Giving application for free to get more in return

For those who follow my blog since the beginning, you know how hard I try to do promotion of my iPhone applications. I'm an indie developer and my options a very few when choosing for advertising strategies. I don't have a lot of money, I don't make a lot of money out of my application sales and I don't have too much time to spend promoting my application on top of spending time developing them. But, I tried sometime different on April 14th.

My application came out to the App Store on June 9th, 2009. This will be the first anniversary in a few weeks. I wanted to try sometime different in order to promote my application. Instead of spending money of advertising like I did many times in the past (with very low return on investment by the way), I decided to set both of my application free for 24 hours. The expected effect is that this will create a buzz in many ways.

First, there is so many web sites pumping their data from iTunes in order to try to add value to the App Store. Many sites exists just to present certain kind of apps or events like "Applications now free" type of event. Exemple: http://www.freeappalert.com/. By creating "beeps" on those site, this will bring people in and make them try the application so sales should increase and my ultimate goal: make my application appears in the top 200 in as many countries as possible. Then, when the application return to its normal price, people will probably continue to buy it (not as many I guess) and this should help me recoup my investment.

First, with the help of www.appfigures.com, here is the application behaviour on the sale charts.

I wasn't prepared for that as this was the first time my application would make it in the top 200 on that many places in the world. I monitored the events during the day and I was pleased by that. This was really exciting. How many downloads you may ask?

Not bad. Now, I have lost the equivalent of 4543$ in lost sales, but I feel my application gained some visibility. One of the thing that I have learned: when an application is at a certain position in the top 200 of free applications, as the price change back to its original state, the application disappear from the Top 200 free apps and doesn't appear in the corresponding position on the Top 200 Paid apps. Too many, this may seems obvious but for no apparent reasons, I didn't know that. 

Did I get more than spending in advertising? So far, no more sales. Maybe it is still to early to tell. 

Finally, 172 users did upgrade to the new version that was coming out on the same day, version 2.1.1. So, the timing was right because when an application comes out, it sends a small beep to iTunes satellite sites. But, as I will write on the next post, not everything went as planned.