How Mobile Games Can Leverage ASO for Post IDFA User Acquisition

our next speaker is going to talk a little bit about how how mobile games can can can leverage aso to uh um absolute optimization to help counter this and that's uh simon filet from apt week who will be joining me any minute now hope there is he's popping in um uh so simon hello how are you good how are you i'm not not bad look at you you're very branded that's very good it's always mandatory with my own personal brand which is chaos so um that's good to know that's that's fantastic good to have you so where abouts are you based simon um based in brussels oh nice fantastic uh yeah frances how's things in brussels uh it's currently snowing at the moment which is very rare for the city so um i i guess lockdown

makes it less chaotic but definitely surprising yeah so it's snowing here in london as well so london still has something coming with brussels so despite all the anyway um yes so you're from apt week um and you're going to talk about um aso right that's that's absolutely um and today aso and uae because yeah it's the big topic of the quarter i think so it is it is we're all we're all waiting to see what spring means at the moment aren't we where that's the apples just this day to tell us a rough period not an actual month or date or anything yet so uh i'll i'll let you crack on if you're ready are you ready to go yep i'll just share my screen fantastic one here in the background so if you have any issues i'll keep monitoring it but otherwise i'm going to uh going to be quiet and and leave it to you perfect well um in that case hey everyone and um i'll get started as i said i'm going to talk about uh how you can use aso uh for your user acquisition especially

with the disappearance of the ida phase soon uh before i get started i have to give you a quick word about my company aptweak uh we are an app store optimization and market intelligence tool uh working with both app developers and game developers to help them improve their store visibility and get more of these organic downloads um we work with already quite a few different clients in gaming i can name jam city zynga big fish super solid product madness warner brothers and many more so um if you're interested in learning how we can help you specifically uh you can reach out to my colleagues in the chat or in the expo i know they're here today so um feel free to get in touch with us as for myself a quick word about me uh i'm head of app store optimization at aptweek i lead our team of consultants um supporting mobile app and game

developers across different regions of the globe across different app verticals um and i've personally been doing aso for over four years now i come from a growth marketing background uh also trained in user um analytics um and a bit of seo as well so i've always been super curious about all of these topics and obviously when apple announced uh the att framework and all these things um i had to talk to you about this because it's a great opportunity to understand more how aso and ua can work together um and so for our agenda today um i'll start with a quick reminder of what aso actually is in 2021 because it's not necessarily what you think it was and what it used to be um also a quick reminder about att and then uh we'll talk about how you can build mutually beneficial relationships

between your aso and ua and in the store first so specifically around apple search ads then we'll talk about having uh creative optimization led by your aso team and finally how acer can also help you research customer intent just before i get started i also want to tell everyone that these slides are already available on our website and social media i know a lot of people usually ask will the slides be made available after the presentation um for us it's not after it's already available so feel free to get them if you're interested now for the good stuff we'll start with a quick reminder of what app store optimization actually is uh so you can see on the top of the screen our definition uh it is the process of improving and apps visibility in app stores throughout the app's lifetime and also maximize the apps appeal to users to increase the

downloads so it's pretty straightforward but you can already see there are different parts to aso the first one is increasing your traffic uh the second one in this sentence is that you will have to do it more than once and you have to do it as your app evolves um and also it's not just about getting you more traffic it's also making sure that uh the traffic you get converts better uh to get you these installs uh which are key to your growth process now how to do it um and this is where you might not know everything about aso is that it starts with optimizing your metadata and this is usually what people know about asus they think it's about keywords and it it is at least in part it is uh you have to optimi optimize your title your subtitle uh your long description on google play or your keyword field on ios

but also choose your category carefully craft a good developer name use a different product id google tags if we're talking about google play so there's already quite a lot to do here but it doesn't stop there you also have to optimize your store creatives to get the best conversion and today you even have to pay attention to your videos and ratings try to improve them over time monitor your product metrics on google play otherwise you will your visibility will suffer and overall asu is also about supporting your inorganic traffic so if i look at an app page today or games page it's pretty much everywhere and that's the bottom line about a so and why we're going to talk about um optimizing aso and making sure that it helps your uae as well for the for the question of how does it

help specifically now well you know that apple is bringing these changes early spring of requiring all developers to acquire content to track users specifically the device id but not only that id and according to a study made by feature and addictive um that means that most ad networks who rely on the user idfa are expected to lose this information for more than 50 percent of the traffic at the same time we've heard apple developing their own privacy friendly attribution tool called scan network the problem with that tool is that it doesn't uh allow the same level of optimization on post install events retargeting is already not covered right now deep linking as well and that means it's going to bring a lot of changes to ua and overall it's expected that

