I would like to correct one of the statements I made about the app store.  They do work on the weekends!!  My last version of DPart got approved late Saturday night.  Thanks Apple Store umpa lumps.  How many people work at Apple that just review and approve apps?  There are so many apps and people are updating them every day.  This doesn't account for all the people run the App Store.  

One more tip.  Make the title of your App as long as you can.  Use up all 255 characters that Apple gives you.  I'm pretty sure they have more weight then the keywords.  An approach that I might take with my next release is using different keywords than what's in the title of my app to get more "keyword" coverage.  This would give me about 355 characters of SEO juice in the App store.  255 characters for title + 100 characters for keywords = 355 chars.

I also experimented with iAds for the first time.  Extremely easy to implement and setup.  Early stats show that you need a sh*% load of impressions and click throughs to make any money.  You might be better off advertising your other apps then using iAd.

Here are the results of the changes I talked about in Part 2.

• The change of the title did help a little bit with search result placement.  I moved a head of another app when using "transportation" in my search, but didn't move with other keyword searches.  I guess this tells me that keywords in the title are really important.  More important than what you use for keywords.
• Jury is still out on if my new description can connivence more people to download the app.

Couple more notes to share about the Apple App Store

• Submitted an update to the app this week and it only took 3 days for it to go into review status.  Nice!  But the problem was that the app went into review Friday afternoon and guess the Apple Apple Store is closed on the weekends. DPart didn't get approved until to Monday.  I don't get this.  Why is the app store closed on the weekends?  People are making a living by selling their apps through the app store.  People are investing money and time to develop high quality apps on Apple's platform.  You don't see eBay closing shop on the weekends.
• I'm going to continue to complain about the lack of analytics that Apple provides.  On Saturday the number of downloads doubled for DPart.  Why did this happen?  This is a question that Apple should be able to answer for me by providing some insight into "What my customers search terms were?" Did they click a link to launch the app store and what was the referring site?  I'm totally blind to where my customers are coming from and who they are.
• Is there anyway to know how many people have deleted your app?  I couldn't find a way, but you could "reverse engineer" the number of updates you get when releasing a new version.  This should give you a good estimate of how many people still have your app installed.
• I wish Apple App Store would just email me download stats every morning instead of me having to login and check.  Their iPhone app is nice and is very convenient, but I would rather have an email.  Plus, their iPhone app times out after a certain amount of time so I have to login every morning :(
• One more comment about updates.  Establishing a communication channel with your customers is not easy.  I'm thinking that releasing a new version is a great chance to "message" your customers.  In the release notes or description of your app ask them to review your app or put a link to your web site.  Getting feedback and suggestions about your product is important and companies need to find creative ways to form those communication channels with their customers.

I hate to keep complaining about the Apple App Store, but it's been around for a while and really doesn't have the tools needed by people to make good strategic business and technology decisions.

I made a couple more changes last week to increase DPart's rank in the app store search results.  I also came to some new conclusion on how the app store ranks and returns search results.

• App review's take 1 day to be posted on the app store
• Changes to your description take 1 day to be posted
• It looks like keywords in the app title have more weight than your keywords
• App reviews do not seem to increase an app's search result rank.  As far as I can tell, only the number of downloads can increase an app's search result ranking. 

This week I'm going to make one more change to try to increase my search result ranking and increasing the number of search results DPart is included in.  Im going to change the title of the app to be Disney World Park Transportation – Disney Bus Wait Times and Schedules - DPart.  Adding "Transportation" to my title in addition to my keywords might increase the app's potential to get found.  The other change I'm going to make is to the description.  I'm going to try to sell the app better in the description.  More call to action text.  "How to" section.  I'm hoping these changes will increase the number installs.


What will also be interesting to see this week is if the number of DPart installs go down.  The big spring vacation week might have been last week which means less people vacationing at Disney this week.

Here is an good article that talks about App Store SEO.  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214857/App-Store-Optimization-8-Tips-for-Higher-Rankings

I thought I would share some of my experiences with publishing our DPart IPhone app to the Apple App Store.

• It took about 9 days for Apple to approve the initial release of the app
• I've updated the app twice and both times it has taken 7 days before it was approved

Getting found and adoption is really hard.  Going from 0 downloads to 25 a day practically overnight was a good start.  There are many other ways of getting your app found, but there is no silver bullet.  I believe that it will be lots of little things that get your app found and you can't do too much at once.  Because if you do too much at once it becomes impossible to measure what works and what doesn't.  

For example, bickster.com is not getting any traffic, and the apple store landing page for the app is not coming up on the first page of google, so I know all of my downloads are coming from the App Store.

I do wish apple would provide some more statistics about the App Store.  Here is my wish list.

1. Keyword Tool - It would be very help if Apple would provide a Keyword tool like Google AdWords.  I used Google's Keyword Tool to come up with the keywords for the App Store, but I have no clue what people are really searching for.
2. Landing Page Stats - I would love to know how people are visiting the DPart App Store landing web page and what they do once they get to the page.  How many click "Download"? How many don't?
3. Search Rank - How do apps get ranked in App Store search results?  Do the number of reviews effect your rank?  Does the amount of stars/rating effect rank?  The age of your app effect rank?  Many these conditions are posted somewhere, but I can't find them.
4. Update Keywords - You can't update your app's keywords unless you update your app.  Would be nice to tweak your keywords to see what works and what doesn't without having to release a new binary.

My next objective is to increase the number of downloads from 25 a day to 50. To do this,  I would like to find a sustainable way to generate more interest in the app.  I can make some facebook posts and get another 25 people to download the app, but that will be a one time event as I don't think this app will go viral over night.  I guess I'm looking for suggestions. Anyone?

-cb