The Value of an App Store Feature When (And Where) to Pursue Getting Featured on the App Store

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Report Highlights

•  Featuring had a clear positive impact on app downloads (both game and non-game), with a median effect around 4x larger for games. This amounts to a roughly 140% expected increase in game downloads during the featuring period compared to what would be expected without featuring.

•  The impact of featuring has been declining overall, but at a particularly high rate for apps outside of games, going from a roughly 80% expected download boost in H2 2013 to less than 25% in H2 2015.

•  For apps which were featured for seven days, downloads tended to peak at day three.

•  Apps and games in South Korea saw the largest boost from being featured, likely thanks to droves of new iPhone users.

•  Apps and games in the US were the least affected by being featured in percentage terms, perhaps reflecting the country’s app market maturity.

For details on the methodology used in this report, please refer to the appendix.

Contents

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1.  Introduction

2.  The Impact of Features

3.  Feature Impact by Country

4.  Company Ranking Tables

5.  Methodology and Model

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Introduction

Introduction

Having your app featured in the iOS App Store is not only a major achievement, but also an opportunity to reach new users. Featuring puts your app in front of countless users: from app enthusiasts scouring the App Store, to gamers looking for new experiences, to new users entering the ecosystem on a new device and installing their first apps.

However, the process of an app becoming featured can be quite involved. Apple has the final say in what is featured on the App Store and often requires publishers to make major changes to an app before it will be considered for a feature. Publishers might have to decide how much effort and resources are worth committing to an attempt at winning prime App Store real estate. This decision depends largely on the answer to one question: “Just how much can our app benefit from being featured?”

Using data from App Annie Intelligence, we analyzed this question by fitting a statistical model to over 3,000 instances of iOS App Store featuring periods across 5 countries. The results suggest that the featuring periods examined were responsible for a median increase in downloads of around 80%, but many increased downloads by 500% or more.

“While UA can consistently deliver thousands of consistent quality users, a prime featuring placement can drive hundreds of thousands of users in days, creating a compounding velocity and completely shifting the network and product trajectory of an app.” —James Peng, Head of Mobile App Acquisition, The Match Group

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The Impact of Features

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Games Benefitted From Features the Most

The impact of featuring on downloads was substantially greater for games than for apps outside of games. This held true across all five countries in the analysis.

The large difference in impact suggests that browsing the app stores to discover games is probably a more common user activity than browsing to discover apps.

Additionally, games address a relatively broad need (entertainment), while apps outside of games often target much more specific user needs. This could help explain the discrepancy in impact.

“When Apple ... brings strong featuring support, there is often an exponential effect. We aim to advertise our games at the same time as featuring.” —Baudouin Corman, GM Americas at Gameloft

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The Changing Impact of Features

The impact of featuring on iPhone downloads appears to be decreasing across the board, though at a much quicker pace for apps outside of games. While some individual countries saw the effect for games continuing to hold over time, all five countries saw the effect for apps declining.

The higher rate of decline for apps is likely due to differences in the typical lifecycles of games and apps. Users tend to cycle through apps at a lower rate than games, which translates over time to less instances of users actively browsing for apps.

For publishers outside of games, it should be clear that app store featuring is far from a silver bullet for user acquisition. This underscores the importance of ASO, intelligent marketing and user retention.

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Downloads Typically Peak on Day 3 of Featuring

Downloads continued to climb to a peak at day 3, indicating increases in visibility beyond the feature placement itself, for instance from increases in app store rank due to the initial download boost.

In the days after featuring, median downloads began to return to pre-featuring levels. However, this isn’t to say that there are no residual effects from featuring; around one quarter of the observations in this sample were still seeing a 50% or greater boost on the third day after featuring compared to the day before featuring.

Among week-long feature periods in our sample, we found that median downloads on day 1 of featuring were around 50% higher than downloads on the previous day. This basic pattern held for all countries in the analysis.

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Feature Impact by Country

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Apps Outside of Games See the Biggest Effects in South Korea and Japan

iPhone apps in South Korea and Japan appeared to be much more heavily influenced by featuring than the other countries in our analysis.

The US had the lowest median impact of features for apps outside of games at around 30%. As we noted in our Q1 Market Index, however, the US is the world’s second largest downloader of iOS apps (after China), so it is important to keep in mind that a 30% increase in US app downloads is still substantial.

