App Store Seasonality

Seasons create a significant impact on the app store experience. Gripping seasonality might drastically affect the explicitness and CVR of your optimisation strategy.

What is seasonality?

On a high level of functionality, the app stores undergo a shift in user behaviour based on seasons.`When we start a topic about seasons, we tend to look at it from the biased standpoint of the seasons of the year and holidays. However, there is more to this perspective of app store seasonality on various levels. It is common among such meanings as the Health & Fitness category,  New Year’s resolutions and Black Friday in the Shopping classification. Important to mention as well that it exists on an app-level realised in new game content or a renewed season of a show on a streaming app.

For a better perception of a seasonality definition, it should be mentioned that those are frequent updates and time-related changes based on external (global events and holidays) and internal (in-app events, seasons and new content) events. Judging by those your customers decide whether they want to proceed with your app or a game.

What Impact does it make?

One of the main aspects of getting the best of App Store seasonality is to leverage seasonality marketing. The decisions which the app users make are influenced by news and information from various sources. If we take as an example a customer browsing an app store, he might not care that much about the variety of products or deliveries, but a list of special offers and sales at his disposal. Seasonal marketing aims to capitalize on repeated interest for certain holidays, events, or entire seasons by adjusting one’s seasonality marketing strategy. 

Operating distinctive seasonal app creatives and messaging do affect conversion rates, though it also influences discoverability. Moreover, an application becomes easy to find by implying holiday keywords to fit varying search queries and by demanding the App Store and Google Play store editors.

Eventually, by having your seasonality marketing in order, the platforms get a significant increase in app store conversion rates throughout different periods.

Types of ASO seasonality

Holidays

The most common level among ASO seasons is during holidays. This aspect is highly diverse and dependent on a representative country, each culture celebrates and observes different events. Christmas is a high peak period for app and game time updates.

Category-specific

A variety of sports seasons throughout the year in the Sports category (for example the NBA season vs. the NFL season) are called category-specific ASO seasonality. Knowing those are the main key concept for leveraging essential events of the category.

App-specific

There is another group of seasonality that is dictated by continuous changes to the content of their app for many products and games. For instance, freshly added chapters to a game every month or certain in-app events that occur at a particular period of the year. 

The different seasons of series that go live on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and other streaming apps are great examples of app-specific seasonality. Once there is a new season of a famous show, viewers are more probable to react to an app store page that showcases it and the fact it’s available through the app. Learn more about App Store Optimization trends.

How to get the best app store optimisation practices?

When seasonal creatives can harm conversion

Browsing through the App Store or Google Play during a particular season, you might notice a huge variety of season-themed creatives that motivate visitors to look through a product page to see a unique in-app feature related to the holiday. However, this high attention can easily fall if the creatives aren’t consistent with the season’s theme with no extraordinary seasonal expansion. In reality, if there is no app or game update, despite a long-term page exploration, the visitors might eventually drop their curiosity once they see the contradiction. 

Opportunity for Re-engagement

It’s rather typical for apps and games to tailor features or add characters related to a particular holiday. For this cause, app store browsers are digging for themed apps and games. In the gaming industry users tend to experience unexplored storylines, seeing updated environments and unlocking new characters created accordingly to the holiday period. And with nearly half of all installs being reinstalled, it gives a possibility to employ seasonal creatives to elevate re-engagement metrics among existing or lapsed users.

This is a grand chance to advertise your holiday-specific features to stimulate visitors to re-experience a product.

Optimizing for New Users

You should make sure your unique seasonal events, storylines, features or characters are valid on your product page, specifically within the gallery assets. It should deliver an explicit representation of the app’s functionality, updated and basic ones. This ensures that users instantly catch that the app is being updated frequently.

Sense of Urgency

Additionally, usage of a sense of urgency can impact conversion. Since numerous seasonal events are restricted in time,( once it’s over, it’s over) highlighting the “limited term” is effective in stimulating users to download your app and experience new features before they’re gone.

ASO tips to set up your seasonal plan

1. Research

The first phase is to uncover what tendencies apply to your place and determine your primary targets before founding a yearly calendar.

Another approach to understanding seasonality in tracking is Google Trends. Apart from displaying the relative favour of web search queries, it will help:

• Catch when you should begin optimising.
• Detect the questions users search for when they dig for a term. This helps to find additional keywords and understand the questioning intent.
• Analogise the close popularity of search terms in diverse locales.

Not less important to mention the significance to sync up with your marketing and product team to learn about the current plan. Therefore it can be useful to:

• Find if there is any seasonality in feature usage.

For example, to-do list feature usage of the application decreases during holidays. 

• Know the most valuable content at a current time.

For instance, regarding preferences between light and comfort food during summer and winter accordingly, thus it might be wise to consider including diet meals on a menu after the winter holidays.

2. Planing

After gathering all essential information, begin with a list of all relevant events and high-level activities to create annual guidance. Pinpoint your goals and work backwards. You should concentrate on:

• Keyword optimization: Before proceeding with the event itself, plan detailed keyword research in diverse markets, for instance, holiday keywords, and set up for yourself at which point you want to move those to achieve some ranking and relevancy, and at which matter you ought to switch it up a notch and bring the keywords into for example your subtitle.
• Featuring: Do have an option for Apple and Google to feature you? What would it be about? Perhaps, you can cooperate with your product team to launch an update with an additional “Christmas” character. 

3. Execution

Once you are finished with your research and planings phases, you have at your disposal a lifetime app plan. It will help to understand more in-depth your users’ preferences, update theses, and continually explore new prosperous assets. You should start with:

• Setting up the seasonal test on a testing tool. 
• Strategising and planning which traffic sources and segments to send to the test. 
• Handling and monitoring the test to minimise spending and assure flourishing testing.

When you finish the test, we advise you to analyse the test metrics and use those understandings for the next test hypotheses:

• Decide why a deviation is a leader. 
• Quantify probable CVR increases in the live store. 
• Set page assets’ performance to identify the best resources to assign. 
• Specify the strengths and flaws of all interpretations to integrate with the general testing strategy.