For the last month or so we’ve been semi-secretly working on adding iAds to appFigures. Some of our members have been beta testing the newly-added reports for about two weeks and their feedback was invaluable. Now that the beta is complete we’re excited to bring iAds tracking to everyone.

We’ve done our best to make iAds tracking as easy as possible by adding new reports that break down all available iAds metrics in the same way you’ve come to expect. You can quickly analyze requests, impressions, eCPM, CTR, and fill rate with interactive charts, beautiful maps, and detailed data tables.

In the coming weeks we’ll also be adding iAds data to your beloved email reports so you can wake up to all of your data.

Maybe it’s the sense of competition, maybe it’s just having more numbers to look at, but either way people love ranks.

We realized we were already pushing the ranks code and infrastructure we had to its limits. It was time to start from the ground up and rebuild it, and that’s what we did.

We’re really excited to take the next step and provide top-400 hourly rank data to all of our members, along with data for all of the top grossing categories.

So, starting today you get:

1. Much, much faster reports overall
2. Even deeper tracking – Top 400
3. Reporting on top grossing categories for all categories and subcategories
4. Ability to filter ranks by device (iPhone or iPad), as well as type of category (Free/Paid or Top Grossing)

With this new infrastructure we can (and will) push ranks even further to give you access to more data and even better analysis. We don’t want to spoil the surprise so we won’t go into details :)

Check it out!

We’re doing some maintenance on the parts of appFigures that handle syncing and uploading reports as well as the archive. Everything should be back up by 9pm 2am EST. While this is going on you may see empty region reports and other weirdly displayed data, but have no fear your data is as safe as can be.

When it’s all behind us you can expect a genius importing engine that can eat even the most disgustingly mangled reports.

A few months ago we (somewhat) sponsored and (mostly) hung out at an incredible iPhone development conference, 360iDev.

Part of being a sponsor meant we could throw a tuesday-night nerd party. So naturally we chose to have a sumo competition for an iPad. Recently a video of this abomination to good taste surfaced and we knew we needed to show it to you.

This was the final showdown. A lot was at stake. Men were made and broken in inflatable suits. To the winner: everlasting glory and a smooth, sexy electronic joy-machine. To the loser: a beer and a promise that we wouldn’t tell his wife.

Take a look:

Thanks to David “Bloodsausage” Ballard of TapMeGames
and Doug “The Baconator” Sjoquist of Sunetos, Inc for being great sports and putting on a jolly good show.

When we first opened up appFigures to the public we knew we wanted to create a place for our members to be able to talk to us directly as well as interact with others freely and about anything. That’s the day our twitter-like community was born.

Just last week we surpassed 2,500 posts. We call that an achievement!

So we wanted to thank all of you for being a part of the community, for the feedback, and for helping other members when they have questions.

If you’ve visited the community recently you’ve probably noticed the addition of gravatars to posts. That’s the first improvement of many we’ll be adding to the community over the next few months. Our goal is to make it the ultimate place for developers to discuss everything iPhone and ipad (and appfigures, too).

P.S – If you’re curious about gravatars check out www.gravatar.com

Over the last few months Apple has introduced new data to iTunes Connect reports. We’ve started tracking this new information and have added it to data tables in all reports.

New information includes:

App Returns
The number of purchases that were refunded by Apple due to user request. A return means money was taken away from your account.

Promo Codes Used
The number of downloads that came from a promo code you handed out. Unfortunately there is no way to know which actual code was used…

Gifts Redeemed
The number of times your app was downloaded by a user that received it as a gift. Gifting apps results in two transactions in iTunes Connect reports, one for the actual purchase (not download), and for the actual download (no payment). Gift redeems show the number of downloads.

With this new data, we’ve changed the formula we use to calculate the total sales. The old formula was pretty straight forward, just downloads. The new formula, which takes into account all new inputs mentioned above is as follows:

Total Downloads = New Downloads + Promo Downloads – Returns

Gifts redeemed are not added as they do not reflect the actual purchase but only its download counterpart. The actual purchase was counted as a standard download when it happened.

As you may already know, earlier today we had a ranks outage that lasted from 11AM to 2PM, so your reports will currently show a big blank gap for that period. Yikes!

We do have some good news: Ranks began aggregating on schedule again at 3PM and have continued since.

And we have even better news: We traced this back to an issue in our reports display engine and our team is currently working to fix it. We expect to have it resolved within the next few hours. Once corrected those ranks will display properly and that big gap will go away forever.

appFigures will be unavailable for planned maintenance at 12AM EST on Sunday 6/27.

UPDATE: Maintenance is taking longer than expected and may require more time to complete. We apologize for the delay and are doing our best to wrap it all up as soon as possible.

UPDATE: Maintenance has been completed successfully.

During the maintenance we’ll be upgrading several parts of our infrastructure so that we can support the growing traffic to our site.

The appFigures Team.

Sometimes you just don’t want a monthly recurring charge. Until now that was the only way we could bill you: one month at a time every month. Well now you’ve got another option. We just released the ability to prepay your account with your credit card or with PayPal.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve noticed that a lot of developers are confused when it comes to understanding Apple’s payment system, and with reason. And while Apple has been very clear that daily/weekly reports should not be used for financial purposes, they never explained why.

We bring you the explanation!

Before we go into the actual explanation keep in mind that financial reports follow a fiscal calendar that is different from the normal calendar. You can see Apple’s fiscal calendar for 2010 here.

So here’s the big difference:

Daily/weekly reports record downloads as they happen, while financial reports record credit card transactions as they clear with the bank.

This means that downloads that occur at the end of the fiscal month will be reported in the daily report but not in the financial report, and it can go either way depending on the previous fiscal month.
With that in mind let’s look at actual numbers.

Here’s real data for the fiscal month of Aug. 09 (8/2 – 8/29).

Here’s a comparison of estimated vs. actual profit for the data above:

Profit (from daily): $7,739.90
Actual Payment: $7,767.00
Difference: $32.90
Last 3 days: $30.80

* These results may be a bit skewed because the app was featured early in the month.

Conclusions:

1. Credit card charges may take more than a day to clear.
2. There’s a delay between when a download occurs to when it is posted.
3. Because of 1 and 2, downloads that took place over the last 3-6 days of the fiscal month may not count towards that month’s payment.
4. This results in a difference in profit of the total of the last 3 – 6 days of the month

Feel free to share your story by commenting.