ASO (App Store Optimization) and How it Can Help Developers to Improve Their Profitability

[Music] hi guys how's it going good morning everyone all right so we're gonna talk about him a so who is familiar about App Store optimization raise your hand no questions two three four many I hope you more of you do on your shy or they'd understand my question anyway so this is us we were 13 we release to date about 700 apps and we achieved over 250 million organic downloads now these are the results I just told you were just now but the truth is when we start working at lap cave our first game was a flop no one download the game literally no one so we had to come up with ways to actually get people to download our game and that's

where our AAC expertise comes in place so since then I'm glad to say that we're doing better you can see here the graph how it fluctuates you can see the pointer no either way so you can see how it fluctuates a lot these because they're our algorithm changes both in Google Play and the App Store these are really hard to account for and every single developer are playing the cat-and-mouse game so Jonathan you can do is react to changes it's really hard to know exactly how things are going to be that being said there are some trends that we're going to discuss today for you guys to kind of like figure out what both Apple and Google Play are looking for when you develop a game now before I move on I'm gonna just make sure we're all on the same page because not many of you raise your hands but ESO has been a steady on lap cave it's about improving as much as you can the number of organic installs that your game has resist

thanks to two different things the first one is improving the visibility in the App Store that is how light is for someone to go on the App Store page look for a keyword search and then finding your game and then you just download it and as a second part which is optimizing the visit to install rate once I got the user attention is for them to actually say oh this game is interesting because I like the item I like the screen I'm gonna tap on download that's what we call about improving the conversion rate now this is thanks to the combination of two factors which is the our metadata and the on metadata you will see that I have added these one in purple there's a reason for that and we will cover these in a few more slides but on metadata you're gonna understand that iOS and Google have different metrics to account for for instance and the description on Google Play it's the long description is really important in Google Play this is about how many keywords you have and how

many how many times is being repeated they keep relevancy whereas on iOS the description the long description doesn't matter whatsoever you don't have to worry about it but today I'm gonna focus more about the of metadata part so why is so important these are these are three standard and things like nothing here it's gonna blow your mind what I want you from this slide is remind these one here that Apple stays that 65% of the their installs come from search traffic to remember the 65% because we're gonna come back to it in a few more slides now before I keep talking about ASO and how well it's gonna help your game and how what we're doing a lot cave I think is always interesting to showcase some case studies things that we've done a lot cave to actually improve the results and for our games or for our partner games here's one of our partners is called zombie frontier 3 as you can

guess it's about killing zombies is done by filling touch FT games these are the screens and the icons that we had before we started working with them there's nothing wrong with them you know pretty standard decent icon you see on the screens but after working for it for a while I will show the results in the next slide you will see how these translate into actually into more slides you will see how these translate into more installs better conversion rate but here you can see for instance this icon versus this one dark there are not many I mean sure a few things change but there is a rationale behind it and rationale is we were looking into wide players like this game and first and foremost they said they'd like to play realistic games so we changed the icon to make it more realistic you see we changed the colors here just to make it more feeling like it's a real real game for real play as it is and then we know that I'd like to fight big bosses or big zombies so

instead of having random zombies we put a big guy there to showcase hey you're gonna be fighting big bosses at the end of every level and we know that I'd like to be part of a special forces like the SWAT team like no please and the police forces so we switch guess what the characters from the random characters on the on the gameplay - SWAT forces these all of these translates into results like I will show you next slide in terms of Hamid how many more installs which he thinks to that but these translates into coming up with these iterations now what I'm trying to show you I'm just from more of our so you can see everything one show you here is that from the same screens and we come up with once we know that the best iterations just the order of the screens is gonna have a direct impact on how well your game performs in terms of conversion rate so same screens just different order it's number C or letter C which got the best conversion rate so right now just your game if you switch the screen that you have it's likely can come up with a better

conversion rate not the results and that's what we got and after doing a few iterations on Google Play the durations are the yellow lines every single time you see a yellow line is that we need an update on the App Store or Google Play page right here that's when we did the first icon change where I'll show you guys the icon from doing the icon about 3d going to a realistic icon that that one's little increase of about 20% on the number of visits studies how many more people are actually going to visit my apps or page based on changing my icon and then once the game got a featuring you see this increase here the blue line the number of visits this increase is because they've got a feed shrink I'm on Google Play even though they had an increased number of visits we somewhat maintain the conversion rate and then once again we put it up again conversion rate is in the gray line now keep in mind this Grillin here because what normally happens when you get a featuring or editors choice you're gonna

