iOS 15 Upcoming Changes & Impact on ASO

uh moving right along we've been talking a lot about the um the recent changes uh with rdfa in ios 14.5 1.6 um but uh we're going to try and get ahead of the game now we're trying to get looking ahead um because it's not the end of the changes hurrah hurrah we're going to look ahead now um to the next wave of changes the upcoming uh changes and impact on air so um in ios 15 and we're going to do that i believe in the company of simon fellay is that right is that about right uh it's tm it's it's a french okay well i so far i've managed not to butcher everyone's sentence i apologize uh but cool anyway you're from apt week right absolutely really happy to be here and uh yeah i wanted to bring ios 15. where are you based uh we're based in brussels in belgium

fantastic okay well you know also had heart attacks during the euros so it's not uh you can sympathise with uh sympathize with english because they didn't but anyway enough football i was going to pass over to you and um the floor is yours you'll get your time don't worry um we're about sort of 89 minutes behind but we'll we'll come back with questions so i'm gonna hand over to you now so yeah uh hello everyone and um i hope you're excited about ios 15 because uh if you have missed apple's announcement uh last month uh there are some big changes coming so before i get into it i'll i'll give the traditional quick word about my company so if you're not aware of who aptweak is uh we're um we're providing a tool an aso tool um and we're our goal our mission at aptwiq is to help all of our clients in both apps and mobile apps and games to grow their app through actionable insights

packed in a simple interface so our tool relies on four main pillars which are going to be aso intelligence to help you really understand how you can grow your organic traffic and conversion such as intelligence as apples such as google uac and many more channels are now also playing a big role in the life of an app on the store and then app intelligence and market intelligence which are meant to help you get a cross-country view and scout which new opportunity may arise for you um so we've been working uh in aso since 2014 we're now working where we actually have offices in four different countries and we work with developers across the globe uh both in apps and in games so you have a few names here um and to to get you a better understanding to give you a better understanding of what it is that we do

well in the past 12 months we've released over 50 new features in our tool um every day we're tracking over three million keywords to help developers identify what term is going to be important for their organic search my team has been working uh to provide over 400 keyword audits and recommendations to our enterprise clients uh in past 12 months i think uh and we have um in-house speakers for many different languages which is definitely a big help when aso is also something that helps you boost your downloads across the globe and target more people in just more than one local myself uh quick word about myself i've been working in aso for over four years now going into my fifth year um as head of aso at aptweek i'm heading our efforts to support our

mobile app and game clients uh when do we when they require consultancy work to really identify how to grow their apps um i'm a bit of a sport enthusiast but most importantly uh currently i'm hiring uh for multiple positions in the us and europe so if yourself you are interested in a new uh opportunity in digital marketing and aso or if you know anyone who could be interested feel free to go have a look at our jobs page as well because um we've been growing very fast we're aiming to grow even faster and we're really happy to bring all that energy uh to our clients as well now i did promise we were going to talk about ios 15 so here's the agenda for um for today i'll give a quick word of introduction on what is a change that's coming and kind of give you the context of

why it's going to be big and then we'll review for each of the new features that apple announced what they are about some of the challenges they may bring and most importantly kind of go through a quick checklist that you can copy for yourself and start uh applying to your company so first question if you've read anything about ios 15 is is this a revolution because um a lot of asos have announced this is the biggest update since ios 11. uh before we go into that i do want to point out why there is such a change coming and it's that if if you look historically at what apple has been doing since the launch launch of the app store in 2008 the consumer's benefit was always at the heart of the product development of the app store today it is we are starting to see a

shift and it does not mean that the continuous benefit is not a focus of apple anymore but simply that with all the recent controversy about the cut that apple takes on any transaction on the store accusations of monopolies etc apple has basically now worked to make their product the absolute product more valuable to app developers and marketers and is starting to really grow the store as a marketing tool itself um whereas before it used to be all about the users and so this is why basically uh the changes that are coming are to me maybe not as big as ios 11 but definitely some of the biggest we've seen recently um there they have announced three main features in-app event card custom product pages and product page optimization and we're

going to go in each in detail over each of these three features but what you can see already just by looking at all of this is that these are going to be marketing tools they're going to help you grow your conversion um there's not a lot of work on traffic itself this time but when it comes to conversion the idea is to really provide developers with opportunities to really a b test how they're doing and then also develop custom landing pages for their ua campaigns and also have engagement tools within the store to target new users but also active users and lapse users so let's start with custom product pages because this is probably um the most anticipated uh change at first also not necessarily