there's not going to be an individual at targeting anymore um and ad targeting is going to be based a lot more on context and this is where aso can help you because aso gives you a lot of um information when you know how to find it to understand what is the best context for your app so we'll start by talking about in-store user acquisition and because we're talking mostly about ios i will focus on uh apple search ads um so the reason why apple searches is a very big talk right now is that we see a lot of developers uh consider increasing their budgets in apple search ads shifting budgets from other networks to asa especially because apple is going to give a relative exemption to att uh for apple search ads it's not going

to be completely uh the same as it is today but still apple search ads are going to have more device ids uh because of a different mechanism than what other apps will have to follow and where um where asu is going to be able to help you is that if you're if you have an aso team and they use a tool today they already get uh their keyword volume data from apple search chat and that means they can help you identify which keywords to target and they probably also build different search clusters to help identify which are the best keywords for different ad groups that you may want to target so the first thing to do is talk to your aso team ask them to help you identify which keywords to get started on if you're not already running apple search apps

the second thing is that um apple such as actually consider what you have done for aso as a relevant signal for um the um algorithm that determines whether your ad is the one shown or not and that included in the apple uh apple search that's web page and so where it's important it means that your aso team if you work closely with them on asa is going to be able to change metadata to help you target the keywords and try to um improve your relevance just lowering your cpi and roast and improving your os and here we have a quick tip which is that technically on apple uh the long description is not indexed for organic purposes however we've seen a lot of asl practitioners tell us that they believe the long description is actually a relevance factor for asa

and because aso team are trained in optimizing a long description for google play they can also help you rework this long description on ios which is read by very few people and helps you get the right amount of keywords in there to boost your asa it's also a mutually beneficial relationship because aac can also boost your aso the first way it can do this is by helping you measure conversion rates per keyword this is a super important ranking factor for organic search queries if you look at the top 10 results for a certain keyword usually the biggest difference between them is going to be their conversion rate for the keyword not overall but specifically for that keyword

and having asa data can help you understand how you convert for a certain keyword today and if it's a keyword you can focus more on or a keyword you might actually not perform that well for and that you should change replace with another one um if you do this is just one tip we can give you it's to always consider how likely it is for a user to convert when they see your ad because um if you're let's say a car game and you target nascar or you target bike games you might not have the same conversion rate because it's not always how it works so making sure that you also consider am i ranking better because it's more relevant organically or because i've been pushing a certain creative for instance is going to also come into um into play

here a good way to also help asu is to use it to use apple search at sorry to test a wider array of keywords and that includes product adjacent terms and that's where my example of uh having a card game and trying bike related keywords can help you as well because this is going to help you determine for a keyword you're not sure you want to add in your metadata if you're actually relevant enough to try and rank and rank high enough for the term and therefore uh use asa as a preemptive measure to choose the best options in aso the last thing to know is that most apps that get the top slots in apple search ads tend to appear in the top 12 organic search results however it's not an automatic

correlation so we've seen in a small in a small sample study that there was a recurring factor that if you are in asa your organic ranking may increase but it's not automatic so you have to consider this carefully if it's a hack you want to explore a second thing to consider is how you can use aso to um to improve creative improve conversion and at every level the first way it works is simply that your app store page is the ultimate bottleneck in the ua funnel um whether people are coming from the web from uh different ad networks in app or um from social media even if it's a user referral marketing across your apps most likely are going to end up on the app store or the play store

and that means that improving your overall conversion rate there is going to benefit all of your ad channels you can also use this as a way to test different marketing messages before you start a new ua campaign if you're thinking of uh ramping up qa and doing a major boost campaign um and you're not sure what your message is exactly going to be you can start by just changing your creatives on the app store or on the play store and see what seems to convert better here what's especially interesting is on the play store where google has implemented a tool called google play experiments which lets you a b test creative you can control the percentage of traffic uh that uh gets to see the new creatives and you can split in different way in different samples so it's actually a great way to kind of

test new ideas before you turn them into big ua campaigns with large budgets if you do that um we have a quick tip as well it's to use an abb test format on google play and that's because we've seen in the past the tool is very powerful but sometimes quite unreliable and so this is a quick way of making sure it becomes reliable and if you're interested i invite you to get in touch with me on the platform after the event or during the q a and we'll be able to tell you more about this a second way to leverage aso for creative optimization is to consider how you can use a combination of asu and asa for instance to improve contextual opportunities the way it works is that um for instance on applesearchat

