Superstar Session: What to Expect in ASO in 2022

[Music] [Music] and to start off the track um i'd like to welcome simon thiele to the stage who'll be talking about aso trends and what to expect in 2022 i'd like to remind you all that questions are available at the end so just raise your hand when you're done and be sure to if you're going to tweet anything about the sessions to hashtag it with pg connects would you like to come on up all right hello everyone so we're going to be speaking about asu trends so first thing i'd like to do is just quick show off hand for people in the room who's familiar with aeso fairmount good so we'll be uh first speaking about app tweaks

though uh just because you know it's after all a sponsored track today so if you're not familiar with aptweak uh the company i represent where's the number one aso tool uh so if you're looking for any aso intelligence if you're looking for competitive intelligence about what your competitors are doing in aso and in the store in general uh this is when you might want to look us up we also have a boost at the event so obviously uh feel free to come chat there after the talk we work with a lot of mobile apps and games so just name a few we work with zynga we work with warner brothers we work with big fish miniclip and i'll stop the name dropping here but uh if you want to know how actually we work to help them with aso again these are conversations we're happy to have today and tomorrow at the event and we get to brag a little more because we're also the uh aso uh tool of the year uh 2021 uh so one a nice project

aps and we want to uh recognize that because it was still something that we were very happy to show because it attests to what we're trying to to offer to the industry which is quality data and transparent easy to use ui uh and values for uh [Music] an amazing organic grows uh in the store because we believe it's still doable today if you're wondering who i am uh as the head office at aptweek i lead a team of consultants i've been working with zapfree for almost three years now and i've been around asl for five years so uh if you want to go old school and talk about how ios 11 used to be is a big thing in here so back in 2017 i'm happy to to reminisce but today we're going to talk a lot more about new things coming up so first we'll kind of have a quick review of what happened during covet and the big things that happened at the end of last

year ios 15 probably a word you've heard a lot in recent months and we're going to talk a lot about it today as well but then the goal of the session is also going to be covering what you can expect from apple and from google this year so these are going to be predictions and i'll explain how some of them are probably boulders and nozzles and finally try to also we'll try to also reflect a little as to where is who is headed as an industry uh because there are big changes coming these days and this is something that we want to really help our clients uh understand and get ready for a transition that's going to offer a lot of opportunities so what's happening in aso this is all that happened while we were locked up at home uh i'm not going to read all the items to you but if you have to look at some larger trends what you can see is first when it comes to apple

specifically two main directions have been increasing the place and options offered by apple search ads and second has been a lot of marketing tools that have been developed already a little before ios 40 before ios 14.5 and app tracking transparency and a lot since as apple is really trying to make the store again the place where people will discover apps rather than download there but have discovered the apps elsewhere if we turn to google there's been a lot more variety in what google has been doing these past two years but we still have this overall trend of mixing ua paid ua organic ua and trying to also improve search experience improve user experience and make more competitive challenges so this is also a place where we're

going to talk about today because a lot more is going to happen with google and this is where uh it's important not to underestimate google play it tends to be more an os that people invest less in because of a lower revenue per user but in reality with the amount of users available there it's really important to not forget about what's happening to begin with ios 15 though as a reminder for everyone there were three major features that we we expected when ios 15 was released neither was actually released on the day ios 15 hit the store but back in october we got in-app events some things that game developers had been expecting for a while and then december we got product page optimization custom product pages so the values here are really interesting to see how the store is now again trying to

give value to the developers and not focus only on on final consumers with snap events the goal is really to help retarget and engage with active users and not only be a place for new user acquisition with product page optimization it's basically finally giving a tool for a b testing about four to five years after google made it possible so give props to apple for finally listening and for custom product pages this is where a lot of expectations lie today because suddenly it becomes possible to have custom landing pages in the store to start uh identifying personas and segmenting traffic to the store and maximize conversion per traffic per segment rather than have to do a one-page fits-all kind of approach so now if we think still with apple what's going to happen this year well the first

place is going to be ios 15 and try to improve the early limitations so if we look at in-app events something that maybe a lot of you are looking at right now in-app events for games are working pretty well there's just two main issues with them first is there's still a few options that are not available so we could expect that there's going to be more event types coming out at some point during the year probably not in the beginning but this is something that is likely to happen uh toward the end of the year and if not then probably later but this is something where google apple will have to move and that's especially because google has more options with live ops also one thing that is missing if you compare liveops and on google play and in-app events on ios is a possibility to reward people engaging with your in-app events

and when we see that apple and google are very keen on copying on each author this is something that you should expect may happen and something you can already identify as how can i give more to people with my events with a b testing um maybe another show of hands for people in in the room but like who has already experimented with a b testing on ios three people anyone had some amazing experience yeah this awkward silence is exactly what people complained about in reality is that right now your a b tests on ios are interrupted as soon as you release a new app version and that means that it's really hard to keep track of the right timing for your a b test and that also impacts the statistical significance of your test the

reliability of the results and this is why we at aptweak recommend to conduct a b b tests rather than a b the reason for that is that if you run two b segments instead of one so the idea is to run twice the new variant you can just compare if the results in b1 and b2 are the same if they look similar enough then you can be fairly confident in your test result but more often than not you'll see that there are quite quite important gaps between the results of b1 and b2 and suddenly it becomes much harder to trust the results you have under your eyes so this is the first step to address the lack of statistical significance and then this is also when you may want to turn to the possibility of segmenting with custom product pages and here is a main challenge you'll have is driving traffic to the custom product pages obviously you can do it as if it was a

