3MagicShots Free App Of the Day Promotion. My results.

I recently decided I would try a new marketing approach to market one of my newest games on the App Store, Zappy Duck. Zappy Duck is a great game, but the market is flooded with similar games of much lower quality. A key challenge of mine has been in getting this game to stand out.

Enter 3MagicShots.com. They emailed me in response to a press release and offered me a slight discount on their ‘Free App a day’ Marketing promotion. Essentially, you make your app free for a few days, pay them $300 and add a tag line into your app description. On a given day, they will feature your app on their home page and within their app on the app store. What they promised seemed great— 100’s of thousands of downloads in that day and hopefully a rise to the top of the charts for a relatively low price.

I found the results to be more than disappointing. The first thing I noticed when my app went live was that the link from their web page actually pointed to their app on the app store… it didn’t even link users directly to my app. Instead of promoting my app, they were indirectly promoting their own. Shame on them.
With this aside, what really matters is “did it get results”, and the answer is quite definitely “no, it did not”. Over the course of 3 days, I got about 200 downloads. That is about $1.50 per download as opposed to the 40 cents per download I had been paying on my Facebook ad campaign. Also, because of the requirement to change the app to free, you can’t even attribute all those downloads to their site. There were many trackers that picked up my price change and automagically posted and promoted my app just because I changed the price to free. It is definitely likely that a good percentage of my traffic was related to that price change, not even to their promotion.
Its also worth noting that an email to them letting them know my disapointment and lack of results didn’t even warrant a response. It is very unfortunate that they do not care.

So, again- another attempt, another few hundred dollars in the pocket of the marketing companies and less money in the pocket of the developer.

My quest for a worthwhile marketing service continues. In the meantime, don’t waste your money on 3magicshots.