App Growth Week Day 4 Recap: ASO, Testing & Optimization
Gabriel Kuriata
Gabriel Kuriata 
If Apple Search Ads is THE tool for promoting your app on the App Store, then what is App Store Optimization?
App store optimization should always be the central pillar of every user acquisition strategy.
So, if Apple Search Ads is the big “BUY HERE” neon sign, then ASO, testing & optimization is… putting products on shelves? Or just being sure that the store is even open ;). Anyway: it’s just pointless to do one without the other.
…and what can I say – App Growth Week Day 4 Recap will make that obvious even if you just take a glimpse at the titles of its presentations. You’ll see ASO:
…and more. However, the two most important questions asked by people visiting this particular blog are:
To that we must say: yes we can! Just keep on reading & watching. Enjoy!
How ASO and Apple Search Ads empower each other? Both are an integral part of a holistic approach to mobile growth. Think beyond organic visibility and user acquisition. This is the way to optimize your overall conversion rate and lower acquisition costs.
Apple Search Ads is a great source of information for App Store optimization. Improved keyword relevancy improves visibility in Apple Search Ads.
ASO means pushing a lot of buttons, but two truly experienced folks – Thomas Kriebernegg, Managing Director & Co-Founder at AppRadar and Ludmila Samal, Senior Account Executive at SplitMetrics will show you which ones and when:
Real-life experience is the best teacher and our next panelist has a lot to share. MY.GAMES is a leading European publisher and developer of games, with more than one billion registered users worldwide and more than 70 games in operation.
Analyze category leaders, middle league players and unsuccessful games. The Plateau and the Ceiling. This will help to calculate your scenarios – pessimistic and optimistic ones.
How do you validate a game to finish with over 200 million downloads? How do you reach the level MY.GAMES has reached over the years? Watch the presentation and find out:
In-app events: competitions, premieres, updates, holiday specials, all those wonderful, colorful, intriguing events in your app that shine enticingly on the App Store… What can they do for you and your app exactly?
Don’t be surprised when the majority of installs generated with in-app events will come from your existing audience and returning users. In-app events can be an excellent tool for engagement. I also highly recommend localizing them: it will increase the visibility of your app.
Cheapest experiments are those performed by someone else ;). Laura Krivetskaya, ASO Team Lead at Product Madness is here to share their findings on in-app events and answer how to use them for best effect and your satisfaction:
All seasoned app publishers start their research with a browser. What do any app store users want? What’s hot in categories? What trends rule the market… and a really big one: perhaps someone already researched it and published the results generously?
The answer to the last question is frequently yes. Many companies turn to this blog for data on benchmarks & ASO trends. But sometimes you just have to blow stuff up yourself.
Test and experiment. Results are frequently surprising:
Users spend around 7 to 10 seconds on a product page on average. Publishers tend to create 30 seconds app video previews. I don’t want to disappoint you here, but no one watches them until the end.
SplitMetrics Optimize is a leading solution for validating app product & marketing ideas. Two great people will explain how it works and why it’s actually better to blow stuff up in a controlled environment of our platform than on the App Store: Mari Trypolskaya, Head of Sales at SplitMetrics and Alex Laptenok, Customer Success Team Lead at SplitMetrics. Enjoy!
As on previous days of App Growth Week, the final session was a discussion, the best format to elaborate more on the biggest questions asked throughout the day and summarize them (even still, many had to be shifted to e-mail due to time constraints – panelists were corresponding with participants for quite some time after the event). Four specialists gathered for the discussion:
The discussion revolved around these three questions:
A more open format allowed our guests to share quite many useful tips for any app store optimization:
One of my favorite examples are music streaming services. Almost all of them have both music and podcasts. By showing podcasts on the very first screenshot to people who are looking for them (and music to others) they have an uplift in conversion.
Fitness and health apps offer multiple opportunities in one application. We can create a few custom products pages for each of the verticals, and each of them can have different audiences. When targeting these different audiences in different verticals, we find the best visuals which correspond with the audience.
Watch the video for more:
That’s it for Day 4 of App Growth Week. A recap of the final day is coming soon. Meanwhile, you can ask any questions that you might have, we’re always happy to help.
