App Store featuring & Ranking

This is a small post to show the correlation between App Store featuring and ranking.

Montessori Numbers (iPad only app until next update) has been released on August 14th and has been featured by Apple in the "New" list of the education category on August 16th. However it was a little bit hidden because it was not immediately visible (user has to scroll the list to see the app). It stayed in the New list until september 13th, but it was pushed at the end of list (and you can see the result on ranking below).

Then on September 14th - good surprise - Montessori Numbers was moved to the education "What's Hot" list in first position (so with a lot of visibility), and then the app began to be ranked around 10 in education (wow!). It was the perfect timing because Montessori Numbers had received a lot of accolades (NBC,Children's technology review,Wired's GeekDad,...) at this time and it was - of course - listed in the description.

Then last Thursday (October 4th), Montessori Numbers was removed from the featured apps. Check the result in ranking (it is #79 as of today) !

So it was a very good start and 10.000 units have been sold so far :-). Now I need to work on a universal version and add some new features requested by users...

Another interesting thing is the cross marketing. There is a protected parents section that displays my others educational apps (Montessori Crosswords and Word Wizard), and it's clear that it does have a very good effect on sales as you can see in the charts below.

Update (10/20/2012): it's even worse now..of course : just check the graph below. Please be aware that I bought some ads on known educational apps sites, and it is almost useless....

Now I will do a nice universal update and see what's happen !