get many more visits that is people visiting your App Store page but if you have not been working on your conversion rate optimization the number of users that you're gonna get thanks to this it won't be that much and I will show you a case study for an example what I mean with these shows in two more slides these are for the results from Google Play these are the results that we got on iOS now the interesting difference is that here we have less yellow lines less adorations why is this it's because on Google Play we use Google experiments which is a free tool everyone here has it just gonna log into your Google console and then you can just use that who has an iOS first and foremost you have to update the apk or your app every single time you wanna do an a/b testing and two you gotta use third-party tools if you want to do the a/b testing and directly on iOS and so what we do a lot give instead is first we come up with the winning variants and Google Play whichever are the winning permutations the icon the screens are

perform the best are the ones that we apply afterwards on iOS and here we got decent results after a couple of iterations we got here we go from about 2000 installs to up to 5,000 installs and just again changing tech and the icon and the screens now you might remember I told you guys about what happened when you have many more visits and have your conversion rate drops that's another one of our partners is hi GG I got games were with them for many other titles that's for Lords mobile that's what happens when you got an editor's choice you see that the increase the massive increase in on the blue line there's the number of visits so right GG went from with lures mobile went from having about 40 you can barely see here but it's 50,000 so you got from about having 30,000 visits per day up to 270,000 every single time this happens does Ana little choice but if you have not been working on your conversion rate it's

going to be too late to make the most out of these many more visitors you have why because you won't get as many installs if you have not been proving how appealing your icon is how appealing your screen is you can get as many cells so everyone everyone here in this room is dreaming about having another or having another choice or featuring but if again if you have not been working on your conversion rate trust me it doesn't mean anything if one it's gonna be high fives in your team but afterwards you know look into how many more installs you achieve thanks to that featuring and you're gonna realize it won't be that much so really have to do your homework first and work on your conversion rate optimization now now recover and I've been creating a lot about zero now we're gonna get into the trends that we sell up get for 2019 forward slash 2020 the first one you can remember a few more slides before I told you guys hey why you so is important remember that Apple estates the 65% of their traffic or the installs come from search well we did a

study a lot Cape we analyzed 37 apps and we actually on Google Play we realized that I actually the opposite instead of coming from search traffic most of our downloads that we analyzed we're coming from explore traffic and guess what from all the visit that we got from explorer 60% became an install so again Apple may state that search is what accounts for most of their traffic in terms of installs a blood Cape we analyzed it and at least on on our games and the games that we analyzed it's the opposite sixty percent accounts for explore traffic so again you have to work on your items you have to work on your screens because Explorer it's how the look and feel it's not about the metadata and then that that brings me to the second point which is the real attribution is only known by Google and iOS if any of you guys are using the console on a daily basis on a weekly basis there are some box um you know data fluctuates a lot so that's just keeping in mind that things

you gotta use that as a guidance but ultimately it's really hard to work out what happens at the back end within Google or within Apple meaning for instance you may have an app so if a user goes on the App Store they look for a specific and key word puzzle they just tap on one of the games they found and then they see similar apps and then they tap there and then download that app instead how does Google account for that is accounted for search was that account for browse traffic I don't know the answer to this question so if any of you guys know I'm glad to know because right now like you wouldn't know the answer either but that brings me to the next slide which is I told you guys that export traffic is accounting for a lot of our installs so an easy way for you guys to figure out which apps are showing as similar apps you know our app that you might like is using this URL here I'm using one of our games your bundle ID but literally just copy and paste or just take a screenshot of it or take a picture of these change the purple bit here use your bundle ID

instead and it's gonna show you which similar apps are being recommended now we didn't have any so to mafia so tools offer these but if you don't have one just use that as gonna show you when you come up as as a similar app or you can check your competitors which are should being shown there obviously if you're being shown in one of your main competitors apps or games and they have a lot of traffic there's going to be traffic that could be ultimately going to your app instead now since iOS 12 Apple personalizes the the main tab that was a stab the same happens with Google Play I will show you another site afterwards we show cases this point but I encourage you guys at the office if we have an Android device four or five hundred devices open Google Play look for a keyword and see the order of the app that show up you will see that on each phone the lectures will be different so use these ranking as a reference don't use it don't get to focus on intro and then

