Archive for the 'iPhone' Category

The Fortunate Bear FAQ

As some of the more astute readers might have noticed, the sidebar and about page of this blog have changed to remove references to Order N and their products and services. You might be wondering what that’s all about. I’ve decided to answer your potential questions in FAQ format, in order to sound more pretentious.

So what’s the deal with Order N?

They’re still around, successful, and offering custom development services for the Mac and iOS platforms. However, I sold my shares in the company back in October and I’m no longer part of Order N.

What do you do now?

Mainly sit around in my underwear, playing solitaire.

…uh, anything else?

Sometimes I pet my cats, Luna and Pasha.

Alright, I guess we’re done here.

Wait, before you go, let me tell you about my new company.

You could’ve mentioned that earlier.

And miss out on all the interesting tidbits about Mac indie life?

Anyway, so you have a new company?

Yep, still shiny and everything.

…anything you want to say about it?

Yeah, it’s going to be awesome, sweet, sick, and possibly jivetastic, if that’s still a word.

I’m not sure that was ever a word. What’s the company going to do?

Be awesome. Gonna have our own tree fort and everything. See:

Klubhouse.jpg

It’s like Panic’s Founder’s Room, only cooler. I’m also working on the official company super secret handshake, but I can’t think of anything after “patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.”

Wow, there’s so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to begin. But I see the company name appears to “Fortunate Bear.” Where does the name come from?

Insomnia induced delirium, and possibly the sheer jivetasticness of myself.

Really?

No, I just randomly matched up adjectives and nouns until I found one I liked the sound of, and my wife wouldn’t divorce me over.

Is Fortunate Bear going to be a software company or what?

Oh, right, software. Yes, software will be involved in the process. I’m not much for playing solitaire with real cards. It’s the reason why the iPad is so magical.

Is the whole FAQ going to be this way? Because there’s a netiquette FAQ I could be hosting.

Alright, fine. Fortunate Bear is a software company focused on creating Mac and iOS apps to sell under the Fortunate Bear brand. I am the sole owner.

What about contracting/freelancing?

I might have to do some in the early years of Fortunate Bear, but it will be kept a bear minimum (see what I did there?) and phased out as soon as possible. I am not currently available for contracting. I’m focusing on building my own products.

What can you tell me about the products you’re working on?

I’m working on a Mac app for window management. It’s like Exposé except it doesn’t suck. I’ll be announcing a beta for it soon.

What about Hearts Attack?

I bought the source and rights for Hearts Attack from Order N. I’m renaming it, adding a few features, and changing the way it will generate money. I’m hoping to release it soon, but not until I get my Mac app out.

How can I get more information about Fortunate Bear and its products?

This blog will continue to be the main place I write and make announcements. However, I have a placeholder site for Fortunate Bear. You can sign up for the company newsletter to get announcements about products as well as tips and tricks after the products are released. There’s also an official Fortunate Bear Twitter account you can follow.

Anything else you want to add?

It’s gonna be jivetastic.

Please shut up.

Tracking iPhone Ads to App Sales

When trying to promote your iPhone app it helps to know which efforts are actually producing a result. It’s little tricky with iPhone apps to know which ads or promotions are converting into actual sales, thanks to the black box that is the App Store. However, it is possible using LinkShare. I found the process a little under-documented, so I’ll describe the necessary steps.

Step 1: Sign up as an iTunes Affiliate

First you’ll need an affiliate account, so go to Apple’s iTunes Affiliates page and click on “Apply to be an affiliate,” which will take you to LinkShare. The sign up process asks for your company and website information.

You’ll need to apply to advertise for “Apple iTunes.” I don’t remember how long it took me to be approved, but I think it was less than 24 hours. They do check the website you provided to make sure it is legit. I have heard that they will reject your application if the website is just a placeholder or if it has trademarked names in the URL, such as “iPhone.”

