Free for a day – does it work?

February 1, 2010August 27, 2013 Ezone

Does making an iPhone game ‘free for a day’ help with sales? Well, the jury is still out…

Here is a snapshot of sales trends for our Crazy Snowboard game for the period leading up to and after Xmas 2009. You can see that over that period we experimented with pricing and marketing and had two days where we gave Crazy Snowboard away for free:

From the graph it looks like the Dec 11 AppVentCalendar giveaway (130K+ free copies) did marginally increase royalties, however the Jan 23 FreeAppADay giveaway (58K+ free copies) actually decreased royalties.

Unfortunately because we have a number of things going on (updates, sales, Xmas, addition of Plus+ network) it is hard to make any definitive conclusions, but we can say the following:

Free days have minimal impact on sales
Xmas has a huge effect!
Updating used to have a positive effect on sales (no longer as pronounced as apps are not listed based on the update date, but the release date)
Total income does not seem to be price sensitive (for a low priced app like ours)
Adding Plus+ (and being featured on their site) increases sales
Sales go usually up on weekends

The other item of note is that although Crazy Snowboard has in-game links to 12 of our other apps, there was no noticeable difference in sales of these apps over the free period (or afterwards).

However, what the graph doesn’t tell us is the long-term effect of having our app in the hands of an extra 200K+ players. Hopefully this increased awareness will translate to some word of mouth sales, and not just erode our market of potential purchasers.

In conclusion, we aren’t planning any ‘free for a day’ giveaways anytime soon… and certainly won’t be paying any other sites to promote it.

Here are some links to other developer experiences with ‘Free for a Day’ campaigns (looks like you get the best results if your app has in-app purchases or in-game ads):

Please leave a comment below with your experiences.

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