The iTunes Connect portal is great for getting a quick look at your sales and downloads for your apps. I check it first thing every morning to see where my apps are at. I should probably stop, because lately it’s been depressing. But if you want deeper analysis, you’ll need to go somewhere else. A completely free service I recommend is App Annie. Here’s why:
The amount of data you can access is INSANE. Once you are signed up and grant the site access to your iTunes Connect data, it’s a goldmine.
(If you are concerned about security, you can set them up as a particular type of user and only allow them access to data. There is a step by step guide here.)
All this data is in iTunes Connect, but it presents only the basic information. App Annie allows you to browse and view the data so many ways.
The main dashboard lists all your apps and shows each of their downloads and revenues for the past 7 days, with a comparison with last week’s, and how your app is charting in your home country! It will also tell you if you’ve had any reviews you’ve had over the past 7 days. (To do that in iTunes Connect, you have to click on each app individual and click a few more times to see whether or not you’ve had any)
Is your app featured in the What’s Hot? category in Russia? How would you know? Well, App Annie will let you know with a little icon. Notice no icon on my chart? Nobody likes my apps I guess!
I’d like to pretend I blurred out the app numbers because of the mountains of cash I’m making…but it’s really because I’m not. 🙂
Once of the best tools are the RANK options. You can see where you app currently ranks, and how high it has ranked over it’s lifetime in every country in the app store.
I would have never had known that one of my apps hit the TOP 10 in the Photo/Video Category without it!!!
Okay, it was Cambodia…but still. TOP TEN!
I also would never had known that my app was actually more popular than MINECRAFT at one point. Yeah, it was Cambodia, but still. “More popular than Minecraft” is a good selling point. My 11 year old son wasn’t that impressed however. “What’s Camodia?” “You’ll never get more downloads than Minecraft Dad…:
Or that one of my apps was the 7th HIGHEST GROSSING PHOTO/VIDEO app in….MOLDOVA!
Wait…where the hell is Moldova?
Oh. Thanks to Nathan White for that!
The only other way to check something like this is to switch your iTunes to various countries to check if your apps have hit the top 200 in their category. Waste of time.
You can filter the results by dates, country, It’s just insane the amount of ways you can present and evaluate your sales and downloads.
And you can see how your apps have done from the very beginning
Hey…this looks nothing like the graph icon in iTunes Connect! It keep showing the graph going up and up and up….grrr…
And of course you can export all that data.
You can mark special events (reviews, updates, etc) for your apps so when you browse your sales, you can analyze the effect it had. See that big spike below? Promo code giveaway.
Marking all these down, you can look at the data a while after to see what is working, and what isn’t!
Not to mention the fact the graphs your apps make can be quite pretty!
The best part? The service is completely free! (but they also offer a great premium service)
Frankly, I don’t know why Apple doesn’t just buy them out and use it for developers…
ONE YEAR LATER UPDATE:
Really been loving App Annie. Checking it every day to see where my app are tracking…but really I probably shouldn’t be. You get a high when you see tons of green (apps going up the rankings)…and feel down when you are faced with a sea of red (going down). It can get depressing sometimes…
But thanks to it, I have found out that I hit #1 in Nigeria and Honduras, along with a few top tens elsewhere. Something that is cool to know, and you could use to promote your app.
Noel Chenier
PS-Help out a fellow developer! Check out my Photography Assignment Generator Apps and give the free versions a try! And please let anyone else who might be interested know all about them.
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