Building Appstore pages and promo videos that don't suck

[Music] fantastic we'll go ahead and get started now amazon has a fairly large android based app store we've got 700,000 apps in the App Store and that affords us the opportunity to take a look at the things that people are putting in and sometimes the stuff that people put in is absolutely hilarious i mean the the app listing page we we call it a product page or a detail page sometimes is just absolutely dreadful i think we probably should have said suboptimal here but you get you get the idea and i'd like to show you just a few examples of ones that are absolutely abhorrent and some of the worst practices and then share some of the things that we've seen working Who am I I'm Mike Hines and I'm a developer evangelist for Amazon I've

done the startup thing I've done the big company thing my favorite thing is coming around to places like this and talking two rooms full of developers about things that we've found are working well at amazon and not working well at amazon and to start with i love this cover some of the things that really aren't working well when it comes to building your your app detail page the first thing is if you've built something I mean posing a great game is kind of hard right and so if you've built a good game or maybe a companion app it may be easier to get people to download it if you look like something that is really popular we had a guy build a guide for Minecraft kind of tough time selling until he basically copied the icon changed a few of the large pixels and had mine crossed really okay no we're going to pull your app down it's not going to end well so if

you can't look like someone else how about picking someone who looks good okay guys mr robert may like match three games but it doesn't mean she likes your three-game you can't put a picture of her on your app product page and say it's an endorsement by by this famous star that's going to get us in legal trouble and we're going to pull down your app so fast it'll surprise you so you don't do that either so if you can't look like someone else or look like someone famous you're going to have to rely on the content of your own app product page and for the most part of us well a lot of our customers look at your ratings and how many four and five stars review this you have well they can take a while to build those so instead of working hard and getting your friends and fans to give you good reviews why do you just short circuit the process and you know pay people for good reviews right okay at amazon we know when review

has come from someone who's actually downloaded the app or from someone who hasn't and if none of your reviews are coming from people who actually purchase your game okay that's a red flag and it's not going to end well so if you can't pay people for reviews well you won you save a lot of money to you can use that money to write automation to produce reviews for you I mean automation is great in this sense okay I'm not kidding we don't have very many games or very many products at all at amazon that will get 250 legitimate five star reviews in 8 tenths of a second from one IP address seriously guys we know this stuff and if you do this stuff you know what's going to happen we're going to go ahead we're going to pull all of your apps down we're going to yank your developer license and if you've been infringing on somebody else's IP shallow minecraft we're not going to send you a check for your final

payment so don't do this it never ends well alright but the problem still remains you've got to somehow solve that discovery problem I mean maybe you've paid a lot of money into an ASO place to help get your search rankings up and you're no longer on the fifteenth page of search results but over half of your downloads are still going to come organically from people who land on your product page and then decide whether or not to convert to customers or not now discovery is an issue because I mean now that it's so easy to build games you guys know this we've got 12 year old submitting apps to the App Store we just heard a speaker tell us that there are way more game supplied than customers who want to play them so what I want you guys to do is think about what really attaches your game to your customers what is it that they really like about playing your game is it a familiar gameplay mechanic is it a genre that

people really enjoy tower defense games is it a is it a artistic treatment like a film noir treatment whatever it is there is something that endears your game to his customers pay attention to what this is because that's going to be a driving factor in almost all of your really successful ASO and all of your successful marketing for example the one question I want you to ask on every single thing you do is is it worth it now what is what is worth it really especially if you have a like a free game or a freemium game words it well okay really all it takes is time to download and play it doesn't really cost anything right well it's an opportunity cost right because any time you go to a store and download and play somebody's game you're not downloading and playing somebody else's game so it really kind of doesn't matter it's an opportunity cost for your customer what matters here

is the worst part of that are you actually delivering the value that they want to see what is unique about your game and are you highlighting that and all of the advertising you do and are you promoting that on your product page and that's exactly where I want to go is how you showcase that value on the product page in your app listing all right the first thing that's super important in an appt listing is recognizing that this is marketing it's not just a clinical list of facts about your app its marketing you guys know this right this should be news to nobody in this room at day two on a conference like this so remember you're also putting your marketing hat on for this and when your marketing hat is on how does that icon look how does the name sounded mean is it a good name or not a rose by any other name is still a rose but how many of you would really like to get a slizz

bot for valentine's day instead of a rose right well what ok thank you Sally other than that I mean the name has got to be evocative it's got to be memorable it's got to be kind of descriptive if not and I've got a great example i'm going to show you later of how I really screwed that up in one of my own games next on does it look really good or does it look GarageBand and I'm talking specifically about the icon if you can improve the look of your icon your game is actually going to convert between eight and seventeen percent better than it does with a bad icon now I want to play a game with you guys are you ready ok this is this is going to be fun this is multiple choice in this audience participation i'm going to show you 8 app icons your job in the audience is to pick which ones are probably good professional studios and which ones are kind of weld GarageBand hobby studios

okay you guys ready here we go take a look at these all right now quick top row which one is garage bad the one on the Left second left any hands third two left any hands all right last one any hands all right bottom row the one on the left hand second from the left third from the left last one all right thank you very much for playing along I appreciate that the answers are well you know what the answers don't matter the answers don't matter because your customers are going to do exactly the same thing you just did they'll take a couple tenths of a second maybe up to a second they look at the icon and in that fraction of a second they're going to decide whether your app is garage band or quality studio so it really doesn't matter that say this guy right