You need a LinkShare account because Apple has provided LinkShare hooks into the App Store so it knows when a click turns into an actual sale. As a bonus you’ll earn a 5% commission.

Step 2: Create a LinkShare link for your app

Next, you’ll need to create a LinkShare link to your app in the App Store. Using this link will allow LinkShare to magically know if a click turns into a sale.

In LinkShare, select the Links > Deep Linking menu item, and select Apple iTunes as the advertiser. Enter your app’s iTunes URL in the URL field. Don’t worry about the U1 Value field right now, you can just leave it blank. Click Create Link and copy the resulting URL.

On your product page, wherever you link to your app in the App Store, use your LinkShare link instead. If you stop here, LinkShare will be able to track how many clicks from your product page result in sales. This is useful in itself, but it would be even better if you could track each promotion separately, and know how many sales a specific ad resulted in.

LinkShare supports ad/promotion tracking through “signatures” which is what the U1 Value field above was all about. Signatures are simply a user defined string that are passed to LinkShare via in the u1 URL parameter.

Step 3: Tracking referrers through the product page

When creating ads or links to your product, you’ll probably want to direct potential customers to your app’s product page on your website instead of directly to the App Store. This allows you to provide a video of your app, cross promote other products or services, or actually use HTML formatting. The complication that arises from this is remembering which ad the user clicked on to get to your product page by the time they get to the App Store.

The first step here is to know how the potential customer got to your product page to begin with. The easiest way to do that is to simply add on a URL parameter for the referrer and give each ad or promotion a different parameter value, which we’ll call a “signature.” For example, an ad for Hearts Attack could use this URL:

http://www.orderndev.com/hearts-attack.html?u1=GAD001

Here the referrer parameter name is u1, just to be consistent with LinkShare, and the ad signature is GAD001.

Next, you need to get the ad signature passed on to LinkShare. This is done through the u1 URL parameter, so you will need to modify any LinkShare URLs on your product page based on the signature parameter. You can do this either server side or client side in JavaScript. Dan Wood talks about how to track referrers server side for Mac apps, and his examples can be modified to work here. I chose to modify the LinkShare URLs client side using JavaScript. The basic algorithm is:

  1. Check for the u1 URL parameter. If it exists save it off into a cookie.
  2. Check for the signature cookie. If it exists, append “&u1=signature” to the LinkShare URLs.

At the bottom of my product page, I have code that looks like this:

	<script type="text/javascript">
		saveParameterInCookie('u1', 'hearts-attack-src');
		restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor('u1', 'hearts-attack-src', 'buy-link');
		restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor('u1', 'hearts-attack-src', 'app-store-link');
	</script>

The first line saves the URL parameter named u1 into a cookie named ‘hearts-attack-src.’ The next two lines update anchor tags in the HTML by appending the value of the signature cookie as an URL parameter. The second line says: update the ‘buy-link’ anchor tag by taking the contents of the ‘hearts-attack-src’ cookie as the value for the ‘u1′ parameter and appending it to the anchor tag’s URL.

Here’s the code for implementing saveParameterInCookie and restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor:

function getURLParameter(name) {
	name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
	var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
	var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
	var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);
	if (results == null)
		return null;
	else
		return results[1];
}

function addParameterToURL(url, name, value) {
	if ( value == null )
		return url;
	return '' + url + '&' + name + "=" + value;
}

function saveParameterInCookie(parameterName, cookieName) {
	var parameter = getURLParameter(parameterName);
	if ( parameter == null )
		return;

	createCookie(cookieName, parameter, 180);
}

function restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor(parameterName, cookieName, anchorName) {
	var cookie = readCookie(cookieName);
	if ( cookie == null )
		return;

	link = document.getElementById(anchorName);
	link.href = addParameterToURL(link.href, parameterName, cookie);	
}

Hopefully the code is self-explanatory. It relies on functions createCookie and readCookie, which I got from this article on JavaScript cookies. I should also point out I am not a professional JavaScripter, so there may be bugs in the code. I make no guarantees about this code.