web link or a link to the store but it's still a bit challenging today because there are only two networks that are currently compatible with uh custom product pages and the possibility to track performance after the install and these are iron source and uh apple search ads so obviously this is where we anticipate a lot of other networks will try to uh bridge that gap uh and a lot of marketing efforts will change around the year depending on how much you want to rely on custom product pages now there's also going to be a lot of things that will happen with search ads the first question is always is apple going to add some inventory in search ads so there's definitely the question of are they going to add inventory with more uh spaces in search results it seems kind of hard with the philosophy they've always said they had but not to rule out third

party inventory is something a lot of people would like to see uh this is not something apple is clear on engaging right now but they're still pushing their ad technology with sk overlay so not to rule out either and another option that a lot of people expect would be featurings and this one is going to be really hard to guess when it will hit the store it seems unavoidable that some days they will do it especially since they already released the um search tab campaigns but this again is a a question mark as to when it will happen a change that i believe could happen this year and is going to be much more interesting in reality is going with it to be regarding the targeting we saw within up event that apple now has the option of targeting lapse users active users or new users and that means that if you can do it for organic featurings why not do it for ads

and so this is where it's not something that apple will advertise a lot until they're confident in what they've built but something that would be a very logical to see happen during the year and now if you think about having that plus custom product pages then suddenly the potential of doing marketing in the app store is demultiplied for google play first thing you have to remember is privacy um you have until the end of this month to give apple the data needed to to create these data data privacy cards that are supposed to pop somewhere in february and this is very um similar to what we saw when apple first rolled out att so there's a big question of will google roll out an att like system in 2022 now people i've spoken with are not

certain it would be this year but it's definitely something that people expect that when it comes to accessing the google advertiser id this is going to become more limited and at some point will have the same issue so this is also where i want to point out the value of aso compared to other channels is that asu has never really relied on user behavior tracking and that means that the data you get from aso is not affected by um the privacy challenges that you face elsewhere other things that are happening right now first with live ops liveops was some things that people only had in beta uh up until now but it actually released a few days ago i believe and as i mentioned you have the possibility to reward people with those in-app event-like features so it's going to be interesting to see

which of the two actually drives a better conversion to better retention and engagement with users another that may have slipped the mind of advertisers is the possibility of seeing different things with custom store listings if you're familiar with it right now custom store listings on google play only help you set different versions uh for different countries that share the same language and that's that feels very limited right now but if we look back to 2020 google had actually announced something they would they were calling at the time custom details page that would be a google uac feature where you could customize the landing page on the store and that sounds a lot like custom product pages so this is where i believe there might be something we we will see during the year it's quite a long shot because google

has not communicated around this in a very long while and they usually like to show things in beta first but that's not to be ruled out because we know the competition between the two os and the two stores has become much fiercer in recent years and so this is why i wanted to bring it up today last one with google it's a bit of a bold prediction but uh we might start seeing screenshots in the search results and that's something some will be keener to believe in all this but the reality is it's already there if you go to the japanese play store if you go to the korean play store you will see that these already exist this is where this was taken from so the question is how long until google decides to roll it out to more than just two countries now to finish up i want to bring questions as to where asu is headed the first thing is the divide between

organic and paid um traditionally you really had three teams paid media asl and product and retention that would each have their own things to run and historically we started seeing some changes when asa and google uac were introduced when we started realizing that product page optimization um and creative optimization on the store was really something you should match with what creatives you are already running with your paid ua and the product was getting more attention towards the reason ratings but now that we have ios 15 now that we're going to have more with google play it's actually going to be even more complicated because the question is where where will you choose to have the ownership of each of the ios 15 features if we look to the reporting part well

paid media was historically the main driver for trying to identify where users were downloading the app but with att it became much blurrier and suddenly the need for stored data is more important if we look to uh conversion rate optimization product page uh custom product pages are suddenly asking the question are these going to be built by your paid ua by by an aso team probably a little mix of both in fact with the in-app event you're going to have the same challenge the product team is going to say we already have the event that's ready so we want to run it but you have to also follow the guidelines of the store so the aso team might help and then because you have custom product details page in up even details page you can also now target advertising leading to the store to have people download through the event so even ua is interested here

and we're going to have all these challenges that require to review how we structure our organizations and start thinking more in terms of what impact for the user do we want to have versus what is each person expertise so now we have to match what the store already was about which is user behaviors in how we organize our work rather than just stick to core skills that can be taught uh through webinars and other things and that means that the roles you're going to be looking for with your aso teams are three parts you're going to look for people who are skilled in data mining and data analysis you're going to look for people skilled in marketing when it comes to copying creatives and you're going to look for people who can really interact well with product because you know you have to keep a look at what new products apple and google are releasing and then also convert that

to what your product team your dev team is going to be using for next compatibility challenges i don't know if we have a lot of time for q a but i'm happy to take questions and if you want to try apptweek we also have a coupon code for people interested so thank you very much [Music] [Music] you