ASO What's Working Today in 2020 - MGS Presentation

what is up App nation it is Steve P Young founder of Appmasters.com the place you go when you want action-packed content to grow in your app down downloads retaining your users and increasing your subscribers and purchasers essentially better monetizing your apps in this video I have a recording from a presentation that I gave at the mobile growth summit that happened in February of 2020 where we talk about the ASO strategies that are working today in 2020 now after the presentation if you disagree or agree or want to share your insights on ASO in 2020 please leave a comment below and if you prefer to do it privately just shoot me an email Steve at at masters calm now enjoy the presentation all right hey so we're gonna assume everybody knows what it stands for right cool all right so what's working today I want to go through anybody that's like a smaller publisher like okay good cuz I think

we're gonna cover both like what's working for the bigger publishers versus the smaller all right so a lot of things to change so I'm gonna go through some

of the things that we've experienced industry I've been trying to talk to a lot of different pimples because late last year especially on iOS there's been a sudden change some the bigger publishers some of our bigger place I've seen a pretty big increase and while the other ones are seem like not such factors what factors are more important these days whether you're big or small cool still be the background on me I but I started 2013 got interviewed of a couple of different big names over 700 episodes they're making here very magical Oh Matthew all lovey memes out there so

some of the bigger clients that we work with and then if you want to subscribe don't forget to subscribe to because people ask and you can't find it just by searching frat masters so go at masters comm slash iTunes or YouTube we've got a pretty good YouTube channel there as well all right so tip number one especially these bigger publishers and even the smaller publishers you really want to focus the high traffic keywords in your title right I know some of the bigger brands like look we got a brand and so we want to make sure it's just our brand but you got to have that and a little thing that we've done in the past is just having shorter app titles this worked really well in 2019 where we just have pretty much the keyword phrase that we were targeting in the title we might even lose the brand for some of our smaller publishers that worked really well but definitely having the highest traffic because a lot of times before

back in the day I would be like let's focus on lower competition and you know let's go after those type of mid-level medium traffic keywords but now it's just all about the high traffic and I've got some data to share with you guys as well so give you everything about this trick Spanish Mexico trick no yeah one two okay so the u.s. app store actually indexes the Spanish Mexico localization meaning that if you put English keywords in that localization you can literally just double the keywords that you're targeting this is just on iOS unfortunately it tried some stuff on Google Play didn't work so what we did for our seven well smaller publishers we would just let's say we're targeting meditation or butt exercises we would put that in the Spanish Mexico title by itself lose the brand name and we would see an increase in keyword rankings so that's what the beauty of the spanish mexico and if you go in the apple app

store you can see all the different localization so Canada you got English Canada French Canada and then for the us you got us and in Spanish Mexico and confusions put English keywords and the cool thing is you don't have to be avail in New Mexico you could just be us only put some keywords in the Spanish Mexico localization and be able to rank for them so what I try to do is some of the less competitive keywords they I throw them into the Spanish Mexico Mexico localization cool so here's some case study for a client that we did and I'm using the different ASO tools so I don't think it matters which one these are just happened to be my two favorites that I've been using for a while sensor tower and mobile action we use a client of ours and so they weren't doing any type of ASO and they were ranking pretty well for their brand term and another term there were number one they're doing about 80 downloads it's really like no ASO whatsoever we did an optimization

this is why I feel like you've got to go after these high traffic keywords we did an optimization got to 300 downloads and we're ranking number five for this really high generic keyword and when we got to number two we're getting like 13,000 downloads a day only happened for a couple of days but it was pretty fun and so when when I look at all this data right there's a lot of data traffic difficulty search score I usually try to focus on these lower competition keywords but now these days we're really focused on this and we don't really care too much about the competition because those shorter terms were working really well these days you're gonna have to test I think it depends on the app now the bigger the publisher the shorter that memes the better it's gonna be the smaller the publisher I'm sorry there's a lot of things that you're gonna have to focus on to get catch up to those bigger publishers alright so

one of the things that we all have to focus on is generating App Store reviews they just are a big factor a lot of the factors now are you know I feel like keyword optimization used to be really big we should just optimize those keywords in in a snap we get a increase in downloads but now it's these like the anatomy of an app right so the app store ratings you got to generate a ton and we actually tried a case study for one of our clients where artificially we're getting more app story views so I wanted to see if getting over a thousand would tip the scales unfortunately nothing happened but you still have to get a lot of them so one way obviously is to embed the on iOS that prompt because then that allows you to just stay in the app and leave five-star and all that the thing that we always recommend and we've seen double for a lot of our clients it's just be aggressive with this right I did it on first open for one of my apps and I got

