Help me understand my recent App Store surge
I released an app (a game) four weeks ago, and about 10 days ago we've seen a fairly big increase in downloads via "App Store Browse", but the analytics doesn't give you any more information than that. I guesstimate that it means that users are finding the app via "Similar games" or similar, but I'm not sure. I don't think we've been highlighted or anything like that.
Anyway, what I'm looking for is:
A) What could be the reason this has happened, and is it normal?
B) Do you have any resources to share regarding interpreting sales trends etc in App Store / Google Play, or other good ASO resources?
Trending on Indie Hackers
For cross-store context, AppWatch (appwatch.dev) tracks App Store, Google Play, itch.io and Steam in one dashboard — useful when you see a spike and want to know if it's isolated to one store or broader. Free tier for up to 3 apps.
That was great news!
Using the right ASO Tool will help you for a consistent growth for sure. You can read the article below for the best Free & Paid App Store Optimization Tools
https://metrikal.io/blog/best-app-store-optimization-tools-free-paid/
Best,
You were or are probably featured in some subcategory in Games > All Categories > Role Playing or Games > All Categories > Adventure.
However, I looked for your game in the app store in the Games tab and could not find you.
Can you see which country most of the traffic is coming from? I'm in the U.S. and it's possible that you were featured in a different country.
It's mainly US, Canada and UK. But U.S is by far the biggest source. I'm in Sweden and I haven't seen it even once under "Similar games" or featured in the App Store.
If you visit the page of a similar game, such as Magium or Path of Adventure, is it listed as a similar game to those?
It's not there for Magium or Path of Adventure.
However, after digging around, I did find it in "The Wanderer" (position #2 in similar games) and "Titan Conquest" (position #1 in similar games).
Basically, I did a search for "text rpg" then checked each game in the search results until I found yours listed in "similar games".
Given the good placement (#2 and #1 positions), this is most likely the source of your traffic. Maybe you're being listed under "similar games" for other titles as well, but I couldn't find anything else.
Apple's reporting for this kind of stuff is terrible, and unfortunately I've never found AppAnnie or AppFigures to be helpful either. I just manually dig around the App Store on my iPhone until I find a good guess.
Hope this helps!
Thanks a lot! That definitely helps, and I think that's most likely the source of the sales. It helps because now I know roughly how valuable such a position is. I found that we're listed as "similar" to those games in the Swedish App Store as well, so those things might be globally applied. The reason why U.S is the biggest source is likely because it's got a much higher population than UK/Canada/Australia etc.
If we get more of those types of positions (which could be likely even now that we're getting a steady increase of reviews), I'm thinking we might even be able to double or triple our sales just from that.
You're welcome!
That sort of placement is a good sign, that means Apple's algorithms are recognizing the quality of your game and recommending it.
Given the niche nature of your game, here are some strategies that you may want to try:
Let me know if have any other questions. I have a fair bit of experience dealing with the app store. I used to do marketing for a small mobile app shop that had three different productivity apps in the app store. I'll be perfectly honest, trying to succeed in the app store was one of the most frustrating and difficult things I've ever worked on.
you're the fucking boss.
lol, thanks 😋
I've tried, some of the tips you mention - but there's a big difference in trying something without any experience, and having someone with experience actually validating that what you've been doing is good. So thanks a lot for this, it's really useful.
I've been running ads on Reddit on and off. They were basically a zero sum game (slightly profitable still), but definitely increased the number of downloads so I'll probably resume that.
Getting an in-app rating notice should probably also be a priority. I'm surprised we've even gotten as many as we have, but you're right, we need many more.
Also, there's a fair bit of randomness and luck in the app store. In that list I gave you, some of those tactics worked for one app but not another and we have no idea why. Sometimes we would spend a ton of effort on ASO and get no results. Other times, we would do nothing and Apple would magically boost our rank. You just have to play by their rules, do your best, and pray to the App Store gods. Apple can giveth and Apple can taketh away.
I hear you. Do you know if Google Play is different?
Since this surge has only been on App Store, our Google Play downloads are almost unchanged (we have had a slight bump, possibly from word of mouth from iOS players), so I have yet to start working on improving our position there.
I'm not trying to discourage you from the Google Play store, it could work well for you. It just didn't work for us because we were trying to make money. I think "free" works very well in the Play Store. I haven't played your game so I don't know how much of the game is free and whether the IAP unlocks the game, or whether it's just for side perks.
Since you're using React Native, that's a good reason to pursue both.
We chose native apps for both iOS and Android and eventually ignored Android b/c we couldn't justify the developer expenses for such little revenue.
But if React Native makes development time a non-issue for Android, I'd say go for it!
To be honest, we could never get Google Play to work for us. Our revenues were like 95% Apple and 5% Google Play. Part of the reason was that our core apps were paid, and Apple is clearly better for monetization. We did create a freemium app which did OK, in the play store but not nearly as well as in the Apple store so we ended up paying almost no attention to Android. It's possible that because we paid no attention, we didn't achieve success. But it's also true that because we couldn't achieve success, we didn't pay attention.
I think in your case, since you have a free + IAP model, it could work in the Play Store. I just think monetization rates will be significantly lower.
The tactics I described are generally applicable to both stores.
Also, in our experience, there is a very small effect between stores, usually when an iPhone user switches to Android or vice versa. But it's small.
At the end of the day, we were a small team (5 people) that was just spread too thin across 3 apps and 3 platforms (iOS, Android and web app). If I were doing it over, I would have narrowed our efforts. Better to achieve great success in one app on one platform than small success across the board.
