We spent about $1600 on ads, resulting in about 3,000,000 impressions and about 2,000 clicks through to the app's promo page (http://www.class3outbreak.com/iphone-ipad-ipod-touch/games/z...). From there it's impossible to tell how many of those people bought the game, but I assume it's much less than 100%.
Those clicks cost us 80c each. This is not effective for a $1 app which gives a 70c profit after Apple's 30% cut. Even for a $2 app, it would only be effective if about 60% of people who clicked the ad bought the app - it seems unlikely that it would be anywhere near that high.
Most advertising seems to cost about $1 per click. Based on the cost per click and the potential return from a sale I don't think advertising is cost-effective for promoting apps. The only way it might work is if you spend tens of thousands of dollars, so you're on "all" the websites and so "everyone" becomes aware of your app. Therefore it gets talked about, and each click results in potentially more than one sale, by spreading through word of mouth. This also only works if the game is good enough :)
I mentioned briefly in the blog post that we got a few reviews written up. Jay contacted dozens of review sites and sent out about 20-30 review codes. We had a poor response.
In the end I think the only marketing that was really effective was that we had an existing community around the web versions of our games - at the time of ZOS's release we had about 30,000 visitors a month to our website, and about 8,000 fans on Facebook. I think this is the main reason that we did as well as we did :)
Those clicks cost us 80c each. This is not effective for a $1 app which gives a 70c profit after Apple's 30% cut. Even for a $2 app, it would only be effective if about 60% of people who clicked the ad bought the app - it seems unlikely that it would be anywhere near that high.
Most advertising seems to cost about $1 per click. Based on the cost per click and the potential return from a sale I don't think advertising is cost-effective for promoting apps. The only way it might work is if you spend tens of thousands of dollars, so you're on "all" the websites and so "everyone" becomes aware of your app. Therefore it gets talked about, and each click results in potentially more than one sale, by spreading through word of mouth. This also only works if the game is good enough :)
I mentioned briefly in the blog post that we got a few reviews written up. Jay contacted dozens of review sites and sent out about 20-30 review codes. We had a poor response.
In the end I think the only marketing that was really effective was that we had an existing community around the web versions of our games - at the time of ZOS's release we had about 30,000 visitors a month to our website, and about 8,000 fans on Facebook. I think this is the main reason that we did as well as we did :)