Today we got some clarity on the iTunes pricing fluxuations for Phoenix, Oregon digital. For iTunes, you are required to choose a “tier” for pricing. Each tier has a set price. We chose Tier 9 to set the pre-order sales price at $6.99 and told the program to reset the price back to Tier 1 on June 1. The way it interpreted that was to increase it to our intended price of $15.99 on the release date June 1 and then to the “new release” tier at $19.99 on June 2 (a standard new release price.) We have submitted a pricing adjustment to bring it back to Tier 1. It seems they have checks and balances and restrictions in place to keep pricing consistent overall on the platform. They only offer a set list of prices and tiers to choose from all ending in .99 (as far as I can tell at least.)
Some good news… I’ve been talking for months about how filmmakers cannot access real-time sales from iTunes or other platforms. That is still true. But we will have access to the first set of iTunes numbers 30 days after release, and then after that we can access sales within 72 hours of the transaction date.
After July 1, if we want to run advertising tests with iTunes, we will get results within 3 days. This is still not great, and we’ll see if we can really track specific sales (using pixels, etc.) but it is better than waiting 3–6 months which is often the case when going through traditional distribution channels. We are lucky to have fairly direct access through our distributor which is refreshing.
Even though this gives us more options for ad testing on bigger platforms, we are still planning to run focused ads on platforms where we have more granular access to data.
♡ Annie