If you are selling on the App Store you might start wondering on how you will sell your Apps.

Well, some people won’t think but just put their App in the store and wait what happens (I am such a guy ;-)

But afterwards I made some observations I would like to share, especially because there are so few developers that share their experience with the Store.

I will split my observations into different posts to make it 1) easier to read and 2) to allow myself to pause between posts :-)

I will write about the following conditions and events:

1. Category Featured
2. New and Noteworthy listing in iTunes Category
3. “Free for one Day” Promotions
4. in the Spotlight / in the “What’s hot section” on the iPads App Store
5. What’s new listing on the iPad and iTunes
6. Keyword optimization
7. TV Popularity of an unrelated show
8. Visual Quality (yes, you heard me!)
9. Ranking Positions (Top 10 – Top 100)

Not necessary in that exact order. I might sort the list after everything is written and published.

These conditions and events have been made with three different Apps totally unrelated to each other.

So. Let’s begin.

#1 – Category Featured

jQuery Reference is a nice small App to lookup all import jQuery related stuff without opening a browser or searching google. Basically it is a searchable list of the jQuery function listing and its documentation.

The App has been released on Apr 14th shortly after the iPad has been launched and Apple was still playing with the App Store functionality.

In the beginning it climbed into the Top 25 of its category, which wasn’t too hard because there were not many iPad Apps. After a few days it slowly lost its ranking and finally went into something below 100. It came back between 9am – 8pm PST into the rankings when people were buying it.

All numbers for sales and rankings are for the US Store only!
Excluding the rest of the world keeps the stats clean from unknown factors or random customers in some distant countries.

Ranking

On May 5th I noticed a spike in the ranking in its category “Reference”. The App was in the “Featured” Apps on top of its category.

Within hours it jumped back into the top 50 at, this time because of it was “Featured”:

The ranking got a bit more solid for the following two weeks until it was removed from the featured listing.

Screenshots: Category Featured

This is how the featured looked like on the iPad. When someone opened the category “Reference” he got a list of featured Apps on top.
The App was three screens next to the center on the category “Reference” on the iPads version of the App Store:

 

Sales Numbers

If rankings are affected, sales must be too, because only sales can push you up in the rankings.

Well, here are the true sales numbers:

 

Keep in mind that the sales statistics are compiled only once a day on the end of the day. The sales numbers are in units.

The average of 4 sales per day increased to 6 per day which is a 50% increase. The percentage should not be applied to other Apps, the sales numbers are too low to read too much into them.

 

Interesting is also what happens after the featured status was gone. Here are the sales numbers for four weeks after that:

The sales average dropped back to an average of 4 per day and the ranking went down to below the top 100.

While this looks and sounds like nothing was really going on, looking at the big picture of the revenues of that timeframe everything becomes clearer:

The sales were constant in the featured time compared to very random sales before and after. The week following the feature the sales were still a bit higher, which might be caused by the higher rankings. After that sales dropped very fast to zero.

I plan to submit an update with some minor enhancements to see how much influence it has.

 

Conclusion

Conclusion? It’s nice to have such a small category feature and it makes a difference but it won’t make you rich.

There were only 3 million sold iPads after the analyzed time (wasn’t it 3 million after 80 days? correct me if I’m wrong!), making possible customers still very rare.
But when I first seen the feature I was thinking about hundreds of possible customers buying my App – well, the next day told me otherwise: two more customers ;-)

It seems that Apple has dropped the Category-Features in many categories, maybe because it was too much work and too less revenue ;-)
The game section appears to be the only one left which such a Featured-Listing.

 

Oh, and if you are curious about the App, you can find it here: jQuery Reference :-)