iTunes Sales Reports Analytics: a closer look to appFigures

appFigures is a reporting platform for iPhone developers that automatically downloads and visualizes iTunes Connect sales data with App Store reviews and ranks for all of their apps.

We have been using appFigures for a while now and are pretty happy with it. Before we started using appFigures, we had no reliable and fast way to see how our sales were going and no real way to keep track of the effectiveness of our marketing activities.

appFigures today is an important part of our strategic planning for any app.

The basic plan for appFigures is free, and will get you a taste of what it is all about. The main plan (Premium) is 4.99 USD per month for 2 apps and 1.49 USD/month for each additional app. It’s a bargain and it’s well worth the money. Here is an overview of what you get:

1. Interactive Sales & Download Reports: appFigures displays sales, downloads, and updates information for one or multiple apps on interactive charts with totals. It allows you to review your sales by date or country and even by region with sales data converted to the currency of your choice.

2. Automatic Daily Report Importing from iTunes Connect: appFigures will import your daily and weekly reports directly from iTunes Connect every morning automatically. This is a life saver. The appFigures staff also keeps an eye on Apple’s messing up their reports and will fix and re-import if anything goes wrong. appFigures also supports automatic importing from multiple iTunes Connect accounts.

3. You can also sync on demand and upload reports directly from your computer at any time, but I find this feature useful only to bulk-import your historical data if you were diligent enough to download it and save it form iTunes Connect.

4. Once setup, you will get report summary directly by email every morning or every week with key information for your apps. With email reports you can easily set up the type of report, the apps to include in it, and the recipients.

5. You can also keep an eye on your app ranking thanks to a Top 200 App Rank Trending report from all App Stores, updated hourly. appFigures tracks and charts the rank of apps in all categories. Many people are requesting this to be extended to a top 400 since getting into the top 200 is becoming increasingly difficult for smaller developers.

6. Another golden feature of appFigures is the ability to read customers reviews from all 90 App Stores worldwide, and an added feature allows you to translate the reviews in your language. By monitoring tour reviews you will gain invaluable insight about your app and will be able to address your users needs with subsequent updates, turning the fate of your app upside down. It happened to us with our Prayer app, that jumped from 20 downloads/day to 150 downloads/day thanks to an update that addressed all the complains we got.

If you ask me, this is a must have for anyone being serious about iPhone apps development.

appFigures has been our first stop when we were researching for a “google analytics” like package for our iPhone apps sales. There are alternatives out there I hadn’t a chance to try because we were satisfied by this tool we didn’t feel the need to dig further. However, if you are using some other platform and think it is better, please comment this post! I’d love to hear from you.