We create all kinds of mobile and web apps for clients; we are not talking about games here but business / utility apps. As clients usually want a ‘mobile’ app and not an iOS app anymore, we decided to go cross platform with Xamarin. It’s a great choice as it gives you the ability to still publish native apps on different devices instead of dealing with HTML5-based ‘solutions’.

We are also creating our new game in Unity which means finally we are going cross-platform with games as well! Stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon!

So many of you have been asking about the Android version of Soctics.. believe me, nothing would make me happier than having it already available. We’ve started the porting actually a long time ago but for various reasons we are always hitting one wall or another..

However, we haven’t given up on bringing Soctics to the world outside iOS. We’ll port it with Unity and hopefully still this year a significantly bigger audience can enjoy our competitive turn based football game

After the Unity port is complete, we’ll be able to introduce some new stuff in Soctics but it will have to wait for now. Mostly we are talking about some iterative changes and probably some cosmetics, nothing that would re-shape the game. We are pretty satisfied with how the game feels at the moment.

That’s it folks!

We follow a classic App Store model with Soctics: we offer a separate free and a paid version.  Our most recent promotion with AppGratis had an amazing effect on our numbers. On the day of the promotion with them, they generated more than 450.000 downloads for us. It’s a mindblowing number! We made the paid version free during the promotion and climbed to the top charts easily in many countries. I’ve collected the best spots we gained on the free charts according to AppAnnie during the promotion day.

The chart above gives some good ideas about comparative market sizes for the free apps. Look at the US market where we barely entered the top 10 overall apps with 110k downloads while about 50k is enough to come out as the overall top app in any other market.

After we switched Soctics back to paid, we managed to climb the paid charts a decent extent given our huge momentum.

Revenue numbers are estimates here but good enough for presentation purposes. The app’s price is $1.99 and the offered IAPs have been bringing about 25% of our total revenue on top of that. Combining this with the download numbers we see close estimates for each country, showing revenue levels required to climb the top grossing charts. There’s a significant difference between the paid and the grossing positions, this is of course just another evidence how strong IAP revenue is today in the App Store economy.

Again, the massive size difference between the US and anything else is trivial based on these numbers. Another surprise was the bad shape the Spanish market seems to be in. Given the fact that we are talking about a country with nearly 50 million people, I really expected a stronger app economy there.

I hope you find these results informative in case you were wondering what it meant to be on the top of the charts in these countries.

If you’ve ever wanted built a landing page or had the need for one, you’ve provably heard of LaunchRock. If not, have a quick look. LaunchRock makes an extremely good job at making it super easy to build a landing page. No HTML knowledge is needed. Among many features, the page lets your future customers share about your idea / app / future venture on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This is a great way to collect emails of possible futures customers as well as starting to build up the buzz about it.

When we decided to create a new app of Soccer Tactics Multiplayer instead of doing an update, it was clear that we had to use cross promotion to get our existing players know about our new product. For this, we built a LaunchRock site to collect the emails of our fans. Although, we have built a way to talk to them via Message Of The Day and feedback, about which I wrote last week, it was just a simple way of putting out text in front of the players.

We did try this first by simply showing the url, but only our most active and addicted players would take the effort to actually read the url and then open Safari and then fill the form. Not very effective and also, it turned out later, the mobile representation of the LaunchRock site was not that nice as it was on the desktop.

Since we wanted to extend our internal Message Of The Day service for long time, in a way that it can show media rich content, it was the time to do so. Instead of showing a default UIAlertView, we modified it to be able to show web content in a UIWebView. This is great, because we can now open pictures, videos if we liked, not just UIAlertViews.

The rich MOTD looked exactly like the one on the right. We are still hosting it http://soctics.com/launch.html. If you have look, there are a few things to notice.

There are two teasing pictures on the top of this screen so big that it actually won’t fit into the whole screen. This was good thing for two reasons:

1. We hoped, both pictures were eye catchy and it would engage our previous game’s players and
2. LaunchRock part takes some time to load at the bottom and while it gets loaded hopefully players are still watching the second picture.