you have a tool called creativesets which allows you to play around the creatives that are shown in the first positions depending on the ad group and so here i did an example for township where you can see that township is actually bidding on its own brand and the first creatives say play minigames collect resources and build and this is very efficient for um your brand and overall this this is a basic creative set however if they're targeting city building then it becomes more interesting to actually show build build your dream city and decorate as screenshots that will appeal to the customer intent behind the i the ad group so here it's really about using this context of

users searching for different things to show them the right creative at the right time um and it's part ac and part aso because the creative sets are cards that um that are based on what is already in your store metadata you cannot add more creatives for the creative sets you can only use the up to 10 screenshots that are available in your app store page if you think about google play you can also look at custom store listings because they can help you target specific countries compared to locals which is how google works which is a combination of a region and a language so with store listings you can instead target a very specific country and start promoting special offers for that country for instance or you can also retarget certain

users based on their install status right now there's only one option which is which is pre-registered users but you might have in the future more options to talk to already existing users and show them different creators than new users etc the last thing i want to talk to you about is how you can research customer intent with aso and it starts from a very simple thing which is you can look at what people are searching for to understand and try to make guesses about the customer behavior behind all of this so for instance you can compare the marketability of different concepts by researching the search metrics uh of different keyword clusters um going back to our racing example i actually built a click a quick word

cloud to show you how around racing you can think about different types of racing for instance and if you only know you're going to build a new racing game and you're not sure which type for instance you can start looking into which is more popular especially in the country which interface which interests you the most you can also look at search auto suggestions how certain apps already rank to assess customer intent and make sure that what you're going to talk about is something that has a large traction the last thing with this volume data is to always use it to also optimize your messaging to the user's language so here i actually looked at music games and how you might have a difference between beat and drum they are relatively similar intent beat music game and a a game

you a music game relying on drums are probably going to have some of the same mechanics but as you can see here uh there is a gap in the volume for both keywords a gap in the total installs available and in the difficulty that come with these keywords and so based on your app power you're either going to want to use beat as a most important keyword in your metadata or drum if you're thinking that you're not super strong as an app and want to go where there is less difficulty even though it means less installs to get as well you can also use uh reviews uh for this uh because this is a gold mine that a lot of people underestimate and of value basically reviews tell you what your customers expect from the game and so

you can do a sentiment analysis to see what people like about your game how they talk positively about your game and what they don't like what they complain about what you might need to tell your product team to fix but also if you look at your competitors it tells you what are the features that customers value the most and then you can assess is my app a reliable solution for this kind of need or should i not target this because i'm not going to be performing better than most in here and again with a quick pro tip uh if you have a google play phone an android phone you can go on the reviews of any app and see if there are some review topics that google generates automatically to understand what are the things people talk about in a very quick glance and you can even

explore if this is something positive for your app or not and this will really help you understand which features you want to promote in your metadata you want to promote in your store creatives as well and overall improve based on what people are telling you that's it for the presentation uh i think we have a few minutes for q a i hope so and just before uh we turn to q a i wanted to let you guys know we have a quick coupon uh for the event uh so if you're interested in upgrading an app tweak uh or getting started feel free to check it out fantastic um that was great uh really great simon thank you for that um i always uh i i love presenting these things because i usually at conferences i'm off running about having meetings whereas here i get to actually listen to where my mind is always blown by by the uh the amount of science and and i guess

art as well that goes into not just making the games but the kind of uh you know uh optimizing the marketing and and the discovery so um i've got loads of questions i'll get through a few of these um i've got a very direct easy one first from from maxon uh pogovsky which i'm sure you can answer very quickly um what do you mean by a b b test i presume means when it does a b test but a b b test uh yeah an abb test is like an abc test except you actually repeat the b variant twice and that's just a hack we found to improve the reliability of these tests on google play because we saw that there are basically there's not too much control or the samples you can control the size but you don't really make sure people come from different sources and that means that you might get very positive or very negative result for you b sample that don't match reality because

it's just how the traffic how the sample was built is not matching the overall traffic you get and so if you repeat the b sample a second time you just compare does b1 have the same results as b2 and if so you can say okay these results are reliable i can go ahead and implement the new creatives and if it worked or at least i can get the learnings from my a b test uh whereas if you only had done a b you you might see a super positive result apply it and then never see it actually work never giving you that true uplift because you just had a false positive result okay i think i just advised that so that's good i'm wondering i'm hoping for the day that someone goes to the abb a test and surely the winner would take it all in that case uh hilarious i have a joke

