Second Facebook Ad

Tried some new things in the new ad.

• Separated mobile and desktop for US.  Appears that for desktop we were getting clicks for less than half the price, $.09 / click instead of $0.22
• Made a US and non-US add that include people who like Pokemon

I don't like the fact that I had to continue my old ad "Campaign".  Campaigns, I guess, are defined as who you are targeting rather than a span of time.  Anyway, here were summarized the stats for the last time I ran the ad:

WEBSITE CLICKS?

291

REACH?

15,931

FREQUENCY?

1.75

TOTAL SPENT?

$94.35

AVG. COST PER WEBSITE CLICK?

$0.32

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UPDATE
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The Facebook ad has been running for two weeks now.  Splitting the ad didn't seem like it worked well, the mobile was costing $0.35 / click, and Desktop one by itself wasn't doing much at all.  So I went back to the old one and its been doing great!  The average cost per click went down to $0.25, so we're getting a lot more volume of clicks each day for the same daily price as last time.

Spring Promotion Push

Although we're back to getting sub-40 degree nights and frost advisories in Kansas, the weather was really nice last week.  With the nice weather coming, we're doing a Spring push on the promotions.  Kathleen is contacting a lot of geocaching club presidents to ask them to try it and send out an email to the their members and/or post on Facebook.  And I'm going to run another Facebook ad with a budget at least as big as our last one, maybe $150.  So we'll see how much those help in the next few weeks.

Here are some benchmark stats:
Apple downloads: 653 lifetime
Android downloads: 189 current / 633 lifetime
# "active" (not test or failed registration) users in database: 917
# on Legends board: 261
Monsters found: 3726
Vimeo video views: 579
YouTube video views: 470 (in Eric's account: 48)

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UPDATE
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As I mentioned in the UPDATE for the Facebook ad, its been doing better than last time. Plus Kathleen has talked to many cooperative geocaching club leaders too.  I'm not even sure we've seen results of those contacts because a few leaders said they would try it and then pass on to the club, or review with leaders, or whatever.  And some have *thousands* in their clubs.  But still, lots of activity in last 3 weeks.  Here are some updated stats:

Apple downloads: 775 lifetime
Android downloads: 329 current / 820 lifetime
# "active" (not test or failed registration) users in database: 1117 (increased by 200, over 20%)
# on Legends board: 343 (increased by 82, around 30%)
Monsters found: 4139
Vimeo video views: 720
YouTube video views: 498 (in Eric's account: 59)

That's all only translated to $16 worth of purchases so far, but more could come in later as people run out of free nets. (2ND UPDATE: The day after posting this UPDATE, 4 purchases came in for $17.99 each! So make that $88 gross that the ad has brought in, minus 30% for Google and Apple)

Re-Reclassification (Troll Reclassification Reversed)

That was a bummer.  I didn't do enough (any?) testing before I did the troll reclassification several weeks ago.  But finally decided I wanted to run a test this past week.  I created a new account and went out and found a few Level 1 monsters so that I progressed to Level 2, which was now the hybrids.  I went to the Level Details page, and there they were...the Trolls.  I had thought for sure that everything related to monster levels was driven from the server, so I thought the reclassification changes I made on the server would be enough.  I forgot that on the Level Details page I had hard-coded the levels for each monster in order to show all the monsters for that level.  I guess I was just trying to avoid making one more server API call.  That's what I get for taking shortcuts.

I thought about posting an announcement to Facebook that the reclassification was being reversed, but I decided just to keep it quiet since most people won't notice.  It appears that there were only two people who were Level 2 and had found reclassified monsters.  I just promoted them and then made the database changes to assign the new levels back to what they used to be.

Latest benchmarks: 892 active accounts, 254 on the Legends board (including my new test account)

  BACK TO LEVEL 2 :-(

BACK TO LEVEL 3 :-(

Troll Reclassification

When looking at the legends board, I noticed that we have a whooooooole lot of people who don't get past level 2. That's not a big surprise. People only start off with 10 nets, and you need at least 8 monsters to make it to level 2, so some people will run out when they're on level 2 and stop there. And others will lose interest before that. The thing that bothers me about it though is that some of our favorite monsters are on Level 3, particularly Octogirl and Taroostula. That means a whole lot of people never see those.

To change that, today I swapped level 2 monsters -- the Trolls -- with the level 3 monsters -- the Hybrids. Of course this only affects people at Level 2. I figure that if someone got to Level 2 but never found a troll, it doesn't really affect them either. All the trolls will disappear and all the hybrids will appear, but they've still only found Level 1 monsters.