the most important one custom product pages are meant to be customizable store landing pages basically what you will be able to do with this feature is change the screenshots the videos and the promotional text of your app store page to whatever makes more sense to someone who would who would be arriving on your store page via url so what's very interesting is that you can run up to 35 custom product pages each of them can be localized localized and basically this means that whenever you're running a very specific uh ad campaign and you want to be doing contextual advertising you can use a customizable product page as the landing page for that ad and keep a very seamless flow in your user acquisition funnel

some of the things that are important to note are also that the first one is going to be the review process if you're familiar with app store optimization you already know that um whenever you want to change screenshots videos um on the store you actually have to submit a new app version to do that this is going to change with ios 15 as you will still have to upload these assets for review by apple before they can go live on the store but before you but now you won't have to upload a new app version just for that one thing that is going to be challenging with this new feature is going to be which ad channel is going to be compatible this is uh any user is going to

be able to access a custom product page via url and that means that if your traffic comes a lot from uh organic referrals um then it's just give the link to to the website the influencer whoever is going to be sending the traffic and a simple click will send to your custom product page instead of your default app store product page now if you're doing uh campaigns with certain ad networks then this is where you will have to look into compatibility for each uh apple search ads um is actually susceptible to be compatible with this even though and this is going to be the only option to have search traffic app store search traffic going to a custom product page but if you're not using apple search that

you're using organic searches and people will always go to your default page if you're using other networks and obviously the first ones that come to mind are going to be facebook and google you will have to check and possibly ask your customer success point of contact with them what they have planned around this feature because today when you set up your campaign you have you have to give your app id and the tools are the ones that make uh the app install campaign send to your product page and that means you cannot just say instead of um in instead of having uh the app id let me give the url this is not how these tools work um and the reason for that is because when you use app install complaint with facebook for instance um these campaigns can can be optimized furthers into click uh if you want to

use a custom product page you could set up a campaign which will be click based optimize and so you won't know if it's really efficient or not if you're using other networks that basically create the company with mmps you can look into what mmps have to offer because they already have solutions in place to have a redirect instead of the basic app install setting so this could still work but you will have to do some extra work around this to mitigate the loss and you will still have limitations around automation features but this is currently the best way to really optimize on click but also make sure that those clicks do convert into users and ideally into paying users so how can you get ready for the custom product pages first thing you're going to have to do is conduct user research

to identify which user segments you want to target and what are the main motivations for installing your game here i i've taken the example of clash of clans where you can see from the multiple screenshots that they have today they already have multiple value propositions around the gameplay you have build battle and train which are all related but um you have to imagine that if you want to address users that are going to be more interesting in the whole building part you would want to see them see build first whereas users who are very competitive might be more interested in battle and then this is where you would switch switch the order of screenshots obviously with custom product pages you could do even much more than that but this does highlight how you may have multiple user segments that can be targeted differently and why you want to go through that user

research to know how you're going to leverage those custom product pages another thing you should do is review which acquisition channels suffer from the most most important conversion drop the whole point of these pages is to improve your conversion uh for very contextualized ads and that means that if your ads are performing fairly good this segment that you're targeting with that specific ad is not necessarily the first one you want to address so do take the time to consider which segment can benefit the most out of the custom product pages once you've done that um also check which segments are least receptive to your default product page created again it's all about knowing where you're going to have the most impact and then organize sync meetings with all

of the marketing teams um just this is something you probably already do but the goal here is just to flag all the initiatives that are coming in the next six to 12 months to know which one is going to require custom product page and then plan around it because you will still have to get your to have your assets ready in time have them reviewed by apple so you have to start to start thinking that if a new marketing campaign requires a custom product page let's say on uh around christmas then you would need to have apple review and approve the assets about a week before at the very least which means your asset needs to be ready before your hypothesis backlog of creatives need to be prepared before etc uh one important thing also about these is that there have been signals we've heard rumors in the industry that this

feature might not be immediately online with ios 15 and might not come in september but only at the beginning of 2022 so it means you may have more time to prepare for it but you should already start uh educating other teams about them final part of the checklist is also going to be that once you have prioritized the asset production make sure you also review it on in terms of design costs how much localization and scalability is available to make sure that you have the best priority in number one the second feature that we have to talk about today is in-app event card so these cards are meant to help developers advertise about in-game events that they're doing it's going to work for both apps and games but for today i'm going to focus on game events so what you have to