Well, I'm not a big fan of Google Play or Android in general, but there seems to be a HUGE market there. A competing game, Magium, has 45.000+ reviews on Google Play, but only 700 or so on App Store. So obviously a big part of our target audience is there, and supporting Android (from a dev perspective) is not too hard for us since we're using React Native.
Anyway, I think you're right, and I'll probably not worry too much about Google Play for the moment.
For our app, implementing in-app ratings controller was the best app marketing decision we made. It increased the number of ratings from about 75 per day to 250 per day.
If I recall, you're allowed to prompt 3 times as long as they don't refuse. Be strategic about when you prompt. Maybe after finishing a battle or quest, ask when they are having fun or have accomplished something cool in the game. Definitely not interrupt when they are in the middle of doing something.
Most likely you were featured or your app ranked higher for specific keywords during that time.
Is it a paid app, or has in-app purchases? Or is it free? The app store might try to optimize its revenue by a/b testing different app results for different queries.
This increase is not from specific keyword ranking – that would show up in App Store Search, not App Store Browse.
App Store Browse is the Today, Games and Apps tab.
I do think "Similar Games" is also App Store Browse, so maybe you're listed there.
It's free with an IAP to unlock the full game.
Hi insats - first of all this is great! It's always a reward to see progress like this.
Second, I would love to check this out before responding, would you pls share the app store link?
Sure! You'll find the links (for both Android and iOS) at the bottom of the page at https://untold-game.com
Is this new download level continuing to today? Or has it gone down since the initial spike? I did not see any featuring or improvements on ASO keywords - I'm wondering if you were featured somewhere else?
It's continued still. The highest was 4 days ago, but it's still going strong, roughly the same every day.
As in where?
Google alerts not showing any articles or game websites highlighting the game. I was thinking shared somewhere on slack/discord in someone's community or even an email newsletter/group. I checked Twitter, nothing seems to spike. If your app went from a paid app to freemium w/ IAP then there are communities that highlight these changes. I saw two post in r/iosgaming and r/androidgaming.
Your app store reviews are great - it might be worthwhile to respond to those comments and possibly ask them where they heard about the game to triangulate to an answer. Maybe offer a reward so they respond since data at this point is valuable
Not a bad idea, but I've yet to receive a single response from the responses I've given so far (I usually link to our discord and add my e-mail). I could ask around on our discord though. We've had a steady stream of new members since this started.
Regarding Google/Twitter etc, it wouldn't show upp as "Browse" in App Store Analytics if that was the case.
Yeah, no one ever replies to responses to app reviews. Maybe 1 in 100 do. I recommend only replying to negative comments/customer service complaints to let other prospective customers know that you care about customer support.
unfortunately, after having built many apps into the store... the analytics just suck... unless you've integrated like paddle into some of them... but even that might not be very helpful.
sometimes, the surges are just... bots.
are you able to create a feedback loop in the app? asking questions of them?
Sure, I know they're not bots. I have analytics, and they're definitely playing the game. Buying the IAPs as well, so.
The countries are (in order of magnitude) US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. Makes sense since the game is in english.
fantastic. got any ideas in the last day or so? did you try checking google alerts?
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/google-alerts-simple-powerful-and-free-7f5cdb9d48
I've already checked, but it's not really relevant since the traffic is from "App Store Browse" so it's not external traffic. I think the answer is here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/help-me-understand-my-recent-app-store-surge-3f2e08a5a4?commentId=-M5LSbn4qsQ_mDkt0whE
you're right. i used app annie and should have fucking said that!
i had forgotten about it until the amazing @stevenkkim spoke up!
https://john.do/viral/
Couple of things you could check:
If you can, you should really subscribe to one of AppFigures plans. They have added ASO resources as well (which I don't use) but for general tracking of app rankings, sales, features, reviews and ratings, they are really really useful. I don't work there, but have been using it for over 6 years.
The users are real (they're playing the game, buying the full game IAP, giving reviews etc), what I'm concerned about is the possible flakyness of it. I mean, if it's because Apple decided to list the game in a few places, perhaps so that people find it when browsing for similar games, does that mean that this will possibly last? I mean, is it a trend of a fluke? That's the sort of thing I'm wondering.
Normally, if you own a restaurant, a store etc - once you're established, it's usually very easy to know approx what kind of sales to expect. For example, the upcoming month will be similar to the current, or similar to the same month the year before - unless there's som seasonal variation.
That's what I'm trying to figure out here, in order to know what kind of revenue I can expect. I mean, we were down to almost as little as 1-2 purchases per day just before this started. It had been creeping down slowly from the release (where we saw much better numbers). Then all of a sudden we're selling ~20 games per day and have been continuously doing so for ~10 days now.
I've tried App Annie and AppFollow, but couldn't really find any answers there. Is AppFigure better/different?
I haven't tried AppFollow, though I know AppAnnie isn't too useful for trying to track down if your app has been featured or not. That's probably what you want to figure out (something AppFigures does, but might be something in the other services as well) ... it's very possible that your app is featured in an editorial 'story' somewhere.
It's also possible that your keyword ranking has improved for some significant keyword. That's something that AppAnnie can help with, even with the free plan. You should also look at the App Store Connect App Analytics page .... you'll be able to see if Impressions / App Store Page Views have gone up considerably or not to match this upward trend.
AppAnnie shows if your app was featured in free tier.
Maybe it doesn't always show 100% precise data but it is useful for sure to check when and if you were featured. I've used it for many years to track where my apps were featured and it worked well.
AppAnnie tells med that it's been featured 1 time
on App Store category pages but the link to the feature doesn't display any data:
Oh well, I think the answer lies here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/help-me-understand-my-recent-app-store-surge-3f2e08a5a4?commentId=-M5LSbn4qsQ_mDkt0whE