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Analytics for iPad, Release 1.3
Just a few minutes ago a new update was submitted to Apple.
It will contain three very exciting new features:
1) The often requested row-selection
You are now able to select the number of rows to display. Choose between 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500 rows.
But remember, the more you select, the longer you will need to wait!
2) Sub-Categories for the Traffic Sources
Do you want to see how your campaigns perform? Which goals or what revenue you get from a single source?
These are the reports you have waited for!
3) Page filter for Content reporting
Do you want to analyze just a small portion of your content?
Use the page filter to search for them. Only matching results will be included in the report!
For a better screen overview, the new reportings options will only be visible when available.
The release also includes a small improvement:
The compare switch is now independently saved.
And an important bugfix:
Special characters in website names caused the App to crash.
Detecting iPad Orientation in Safari using JavaScript
I stumbled on that by accident. One of my javascript-variables was called orientation and was not correctly used on the iPad’s Safari.
After looking at its content, I found out that you can detect the device orientation. I knew you can handle many cool things on the iOS, like swipes in javascript, but this one was new to me.
So, what are you going to do with this? It’s obvious: Style your website or re-order your content to match exactly your iPad’s orientation ;-)
You can use javascript in an event handler, loop, or whatever by accessing window.orientation (or only orientation).
Here’s an example on how to detect the current orientation of the iPad device either by pressing a button or when the orientation changes, using an event called onOrientationChange:
You can also use CSS Stylesheets using the media definition:
The detection is not restricted to the iPad, it should work on all iOS devices.
Time-based Kill-Switch for iOS Apps
If you want to set your App to stop working at a specific date, you are thinking about a time-based Kill-Switch.
You will want to do something like that if you worry about illegal copies of your Apps, you have sent out for testing purpose.
Realizing such switch is very easy, here’s an example:
NSDate *killDate = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0];
int killDateTs = [killDate timeIntervalSince1970];
if ( killDateTs > 1280624461 ) { // 2010-08-01
exit(0);
}
Replace the timestamp with your own expire time and your App will stop working at that day.
Amazon S3 with Bucket Policies
I received a newsletter from amazon some hours ago with some news about S3:
[..]
We are pleased to announce beta support for Amazon S3 bucket policies, which gives customers the ability to create conditional rules for managing access to their buckets and objects. Amazon S3 customers now have the following options for restricting access to their resources:
- Authenticated requests: Allow or deny access based on AWS account
- Query string authentication with expiring URLs: Allow temporary access to resources
- Request-based restrictions: Allow or deny access based on request attributes, such as HTTP referrer and IP address
With bucket policies, customers can also now define security rules that apply to more than one object, including all objects or a subset of objects within a bucket. This makes updating and managing permissions easier.
[..]
This makes S3 much more fun! You can create temporary access to resources based on a query string like session id’s.
You can restrict content to be used only within your website without external linking (HTTP referrer).
And simple group editing using security rules, just change the rules for a folder with one command instead of executing it for every file!
I like that!
More control over your own data and easier editing!
How to create an .ipa for your App
Apple delivers Apps via iTunes using .ipa files. If you want to deliver some Apps to your testers, you can either sync your App to their device or send them an .ipa too.
An .ipa is nothing more than a simple ZIP archive you can create yourself in three easy steps.
Step 1
- Create a folder called “Payload“
- and put your App into it
Step 2
- Copy your big PNG or JPEG Icon (the 512×512 pixels one) into the same folder where Payload folder resides in and
- rename the icon to “iTunesArtwork” (yes, no extension)
This step is optional. If you don’t care about an icon in iTunes, ignore it.
Step 3
Compress both, the Payload folder and the iTunesArtwork file into one ZIP archive
Rename the .zip extension into .ipa and voila, you got your ipa for distribution to your testers!
Your testers can double-click the .ipa and sync it to their devices via iTunes.
Btw. ipa stands for iPhone/iPod Touch Application
July 4th in the App Store
Independence Day as nationwide US holiday should affect your sales in the US. Why not take a look at the numbers and see what exactly happens?