know first is that those events will be promoted on the app store through different channels but when you start creating an event in app store connect you will have to choose a specific event type and you will also get a chance to specify if you're targeting a specific segment you could choose new users active users or labs user or any combination of the three the event cards once it's created will appear in the apps product page but also in app store search and browse and you can also use a url link to the in-app event card itself instead of just a product page so again you could use external traffic and send it directly to the in-app event card uh if you're doing retargeting

might be more complicated now that ios 14.5 is here but nevertheless if you want to really advertise a big event in your app to drive active users or laps users you could actually send users not just to the link of the product page but directly to the link of the the event card in terms of where those links will appear in the store itself there are multiple things that are worth pointing out when it comes to app store search uh one thing that is important is that event cards will have multiple text metadata those text metadata are going to be indexed by apple and that means that if you're doing aso today if you're optimizing traffic based on keywords you will have new fields for keyword optimization also when it's going to when your ad is

going to appear in search results the event card might appear beneath the app but if you're if your app appears in a search result for users that already downloaded your app the event card could in fact appear instead of the screenshots of your app and that means that there's going to be a new trend in search behavior with the possible possibility of having more return traffic go for your app store page and reopen the app finally featuring is something that apple has been pushing for years and that a lot of developers are very keen to try and get and so here in-app events have already been announced as some things that apple editors will use for multiple featurings whether it's collections in the uh games

tab or even in the today tab for very big events that they can spot so as soon as you can start mapping which event you want to promote in the store to also get yourself better chances at being featured for the checklist itself um it's fairly easy uh you should start by cross-referencing your list of upcoming um in-app events liveops um and check with the list uh that apple has communicated uh to know which would belong to which type uh you have competition live event major update new season premiere and special event so map which of your events already go into each of the category to get started and also review what recent featurings you

got and your competitors got to identify which are the topics that you might have the best chances in once you've done that conduct your keyword research to know for each event is there a specific search traffic you should be targeting for you should be targeting or is this any keyword for you from just your general app that you could squeeze into your events metadata to boost your search visibility you will also have to prepare some creatives and make sure that the event can deep link into your app so make sure to also work with your product and design teams to prepare for this different metadata information and remember to register the events more than two weeks before they start since apple will have to review them to approve again

of your metadata uh but also because your event can be announced on the store two weeks ahead of its start to build anticipation and have users get the option of ticking a certain bell icon to mean that they want to be notified when the event start the last feature i'm going to tell you about today is native app store a b testing if you've been doing a b testing on google play you're already familiar with the concept but i do want to stress how this is technically going to be the biggest update we have um so one thing that is going to be different from google play is that in the app store you will only be able to a b test creatives icons app previews and screenshots but no text metadata just like with google play you will be also able to test globally or on a per local basis

um same as for the other two features any new creatives that you're updating will have to be reviewed by apple but can be reviewed by apple outside of an app binary review for the one thing that has not been clarified by apple so far um basically what we don't know is how statistically reliable will those tests be we know that on google play experience are conducted on a 90 percent confidence interval which is lower than the industry standard for digital a b testing which is 95 and if apple follows the same route they will be the same challenges of checking whether your app store a b tests do show results that apply to real life now it could be better and this is

something that everyone will be monitoring the next few months but if you've if you're already aware of how a b testing is really meant to help you improve your store conversion rate then here's a checklist you should be following first set up an experiment backlog to have a complete overview of all of the different hypotheses you want to test second if you've been using google play experiments already have a look at your hypothesis and establish which one are most likely to have different results on ios than on android third do identify which test results could benefit from a specific channel because you could you could also prepare some tests that are going to help you just prepare for the custom product pages that will be coming later this year or

beginning of 2022 make sure to have enough time for producing all of the assets and submitting them to apple uh to start testing as soon as ios 15 hits and finally do make sure that you can validate a testing protocol with all of your stakeholders one thing that i've seen when working with clients is how sometimes testing is quite challenging because not everyone has the same definition of a success or how to prioritize tests so sometimes we do see that certain stakeholders want to run the test for only two or three days when a statistically reliable test usually requires at least seven and so it's very important to make sure that every stakeholder buys into how you're going to be conducting tests before you start

so these slides i believe will be made are available on our website if you're looking for them and also if you want to uh test more around ab tweak itself we have a component code for you guys today uh that is going to be valid for the next three weeks so uh do enjoy it and obviously if you have questions feel free to ask them right now in the chat or to my colleagues uh on the booth today hello hello hello again wow my god there's there's there's a lot there there's a lot on those i like to put those data on the slides but that's i think that's a record that was great that's really really um interesting and definitely stuff that i wasn't even aware of some of that um so that's really appreciated um i've got a lot of questions i'm gonna try and get through um try and get through a couple of them uh and probably the rest will have to try and hunt you down um uh and and find afterwards but thank you for that um okay uh a couple of

