The Relationship Between Downloads and In-app Purchases

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I've been doing a lot of analysis on my apps, especially the popular ones (BreakFree and Fuel Buddy). One of the points I wanted to dive into was the nature of in-app purchases. How are these related to downloads? At what point do people go for in-app purchases? Does an increase in downloads always translate to higher purchases? 

The common theory is that increase your downloads and your purchases will increase. This is true but with a caveat. Let me explain. 

Look at the graph below. The red bars represent downloads and the blue bars are in-app units sold (the actual number was obviously lot lower, it has been multiplied by x to get both the bars in proportion). Now as you can see the downloads increased from Jan to April, and so did the in-app purchases, no surprise here. But look at June, though the downloads fell drastically the purchases actually increased! The fall in the purchases only triggered in July. This can again be seen in August, though the downloads increased, the in-app purchases fell.

From the above findings we can deduce that in-app purchases do follow the download trend, but there is a lag of a month. The plausible explanation could be that the users only purchase after trying out the app for a fair amount of time (on an average one month).

So the next time you see a jump in downloads but not in in-app purchases, don't worry, it will soon follow :-)

Please keep in mind that this study was done on Fuel Buddy, which is a stable, high utility product. The above study may not hold true for games and novelty products.

Achieve Higher Ranks and Better Downloads for your Apps

Before I start rattling off, let me make it clear that I do not have millions of app downloads against my name, nor do I advocate not marketing your app. I am just stating my experience below.

I have launched 2 apps in the Google play store and I have managed to achieve a better ranking resulting in a higher number of downloads. My Fuel Buddy app used to be ranked 350+ in the Play Store, this has now come down to 120. My downloads have also significantly increased, I used to get about 30 - 40 downloads a day for Fuel Buddy. I managed to get these up to 100 - 150. Let me share on how I managed this. Mind you my experience is only in Android and hence these points, as far as I am concerned, are only valid for Google Play Store.

1) Pay Attention to your App Title

The most important thing which will get your app ranked higher is keeping an intelligent title. Whatever is the functionality of your app, try to include that in the title. Google allows 30 letters, try to squeeze in some important key words in the title itself. Eg, I changed my app title to Fuel Buddy (Gas, Mileage Log)

2) Give Frequent Updates

I have observed that there is always spike in downloads for about a day or two after your update. So make sure you churn out updates for your app. This does not mean giving an update everyday, but at least try to stick to 2 updates a month. These updates could be simple bug fixes as well.

3) Release your App in Multiple Languages

This is an obvious one. More languages means a wider audience. And Android makes it pretty easy to do this (as long as you have parked your strings in the strings.xml). I get my translators from Fiverr.com. Its a pretty decent site. With most gigs starting at $5. So usually end up paying $10 for a translation, 5 for the strings in my app and 5 for my App description in Play Store.

4) Strive for more Ratings

You can do this by displaying a pop-up asking the user to rate your app and then re-directing him to your app store page. I display a pop-up after my app has been opened 10 times. The good part is that if the user has been using my app for that long he likes it and more often than not ends up giving a good rating.

5) Get Feedback

Giving the user an option to provide feedback will reduce your chances of getting a poor review. In case a user is unhappy with a feature, he'd much rather reach out to the feedback button than leave a bad review (unless you've managed to really piss him off!!). There are multiple Feedback services which you can implement in your app and they let the user drop his feedback in your mailbox. You can even reply to that mail and the user will receive a response within the app. If you do not want to implement these in your app, make sure to place your email link which the user can easily access.

If you guys have better ideas to achieve higher downloads and improve rankings please do give a shout out.

Adios.