Camverter

Yesterday the free sale expired. And here's a few numbers in summary:

Store listing visitors: 34.4K

Installs: 7.93K

Uninstalls: 2.66K

Active devices: 5.7K

The initial flood of install activity, more or less dissipated after the first few days. Looking at the user acquisition report, it appears most users came through the acquisition channel marked "Explore", which is described as:

Unique users who found your app on Google Play but not from search results (for example, browsing a category or similar apps cards).

So what I'm guessing happened is, that the app somehow got to the top of a category, maybe through a featuring of some sort. I haven't been able to figure out how or why. It's is a bit annoying, because it makes it seem like sheer luck and not something that I'll be able to replicate in the future.

In any case, the sale worked and the install count got a major boost.

One learning I did take with me during this experiment, is that unstable builds is a complete no-no! I accidentally released a bad update halfway through, which resulted in crashes for a small part of users. That was a big mistake.

As hard as it is to get positive ratings and reviews, just as easy is it to get bad ones, when a user experiences a crash. This mistake cost quite a few one star ratings and reviews, which could easily have been avoided. Lesson learned.

Trying to boost the install count once more, by offering a week long free sale.

Like last time, I've tried to set up an AdWords campaign, to further promote visibility.

Two days in, the campaign seems to have failed, providing no impressions so far. The budget / CPI combo is probably too low.

That doesn't really matter though. Despite the missing ad traffic, new installs count almost ~5000 in just the two first days of the sale. Success!

The sale will run until the 5th of Aug. so projecting for all of 8 days running, if the daily avg. holds up, this might incur approximately ~19K new installs.

The campaign was definitely a success, resulting in 1.93K total. I expected about a 50% retention, since they were free installs, but now that the rate has settled more, it's possible to better gauge the correct percentage.

At the moment the app is at 564 installs on active devices, so retention is closer to 30%, which is obviously quite a bit below expectations.

It's not all bad though, since now there's also some reviews on the Play Store page. Currently at 4.1, with 13 ratings total, and a couple being with feedback attached.

So far so good. Next up is making the first sale!

After having been in beta for what seems like quite a long time, and not really having a plan for further beta recruitment, I decided to simply release the app on the Play Store at a reduced price-point (~$1):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.camverter.app

This didn't really yield any new installs either. Not even any visitors to the play store page. Time to come up with another approach.

Here's what I've decided to try out; Making the app free + advertising a little bit!

The play store allows paid apps to hold sales for up to seven days, so that's what I've done, setting the price to 0.

Alongside, I've decided to spend a little money on ad-words, just to test out the waters. I've created a small campaign, with a limited budget, to run next to the sale for one week.

So far 42K impressions -> 1.3K clicks -> 0 installs.

Admittedly, I've got little experience running ad-words campaigns, so I might be doing it wrong, but so far I'm just trying stuff out.

All in all, I've been really happy with the experience from betabound. Baring in mind, that this is a completely free service, I'd say it's well worth it.

Here's some rough numbers, from the 2x two-week feature they gave me:

• 70-80 signups for a beta key. (Fuzzy number because of duplicates and outside signups.)
• About 60% conversion to actual installs. (Yeah, even voluntary signups -> installs isn't 1-1)
• About 10% of signups resulted in actual feedback, when directly contacted via email.

So far the beta recruitment has been going pretty good, but unfortunately listings are only valid for two weeks.

I didn't know this, so a couple of days ago I wrote betabound asking why my listing was had been marked as expired.

Today I got an answer explaining the two week rule, but also a notice that I was eligible for a free, one-time re-post. Awesome!

Camverter got accepteed to betabound, and the first couple of signups already started trickling in. Great!

https://www.betabound.com/camverter-beta-key/