ultimately battle benchmarks such as retention rate quality uninstalls all these is something we're seeing is a good important trend in 2010 2020 it's no longer about being top 5 top 10 it's about choking and that all these battles are given to you for free and Google there's a reason for that they want you to focus on getting your app to do better on these things and the Apple Store and Google Play are gonna count for better apps are going to be shown higher up if you guys work on these and you have good metrics now about their ranking on the store under the example I was giving you guys about going on Google Play and using the same keyboard across different devices these are the table that put together the guys a feature which is an N Eso agency based and in Berlin they used every single or most of the well-known ASO tools in the market and they compare results and as you can see the result of they got and

across different ASO tools are different so again use the ranking as a reference and get to focus on what I need to be top 5 need to be top 3 doesn't really matter as far as your top 10 top 20 that's good enough work instead on your export traffic work instead on your own your serial work instead on your retention rate on the sole rate have been responsive that's what I we're going to make a difference moving forward and now that's a quite interesting point to allow scilab cave you will see things like these when you go on Google and search for correlation between user acquisition on organic traffic now there is nothing like literally I'm just I just went and Google and just search free which is the first two that I found as a reference nothing against branch nothing against or maven they're great companies but you remember these quotes so I repair install one point five additional organic use tools and show up but with about about a 90% confidence interval

and even states that they find a correlation between UA and organic of about 69 but the dis correlation can fluctuate based on many factors well we decide and I'll be the another study a lot cave and we analyzed three different apps in seven months we applied a person correlation coefficient from minus one to plus one which literally something below 0.5 is seen as a weak correlation and the results are the following on the first app we found there was a true correlation between organic traffic and paid traffic that is indeed the paid traffic helped to actually get more organic traffic there's a correlation of 0.71 which is pretty strong whereas on the other two apps coalition was really weak the first one was 0.16 the same one the second one was 0.32 which brings us to the

following conclusion a lab cave is that it's really hard to establish a linear correlation between your UA and your organic traffic now we're not saying that they doesn't exist what we're saying is that you have to do your own research you have to analyze what happens with your own out there as a storm even says there are too many factors to account for anyone to comment state yes there's a direct correlation between how much money gonna stay on paid how much more organic installs you're gonna you're gonna get what you can do is analyze post mortem analyze afterwards if there has been an impact whatsoever but but what I show you just now these lights doesn't a state that next month if I invest the same amount of UA I'm gonna get that coefficient again know what it stated that there was a correlation back then last month two months three months ago so again you got to do your own research but we propose you guys to do you just gather about one year of your data and I can't by country

and by Channel and just compare them just try to work out what has happened but again that won't give you a crystal ball to tell you what's going to happen in the future because again there are too many factors to account it's really nice to put in your blog or put the news that yes there's a right correlation about how much money you spend how many more organics you get the answer is you gather your own research to work out what happens with your own app with your own game and then just to wrap it up if you're lost about a so and really the first time I ever heard of a is so it's super interesting where do I begin take a screenshot of these if you follow every single book there no see there's no secret sauce there are no secret things everything can be found on Google just you know Google is your friend just search for apps or optimization and follow the guides I can assure you if you follow every single bullet point here in a few months your organic traffic is going to do way better and with that said thank you very much for your attention these are my email my

condo details and I'm gonna be around today and tomorrow so feel free to stop by and we can talk a little bit more about you so we will enjoy so thank you very much thank you yeah big thanks here I'm just before you head off does anyone have any burning questions that they want to ask now raise your hand and we'll get a mic to you oh if I just run run run what about the soft loan part like soft lodging some of the country and launching globally for approval so some like what what part from the South lunch weezing diamond what we're seeing a lab cave is reorders not soft lunch reorders is what actually it's gonna bring you a lot of good results we actually I think it has been release is gonna be released soon there is an article what we cover in depth what can be useful to you in terms of using pre-orders but my recommendation

here if you have never used that before definitely do the more installs you get or more pre-orders registrations you have do more like this for you afterwards to achieve and more insoles that kind of answers your question yeah we can totally run yes absolutely thank you very much guys I know yeah anything work up yes thank you very much thanks I appreciate you thank you [Music]