I can't answer your question about conversion rates, but I can give you my experience with a puzzle game priced the same way. I had about 100 free puzzles, and two sets of 100 puzzles (Medium and Hard) for 0.99$ each.
I also had hints (100 for 0.99$) and 4 different costumes for the main character (0.99$ each)
All in all, I got about the same amount of downloads as you did (~3k), and a very small conversion rate on these free downloads. I made more money by changing the price of the game from Free to 2$ (sorry, I don't remember how much, just that I made more).
Now, the next few lines are my opinion only, but:
- I think that this model does not work because 60 (or 100) free puzzles is too many free puzzles. Unless your game is seriously engrossing, people (especially those playing free games on their phones) will move on to something else before they hit the free puzzle limit.
- Ads will give you revenue, but you need a lot of downloads to start making OK money. This is especially true if you're going for banner ads, which have very low CPM. Other types of ads give more money, but you still need a lot of downloads. As an example, for our current hardcore RPG on iOS, we made about 125$ in a month showing video ads in exchange for hard currency. We had about 50k downloads with Apple featuring.
- Real free-to-play is a complex design beast that requires more that just try-before-you-buy-the-rest monetization. If you want to make money with F2P, you need to look at what the people who are making money are doing, or come up with another new way of doing F2P.
My puzzle game is no longer on the app store, but the aforementioned RPG is, if you want to check out how we integrated video ads. (I'm not saying we did this correctly, but we tried what other companies seem to be doing)
https://itunes.apple.com/id/app/the-order-of-souls-rpg/id704519056?mt=8Good luck,
t
Developer
