App of the Day Promotion

Back in February I was approached about offering List! on a “free app of the day” promotion app. The idea is that you make your paid app free for a day during which you have mass exposure to the millions of users of the promotion app. The benefit pitched to developers is that once the app becomes paid again, there will be a significant increase in the number of downloads (4 to 50 times more). In my case, there was no cost for the app promotion other than the lost sales caused by reducing the cost of the app from $1.99 to free. The results of the promotion during the week ending February 10th, 2013 are shown in the following chart.



I’ve graphed the week of the promotion as having no paid downloads—there were over 446,000 app downloads during the week of the promotion, but only a minuscule portion of these would be paid rather than free on the days before and after the promotion. There was a slight bump of 2 to 3 times the usual number of downloads in the following week, but this wasn’t a sustained trend. So in my case, there was no upside to the promotion.

There was a downside to the promotion that I hadn’t fully considered beforehand. The promotion app was not available in the US App Store, so most of the additional exposure from the promotion was in Europe, Central and South America, Russia, and Japan. List! is not localized for languages other than English and the promotion app apparently did not contain any information about the languages supported by the promoted app. So rather than getting downloads from people who were fluent enough with English to consider using the app, there were a number of people who weren't comfortable with English, downloaded the app without knowing it didn't support their native language, and then left one star reviews because of the lack of localization. It wasn't a huge number, but a half dozen reviews is all it takes to get a one star average. Bottom line: I might consider another promotion like this even though the results were disappointing, but I wouldn't do it unless my app was localized.