Once LaunchRock loaded, it turned out that it wasn’t looking nice on a mobile screen. The font size was too small and the whole page could be scrolled sideways. Although LaunchRock’s support was quick and friendly saying they are working on the mobile version, we did not have time to wait so did our own way

It included a quite easy change within the relevant launch.css and another one to duplicate the email form.

The first part in the css is about to fit LaunchRock nicely on an iPhone. (We only targeted those customers. Like 90% of Soccer Tactics games was played on an iPhone). Adjusting the text in the middle and making it bigger so it’s easy to read without pinch-zooming.

The second part, to duplicate the email entry form, was done to maximize the likelihood of the conversion. On a mobile device, only some part of the page is visible and we wanted the form to appear two times.

If you have a look at the source of the html how it was done, there is some nasty things going on. (I must admit, I get dirty when it comes to html ).

Here is the relevant part:

 var count=0;
 function addSignup() {
 count++;
 if (count==14) {
 var y = $('#signupform-8M3HZA8H');
 var x = y.clone(true,true);
 x.attr("id","signupform2-8M3HZA8H");
 x.prependTo('#inviteform8M3HZA8H');</code>

$("#signupform2-8M3HZA8H > #email-8M3HZA8H").change(function(){
 $("#signupform-8M3HZA8H > #email-8M3HZA8H").attr("value",this.value);
 })
 }
 }

head.js(
 "http://launchrock-ignition.s3.amazonaws.com/ignition.1.1.js");
 head.ready( function() {
 $('#launch').bind('DOMNodeInserted', function(event) {
 addSignup();
 });
 });

There are a few things going on here.

1. There is a <div> in the html body with id=launch.
2. The content along with the id of that div will be modified once the ignition part is downloaded.
3. Before that modification, the addSignup() function is added to that div’s DOMNodeInserted event to catch when the div is being modified to contain the LaunchRock part.
4. The addSignup function simply clones and puts to the right place the signup form. It also changes the cloned form’s id otherwise the the sign up form would be moved not copied.
5. addSignup only clones for the 14th time the div is modified. After some trial and error it turned out that after the 14th  DOM modification, the sign up part could be cloned. (I am a bit surprised this code still works).

Okay, was it worth it? Well, a nice thing about LaunchRock is that is shows you analytics about the conversions  That showed that it was 3x less likely that a visitor would sign up but since it got delivered so many times it ended up being 8x more sign up than before.

There was one more (sneaky) thing we did while delivered our MOTD but it will be another post.

If you are interested in our MOTD module as a service, feel free to sign up for it’s LaunchRock site: motd.bitongo.com.

In this article, I’ll briefly talk about the tools we built and use to communicate with our customers.

Having worked a little on support (among many things) in a multinational company, it felt natural to ship our products so that we can communicate with our players.  In the early days, it was only two features we did tho:

• Message Of The Day (MOTD)
• In app Feedback

The first is a great tool to broadcast messages to all our customers, while the latter is useful for us to learn our customers’ needs. With MOTD we can broadcast messages like, when our new release will be due or available, or even when our multiplayer game server is down for maintenance (that server runs on a different stack). In the early days, it was only text we could deliver but little by little we added more features. Now it’s capable of opening urls inapp to show web pages including videos or forms to collect email addresses, which proved to be very effective in cross promotion when we released Soctics League. (In a coming article, I’ll write more about this).  Also, very effective in making our players tweet their love of the game.

Technically, there’s nothing fancy. We keep a json file updated with the necessary information, something like this:

{"valid_date":"2012-09-30 22:00",
"msg":"For the latest news, updates and promotions you can follow us on facebook.com/Soctics",
"title":"Follow Us On Facebook",
"cancel_title":"Later",
"open_url": {
"alt_url":"http://www.facebook.com/Soctics",
"url":"fb://page/277639452342883",
"open_title":"Follow"
}
}


We use a simple AlertView to show this message. The title / message and the buttons are customized with the content of the json.

