iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. You've Got Customers!

You've launched your product. Customers are downloading your app from iTunes. Life is good!

But to maintain that good life, you have to work at it. You need to advertise and promote your application to new customers. To understand how effective your marketing effort is, you keep track of sales and other trends. You also begin establishing a conversation with your customer base through social networks and other support channels.

The goal is to gather as much information about your customers as possible. With this data, you learn about their buying habits and what it takes to make them happy. And that makes for a successful business.

Tracking Sales

If you're like most iPhone developers, you want to know how well your product is selling. The more downloads you have, the more people like your work, and you feel validated. More importantly, these sales numbers are the primary feedback mechanism for your marketing efforts. Apple provides two types of reports: a daily summary and monthly financial report.

Daily Reports

The daily summary tells you how many units you sold of each product in each country. It's a tab-delimited text file that totals every item sold. It shouldn't come as a surprise that you get these files from iTunes Connect. To download the report, follow these steps:

1. Log into iTunes Connect and click Sales/Trends Report.

   The Transaction Reports screen appears (Figure 9-1).

   Figure 9-1. Your daily sales reports are downloaded from the Transaction Reports ...