Being Amazon's Free App of the Day: The Results

On Monday, August 27th, 2012, Word Crank Elite was the Free App of the Day in the Amazon App Store.  We were very excited about being given the opportunity and promised to share the results (find out how this opportunity came about, here).  So overall, we feel that the promotion was a success.  We were able to increase our game's visibility in the App Store and received some valuable feedback.

 

Here are a few statistics from the past week which help highlight the impact on our traffic:

Aug. 27 - Sep. 2 Visits: 50,677 Unique Visitors: 14,201 Pageviews: 38,010 Pages / Visit: 0.75 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:11:17

Aug. 19 - Aug. 26 Visits: 1,508 Unique Visitors: 251 Pageviews: 1,169 Pages / Visit: 0.78 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:15:16

Based on the above table you can see that we had a huge influx of traffic; an increase of over 33x. We also saw an increase in the number of downloads of the free version of Word Crank, in the other app stores, Google Play and iOS.

What was unexpected to us was the number of negative comments related to the use of OpenFeint in the game.  On Google Play we have 4.4 stars, but on Amazon with so many people complaining about the use of OpenFeint we have only 2 stars.  That is unfortunate as we thought that OpenFeint was allowing users the ability to compete with friends and gain achievements.  From what we have been able to find online, there really is no basis for such negativity.  However, as OpenFeint was recently bought by GREE we were already considering alternative scoring solutions.

So what were our major takeaways?

• we should allow users the ability to choose which game level they wanted to start with, 3, 4, or 5 letter words (this will be included in version 1.3.5)


• we should start the difficulty level at "Bonkers" (this will be included in version 1.3.5)


• we should move away from use of OpenFeint (TBD)

We will share some additional statistics within the next few weeks, as the impact of these types of promotions can have lasting effects.

Becoming Amazon's Free App of the Day

Word Crank Elite is Amazon's Free App of the Day for Monday, August 27th, 2012! So how did this come about?  First, we made an awesome game;-), next we received an email from Amazon:

"We noticed your app Word Crank Elite v 1.3.0 and think it is an interesting candidate for our Free App of the Day promotion."

Ok great, so what happens next?  We agreed to the terms as stated in the email and then we waited. We eventually heard from someone on the Free App of the Day (FAOTD) Team, and were notified that our application had passed all testing; however, they wanted us to reconsider how we were integrated with OpenFeint.

Apparently, other apps had received 1-star ratings by having the OpenFeint pop-up as soon as the application was loaded.  In order to work around, this we removed the default configuration and allowed users to choose if they wanted to use OpenFeint when they click the "SCORES" button.  Once that was done, we resubmitted the new version of the application and waited again.

This past Friday we received notice that our game would be featured on Monday, August 27th.  After which I personally ran through my house and kissed everyone!  We are very excited to have been given this opportunity and will report on the results in another week. So stay tuned!