One of the big things that iPhone game developers (at least forward thinking ones) are constantly working on, is finding alternate ways to point customers towards their games. It is very difficult to build significant paths to app discovery besides the App Store, but it provides some much valued security from the rollercoaster and fluctuation of the app charts.
In that effort we have a “NimbleStore” built into all of our games, which can be accessed from the main menu. The store is displayed using a web view, and we have Google analytics embedded inside to track how people are accessing it. In this post I will show a month’s worth of data from our NimbleStore.
This month of time is a particularly interesting chunk of data to look at, because halfway through the time frame on June 18th, two things happened. One, Scoops 2.0 was approved - which I think provided a spike in visitors to the store as people who might not have launched Scoops lately checked out the update. Two, on the same day we re-designed the NimbleStore to feature the individual games as icons instead of banner-type graphics.
Here we can see the number of unique visitors hitting the NimbleStore per day. In the first segment you can see an average of around 3,000 unique visits a day. There is a big 200% spike when the Scoops 2.0 update goes through. It goes to show how important regular app updates are to keep people coming back to your app over time.
This graph is the average time on the index page of the NimbleStore, which is a little tougher to interpret. You can see that it does climb up slightly from the point the graphics were re-designed, which I interpret to mean that the new design is more interesting, and causing fewer people to close the page and more to study the games shown.
This is one of the most telling bits of data about our new design of the NimbleStore. After the re-design, our bounce rate was halved, from a little under 30% to a little under 15%. This is probably the most important stat to look at for us besides unique visitors, since it tells us how many people actually proceed to access more information about one of our games. According to this data, around 85% of people visiting the store go on to access one of the specific game pages containing review quotes, a description, screenshots and a gameplay movie.
Here is the number of page views for our individual game pages over that time period. It shows which games people wanted more information about. This information matches more or less how well each game is selling according to sales numbers.
Thanks for sharing this! Keep em coming. Nimblebit is different from other developers in that it seems your success in the app store is more hard work and skill (vs Apple blessing, first to market, or luck). Much respect to you guys.
“All the App Store links in the NimbleStore use a referral program…” Are you earning commissions on your own games on top of sales revenue? The bounce rate data is quite interesting as well. After pressing a button the store home page, are you tracking page views on the game specific page as well? Does that number reinforce which apps are selling the best?
Great stuff!
@ cavalcade, thanks! Whether is is hard work or not, we hope the stuff we share will be useful to others in out position.
@The Lab, Yes - we are making a small comission through every sale from the store (pennies). The google analytics tracking code is on every page of the store, so it can track data through all the pages. Those numbers (the last figures in the post) do seem to roughly correlate with the order of sales of our different games. One thing we also do sometimes is switch up the order of the game icons on the store to see if we can get more people to click on say, the very first listed game in order to be able to push certain games we want to highlight at different times.
This is great data - thanks for sharing, guys! It’s amazing what a difference the redesign made in your bounce rate. Will have to try something like that.
Another great post Nimblebit. Appreciate your candid posts to show the realities of an indie developer.
I love your informative and concise dev posts. Really helpful stuff thanks guys.
[...] A few good links this week. First up, congratulations to Owen Goss for making it through the first year as an indie developer. Secondly, thanks to NimbleBit again for sharing some great data: NimbleStore: By the Numbers. [...]
[...] The awesome NimbleBit guys shares their storefront strategy and statistics. So nice of them. Read here >> [...]