TRACKING AND SALES - App Trillionaires: How To Become An App Developer: Enjoy Life, Make Money, and Live Your Dreams! (2013)

App Trillionaires: How To Become An App Developer: Enjoy Life, Make Money, and Live Your Dreams! (2013)

13. TRACKING AND SALES

As you develop your app business, you will be getting a lot of information daily. Sales volumes, application downloads, a number of apps in various markets, total revenue, etc. From this you want to be able to draw various conclusions to help you grow your app business. Let’s face it, if you don’t know your numbers, you have no idea where you are or where you’re going in your business.

You need to know WHAT specific numbers will help you, and you are doing this because with that specific information you can make an educated judgment call on choosing various markets or canceling low performing markets. Numbers will help you determine how to plan your marketing strategy or also how to prepare for upcoming costs.

Knowing your numbers can be very crucial in the App Business so that is why we are going to go over some very special areas to track.

A. FUNDAMENTAL TRACKING

Fundamentals are tracking non-numerical things. Usually this is the market news or latest product announcements. Finding out that a new app market is about to come out or the next tablet device could help you gain more revenues in the future, you can start preparing your apps for that new market. Fundamental tracking is important because it helps PREPARE you for changes in the market. Always keep up to date on the latest fundamental news from top news sites on technology. I personally am subscribed to several major news agencies who are in technology, including Reuters, CNN and even Gizmodo and CNET.

B. TECHNICAL TRACKING

This is the actual tracking of numbers. You want to know sales volume, sales projections, sales revenue, total downloads per market, total downloads per day, what’s your best days, what’s your worst days, etc. Technical tracking is the real meat and potatoes of your operation and gives you a pulse check of your business. It is done DAILY as well, and you may end up going to the data several times in the day.

To help in your technical tracking, I have created over the past years my special Sales Tracking Sheet! This sheet is available online for download to my readers and for those who are part of my programs, tools and systems.

To obtain this special document as well as the others I have mentioned simply go to the Game Scorpion Website (http://www.gamescorpion.com) and click on the App Trillionaires link. Unlock the page use the following password: onetrillion. From there in the downloads list you will see a special spreadsheet document called salestrackingsheet_Completed.xlsx. Simply download and save the file to your hard drive and you should be able to open this document up using Microsoft Excel or even uploading this into Google Docs Spreadsheet and setting it up online. I highly recommend uploading it as a Google Docs Spreadsheet.

TRACKING SHEET BASICS

Before we continue on with using the tracking sheet, please make sure you have downloaded it onto your computer desktop. The following steps assume you have already done this and have the file on your computer.

Step 1. Sheet Setup

1. Upload salestrackingsheet_Completed.xlsx file. (NOTE: If it does not look like a Google Docs Spreadsheet, simply inside of Google open the document and click on File à Convert to Google SpreadSheet.)

Step 2. Sheet Concepts

Concept 1 - UNIT Value = $0.99

Always make sure that every time you enter any sales volume, you enter it in as UNIT VALUE. For example, if you have an app that sells for $1.99, it would be equal to 2 UNITS for every 1 SALE of that app. If you sold 5 apps at $1.99 you would have 10 UNITS that you would enter.

Concept 2 - Daily Inputs

It will be assumed that every day you will be going at 12 AM Eastern Time to check out the daily sales numbers for the DAY BEFORE. For example, if at 12 AM EST your computer clock’s date says July 5th, you would be checking SALES for July 3rd. The reason we do this is that sales have not usually finalized until a full 24 hours has passed. Many marketplaces allow time for a user to refund an app and also require time to finalize their numbers.

Alternatively you may also check the numbers early in the morning. The same concept applies, subtract two days from the current date to get the actual day you are going to enter numbers for.

Also if you are on iOS you will notice that sometimes app sales are delayed. This 1 day difference takes into account ALL these factors and for most of the year this 2 day delay works very well. The ONLY time this 2 day delay does not work is during DECEMBER.

Expect to have no sales data being shown to you for many days if not weeks! In fact Apple takes a 1-2 week BREAK during December which means that you can’t even SEE your sales volume for at least an entire week during December! Now you know, so BE PREPARED!

Concept 3 - Total Daily Sales

In the sales tracking sheet on the first page there is a long equation. This equation (=B4+B15+B26+B37+B48+B59+B70+B81+B92+B103+B114+B125+B136+B147+B158) will help you in calculating daily sales. It takes into account up to 15 different Marketplaces! As you expand your business you will be able to add various marketplaces which you would like to test into the mix.

Not all marketplaces work well, so later you can always throw a marketplace out of the mix at any time. This equation listed above will calculate the sales for the FIRST Sunday of the month. If I add a SINGLE digit to each Cell number, I will then end up with the total sales for the first MONDAY of the month. For example:

=B5+B16+B27+B38+B49+B60+B71+B82+B93+B104+B115+B126+B137+B148+B159

Concept 4 - Colored Zones (Green or Aqua)

Throughout the sheets you will notice Green Zones or Aqua Zones. These are EDITABLE areas. Do NOT edit outside of these areas. The sheet will auto calculate everything based on your entries so make sure you only enter in green areas. That being said however, play around with the sheet to try some new things. If you start learning how to work with spreadsheets even more you may even be able to do even more fancy things and get even more interesting numbers spit out to you. For example I was able to adjust the sheet and calculate what percentage of my overall sales each market I had my apps in was generating. These numbers can help you in making decisions in the future to either support a market or totally leave a market completely!

So there you have it, now you can start manipulating the sheet as you wish or learning from my newsletters, programs or other online resources how to keep your sales data up to date and helping you grow your business. Technical and Fundamental analysis of your app business will help you to succeed as the Mobile Industry changes rapidly!

“Dreams are what make life worth living. Dream big! Dream of the BEST! This is what builds hope in life and gives us a reason to try harder!

— Abhinav Gupta