Here is how it affected my sales, first graph is US only and the second is all stores including US. Both are for the past two weeks.
As you can see, the 4th was a overall normal day, in the US a bit lower, but on the 5th I felt it by -35% on that day :-)
I made similar observations on some soccer nations the last days, while the soccer world championships.
Very involved nations had low sales while playing (and a day after that). I wonder if someone had the time and access to numbers to analyse this further?
App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #2: New & Noteworthy in an iTunes Category
This post continues my analysis of some App Store conditions.
The first post can be found here: App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured
#2 – New & Noteworthy in iTunes
When you release a new App you get a chance of getting listed in the New & Noteworthy section on the iTunes within your category.
These aren’t hand picked and so it is very easy to get in there if your first day downloads are high enough. I had two App releases where I could watch what happens if you get into that list.
Looking New & Noteworthy
Here are two screenshots, showing both Apps on top of their categories in iTunes in two different countries:
The Apps are Analytics for iPad (iPad only) and Webshot (Universal).
The duration of the listing is very short and depends very much on how many new releases are published into that category. From what I have seen, you get listed for about 1-2 days.
How to analyse this position
I will compare them with two other releases which were iPad only and Universal – both never listed in this prominent spot.
Because these are new releases, there are no previous sale statistics that could increase. Therefor I will compare the first four weeks of sales after release.
The sales will be compared with sales made in the same country they were listed New & Noteworthy.
Sales numbers – iPad App only
First the one that was New & Noteworthy:
The graph is not exactly four weeks because the App is not that old yet, but the trend is visible.
You can see a spike on the first day and sales going down very fast to a constant level.
And one that wasn’t New & Noteworthy:
No spike in the beginning but a slowly growing number of sales over time.
Sales numbers – Universal App
Again, first the New & Noteworthy one:
Again: You can see a spike on the first day and sales going down very fast. Later they start growing again, very slowly.
And the one which was not:
No spike in the beginning. No growth visible in that country.
On a side note: Most sales for Universal Apps seem to be iPhone based, iPad users still seem to have problems finding Apps.
Originally these Universal Apps were meant for the iPad and made iPhone compatible to reach a bigger audience.
Conclusion
These numbers are very tough to read because the event is so short and the numbers are not that high.
But a trend can be found and looks promising. If you get listed in the New & Noteworthy listing on iTunes you seem to get a good and very visible spot to kick off your new App.
In contrast to not being listed, you will find the sales trends going down instead of up in the following weeks because there is a huge spike in the beginning that you can not repeat without other marketing or promotions.
Thats why this seems to be a worthy spot to claim.
But how can you improve your chances?
I will try to use promo codes. Getting all available promo codes into user hands and get them to purchase my App within the first hours after its release may be worth a try.
App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured
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:
- Category Featured
- New and Noteworthy listing in iTunes Category
- in the Spotlight / in the “What’s hot section” on the iPads App Store
- What’s new listing on the iPad and iTunes
- Keyword optimization
- TV Popularity of an unrelated show
- “Free for one Day” Promotions
- Visual Quality (yes, you heard me!)
- 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 :-)
Analytics for iPad, Release 1.2
A new release for Analytics for iPad has been submitted to Apple today.
Depending on the current speed of Apple’s review process it may take about 10 days to hit the store.
Here is a list of all the things to come with the 1.2 release:
New Features:
- eCommerce Reporting added
- Forward Reports as Excel-CSV
- Forward Reports as XML
- Possibility to switch to another account added
- Language Support for Reports added for:
Deutsch, Français, 日本語, Nederlands, Italiano, Español, 中文 (简体), Русский
Improved:
- Animation for Fullscreen Reporting improved
- Report Titles shortened for better readability
- Several Reports display more than 10 entries by default (configuration for an exact count is on the way)
Bugfix:
- Fixed a crash that happened if the Premium-Upgrade was done too fast after application launch
- Fixed a problem in the Login form which blocked a second login after a time out
In the meantime we will work on other features to improve Analytics for iPad to meet your needs!
Keep sending us emails with your ideas and wishes, so we know which direction to go!
2010/07/03 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!
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