“Strong featuring doesn’t necessarily ensure the success of a title, but it goes a long way... We believe that great games and great brands are drivers of app store featuring, and we work closely with app store managers to showcase the products and features that their audiences want." —Chris Heatherly, SVP & GM, Disney Interactive Games

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iPhone Featuring is Gold for Games in South Korea

On iPhone, games in South Korea benefited massively from featuring, with a nearly 500% expected lift.

The huge impact in South Korea across both apps and games is likely due to strong iPhone uptake since the launch of the iPhone 6. We have noted before that users who are new to a platform tend to download more apps than more longer-term users, and we may be seeing a consequence of this here.

Unlike apps outside of games, games in Brazil see a bigger featuring impact than both in Japan and the UK. This likely stems from Brazil’s status as a leading emerging market. (Games tend take the lion’s share of download growth in emerging markets.)

Other countries also saw substantial impacts. Even games in the US and UK, the least-affected countries, saw considerable median jumps in downloads while being featured.

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Company Ranking Tables

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Note: This table reflects the total count of 2015 daily front page features, including those which were excluded from this report’s other analyses.

Game companies grabbed most of the top positions in the country rankings for number of front page feature occurrences in 2015. Electronic Arts secured this front page space the most often, holding the #1 spot in all regions except Japan.

Rank Brazil Japan South Korea United Kingdom United States

1 Electronic Arts SQUARE ENIX Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Electronic Arts

2 Time Warner Electronic Arts Gameloft Disney Time Warner

3 Gameloft Gameloft GAMEVIL Time Warner Disney

4 Disney Rovio Lightricks Apple InterActiveCorp

5 Grupo Globo NAVITIME JAPAN Tinybop Gameloft Zynga

Top Companies by 2015 iPhone Front Page Feature Occurrences

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The front page of the App Store contains a continuously updating set of feature groups under which apps can be featured. Of these, the Main Banner at the top of the page is perhaps the most sought after position in the App Store. The rankings of companies by Main Banner placements are similar to the previous rankings. One notable difference is the higher placement of Apple in most of the countries.

Rank Brazil Japan South Korea United Kingdom United States

1 Electronic Arts Apple Electronic Arts Apple Apple

2 Naspers Electronic Arts Gameloft, Tinybop Electronic Arts Time Warner

3 Time Warner SQUARE ENIX Frogmind, IllusionLabs, Kabam, Lightricks

Activision Blizzard, Amazon, SQUARE ENIX

Disney

4 Grupo Globo Amazon, King, Lightricks, Tinybop Activision Blizzard

Lightricks, Sega Sammy Holdings Activision Blizzard

5 Apple Kabam, Netflix, Pixelbite, Rayark, Rovio, Toca Boca

ZeptoLab Netflix, Tinybop Electronic Arts

Top Companies by 2015 iPhone Main Banner Feature Occurrences

Note: This table reflects the total count of 2015 daily front page features, including those which were excluded from this report’s other analyses.

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Methodology and Model

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Methodology and Model

To estimate the impact of being featured, we treated each time an app was featured in the App Store as a separate instance. For each of these instances, we fit a window of the app’s pre-feature downloads in that country to a time-series ARIMA model. This model allowed to us to predict the downloads that would have occurred had the app not been featured. We then compared these projections to the observed downloads during the featuring period to determine the estimated lift that featuring gave the app. The arrows on the figure on this page indicate this comparison.

Each model also incorporated downloads for the app in Google Play, which helped control for outside factors that might otherwise cause us to overestimate the impact of featuring (for instance, marketing campaigns for an app during the featuring period, or seasonal events that tend to correlate positively with both an app’s downloads and its chance of being featured).

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The analysis was restricted to free iPhone apps that were featured from June 2013 to March 2016. We studied five countries representing different regions and states of app market maturity: Brazil, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. An app was counted as featured if it appeared on the front page of the App Store on iPhone. We did not count instances where users were required to manually navigate to lower “levels” of features (such as an app which is only featured on the Entertainment page). We excluded instances of apps being featured within 60 days of launch, since downloads in these instances had not yet stabilized to provide a reliable model fit.

Methodology and Model (Cont.)

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About App Annie

App Annie delivers the most trusted app data and insights for your business to succeed in the global app economy. Over 500,000 registered members rely on App Annie to better understand the app market, their businesses and the opportunities around them. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with 425+ employees across 15 global offices. App Annie has received $157 million in financing, including investors such as e.Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Greycroft Partners, IDG Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Learn more at www.appannie.com.

Report methodology and updates are available here.