um anyway um i've got a couple more questions here what is the impact of a video a video preview any best practices regarding orientation messaging or cta uh that's that's a big big one again so first of all the impact of a video preview uh it can be huge but it can work both ways so um it's super important to test it because it's usually first of all it's going to be the creative that people see first once they get uh on your page or in the search results but um that means you have to really make sure it's going to give you an uplift because we've seen some people make a video preview just because they thought it's better to have one and it didn't work that well and in that case it's better to just stick to screenshots um in terms of orientation there are a few hacks for instance on

ios if you have a portrait screenshots but use a video in landscape your video is going to be the only thing that shows in the search results but when people arrive on your product page it will not show or rather it will show in um a very bottom position so not be not above the fold and it will just show in a small placement called i believe um learn more or something like that okay so there are ways to play around and you can you could say i want to have a video just for search as a result or try to optimize your video for other things yeah okay there's loads of questions in here um i've got another one coming which looks uh what are the best ways to form correct and more accurate hypothesis for creative testing can kiwi or kiwi keyword pardon me or

use intent help in this hypothesis forming process of course the whole point for your uh the first thing you you should consider for uh doing an a b test is what do you want to learn um the the a b test that will give you the most uh obvious results are the one where you're changing everything but the problem with that is uh even if you get a win you get a nice win uh it gives you a boost for some time but you don't really learn what worked for you in that new creative and so here um it's really about formulating a high process hypothesis and then uh making sure you have a process to measure um to be sure that this was a thing that worked for people so if we're thinking about customer intent let's say you're thinking do i want to talk more about pvp you can just use a creative you already

have on pvp move it to the first position where most people will see it and look at what happens but if you do this you must make sure not to change too many things at the same time because otherwise you won't know if it's just putting pvp first that worked for you or if it was changing the design behind the creative et cetera fair enough and we're trying to excuse me one one or maybe two final quick questions here i i it's something i was actually interested in a lot of it was interesting but you mentioned um the diff the different platforms particularly google app have different um tools and things you can mess around with is is there a is there an argument this question is where you should hone a strategy on one before going to the other just like is it does it make sense to to to do some work on google play and to and and then move to apple or vice versa or are the results mechanics of the platform so different that that's kind of irrelevant um it's it's kind of a testancy uh

process so it's good to drive in one environment first usually i would say it can translate but not all the time so you have to be careful around it um in terms of creatives for instance google play is much easier to navigate because you don't have to upload a new build every time so i would say probably better to test on google play first but when it comes to keywords um apple seems to be more reactive google takes more time to react to a keyword change so there's always kind of see what you can do prioritize your resources and and start somewhere and once you get a nice result try to see if you can translate it to the other platform but keep an eye on it because it's not always going to be automatic okay i'll give you one final question which is a bit more of a broad thing to conclude here's where does does does aso fit in the

marketing toolkit um i mean for me considering it's the point of say i agree with this point here it should should this be the first thing we're thinking of all the game developers are thinking of i'm obviously in huge companies it's you know you've got you're doing everything in a smaller business you maybe don't have you know a team of 20 or 30 working marketing so is this is this the absolute first thing and and and the second one i'll tie in just closes how do kind of costs compare to like a ua campaign or is is this i'm sure you're going to say variable because everything's variable right but but yeah um so yeah variable in terms of cost because it depends on the scale you want to do i would say aso is probably um less costly than the ua but at the same time you have to understand aso results are going to come over time um and the best results you get are actually not doing just aso but doing aso and ua or aso and referral etc so um thinking

aso is just like you a just go into one channel invest a large budget and uh wait to see results in two weeks it's not how it works um and here it's more about build synergies and so when you ask is it where you should start i'm tempted to say yes but if you have a good understanding of how aso fit in your company and that's because a so it's not going to be just marketing it's going to be marketing and product right and at the same time also it's not just product so you can just you cannot just say your product team there's one person in charge of doing the um metadata metadata update just because they're uploading the new build to your app store connect so they're in charge of doing that and they're not talking to marketing team it's like make sure people talk together and that's how i'd say yeah asu is the first thing to

do but it's just because the first thing to do is make sure everyone goes in the same direction fair enough well you should say it's the first thing to do it would be bad for you not to say that okay but no that's a fantastic appreciate thanks for being very generous and sharing some tips and i'll see you guys go and check out the uh presentation download and take advantage of the discount voucher thank you very much for that thanks for having me and i see there are a couple more questions so i'll hang around in the chat to answer a few more awesome all right cheers thank you have a good day thanks you