Note the open_url part. With url and alt_url we can make sure, that devices with or without the Facebook app being installed can open the Facebook page of Soctics.
(ie: [[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:url]).

This was also extremely effective in getting our players tweet about Soctics. Hundreds of players were willing to press the Tweet button and then post a pre-edited text. Maybe the smilies helped there too

The relevant part for Twitter goes like this:

"open_url": {
"alt_url":"http://www.twitter.com/?status=@AppStore+Soctics+League+is+my+favourite+game",
"url":"twitter://post?message=@AppStore%20Soctics%20League%20is%20my%20favourite%20game",
"open_title":"Tweet "
},


Feedback turned out to be very useful as well. Not only would players send their best advices but also it’s more likely to share their frustration on the feedback channel rather than on  the app store, resulting higher app rating. Also, when we manage to finish something they asked for, its also reflected by the stars.

Feedback however, was a one way communication: from customers to us. Thus we had to fix that by adding a feature that we can use to privately answer feedbacks. This is very powerful as not only get’s a feedback message answered but many times that ends up in a discussion which is very useful to dig deep and clarify problems and ideas.

Notice the empty line in the alert view. \n goes a long way. The UIAlertView also supports longer text that are bigger then a screen, although thats not as nice as the default look.

There is one more thing we did use a lot while developing and after releasing Soctics League, which is real time chat but is not tied yet to our MOTD system. The real time chat room was first introduced in the previous version of the game where players could chat between matches. We did also visited it and gave real time support to our customers. This is probably the most time consuming form of customer care but while doing so, many of our customers gave valuable feedback just because we were accessible. Probably, many of those players wouldn’t even write a feedback.

What tools, methods are you using for talking to your customers?

Would you be interested in using something like this?

Would you be interested in an easy to integrate SDK along with a web page that lets you do what I described above?  Sign up at our LaunchRock site motd.bitongo.com or just leave a comment here.

UPDATE: here is another post further discussing what MOTD is capable of: how-we-used-uiwebview-along-with-launchrock-to-engage-mobile-users.

Please note, our experience here is strictly iOS-only.

In part I., we are going to focus on the more traditional ad type: banners.

Advantages:

1. limited screen estate
2. not too aggressive

Disadvantages:

1. most banners are not engaging enough -> low CTRs
2. if applied during gameplay, it degrades the game experience

We conducted the tests in our latest game, Soctics. The following ad providers were tested:

1. AdMob: one of the oldest and biggest banner ad providers for iOS
2. Mobclix: they aggregate 30+ ad providers, claiming to provide you the highest bidder
3. iAd: of course, the ‘official’ banner provider should be tested as well

Method of testing

iAd does not provide ads in every country where the App Store is available, so we decided  to group it together with AdMob. We would give priority to iAd requests, then access AdMob if we don’t receive anything from Apple. Mobclix claims to receive possible ads from 30+ traffic sources and it should be able to fill your banner space all over the world, so we felt this grouping to be fair.

On even days, we would use iAd + AdMob, on odd days we would go with Mobclix. We used the month of June for our benchmark.

So without further ado, lets see the results!

Results

Albeit slightly, but the iAd + AdMob combination came out as victor. If we kept testing the providers, the difference might even have been smaller between the two, but for now, we can say that we gained more revenue from iAd + AdMob than from Mobclix.

What really made us flip the off switch on Mobclix were the following:

- Mobclix’s payment terms: they seem to offer net 90 payments while with iAd and AdMob you get your earning quicker
- on Mobclix’s website, there seems to be a continuous apologizing for late payments, messed up stuff really all the time. Taking into account that their default payment schedule would be 90 days, you could end up with 120+ days of payment schedules
- sometimes Mobclix’s ads would be awful animated banners. Even if we totally discard aesthetics , what we  cannot go by is the huge performance hit we saw while displaying these animated ads. Given the fact that we are using an OpenGL based game, this was a big discouragement for us

Summary

Switching off Mobclix was a no-brainer given the facts listed above. For now, we have a clear winner for banner ads!

Let us know if you are interested in similar tests for interstitials, or even video offers, etc!