One Country, One Language? How Custom Listing Pages can Change A/B Testing on Google Play

[Music] so thank you for that introduction I'm gonna talk to you a little bit today about custom listing pages and how they may be effective for you and it's completely data-driven as to if they will be effective for you but before I do that because I never assume people know who I am I've been in the game space for about seven years now and I have worked with helping developers find funding for their games I've worked in helping monetization I've helped in pitching titles playtesting because who doesn't play tests and I also do team building because I love my team so happy with what I do and lab cave we are based in Madrid in Spain the whole company is

based there we are about 50 people in the office and we are part of the Sun Media Group the team itself has been around for almost seven years and they've launched a lot of very small games as you can see 700 small apps there and the main focus of the company is publishing for mobile titles for add mediation and then also for App Store optimization and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a specific aspect of App Store optimization so first yeah so so just for those of you really quickly who may not be familiar with with App Store optimization it's a combination of keyword research which we would call your metadata external campaigns and conversion rate optimisation so those all come together to create a really strong store listing page for you that will attract users it's a it's just a combination there and what we're gonna speak about today has to do with your conversion rate optimisation so that did not come out as big as I'd hoped but really quickly custom listing pages so

different comfort countries can react differently and not everybody is living within a country and has that language chosen so you want to be really careful when doing any of your testing because you may be talking to an audience that you don't realize you're talking to it can be really targeted to be it a you know making sure that you're getting to the user you want so this is an example showing why you might want to try this out this is on a title and you can see that English UK has almost 3,000 users for this but only 185 of them are based in the UK so if you're doing your a be testing completely within the UK and you're doing all of your art work completely within the UK you are missing a huge segment of your user base that is finding your game on their own so you're just not getting the data that you're looking for it's not always good to do this this is definitely something that you'd want to dive into here you can see the first example is similar to what we saw before and the second example they line up just about exactly so no need to

jump into doing a custom listing page if you're that close but sometimes you will find in your data that you have something closer to the top section so I'm gonna do a quick case study to run you through my clock is not going so I have no idea how long I'm allowed to speak for sorry okay great so I'm just gonna run you through a quick case study for a small title that lab cave has put out called tooth fairy horse it is a game for young girls about taking care of a horse for your princess tooth fairy that's not important I just want you to know that because you'll notice that so as I said before when you think about a country you think about the language of that country so we think about the UK we think about the English language UK and that's gonna be within this territory so for this game what we found was actually only 1% of our users were based in the UK so what are we doing what are we testing why are we focusing here what we

found is actually the largest portion for this game are based in India and we were not paying attention to the specific market we were just saying testing within the UK and applying so our conversion rate team decided let's check this out what would happen if we just focused a specific custom listing page within India and we found the icon results were different than what we had had so you can see the current icon in the corner here that had one within when we just did the testing within the UK but when you open it a little bit wider to other countries that have a large GB English you can see that there most of the people are not located in the UK and instead have different opinions about what they like and what resonates in terms of artwork so one country does not necessarily mean one location so really quickly here you can see the breakdown within India so

our team decided what if we tested a custom page for each of them for a/b testing what would happen what would happen here if we decided to see what icons really met with people and they came up with seeing a common thread throughout India which was not what we got from the UK so what the team realized viewing this is that they were focusing completely wrong on how they wanted to get the results and they had the potential of getting a lot of additional users by really focusing on where the language was coming from and where that what the country the language was focusing in so a lot of different a lot of different thoughts and it's for me it's really interesting here is that the icon chosen is the same and yet not but not on par with what you're getting in the UK so just an interesting data point here and an interesting way to move forward with what Google allows so the result of this for us here so you

can see we applied the results and we had a great result in India but it didn't apply correctly in the UK original thought was where most the users let's just apply that icon for the whole language but that was also incorrect and that was because we would see short term growth because you're attracting the users within India but then you're forgetting that your UK users are responding differently so again custom listing pages would allow you to have a custom page within the UK language in India so you are making sure to apply the right artwork the right metadata to the people who you are trying to talk to you in India and then have a separate listing page within the UK for trying to get to the users that are based here and that is my very quick case study does anybody have any questions yes I love it still I compare

confusion personal Monza there is one item so you can have a different icon for each country in Google Play yeah on the device it should come up with that icon as well and but it really shouldn't mess up with the user because what you're doing here is you're trying to attract the right users yes they were downloading the app with one icon and ended up having on the device physically installed and up with the like a master icon we haven't had that as an issue we haven't seen a large amount of uninstalled so for us we think that that's probably ok it's probably along the same lines of if you download a game and all of a sudden it changes to a seasonal icon like you know it's still the game it's still getting the same information it'll still have the same name on there but in terms of CRO you're just attracting the user that you want so it hasn't caused confusion that we've seen yet but if we have a large uninstall obviously this wouldn't be there but I have a feeling goggle has designed it so that you can

you can have the custom page and get the custom icon yeah thank you any other questions clarify for us like what are the options on Google Play Store in terms of country listing so you can change it for country but it's there's also language so like can you only change it per country can you can you specify per language per country you can and then so I am from originally from California and I live in Spain so I'm in a country that English is not a huge like a huge language spoken and so you can in theory it because you know that my device is set up within us English that within Spain you could set up a custom listing page to talk to all of the expats within within Spain you have the same setup on their phone so that's the whole point of why you'd want to try out a custom listing page is because I am not within the US so I am gonna be showing I'm kind of gonna be throwing off some of their data but I am in a country where if you work on the store listing page just for there you're not going to be getting me as a user and that's the same as a user

do you see an app a Play Store but specifically for Spanish American speaking people in Spain so I would if you set up a custom listing page for it but currently what I see is the US store and people in India today are seeing one store for example I mean I I'm not I assume that they are seeing the same store where they based on the location based on what they're set up with but I'm not quite sure we have another question here what Google are you running - for icons on a product page or using their a/b testing in determining yeah we're using their a be testing tool the first the tool is so powerful and we're able to test on such a you know we never test globally because you're just not going to get the right results but especially when you're looking at a custom listing page you want to really zero in on what you're trying to test on so what through the a be testing allowed within Google Playstore you're able to get results

[Music] normally we would we have one and then we would test three against it for variation and then probably not run more than four tests at a time but definitely not all within the same country are there because then it would throw off the results so you want to do one test per country and then you can run depending on what you're trying to focus on just a quick question was this organic insoles or UI driven yeah we did this is that this is a game we test on so we never take anything to our clients that we haven't actively tested on our own titles so for us this was a completely organic driven because we wanted to see what the user base was going to respond to and when you add UA in there it's really great for growing your users but it doesn't give you the same data back once you've done this testing on on Android obviously you apply it on Android but what does it tell you in terms of what to do for iOS well I'm not I don't as far as I know you can't do custom listing pages on iOS right now so you would have to pick the icon that you would want to go for the specific country and so it you just

don't have the same flexibility so in terms of what you would do for iOS for me it would be you'd have to go look at the data and see what the results were specifically I can't just give you one answer it's going to depend on how big the disparity is between the language and the country and where people are located because while you may see a drop in the UK for this game if it's only resonating with 1% of people there it may make more sense for you to put an icon up that resonates with more users but just again is data driven there and this definitely is not something that will make sense for every company you may find that most of your your titles are haven't pretty equal share it's just this specific one was nice for a case study anyone else well thank you for your time I appreciate you listening to me [Applause] [Music]