here that's actually a fortune 500 financial services company you don't have to be poured to do this badly you could be really really wealthy and do a really lousy job on this um yeah you guys are right this is actually mine okay I'm a better developer that I am an artist and I'm not that great a developer so that's that's my excuse for that one but i'll show you something else guys that was also mine because what i did was recognized that i didn't want to look like a garage band anymore so i took a little bit of money and i really do mean not that much money and i got a designer to help build an icon for my app all right i actually did a lot better when I actually stopped looking quite so GarageBand and and that's what i want to show you its kind of the results of what I've done with my own with my own app in that sense so the app that I wrote that for is it Alexa voice

services skill you talk to this little thing that's on your counter you say Alexa you know tell me a quote and I had one app and it basically it was a shame code and it ran from two different quotes databases one quote database was from America's Founding Fathers the other quote was just from famous politicians all over the world the name's not that great for the first one famous quotes really famous what clothes famous insurance quotes famous auto auto close no famous quotes ok the other name was actually a little bit better founding fathers clothes and you'll see the effect of this when I do my first facebook ad I did my first facebook ad and again the code base is the same the databases are a little bit different but the one of the better name got a lot better traction in the facebook campaign than one was a kind of lousy not very specific name I did a Twitter campaign ok the twitter campaign wasn't nearly as successful but i got a little bump

but in both cases I started with less than a hundred you know daily users and after the campaign's finished I ended up with less than a hundred daily users so I needed to do something else so I took one of my apps founding fathers quotes and I gave it the new icon just giving it the new icon only but the only thing I did was change the icon and boom over a four hundred percent increase in the amount of daily users I was getting my little app and when it finally came back down from that I still had a significantly larger number of daily users than they did before I change the icon remember my code hasn't changed I haven't changed a line of code and any of this and the code base is the same for this one as it is for that one and honestly the databases have a share a lot of the same quotes too so the

products not really different all right but what happens when I take this and I do a Facebook campaign well i did a facebook campaign on that and it went really well and it actually continues to go well last time I checked I had over 800 average daily users daily average users all with the same code base so they had when I was getting less than a hundred and the only thing I did was follow my own advice in the last couple slides okay I like how this is going this works so when I start writing some other apps that need other things like videos or screenshots this is exactly what i'm going to do a good screen shot an optimized screenshot could result in a thirty-five percent increase in conversion on your product page okay what is an optimized screenshot as opposed to a screenshot all right screenshot steps that are suboptimal

they show menus they show login screens they show stuff that isn't gameplay so don't do that really good optimized screenshots will actually be added to as well I mean you'll put texture that's not in the game to kind of help you understand what's going on and the screenshot that you're being shown and that really helps improve conversion again it also highlights what's particularly wonderful about your game remember find out what about your game really attracts your audience well this is a great place to showcase that a lot of people really love the art in the card games so for this video card game well they're going to go ahead and showcase some of the things that make it lovable and and well you know desirable same thing goes what do you actually get to the videos just adding a video any video can increase your conversion by 19 to 35 percent and that's a big deal

again we're not showing splash screens when are showing login screens but just a video one of the things I want to talk to you guys about is is trailers how many people are investing a significant amount of their budget on trailers okay I'm really glad to see no hands show up but if you do have a trailer please show something other than the trailer I was watching someone look at a trailer and it was beautiful it was cinematic it was you know the sound was amazing and right before they rolled credits on the trail of the guys were like okay where's the game what am I going to play if I download this what do I get you gotta show some of the action you got to show that thing that makes your top down dungeon crawler different than every other top down dungeon crawler I'm going to buy so here's an example of just a game video it actually works fairly it's got what this game is and you get what you're doing in this pretty simple

and straightforward right so notice he's not shooting the device on his coffee table um if you guys don't know you can actually use Android debug bridge to go ahead and attach and record a video directly from your device to make you can download that information you got your computer and you don't have to worry about Titus's still an actual device so go ahead and look up the documentation on your Android debug bridge on how to do that it really works so if you take your existing video from which you got a lift and you optimize that you can get another twenty two percent lift on conversion ok what is optimizing a video look like this guy's is an optimized video ok honey Oh [Music]

here [Music] now and super tidal that's what I mean when I say optimize your video and get that additional twenty two percent so the last thing or what you guys optimize is a product description especially if it's a premium game doing this can result in eleven

percent on the freemium side twenty-three percent on the on the premium side increase in conversions it's not a place to stick every single keyword you think is going to be searched on an engine that actually doesn't work as well as a lot of people think it does it's a place to be really creative and descriptive about what you've built think of it about think of it as your app to dating profile after reading your product description would you take your app out for a for a date for you know download and a trial play so think about how you do those things so the most important things I want you guys to do jerks will try to game the system and they'll create really lousy product pages don't be a jerk okay get that know your customers know what makes your game really attractive to those customers and then take the ability in your product page and your detail page to highlight that then go ahead and optimize these components on your product page run your detail page they do result in big product conversion

improvements so if you just do one thing when you guys get home from the conference tonight spend a few minutes dress up your product detail pages optimize some of these things and start seeing some of the benefits that I saw when I did this on my own app guys thank you very much for your time I really appreciate it [Applause] [Music] you