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在竞争激烈的应用市场中获胜的方法

发布时间:2014-02-26 14:04:47 Tags:,,,,

作者:Mariya  Yao

在这短短的几年内,智能手机用户的数量取得了显著的增加。这个世界不断将计算任务和更多注意力投向这一日益活跃的设备中。

如此的手机复兴对于应用开发者来说意味着什么?一方面,更多消费者希望能够在自己的智能手机上看到更多内容。另一方面,苹果和谷歌都拥有超过100万的应用活跃于它们的应用商店中。在此,吸引手机用户的优先关注及消费的竞争非常激烈。如今,简单的应用也能够创造出数百万的下载量和收益。

所以应用开发者应该做些什么?我与经验丰富的手机产业老手和充满希望的企业家进行了交谈,并列出了他们所分享的在今天这一充满竞争的应用市场获胜的最佳策略:

获得推荐还不够

没有人会拒绝苹果或谷歌的推荐。一个成功的手机企业家兼天使投资人Ed Roman估计,iOS App Store商店中的最高横幅广告推荐每天能够为一款应用带来大约100万的下载。Roman最近发行的《角斗士之怒》在iOS和Android平台上被推荐后便获得了超过100万次的下载,他说道:“今天,我们更难得到推荐,但被推荐的价值也变得更加巨大。”

Rage of the Gladiator(from ghostfiregames)

Rage of the Gladiator(from ghostfiregames)

然而,Roman所分析的大多数应用都在短暂的出名后便迅速坠毁。所以开发者们不能只是依靠推荐去确保最终的成功。

关注于用户留存

根据CB Insights(游戏邦注:受数据驱动的分析公司,主要覆盖手机趋势)的创始人Anand Sanwal:“一般说来,前1000款应用的平均寿命是23天。上位是很难的。长时间停留在高处更难。”

Roman也同意这一观点。他建议初创企业能够在游戏发行前明确地分配预算去调整用户获取和留存。做到这点的一种方法便是面向加拿大或其它使用英语的App Store发行游戏,因为这里的广告费用比较低,且能够一直迭代直至应用的参数变得稳定。Roman建议开发者能够以达到1天40%的用户留存,7天20%的用户留存以及30天10%的用户留存为目标。

ASO是新的SEO

尝试着搜索一款应用,你将会看到许多结果。进入ASO或App Store Optimization。ASO是相对于手机应用而SEO则是相对于网页,这是开发者去提升曝光率并获得免费的有机流量的少数方法之一。

应用开发公司Contract的创始人David Barnard便是基于苹果的搜索法则改变名字而推动自己的应用“Mirror”取得更好的表现。用户在搜索“mirror”这一词时,他的应用便会出现在1409个结果中的第一个,作为一款未知的应用瞬间便获得超过250万的下载。

Barnard提醒道,ASO过程应该早于你编写第一行代码前便开始执行。他建议新开发者避开带有过分饱和关键词(如“照片”和“聊天”)的应用类别,相反地应该找些他们有信心去控制的利基类别。

不要与免费游戏相抗衡

作为成功的应用开发公司Savvy Apps的创始人,同时也是像Renaissance等手机开发者大会的著名演讲者,Ken Yarmosh表示,因为现金充足且敢于冒险的初创企业创造了像《Candy Crush Saga》,《Mailbox》和《Paper》等大受欢迎的游戏,从而导致独立开发者和白手起家的企业们越来越难获得成功。

这些公司都具有开发预算和市场营销预算能够创造出高质量的免费产品,从而导致独立开发者所创造的付费应用瞬间黯然失色。Yarmosh说道:“即使小型开发商尝试着创造免费游戏,他们也不可能到达所需要的目标而让自己的游戏有效运行。基于预期的转换率,数百万用户将需要创造出数千美元的收益。”

向大部分应用学习

并不是所有开发者都将应用商店中不断提升的竞争当成坏事。从模特和摄影师转变成手机初创企业创始人的Simon Czaplinski便将这种竞争当成是充满机遇的活跃市场的表现。Czaplinski说道:“从糟糕的应用中我们可以学到什么事不该做,而从优秀的应用中我们可以学到该做什么。”

为了准备创造他们现在的一款应用《Revel》——一款基于社交照片的寻物游戏,Czaplinski及其联合创始人研究了像“Grindr”,“Blendr”以及“Tinder”的社交动态,《Words With Friends》和《Draw Something》的游戏机制以及“ Foursquare”和“Yelp”的地位和地图设计。

向东看,年轻的开发者们

尽管智能手机已经渗透到了美国和西方市场中,但其它国家也在推动手机的发展。根据手机应用研究公司Distimo,2013年12月,41%的全球应用收益是来自亚洲,而31%是来自北美。研究公司IDC估计,2014年,单单中国的智能手机用户便有可能超过4.5亿。

同时,非英语国家的智能手机用户比例较小,这也为开发者去扩展市场提供了机遇。除了亚洲,非洲和印度在接下来几年里都会有数十亿人口涌向手机领域。也许下一款《Candy Crush Saga》或Snapchat便会出现于这些新兴市场中。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

6 ways to win in today’s hyper competitive app markets

By Mariya Yao

In just a few short years, the number of people with smartphones has outstripped the number with clean water. The world is increasingly shifting computing tasks — and precious attention — to on-the-go devices.

