Pelin Culha
UA Advisor and Apple Search Ads Client Partner at Mobile Action
Where to hear and read about Pelin Culha1 episode or test
Pelin Culha is a UA Advisor and Apple Search Ads Client Partner at Mobile Action who advises apps on App Store optimization and paid search. The lesson most worth taking from her is to make the whole journey seasonal, from keyword to icon to in-app experience, and to switch it back when the season ends.
you need to match the creatives with the in-app experience for sure
How to Maximize App Store Optimization Seasonality
Pelin Culha: the story and the lessons
1How Pelin Culha frames seasonal App Store optimization
Culha treats seasonal work as ordinary ASO, not a separate discipline. She defines ASO as every organic effort to raise store visibility and then conversion. The factors an app controls are keywords in the title and creatives such as the icon and screenshots.
Ratings and reviews also count, but they can't be controlled directly. Seasonal keyword and creative changes use this same toolkit.
She sorts seasonal moments into holidays, special events and viral moments. Holidays like Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day suit any app. Black Friday suits apps with in-app purchases, and sports suit streaming and radio apps.
Viral moments need the fastest action. Her example is a chess app that added a 'billionaires' event with tech-billionaire opponents while Elon Musk buying Twitter was in the news, shipped before the hype died.
Culha ties the season to what the app does, not just decoration. Spooky suits Halloween, cozy and giving suits Christmas, and a black icon backdrop with red urgency accents suits Black Friday.
She warns that decorating without relating it to the app 'might have the exact opposite reaction from the users'.
She picks seasons that fit each storefront's culture. In a majority Muslim country she would skip Christmas themes and use New Year's instead.
Her rule is to study the user base and set strategy per storefront.
2Why Culha says the icon, store page and app must match
Culha starts seasonal creative work with the app icon. The icon is the first thing a user sees, so it is the first asset to change. Preview video and screenshots follow, then the in-app experience.
Steve Young also reported good results from seasonal icons.
She warns that a seasonal page over an unchanged app misleads users. A bright, sunny game under a spooky page frustrates users, who may close the app or delete it. That is the opposite of what the seasonal page was built for.
Her example is Subway Surfers, which changed its icon and screenshots for Halloween, made the gameplay backdrop creepy and ran three or four in-app events. It has stayed in the top charts for about 10 years.
Culha uses in-app events to win back existing users. Event cards are shown to people who already have or have downloaded the app, and they end on a visible date, which creates urgency. Reaching returning users is cheaper than always hunting for new ones.
Client data shows people who install from an event open the app almost immediately. She has seen event cards work very well for some users, especially Black Friday deals.
3How Culha uses Apple Search Ads and promos for seasonal demand
Culha bids on seasonal keywords instead of rewriting metadata. Swapping a keyword out of metadata for a seasonal one costs the rankings of the keyword removed. Halloween alone has many variants, such as ghost games, Hocus Pocus, 'games free', 'games for adults' and misspellings.
She adds the variants to Apple Search Ads and pairs each with a seasonal custom product page. 'You're not going to be able to place all of these in your metadata obviously because organically we have very very limited space.'
She sets up a Black Friday promo without a developer. Create a promo on a subscription in App Store Connect, then publish an in-app event that links to it. A special discount or new bundle also fits, within App Store guidelines.
Apple can be tricky about event links, so one client was testing an event that links only to the app. Steve Young planned to run it on Black Friday and see the result.
Culha suggests Today tab placements to build brand awareness. To raise brand search volume she points to the Apple Search Ads Today tab placement. It brought impressions at 'multiples of what our regular campaigns are bringing us'.
She also names influencer marketing as another route to brand search.
4Pelin Culha's seasonal calendar and pitfalls
Culha tests seasonal changes weeks before the season peaks. Product page optimization needs at least two to three weeks of data, and the app can't be updated during the test. Custom product pages split traffic less cleanly but still show what users lean toward.
Her cycle is research, planning, testing, execution at the right moment, then analysis. Planning for next year starts right after the results come in.
She studies competitors' past seasonal updates before planning. An ASO tool that shows an app's full update history reveals which seasonal changes competitors repeated across years and how their strategy evolved.
She uses that history to build a roadmap and calendar. Starting early matters because a season comes only once a year.
Culha reverts seasonal assets as soon as the season ends. Santa on the icon a month after Christmas tells users the app is not looked after. It also signals neglect to Apple, which can hurt visibility.
'You cannot leave your app seasonal all year round.' The switch back belongs in the calendar.
5Culha's audit of a kids learning app
She replaces duplicate keywords with popular generic ones. On iOS a keyword is indexed once, so repeating it across title and subtitle wastes space. Mobile Action saw no benefit from duplicating.
Swapping duplicates for popular generic keywords brought more rankings without losing rankings for the original keyword. A word added to a repeated keyword to form a long tail also helped. She also suggested different keywords for the Spanish Mexico localization, since the US App Store indexes it.
Culha judges a keyword change after two to three weeks. If a keyword still performs poorly after three weeks, she removes it. To push one higher, move it into the title or subtitle and bid on it in Apple Search Ads.
For a keyword that is ranking or bid on, she fixes low tap-through with the product page and low conversion with the description.
She puts trust signals in a kids app's first screenshots. Parents want to know what is inside before downloading. She recommends a Kids Safe badge in the first three screenshots, testimonials, and separate shots for subjects like maths and science.
Steve Young says trust symbols have tested as important with parents. She also noted kids categories favor blues, purples and greens over bold red, and that the current testimonials look dated.
Culha rewrites dense descriptions as bullet points. In a big paragraph the eye goes only to the uppercase word 'STEM'. Bullets let it move through each value proposition in turn.
