uninstall
so many daily installs means that the visibility is not the main issue and I have to work in the direction that makes the user to keep the app installed. Since almost all of the user reviews are enthusiastic I think that the app itself does not have any problem and that the big villain is the user interface, which I admit is rather poor.

I spent one week to introduce themes in the application and I created three themes. You can see the screenshoots here below:




If i'm right I should see a decrement of the daily uninstalls. I'll update you in a couple of weeks when the Christmas madness is over.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Tell to a friend mechanism

The AdMob campaign for GPS, find me! has been terminated since two weeks and the 68 new users I gained are still there; this means that my application is considered enough valuable to deserve a few MB of space in the device. This makes me very happy, but the tell to a friend mechanism that I ingenuously was expecting did not happen as I did not see any significant increment in the downloads after the campaign.

I think that 68 new users do not reach the critical mass that can feed and sustain this mechanism and for this I'm planning to invest more money to investigate this aspect. The only doubt I have is about the timing.

As Christmas is near I do not know if it is better to wait and look what happens with the hundreds of thousands of the new devices activated in this period or to join the Christmas effect with a new campaign to give a great burst of downloads...

I'll keep you informed, stay tuned...