I am mulling over the possibility of doing a free for 24hrs promotion.
Now I am slowly climbing the ranks in my category in paid apps and sales are increasing on a day by day basis (upto about 100), however I am after a quick "boost" to try and get on the first page of results based on my keywords.
If I go free for 24hrs , when I return what will it affect ?
Will I just be higher up in search results ?
Will my paid app ranking be improved by doing this promotion ?
or will it actually drop as I was not a paid app for 24hrs ?
Anyone done this before and can offer an insight it would be appreciated.
Any ranking you had before you switch from paid to free and vice versa is completely reset, and you are reliant on any momentum you have to get back to where you were and beyond.
The intent of doing a free promotion is generally to build word of mouth and/or a larger user base that you can leverage/moentize in other ways. In order to achieve either of these in any meaningful way, I'd suggest that your free promotion if you do one runs at a minimum of 3 days. Anything less, and you not only don't have the time to climb the free charts, but you won't benefit from further word of mouth which normally takes a couple of days to "catch".
Overall, free promotions are nowhere near as powerful as they were a year ago or earlier, and potentially you can even lose ground that you have made. You should consider doing a lite version of your app, adding IAP to you app prior to going free to lessen the downside risk, or running with just a discount as you suggest in your last post.
Whatever ranking you gain while free, you lose as soon as you go back to paid. But you might offset some with word-of-mouth sales.
Will it lose the keyword popularity as well? For eg if I have a music keyword and when searched with the keyword, my app pops at #4. Now if I switch say paid to free and back to paid will I lose my #4 position in the keyword search?
Free for 24hrs - how does it affect rankings ?
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