Do players find your games?

[Music] two players find your games in the App Store's hello Pocket Gamer connects my name is Thomas I'm the CEO of Ephrata and today I'm going to talk about the topic two player finds two players find your games within the app stores before I'm jumping right into the topic I want to give you a little bit of context why I'm standing here and introduce myself first of all I'm an ex hardcore gamer and I'm quite sure that most of the people here can relate to this I ended up becoming a marketing dude somehow that fell in love with the topic mobile eventually ended up founding a company called a parada BB already heard from my very Austrian inspired accent I am from

Austria and I have a true passion for the topic App Store optimization or in short ASO before we jump into this topic I want to take you with me on a little bit of a journey I'm sure that most of you guys have been participating within a mobile game launch or with a game launch so let's sink back you know the last weeks short before the launch all of us have been working very very hard together fixing the latest parks getting everything right uploading everything to the App Store and finally our release manager is hitting the button it's releasing the game we are rushing through our KPI monitors having a look at the dashboards and nothing why because we didn't invest in marketing so now we have the possibility to either take a lot of money and throw it in marketing or I want to show you an even smarter approach today invest in the topic App Store optimization what is f store optimization app store

optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your games within the app stores or in other words it is attracting the it is attracting the attention of potential players out there searching for a game like yours and hopefully ending up downloading exactly your game what are the benefits of App Store optimization with the help of F store optimization you are able to attract maalai eyeballs directly within the app stores within a very relevant target audience please keep in mind that we're talking about people that are actively searching for a game like yours to download it with the help of it and you can increase your organic installs as well can profit from higher revenue as well profits and the best thing of it on autopilot because when we're doing ads as soon as we are stopping running at we are also getting no more users on the other hand people out there are searching 24/7 365 days within the App

Store for apps and mobile games you may ask yourself ok sounds really cool but where can we start how can we start first of all we have to understand that the app stores are based on different algorithms in the background that are trying to accurate the content that is within the app stores for the users out there when talking about algorithms they are taking factors and we're now going to jump into the most important ones let's start with the really one and most important abstract emulation ranking factor out there which is the app name and the subtitle it should obviously contain the name of your game but it should also contain descriptive keywords informing the player what is your game about because when you have a name and like it doesn't mean that the players really understand what your game is about so you have to describe it it should be optimized for the player so don't stop key words in your app name this doesn't make any sense and try to

integrate a call-to-action I brought some examples with me so for example as we can see in the middle on the top of with forge of Empires they have a really good strong call to action with build a city and when you look the subtitle of the game there you see a civilization civilization building game so we instantly know what this game is going to be about this instantly gives the players out their feedback what they are going to download next ranking 4 factors are keywords when talking about keywords it's very important to understand that the keywords should be relevant popular as well as achievable when talking about the chief oh cool I'm quite sure that we all can agree that racing game might be an awesome keyword out there but when our racing game only has 10 downloads or something like that we'll be impossible for us to be found on this keyword based on how the app stores in the background work I brought you some examples MIT if you're doing an idle kicker game a keyword cloud could look something like this with different keywords that you could

try to optimize for visuals 50% of all people going into the app store making their decision within the first impression if they're going to download your game or not so it's really really important that you nail your app icon you nail your preview video and especially for a screen shot because this is the stuff that the people are going to see once they are hitting the App Store so also very important get creative and try to try to tell a visual story I brought one example from Idol Factory with me from Calibri Games as you can see over here they really put a lot of effort into creating a really cool screenshots with a nice story in the background they really put a lot of effort into it and it pays off when talking about the description also interesting for me every time I ask this question who of you guys is reading the description within the App Store of games can you raise your hand yes we

have some people here and the story and the bill depends on which kind of games you're looking at because when we're looking at strategy games where players know that they are going to invest a lot of time playing this game and also probably know that they're going to invest a lot of money into this game they're also reading through the description because they want to have a clear picture of which game they are going to play and so they want to have this information first these are some easy tricks how you can pimp your description so first of all the description should be informative it should be easy to understand always think of making it easy to understand for also younger players out there it should be clearly structured you can use bullet points as well as emojis to attract additional attention and it should contain relevant keywords especially within the Google Play Store one topic that I also brought with me especially when we are launching a new game it will be nearly impossible for us

that we're in the beginning are able to rank for specific keywords in really good positions so therefore on Apple site we have the help of Apple circuits that helps us getting traffic for keywords it's interesting to know that when you buy traffic from Apple searches this also has positive impact on your organic rankings for those keywords that you are getting traffic resumed so keeping this in mind your Apple search has strategy could look something like this first of all you should research relevant keywords once again it's really important that those keywords are relevant if you are having a 3t shooter game and you're trying to rank for keywords like racing game even when you're ranking good on racing game nobody is going to download your game because they have been searching for a racing game and not for a 3d shooter game so it's very important that those keywords are relevant meaning they should have a good semantic fit they should have a popularity popularity is a value within searched that gives you feedback on how many people are actually searching for a keyword between 16 and 15 and they should have organic ranking between 6 to 50 to really get

there organic uplift and to achieve top rankings for those keywords because what we also have to keep in mind people when they're going into the App Store searching for a keyword probably they are only not you know like going to scroll down to position number 100 so we we highly suggest to optimize for positions within our top five ranking yeah and once you created this keyword set go out there and run Apple search ads campaign for those keywords to recap the app name should campaign contain the name of your game it should also contain which type of game is it the keywords should be relevant popular and achievable the visuals should be used for storytelling nail the preview thumbnail as well as the first the first thing that people will see the description should be informative clearly structured and contain keywords and you search ads to achieve organic uplift of boosting of relevant keywords

last but not least if you like content like this and also want to find out a little bit more about the topic abstracting ization we are running a YouTube channel you can find us on YouTube by searching for Ephrata would be really great if you subscribe give us some upwards also click on the notification bell that you're getting notified soon as soon we are is releasing a new video and thank you very much for your attention I think we got some minutes left for some questions maybe yeah so if there are any questions either now or also my team is also with me here we're having a boost in the second floor where you can also participate in a raffle to win a free App Store optimization audit so [Music]