creamed when people would rate one star and be like I can't use the app without reading the app itself and so what I usually say is you know you guys know all the best practices find a nice spot where maybe you're the user did something amazing and you want to show that prompt or just show on a second open right no that's what we did we've seen pretty good results for one of my apps or for our clients we've seen double the app store ratings just by implementing this because of the podcast you don't get to talk to a lot of cool people and this is a case study that Zinio put together that absolutely loved and so what they did was they led the user to a five-star review so before you just be like hey can you just rate my snap or the default that we normally see is hey how do you are you enjoying our app right plus down all that stuff Zinio and I like this and my friend of mine did the same thing he's seeing really good saw results as love our app

like do you want to rate it is our app a five-star app and only if you say yes they prompt you with the the default if you say no go to the normal email form or contact us type of form so really brilliant kind of like bleeding them and here's what happened to their results so get this like in a nine year span they got about 8,000 five-star reviews within the first month of implementing this they've already skyrocketed so that's the number of five-star reviews they shared this because they were they had a bad update and they had like 2.1 rating average rating they brought it back to a four point nine or four point eight so really brilliant strategy there the from a like I said like keywords probably aren't as important now so a lot of things that we focus on is creative optimization so does that mean like app icons your screenshots hugely important I'll show you some case studies so this is a client of ours and this is one of

our smaller publishers but which I how many think whoops okay I didn't press anything how many people think that a1 in terms of our a/b test B so it's actually a got 25% this was hugely popular back in like 2009 with the you know like the 3d frame and then everything went flat and so we did that and now he uses for all his view apps he uses that flat design but that brought in 50% more downloads without doing anything else so hugely important to try to do that creative optimization we did change the key words we didn't change anything besides the act by Khan for one of our other clients you know what we did was especially for the bigger publishers out there what I always say is like if you go to any website what are we trying to do like I did it from the very start of this presentation I had social proof I said hey look I've talked to some amazing people I've done seven hundred episodes here's some big-name clients but then we'll look at an app store I'm like who

your app store up the musician you just highlight some of the features right and so what we did was like okay here here's our unique selling point it's simple this is what we do that's generally how I like to leave it off with a first screenshot and what I'm gonna hit them hit the user with here's our biggest brands that are using us right and so and if you're a smaller publisher borrow credibility right like if there's a famous quote out there from Einstein that you were inspired by to build this app use it right any type of social proof that you can add to the screenshots really help with the downloads and we got over 91% increase in downloads just by optimizing the screenshots all right and on Google Play if you guys know it's very easy to a/b test screenshots fortunately on iOS you have to just update the app and look at the metrics all right so backlinks on Google Play just like SEO really

important once you've done all the optimization you have in your title maybe having a short description maybe you spammed your long description with a bunch of different keywords building the backlinks just like you would from an SEO perspective so meaning if I'm trying to rank for meditation and I'm trying to get coverage or I'm trying to build these backlinks on these other websites well linking meditation to my Google Play app store will help with those rankings I've got some stats for you I try to block out okay I did I think I did good job lucky now so here's what we did they were about number owning seven eight for this keyword started building backlinks got them to be steady at number two and this is for a very very competitive term so just think blank games so backlinks works for Google Play unfortunately because Google SEO or you know web search they're more I say from a obviously a backlink or SEO strategy

even with apps or SEO strategy then were sophisticated than Apple but Apple is really catching up it could just be an article so the strategy that we use great question is look at like let's say top fitness apps right a lot of these blog posts come up and then when you go to these blog posts you say hey I'd love for you to add my app to this how much is it essentially that's the easiest way to do it and you know with SEO you want domain rank you want page rank you on all these little factors and so anything on the first or second page that you see that kind of makes sense for your app ask for that pay for that back line there I also want to make this interactive so like I would love to show you some tools on my favorite tools like any questions you have we can just exit off of this I didn't want this to take the whole 55 minutes or whatever we got alright so again especially for the smaller publishers I think the bigger

publishers you should still do keyword optimization because you're gonna see a huge effect on it but the smaller publishers because the download acceleration isn't there maybe the reviews aren't there we can't just back in the day and Susa like the literally mid last year back in there you just did some keyword optimization like I said boom we got the growth now I feel like yeah not so much for the smaller publishers I think everybody knows is tricks already that I've I personally like once I find a trick I'm just like hey this works guys go try it out and I think everybody knows it now and so it's not so much that you can optimize the keywords that's not to say that you shouldn't do it you should definitely do it but you might not see that immediate impacting growth that you were expecting to see and that's that we expected to see later like earlier mid last year so here's some of the factors right

