If you’re in the market for a mortgage or looking to refinance, check it out!

Needless to say, some people were pissed off, and pissed off people are incentivized to leave bad reviews. Our star rating went from 4-5 stars to 1-2 stars in about a week. Here’s the effect on the number of downloads:

Basically, we went from 200 downloads a day to 20. Not good.

The dynamic on the app store, at least for free apps, seems to be that only people who are pissed off or bored leave reviews, thus leading to poor reviews for apps that may have hundreds and even thousands of satisfied users.

The key to a good rating is to politely ask your satisfied customers to leave a review.. But how do you know who’s satisfied? The easiest metric is to simply ask the people who use your app more than a certain number of times. In our case, we ask users who have used the app more than twice if they’d like to leave a review (and that we won’t ask again).

Our response to this has been pretty good; we’re now at 4-5 stars again, and our download numbers are back up where they used to be. (I also prevented the app from crashing which helped..).

In order for this to work, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to write reviews. What we do is to construct an App Store specific URL directly to your app’s review section. It should look something like this:

itms-apps://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?type=Purple+Software&id=337064413

Simply change the ‘id’ variable in the above URL and you’re good to go. Of course, this isn’t guaranteed to always work, so keep a close eye on it.

In any rate, good luck and hopefully your app ratings will go up! Because the difference in number of downloads is huge.

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Now, the reported CPM for iAd is actually only for ads shown, and iAds do not have a 100% fil rate; that is, some of the time the app won't show any ads (a low fill rate is bad, a high one is good).

For the apps I have been working on, I'm seeing somewhere in the region of 50% average fill rate. Below is a screenshot of our August numbers:

Our CPM has been all over the place, but with an average of about $8; meaning the apps are getting about $4 per thousand impressions. Below is a graph of one of our apps:

The key differentiator between a very good day ($17 eCPM) and a very bad one ($3 eCPM) seems to be the quality of the advertising and the targeting. The Nissan Leaf ad shown below, was getting very high click through rates initially.

However, there seems to be a saturation point for each ad, the click through rate (and thus eCPM) was well down when this ad was still being shown day in and day out for weeks (still being shown from what I can tell).

Unfortunately iAds won’t give you insights into what ads were shown (so all my observations above are speculations based on the assumption that everyone else was seeing the same as me), and also won’t give you any control over what ads get shown.

This is unfortunate, as with some of the apps we’re developing, the audience is very targeted to certain niches, and thus if we could pick and choose our ads I believe we’d do much better.

If you want to be notified of these types of posts where I discuss App Store metrics and iPhone monetization, please do sign up to the Friends of Left Coast newsletter.

Back then it was hard to isolate the impact of being TechCrunched, the exposure of being a YC startup, the frequent revisions we pushed out, etc, but lately I’ve been working on so many apps that I’ve been able to isolate the impact:

In part as an experiment I released our Car Payment Calculator without any attempt to widely publicize it, submitting it to app review places or really anything beyond the obligatory getting 3 friends to give it 5 stars. The app is ugly, but functional, and solves a need some people have.

Initially it was priced at $2.99, and sold around 1-2 apps a week. Hardly gangbuster, so I decided to reduce the price to $0.99 and left it there for 2 weeks. That resulted in 0 sales, so clearly $0.99 is not a great price, at least for that app.

After the disappointing 99 cents test, I decided to make it free, thinking I’d get somewhere in the region of 20-50 downloads a day. Nope. Instead it did this:

Essentially shooting up to 180-280 downloads a day, where it held steady for weeks, until I made some rather unfortunate changes (that I’ll discuss in a later post)

As an aside, around that time the initial iAds reports were coming out, reporting eCPMs in the $150 range, so I quickly added that. By the time we got approved (2 weeks later, this was around iOS4 release remember, so EVERYONE was pushing new versions), the eCPM wasn’t anything like in the $100 range, but we still made eCPMs of $15-$20.

In summary; I’d heard that the difference between free and 99cents was 100x, but I didn’t really believe it. I do now, if anything, it’s actually higher than 100x.

And what was the unfortunate change? I’ll blog about that next! If you want to be notified of these types of posts where I discuss App Store metrics and iPhone monetization, please do sign up to the Friends of Left Coast newsletter.