The people really affected are Level 2 who have found a Troll, and therefore were progressing to Level 3. Now they're count of Level 2 monsters will start over. That's a little unfair. At first I thought I'd just promote all those people. There are 79 of them. But I know that many are not active, and I thought it would look strange on the Legendsd board to have so many Level 3, and many that haven't even caught the required 8 monsters. So I decided to just promote those people to Level 3 if they request it. I made that the sole Message of the Day for a while, and posted it on Facebook. I doubt there will be many requests.
  NOW LEVEL 3

NOW LEVEL 2

Google's Pokemon Challenge April Fool's joke

Today Google published a video that was a half-joke.  It's April Fool's Day, and the joke is that they are hiring Pokemon masters who can prove their skills at catching Pokemon.


 The non-joke part of it is that they actually put a mini-game in Google Maps so that you could see Pokemon in Google Maps, tap on the monster, and catch it.  The big differences are that

1. You don't have to physically go to the location the monster is to catch it.  You can just scroll your map wherever you want.  
2. All their monsters seem to be centered around Google headquarters

We're going to post a few comments on blogs, and on YouTube, to let people know that Monster Cache is a real game that already does this.  We'll see if we can generate any traffic.  As of today, we have about 800 accounts in the system and 235 players on the Legends board (making 29% of registered users who have ever found a monster).

Learning about App Annie (via TechCrunch and Flappy Bird)

This past week, TechCrunch had an article about the Flappy Bird developer removing his app from the App Store.  As a game developer, the whole Flappy Bird app story was very interesting.  It was a simple-in-concept game that was very difficult to play.  Apparently, people found this very addicting and it became the #1 free game in the App Store.  It did have ads in it, and supposedly, at one point it was generating $50,000 of ad revenue a day.  But the developer found that it was a lot of pressure to deal with the popularity, so he took it down, and a bunch of clones appeared in its place.

But anyway..... the article referred to some statistics found on a site called App Annie.  I'd never heard of the site, but it compiles statistics about iOS applications.  It does that for free for every app, including Monster Cache.  It seems it can also do the same for the Play Store, but only if you sign up for an account and then tell them your Google Developer Console password.  I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, but I did already learn some interesting things from the free data about the iOS version.

At one point, the iOS version of Monster Cache was in the top 500 grossing Adventure and Family apps in the United States.  And more recently, it was in the top 500 overall Adventure and Family app downloads in Ireland and the Czech Republic.  Based on the dates, the United States grossing ranking came after we got the good response from the Kansas geocaching club, even though that was only about $60.  The Ireland and Czech Republic rankings came after our international Facebook ad.  (That ad cost $100 and brought in about 100 new users, so it cost about $1 / new user). I don't know where App Annie gets this ranking data, since gross revenue and specific # of downloads aren't publicly displayed in the App Store.  But since TechCrunch references them,  I'll believe it.

(Current # players on Legends Board: 202)

High cost of developing for Apple

You could say that I am biased because I do all my daily development work on a Windows machine and use a lot of Google tools.  But I've been very frustrated by how much money it costs to develop a phone app for Apple platforms.

First of all, you HAVE to have an Apple computer to develop for the Apple platform.  The converse is not true for Android, you can develop for Android using a Mac.  But Apple forces you to have an Apple computer in order to produce a testing profile through their development environment, XCode.  So when I wanted to develop Monster Cache for iOS, I had to go buy an Apple computer that ran a certain version of  XCode, which translated to needing OS X 10.7 (Lion).  So I got a used iMac for about $400.

Next cost is the fee for a developer account.  For a Google Play developer account, there is a one-time fee of $25.  For Apple, its a YEARLY fee of $100.  I just had to pay for my second year.

After paying for both of those, I was able to develop Monster Cache for iOS and make updates for a little over a year.  Then iOS 7 came out.  Developing for iOS 7 requires the latest version of XCode, XCode 5.  XCode 5 requires that your Mac's operating system be at least OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).  Apple no longer distributes version 10.8, so if you want to upgrade through the App Store, then you have to upgrade to OS X 10.9 (Mavericks).  Of course, my older iMac does not support 10.9.  So I will have to buy another Mac, which means another few hundred dollars.

The last Apple-specific cost I've been seeing is far less significant, and may not even be Apple's fault exactly, but its just a little salt in the wound.  When people make In App Purchases, Google and Apple transfer the money to my bank account at the end of the month.  Apparently, Google's transfer is a domestic one, but Apple's is an international transfer.  My bank charges me $3.50 for each monthly transfer that Apple makes to my account.