keyword optimization creative optimization using Apple search ads or Google AdWords apps or ratings and then I think the two key pieces and this is what I'll end with as well is really focusing on the retention monetization side as Apple's starting to get sophisticated now they're really focused Google's already been doing that but apples really starting to think about retention monetization in terms of how they rank certain keywords so I'll cover that real quick and then we can do more of a live workshop type of thing if you got any questions in terms of you know favorite tools or how we do keyword research so at monetization you know for the longest time I used to talk a lot about growth like through the podcast or the YouTube channel I just saw by here's some little tacks that you can use to grow downloads and I won't talk about it so much anymore because I feel like if you're not monetizing if you're not retaining it doesn't really matter right

and we used to think now it's a mature App Store right and so I I try to really talk about like okay retention is way more important than growth so let's let's talk through some of these best practices I'm gonna show you some examples and I want you guys to kind of if you guys see a theme developing so from a monetization standpoint and one of my friends he's doubled conversions and a revenue by doing what I'm about to show you so if you see this you see that this is long so you get you in the back guys in the back you might not be able to see this but any commonalities that you guys seen from these subscription-based apps this is onboarding experience by the way what a short one and then a long way now it's the pricing page so this is where you got a you know if they do head space does it at the end calm does it right here they don't even like signup and then we're gonna hit you that works right like don't be shy about showing your

pricing right during the onboarding process because you're gonna find that yeah people connects out and there was an X right here there's an X right here but most of the time people are all they go yeah we wanting to check out the app they want to pay for it right away so you're gonna see a good increase in conversion and revenue just by incorporating your whatever pricing page on to the onboarding process and blink is I did a case study about like million dollar apps and what they do really well blankets will actually show you just the the annual plan and then when you get to their normal pricing page they have a different entirely different pricing page so you know they're pushing the yearly plan during that onboarding process because they know that most people are likely to sign up and I want them on that yearly plan instead of the monthly plan alright that's that next you know obviously if you crease retention this is miss being me Captain

Obvious here you increase monetization right get that retention up increase the monetization and so what's the one thing I think too many times we kind of show like hey you're all these cool meditations I wish I had that screen shot but like here's all these cool meditations but like as you can see that comm tarde recently doing this - what's the one thing that you want your user to do and so I had rev.com come share and do a little presentation with us but essentially they noticed that they saw I don't know what the increase was but they declutter their homepage you just said look record it's free recording just record we're gonna make our money on transcription but we just want you to record cuz you're not gonna transcribe crap if you don't record anything so you just took everything out and just said record so what's the one thing that's gonna really get your user to use your product just

focus on that and what's a headspace you know this is there's their onboarding process but they want you to start meditating right away right so they focus on that like you can't even go to the next one which is kind of annoying but you can next out but like they want you to meditate they want you to experience that during the onboarding process alright and then I would love you guys and this is the way I sort of saw this happening was like morph interactive thing where we can all share cuz I love that and that's how I built up my entire brand but like don't forget about traditional online marketing so at the end I would love to know what you guys think or what's working for you guys - and what I mean is there there's tons of books like Robert SIA Dini persuasion that say you know here the seven rules that you gotta use to persuade anybody to buy your stuff right and we don't do that on the App Store's

we're so accustomed to doing it one way we don't do the tricks that online marketers have been using for ages and that's urgency right like this is one that I saw from go from classpass where they said hey you just signed up so I just signed up they said look you got nine minutes you got 10 minutes to subscribe to this amazing offer and they even have a countdown now really like that because it makes me act now this is the offer but you see that anywhere right old navy hey two days sale everywhere it exists so we should start utilizing it in the mobile app space and then calm urgency and email right that they gave me this amazing offer which I ended up paying for and they said look 50% off stale extended last day last day emails drive the biggest sales last days and first-day emails drive the biggest sales so start incorporating that I know it's harder for most because this is taking me to their website where I can

subscribe and not all of us can have that functionality yet but just starts thinking about how you can start incorporating on email and urgency within your subscription or conversion flow I guess what this wasn't the first oh I just wanted to prove to you guys I bought it all right that's it guys so I'd love to get your thoughts if you guys want to check me out it's Steve a tap master Jaco and then see that or at masters calm for the website I'd love to get your thoughts on ASO to like what's been working for you guys what hasn't what if you tried that worked and then if there's any questions you have on tools or anything I'm happy to just exit this and then go through some of the the live workshop stuff which I find very fun that it's I hope you enjoyed the presentation I want to thank MGS the mobile growth Summit for letting me use this recording on my youtube channel as well so at the end of the video make

sure you check out a playlist with all the videos and the presentations from the event and I will link up their YouTube channel into the description below alright till next time I'll see you on the next video