She makes free content clearly free on the paywall. In the audited app a star icon looked like a lock, and 'watch 3 free episodes' confused users. She suggested 'our most popular episodes for you before you start your free trial'.
She would drop the lock-like icon and use popularity and FOMO framing.
How to Maximize App Store Optimization Seasonality
Explains how to use holidays, special events and viral moments to lift App Store conversion and retention through seasonal keywords, creatives, in-app events and custom product pages. Includes a live audit of a kids learning app with concrete fixes for keywords, screenshots and paywall copy.
Culha treats seasonal work as ordinary ASO, not a separate discipline. She defines ASO as every organic effort to raise store visibility and then conversion. The factors an app controls are keywords in the title and creatives such as the icon and screenshots.
Ratings and reviews also count, but they can't be controlled directly. Seasonal keyword and creative changes use this same toolkit.
She sorts seasonal moments into holidays, special events and viral moments. Holidays like Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day suit any app. Black Friday suits apps with in-app purchases, and sports suit streaming and radio apps.
Viral moments need the fastest action. Her example is a chess app that added a 'billionaires' event with tech-billionaire opponents while Elon Musk buying Twitter was in the news, shipped before the hype died.
Culha ties the season to what the app does, not just decoration. Spooky suits Halloween, cozy and giving suits Christmas, and a black icon backdrop with red urgency accents suits Black Friday.
She warns that decorating without relating it to the app 'might have the exact opposite reaction from the users'.
She picks seasons that fit each storefront's culture. In a majority Muslim country she would skip Christmas themes and use New Year's instead.
Her rule is to study the user base and set strategy per storefront.
Culha starts seasonal creative work with the app icon. The icon is the first thing a user sees, so it is the first asset to change. Preview video and screenshots follow, then the in-app experience.
Steve Young also reported good results from seasonal icons.
She warns that a seasonal page over an unchanged app misleads users. A bright, sunny game under a spooky page frustrates users, who may close the app or delete it. That is the opposite of what the seasonal page was built for.
Her example is Subway Surfers, which changed its icon and screenshots for Halloween, made the gameplay backdrop creepy and ran three or four in-app events. It has stayed in the top charts for about 10 years.
Culha uses in-app events to win back existing users. Event cards are shown to people who already have or have downloaded the app, and they end on a visible date, which creates urgency. Reaching returning users is cheaper than always hunting for new ones.
Client data shows people who install from an event open the app almost immediately. She has seen event cards work very well for some users, especially Black Friday deals.
Culha bids on seasonal keywords instead of rewriting metadata. Swapping a keyword out of metadata for a seasonal one costs the rankings of the keyword removed. Halloween alone has many variants, such as ghost games, Hocus Pocus, 'games free', 'games for adults' and misspellings.
She adds the variants to Apple Search Ads and pairs each with a seasonal custom product page. 'You're not going to be able to place all of these in your metadata obviously because organically we have very very limited space.'
She sets up a Black Friday promo without a developer. Create a promo on a subscription in App Store Connect, then publish an in-app event that links to it. A special discount or new bundle also fits, within App Store guidelines.
Apple can be tricky about event links, so one client was testing an event that links only to the app. Steve Young planned to run it on Black Friday and see the result.
Culha suggests Today tab placements to build brand awareness. To raise brand search volume she points to the Apple Search Ads Today tab placement. It brought impressions at 'multiples of what our regular campaigns are bringing us'.
She also names influencer marketing as another route to brand search.
Culha tests seasonal changes weeks before the season peaks. Product page optimization needs at least two to three weeks of data, and the app can't be updated during the test. Custom product pages split traffic less cleanly but still show what users lean toward.
Her cycle is research, planning, testing, execution at the right moment, then analysis. Planning for next year starts right after the results come in.
She studies competitors' past seasonal updates before planning. An ASO tool that shows an app's full update history reveals which seasonal changes competitors repeated across years and how their strategy evolved.
She uses that history to build a roadmap and calendar. Starting early matters because a season comes only once a year.
Culha reverts seasonal assets as soon as the season ends. Santa on the icon a month after Christmas tells users the app is not looked after. It also signals neglect to Apple, which can hurt visibility.
'You cannot leave your app seasonal all year round.' The switch back belongs in the calendar.
She replaces duplicate keywords with popular generic ones. On iOS a keyword is indexed once, so repeating it across title and subtitle wastes space. Mobile Action saw no benefit from duplicating.
Swapping duplicates for popular generic keywords brought more rankings without losing rankings for the original keyword. A word added to a repeated keyword to form a long tail also helped. She also suggested different keywords for the Spanish Mexico localization, since the US App Store indexes it.
Culha judges a keyword change after two to three weeks. If a keyword still performs poorly after three weeks, she removes it. To push one higher, move it into the title or subtitle and bid on it in Apple Search Ads.
For a keyword that is ranking or bid on, she fixes low tap-through with the product page and low conversion with the description.
She puts trust signals in a kids app's first screenshots. Parents want to know what is inside before downloading. She recommends a Kids Safe badge in the first three screenshots, testimonials, and separate shots for subjects like maths and science.
Steve Young says trust symbols have tested as important with parents. She also noted kids categories favor blues, purples and greens over bold red, and that the current testimonials look dated.
Culha rewrites dense descriptions as bullet points. In a big paragraph the eye goes only to the uppercase word 'STEM'. Bullets let it move through each value proposition in turn.
She makes free content clearly free on the paywall. In the audited app a star icon looked like a lock, and 'watch 3 free episodes' confused users. She suggested 'our most popular episodes for you before you start your free trial'.
She would drop the lock-like icon and use popularity and FOMO framing.