I already wrote in the past how frustrating it is to contact App review web sites (here: http://www.touch-code-magazine.com/how-to-get-your-app-reviewed-by-a-big-app-review-site/), and actually didn’t have much progress on the topic ever since.
Some time ago the guys from apptlantis.com contacted me, asking me to do an honest review of their service on Touch Code Magazine. So I did a test drive of their service and in this post I will share with you what I found out.
Funny enough almost at the same time I found out about two different services: AppLaunch and Apptlantis. I was in touch with both, but AppLaunch didn’t follow through, so I can’t really put a comparison post of the two services, so I’ll be talking only about Apptlantis.
What is Apptlantis?
Apptlantis will fetch your app’s info from the App Store and send review requests to a number of the App review web sites. If you don’t have a web site, they’ll offer you a quite flexible small web site for your app, including a PressKit page, and finally they’ll provide you with reporting on the campaign results.
Signup for Apptlantis promotion
If you head over to http://www.apptlantis.com/ you can, in matter of minutes, create a new promotional campaign with the service.
NB: One gotcha is that on the first step you need to enter an App Store URL. That means that you should have already launched your app, before you head to Apptlantis. This makes pre-launch promotion and hype creation impossible, but as soon as you’re live on the App Store you can already start with Apptlantis.
Payment plans
After filling in some basic information about yourself you will get to the last step, where you need to select a payment plan.
At present there are 3 different plans as follows:
- STARTER $299 – 20 submissions, 3 reviews guaranteed,etc.
- MEDIA-EXPOSE $399 – 60 submissions, 5 reviews guaranteed,etc.
- MAXIMUM EFFECT $499 – 100 submissions, 7 reviews guaranteed,etc.
I went with the MEDIA-EXPOSE package, so consider all the results below as my results for that plan.
What you get
Once you submit your app to Apptlantis, they will start a short review process of your app’s information, make sure they have the info they usually send to app review websites and they’ll send you an email when they start actually sending the review requests for you.
Then whenever a review post pops up on one of the web sites in their list – they’ll notify you via email.
The range of websites in Apptlantis’ list is pretty diverse. Basically you will get a unique post about your app in several non-high end app review web sites – and that’s guaranteed. The probability to get featured in a major web site is probably about the same as if you would’ve sent the information yourself – ie – very low.
However – Apptlantis’s system works pretty fine – you can track the progress of your reviews and you can see posts popping up here and there shortly after the promotion:
I did a promotion about the version 2.0 of Doodle Booth and here’s the reviews that got online so far (in about 20 days time):
http://www.apptlantis.com/reviews/ios/app/403497940
Besides the review posts I already got mentioned in 2 forums about iPhone applications. The forum posts however are in threads on “self-promotion”, so I guess the click-rate is relatively low (I could be wrong, just my feeling)
In the end you get also a simple app page, hosted by Apptlantis.
The page is relatively flexible – you can add social media integration, facebook tab, google analytics tracking and pretty much customize the whole look & feel of the page. If you don’t have your own web site and would like to, it’s not a bad option.
Gotcha In 3 months the hosting of the webpage becomes paid.
Gotcha The system does not recognize automatically iPhone vs iPad apps, so you might end up with an iPhone showing iPad screenshots like here: http://doodle-booth-hd.apptlantis.com/
Anyway – if you already have a web page, you don’t need to use the Apptlantis page, but since it’s included in your package, I’d say it’s worth customizing quickly the page with your own logos and background images, even if you don’t use it.
The default page that you will get looks like this:
The results of the campaign
After 20 days I would say the campaign is to an end so, let me have a look at the results.
7 review posts – all uniquely written, simple reviews. One of them had custom artwork created, 1 of them used a custom banner they asked us for, the rest used the screenshots from the App Store.
1 more guaranteed review is still not online – I’m waiting for it
2 forum posts – as said in threads for self-promotion.
The Apptlantis page got 41 visits so far (and my custom URL did get few hits as pictured below)
How many hits the Doodle Booth page on the App Store got I can’t really say, and actually the reviews link directly to the App Store (Would’t it be nice if they were linking to a clicktrough counter script?) Anyway here’s the stats from the last 3 months so you can have a look for yourselves:
The verge
The system is for sure in an early stage, but the team is apparently putting a lot of effort into making it better.
I didn’t notice any boost on my own app’s download chart, but you have to consider that it is not a new app, but a version 2.0
I would say that if you are about to write to a long list of app review web sites, putting Apptlantis to do it for you could free you some valuable time.
Go visit Apptlantis and decide for yourself: http://www.apptlantis.com/
Also if you are interested in the list of review sites they submit to, here’s a direct link: http://www.apptlantis.com/app_reviews
The post was originally published on the following URL: http://www.touch-code-magazine.com/apptlantis-com-review-app-review-promotion-service/·
Source : touch-code-magazine[dot]com
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