Let’s face the facts. Retailers and brands aren’t making boatloads of money through their commerce-enabled mobile apps. Total global mobile app revenues reached $970 million in 2011, according to eMarketer. That’s less than 1 percent of total e-commerce sales for the same year, which clocked in at $680 billion.

But with consumers spending more and more time on mobile devices, the opportunity to grow mobile commerce sales is there. And retailers are finding new ways of converting loyal app users through tactics like in-app notifications, personalization techniques and integrating loyalty programs.

Earlier this month, we reported on the Fiksu Indexes for the App Store in February. As a recap, January was an all time high for app downloads while February decreased. And the Cost per Loyal User Index rose from January’s $1.14 to February’s $1.31. Fiksu has just made their March numbers available to us.

The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which measures the volume of daily downloads of the Top 200 ranked free iPhone apps (U.S.), was down by almost two million downloads at 4.45 million. February had 6.35 million downloads and January had 6.79 million (a record high).

The Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index, which tracks the cost of obtaining loyal users (users who open an app three times or more), remained steady between February and March. For March, the index was $1.30, slightly down from $1.31 in February. In January, it was cheaper at $1.14.

NORTHAMPTON - A Boston company that markets advertisements for mobile phone applications has opened a satellite office downtown and hired seven employees - and it is looking for more.

Fiksu Inc. opened last month at 104 Main St. Its office is on the second floor above Everything Optical.

The company chose Northampton because of its proximity to software engineering talent at local colleges and to give employees an alternative to a daily commute to and from Boston, said Mark Corner, vice president of engineering, who oversees the local office.

Fiksu is now hiring software developers and engineers for both of its locations, Corner said, including as many as 20 more people for the Northampton office. But he said that finding them hasn't been easy, given the competition among technology firms bidding for talent. The Fiksu jobs pay between $60,000 and $120,000, depending on the candidate's experience and skills.

If you're thinking about launching an app to make your millions, then perhaps you need to think again, especially if you plan on producing an app for Apple's App Store.

Figures from the US show a thirty percent fall in March downloads to the top 200 free iPhone Apps as the "novelty factor" of the iPhone 4S begins to fade. Statistics from mobile app marketing business Fiksu's App Store Competitive Index (which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free US iPhone apps) show downloads dropped by almost two million from 6.35 million per day in February, to 4.45 million in March.

The reasons for the sudden drop in downloads are unclear, but Fiksu believe it's partly down to users finally getting bored of their new Christmas toy, and a move by Apple to clamp down on app store manipulation.