direct questions here i guess should we focus the majority of uh of our marketing money direct on the app store now then i'm assuming this is the plan i presume it means the plan for map or they mean the plan i don't know is that there there's a sort of uh a feel here and a couple of questions that um obviously these changes uh are making uh giving up a lot more power which is fair enough is their platform but um is is that is that a thing that you know that the much more of the the marketing spend should be spent direct with apple or with companies so if if we're talking pure mock cutting spend uh i suggest to do the same as what we do in aso every day which is test and learn just try various channels apple is definitely pushing to make their solution uh much more advanced than what it used to be but it it still may not be the best uh network for you now where i do think you should really be putting more of your efforts is the whole creative production part

because even before if we think only about the a b testing part and not the custom product pages that are going to be coming later um just a b testing and having the best uh creatives for the entire funnel you have to think that almost all of your users except maybe some better taster testers except for them everyone is going to go through the app store to download your app so improving your conversion rates there is improving your conversion rate everywhere and so this is really why this is a very big update it's we've been waiting for this i was personally convinced that apple would just not do it because they they couldn't find a way to make money out of it and then uh with the car as a as a current pressure on them to show more value to the developers they're doing it and so i'm really excited with that because we've always uh hypothesized how

ios users might differ from google play users yeah but now we can actually measure it yeah yeah i guess i've got a couple questions here i don't know so this might be a naive question but they're saying multiple customer product pages seem like a great or a sizable new idea say here i mean i think it's fascinating really is is there a similar solution to android or is there something coming onto google play not exactly at least not at the moment we'll see how google reacts because this is always a a dance between apple and google um but so far what apple what google has sorry uh is custom landing pages custom store listings sorry as a name and this is uh something that is also very powerful but here it's not a url where you can really customize the creatives instead it's you can define for one country uh a set of screenshots a set of well anything on the store listing really

title uh that will appear differently so if you're doing specific marketing campaigns uh and you have challenges um about how you have a special offer available in only one country yes it's definitely super helpful like imagine where we have an app trying to make a very specific offer in um argentina because they just won the uh copa america or i'm not sure of the name but i i know they beat the deal in the final and if you want to have something there just for argentinians well on google play the the store listing the default one is going to be um latin america so you might still you might have people in colombia seeing the same yeah there's gonna be slightly less happy about that offer probably that's uh so yes um i get that no no i think it's a brilliant it's a really fascinating innovation well a couple more we're trying to get through two more because i'm because we are we've given you a time we're a little bit behind today what sort of

time frame this is i think it's a very practical question would we expect for apple approval on customer product pages now i know you don't know that because you haven't they're not there yet but obviously approval times are always a challenge you know when you're releasing updates and and new apps in there yeah letting it be quicker on on things like custom product pages because obviously you're going to do quite a lot of those potentially you might wear quite a lot of those i i would say better better played safe than sorry and anticipate that at first it's going to take at least one week if not two yeah and treat it as um almost as an app binary review because probably it will get very much faster than for the app reviews themselves yeah but also there's going to be a lot of people pushing the door at the same time when it first comes out yeah of course no better to anticipate that okay final question is if there's a few more in there so people please

find uh simon or his colleagues in in the meeting system but uh final questions at the end is there's a lot of changes here and a few question marks still what what do you think is the greatest opportunity here and and all the biggest risk to be aware of of all the things you mentioned there's quite a few quite a lot of detail in that what's the biggest opportunity for is it is it these custom product pages are a big sorry i think i think the biggest opportunity is is the a b testing itself because um a lot of people have hypothesized like yeah ios players don't behave the same way as android players but we've never really been able to find the best way to a b test for them because there were some hacks around apple such as creative sets or using third party tools but each solution there was just a hack with certain biases so now it's going to be finally putting this in front of a segment of users that come from

all of the different traffic sources and measure how they react sure okay i'm going to have to let leave the other set to talk to you directly for now but thank you so much uh someone for that that was really insightful lots of lots of insight and data i'm going to go back and download that uh presentation have a good pour through myself there's plenty to be learned from that uh have a great day uh in belgium and um i'm going to send you the digiliter now and i hope you enjoy the rest of the show