What does this mobile renaissance mean for app developers? On one hand, millions more consumers with an insatiable desire for content now own smartphones. On the other hand, Apple and Google each have over one million apps live in their app markets. Competition to capture mobile users’ limited attention and cash is tremendous. Gone are the days where simple fart apps can generate millions in downloads and revenues.

So what’s an app developer to do? I talked to both seasoned mobile veterans and hopeful new entrepreneurs and compiled their top strategies for winning in today’s hyper competitive app market:

Getting featured Is not enough

No one denies that being featured by Apple or Google is a huge boon to developers. Ed Roman, a successful mobile entrepreneur and angel investor, estimates that a top banner ad feature in the iOS App Store store nets roughly one million downloads a day for an app. “Nowadays it’s harder to get featured, but being featured is more valuable,” says Roman whose latest release Rage of the Gladiator was downloaded over a million times after being featured on both iOS and Android.

However, most of the apps Roman analyzes experience an immediate crash as soon as their 15 minutes of fame are over. Developers cannot count on features alone to guarantee success.

Pay Attention To Retention

“The average shelf-life of a top 1000 app is only 23 days” according to Anand Sanwal, founder of CB Insights, a data-driven analytics firm covering mobile trends. “Getting on top is hard. Staying there is harder.”

Roman agrees. His advice to startups is to allocate budget specifically to tuning acquisition and retention before launch. One way to do this is to launch in Canada or another English-speaking App Store where advertising is cheaper and iterate until an app’s metrics are solid. Roman recommends aiming for a 1-day retention of 40 percent, 7-day retention of 20 percent, and 30-day retention of 10 percent.

ASO Is the new SEO

Try searching for an app and you’ll likely get dozens if not thousands of results. Enter ASO, or App Store Optimization. ASO is to mobile apps what SEO is to websites and is one of the few ways developers can boost visibility and win free organic traffic.

David Barnard, founder of app development firm Contrast, dramatically boosted the performance of his app Mirror simply by changing the name to perform better under Apple’s search algorithms. His app shot to number one out of 1409 results for the search term “mirror” and skyrocketed from unknown app to over 2.5 million total downloads.

Barnard cautions that the ASO process should start long before you write your first line of code. He advises that new developers avoid app categories with over-saturated keywords like “photo” and “chat” and instead find niches they can confidently dominate.

Don’t fight freemium

Ken Yarmosh, founder of successful app development company Savvy Apps and popular speaker at mobile developer conferences like Renaissance, cautions that success has become harder to achieve for independent developers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs due to competition from cash-flush venture-backed startups building apps like Candy Crush Saga, Mailbox, and Paper.

These companies have the development and marketing budget to push out high quality, freemium products that overshadow paid apps made by single developers. “Even if smaller devs try freemium, they just won’t be able to get the reach they’ll need to make it work,” says Yarmosh. “Based on the expected conversion rates, millions of customers are needed to make thousands of dollars”.

Learn from the masses

Not all developers see the increased competition in the app store as a bad thing. Simon Czaplinski, a model and photographer turned mobile startup founder, sees competition as evidence of a thriving market filled with opportunities. “Learn from bad apps what not to do, and learn from good apps what to do,” suggests Czaplinski.

In preparation for building their current app Revel, a social photo-based scavenger hunt game, Czaplinski and his co-founder studied apps like Grindr, Blendr, and Tinder for their social dynamics, Words With Friends and Draw Something for their game mechanics, and Foursquare and Yelp for their location and map designs.

Look east, young developer

While smartphones have largely saturated the US and western markets, other countries are surging past in mobile growth. According to mobile apps research firm Distimo, 41 percent of global app revenue in December 2013 came from Asia, compared to 31 percent from North America. Research firm IDC estimates that China alone will ship over 450 million smartphones in 2014.

At the same time, the ratio of app developers to smartphone users is much smaller for non-English speaking countries, presenting an opportunity for developers in expanding markets. In addition to Asia, Africa and India both have billions of people going mobile in the next few years. The next Candy Crush Saga or Snapchat may very likely emerge from one of these new markets.(source:venturebeat)


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