Every mobile app developer has one main goal – to get his app to the top in the App Store. It’s great to get to the top 50, but the coolest thing is to become app #1. But that’s next to impossible, right? Wrong! We’ve been there and done that. Our TrafficVille 3D became #1 in the free apps category in several countries including Italy, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and more. So, let’s see how we did it and what results we had.
TrafficVille 3D is a game. This alone helped a lot because games are the most downloaded apps on the App Store. But because it’s a free game, the competition was still fierce. According to research done by Distimo, a mobile app analytics company, a free app needs to have 23,000 downloads per day to get to spot 50 and 80,000 downloads to get to the top 10 in the USA. Paid apps are a stark contrast, with only 950 daily downloads needed to get to #50 and 4,000 daily downloads to get to #10, which is very modest.
Don’t forget that these figures are relevant to the USA, which is the most competitive mobile apps market with huge numbers of downloads. If you are competing for the top 10 spots in other countries, then all you need is 50,000 for the UK and as little as 10,000 for Australia.
But even the massive U.S. downloads are realistic. If you are sceptical, then let us tell you that TrafficVille 3D got downloaded 214,000 times on November, 22. And we are still getting a healthy number of daily downloads.
Our massive download numbers didn’t spike just because we got lucky. First of all, the game is addictive and fun. Plus we used an amazing service from AppTurbo.it who reviewed TrafficVille 3D and included it in their App of the Day offer. This gave our downloads a real boost.
As a mobile app developer, you must be thinking about revenue. We are not all that secretive here at FanStudio and we will happily share with you some numbers. On the day we had 214K downloads we made $217 in ads revenue and there were 58 in-app purchases. The interesting thing is that the next day TrafficVille 3D was downloaded 115,000 times, but the ads revenue increased to $320 and the in-app purchases to 83 units. Basically, this means that not all users click on ads and make in-app purchases the day they download an app and that it depends on the type of user too.
One other important thing that Distimo mentioned is that it’s quite difficult for new developers to get discovered on the App Store. That’s a problem Apple needs to address if they want to remain the most popular app development platform. But until they make apps more discoverable, there are always services like App of the Day that can help you get noticed