As complicated as all that might have seemed, you are now tracking potential customers from your ads or promotions, to your product page, to the App Store where LinkShare knows if they are actually buying or not.

Step 4: Tracking the performance of ads or promotions

The final step is viewing the results of your ad or promotion in LinkShare. LinkShare will be able to tell you how many visitors actually made it to the App Store, and how many of those actually bought something. To know how many visitors an ad or promotion is driving to your product page, you’ll need to use something like Mint or Google Analytics.

In LinkShare select the Reports > Advanced Reports menu item. Select the “Signature Activity” report type, and click View Report. You’ll get a table that looks like this:

linkshare-sales.png

The Member ID column is where your ad or promotion signature will show up. It will be whatever you pass to LinkShare via the u1 URL parameter. It also shows how many clicks the link got, and how much sales it generated. As you can see, my ads aren’t doing so hot, but at least I know that now.

Launching Hearts Attack, An iPhone Game

The first week of sales for Hearts Attack finished up earlier this week. It was a typical first week for an iPhone app; that is, a large spike of sales followed by a rapid crash to nothing. Here’s a graphic illustrating this:

Car Crash

Oops, sorry, wrong graphic. I meant this one:

First Week Sales Graph

Hmmm… not much difference really. As you can see I actually sold nothing on Sunday. Apparently everyone was interpreting “day of rest” as “don’t buy any iPhone apps today.”

This article is kind of a postmortem for the launch of Hearts Attack. I attempted a few different things in order to drum up sales. Some were more successful than others.

  • One of the things I did before the launch was some search engine optimization on the Hearts Attack product page. Dan Wood of Karelia has some good resources on how to do SEO.

    I was fairly pleased with the results. The product page ended up on the first results page for a few of the keywords I was targeting. It could be better, but not bad for a PageRank amateur such as myself.

  • On the day of launch, I issued a press release through prMac. I opted for their “extended press release” which sends the press release the same day and to more people. It’s only $20 so it’s low risk.

    I did see a couple of obvious benefits from this. The first benefit is “link juice” to the Hearts Attack product page and our company website in general. I had done some SEO earlier and discovered the biggest thing we were in need of was links. This helped immensely with that.

    Secondly, I mentioned in the press release that promotional codes were available upon request. Only three people ever asked for them, but I happily gave them away. I have not seen any reviews as a result, but hopefully at least I garnered some good will among reviewers.

    Speaking of reviewers, one thing I did not have ready at launch, that I should have, was a press kit. I kept mine simple in that it just contains screenshots and images of the app icon. I should have linked to it in the press release and product page, because it was something the reviewers immediately asked for.

    It terms of how many sales were made because of the press release, I don’t know. It did noticeably increase traffic to our site, but I didn’t have LinkShare hooked up at the time, so I don’t know how many of those visitors became customers.

  • I wrote about Hearts Attack here and tweeted about it. I both published my own press release and then followed up with the story about Hearts Attack came about.

    This drove a decent amount of traffic to our website, and resulted in a few sales from my friends and other people who follow me on Twitter. Like the press release, it also helped with the “link juice” of our website.

  • I asked my wife, Elaine, to write about it on Facebook since she has approximately 30 bazillion friends on there and I have none. Some say this is because I haven’t even created an account, but I think Facebook is just being stuck up.

    Anywho, this didn’t create much traffic, but it did create a couple of sales from friends who follow Elaine on Facebook, but not me on Twitter.

Of course the biggest driver of sales is being listed at the top in the App Store, which by default is sorted by the release date. Unfortunately being at the top is fated to be temporary, and I could easily tell when I fell down the list by looking at my sales.

In summary, I learned: I should have had LinkShare up and running to begin with so I could properly track conversions and know what approach is the most successful as far as sales. Second, I should have a press kit ready at launch and linked to it from the press release.