What happens to the traffic you send to the App Store? — iA

We constantly test new ways to optimize our sales funnel. The funnel Twitter — Site — App Store is a long, shaky funnel and we don’t get useful data from Apple’s Analytics. We test the wildest things.

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This year, we increased our blogging activity. This allowed us to test how much we can influence our sales by blogging more than just every couple of months. We had a lot to say, and so we blogged almost every day, got better traffic, and indeed that resulted in more sales.

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Nice! As the traffic started going up from in January, sales started going up, too. Okay, maybe we need to blog more regularly then? Daily, even? Well, we also noticed that if we throw lots of traffic at the Store, we get punished, too. The App Store algorithm started downranking us in the charts and thus throttle sales from within the App Store. That was not the first time, either.

Interesting article showing that as there is more traffic to the App Store, developers are penalized. It’s almost as if Apple has an algorithm that wants to keep sales at a specific level, no matter how much work developers do to promote their apps.

iA, maker of iA Writer, my text editor of choice, has found that while blogging more increased traffic to the App Store, they didn’t make any more money.

Maybe they should just sell the app directly…

Source: What happens to the traffic you send to the App Store? — iA