How to Maximize App Store Optimization Seasonality

thank you what'd you think you like that video come on yes very much hi Steve I'm excited to be here thank you for staying up a little bit later I know it's a little bit late in Turkey but I really wanted to break down in what we're going to talk about with you is how to maximize ASO seasonalities so with you know the holidays coming up it's a great way to increase your downloads because that conversion rate increases but talk to us a little bit about it I know you prepared a slide so I want to bring that up for us as well awesome thanks so much um so let's get into it um I just want to give you a little bit of a background on mobile action if you could just go to the next slide thanks so much um so mobile action was actually founded in 2013 as an agency and then two years later we launched our app intelligence and ASO intelligence Suites um three years later later we launched our market and AD intelligent Suites as

well so we became a full stack app store inside suite and we kind of drifted away from that agency uh thing and then 2019 we launched searchaz.com which is an apple search as campaign management platform and then a year later we became an apple search as official partner so if you could just go to the next slide you will see our clients we work with Big Industry names from every industry so we have gaming clients we are helping health and fitness apps Performance Marketing agencies and such so to give a little bit of a background about myself I've been a customer success manager at mobile action for about a year and then after that I I became an emphas search as partner so I've been with mobile action for about two years now as a customer success manager I was helping our clients with ASL and now I am helping with both ASO and ASA which is what we're going to be talking about today nice all right honestly I know a few

people there are here dataology software I think we're going to take a look at your absolento what's happening dude what what's happened to George good to see you here all right let's get into ASL awesome so I'm sure all of you already know this but again just to give a very brief sort of an explanation what is Aso um we're going to be talking about it a lot during this session so it's basically every organic effort that you have to optimize your mobile apps to maximize your visibility in the App Store and increase your conversion rates and the factors that include your ASO efforts are your keywords in the titles title Etc uh your creative such as your icon and screenshots and then um things that you can't control like ratings and reviews and such nice so to kind of get to where the seasonality come in into all of this so um I think it goes without saying that user Behavior tends to change around the

seasons so people maybe um you know giving their attention to different things they might be more inclined to download different apps um according to the season and so you really need to be prepared to get that you know value from those Seasons um grab the you know the user's attention based on the season that we are in another thing that is really important to mention is that you know keywords have different search volumes so obviously every cure that you're ranking for is going to bring you a different level of visibility and around the seasons different keywords tend to get popular and So based on that demand you need to optimize your keyword strategy so that you can really utilize the visibility that you're gonna get from those um another thing that you really need to do is Leverage The seasonality by using unique creatives based on the season which we are going to be talking about a

little bit more in detail later on um but you also need to optimize the in-app experiences and your in-app event cards to boost your conversion rates um this is not only for new users this can also be important for returning users and also your current users yeah I love it oh Bailey I could jump in here and I'll jump this right here for you too but what we've seen within app event you know back when Apple launched it last year it was we didn't know the impact and so a friend of mine did like Thanksgiving Max all that stuff and he was able to get some features here and I've been pushing in up events just because we've seen clients where they're big clients and it's like you can see the data of that in-app event and the people who install open like almost immediately right and it's a great way to get this feature because what I'm noticing is these in-app events are tailored for me meaning I have this app

where I've downloaded this app before like this one and so there's it's a no-brainer as you can see they're going into the fall season so this is a great example of somebody doing seasonality in-app event here I really like this exactly as I mentioned it's really important for returning users as well because it's something new that you're doing with the app and I think these in-app events also sort of create a sense of urgency because they are not permanent they eventually end and you can see when it's going to end and so um people you know tend to want to take advantage of that if they are interested if you can reach the red crowd I like it okay let's get into the next one awesome so when we say yes so when we say seasonality we actually have different types of seasonality the first thing we're going to be talking about um thinking about are going to be the special holidays right so we just

wrapped up Halloween and then we're gonna have Christmas and then we're going to have Valentine's Day and those kind of go without saying and these can be applied to sort of any type of app because you know you can sort of decorate your creatives with these things but then we also have special events which um do not happen all year round and you know category specific apps can take advantage of these um and so one of these that are coming up is Black Friday obviously and so again Black Friday can be used by you know can be utilized by any app that has in-app purchases but it's going to be most beneficial for e-commerce apps we can say but we also have for example sports events that any sort of sports streaming apps can take advantage of of maybe radio apps can take advantage of and so this is also a different type of seasonality that we need to be aware of and then the last one is what I call

Viral Events so whatever is going on at the moment and I think I put a very fun example here this is actually a chess app that I use and you know Elon Musk is kind of a Hot Topic right now with him buying Twitter and all that and so now they they're having this in-app event called billionaires and so these are opponents that you can play against the opponents are like zark mockerberg and Etc I think it's a really fun way to incorporate whatever is happening at the moment into your app this requires really quick action and really quick planning so you can implement it before the hype dies down but if you can do it not just for new users but also this is like I think really fun and you know something that is going to improve the retention rate of your current users because it just shows that you are you know present with the app you are maintaining this app you are staying on top of things and you are giving new and fun

experiences to your users basically what I I love the Black Friday example you know it's one of the biggest events in the US and what I've been telling and I've been playing around with this with clients is hey create a promo because you can do this you don't need a developer for any of this create a promo for one of your subscriptions have an app event that links to that promo now I don't know if this is going to work Caitlyn because Apple's a little tricky with these in-app events we're actually testing with one of our clients an in-app event that just links to the app it's not a deep link because we're like we can't do deeply you know technology wise and I was like okay let me try submitting it with uh the just to the app but I would say you know put that in-app event together create that promo with an app store connect I'll create a video for this a little bit later and then run it on Black Friday and see what

happens because it might be a nice little push for you but I like that example with Black Friday exactly yeah actually we've seen that in-app events in in-app event cars actually um have worked really great for some of our users um because again as I said it's attention grabbing and also it creates a sense of urgency especially for Black Friday deals so you can create like you know a special sort of discount for That season you can create new bundle deals for That season uh you just need to be aware of the App Store guidelines to do that um and as you know as long as you're following the rules um I think it's going to give a good push like it um so when we say uh you know leverage seasonality where do we start so obviously you need to understand the season very very well in order to optimize for it because every season will sort of have its different intricacies and users will be you know

inclined to download different apps during these times as I mentioned but they will also be um you know going towards different teams going for different color schemes for example so for Halloween you might use you know spooky characters like purples and oranges and mummies vampires monsters so all of these like creepy uh you know aspects but then Christmas comes around and you need to switch it up 180 degrees and you need to do festive colors vibrant Reds and greens then you need to use Santa Claus um and they will be looking for more of a you know cozy and warm and giving uh kind of a Vibe and also they will be looking for gifts to buy for example sample so that's something that again e-commerce apps can use and so you need to as I mentioned understand the season well and then once you're done with that you need to actually understand how your app can relate to that season because as I

mentioned it's really easy to just decorate Things based on the season and then just you know update it like that let it go but I think it's important to relate it well to your app because if you do something without giving it much attention without relating it well to your app it might have the exact opposite reaction from the users so you need to really connect the two um and then once you do that you know before strategizing you need to decide on the location uh because not every season is going to be working for every location so for example uh for a country where the majority of people are Muslims you might not want to you know go for Christmas themes but you might want to go for New Year's instead and so you need to understand the user base and then strategize according to the storefront not every strategy will work the exact same in every storefront and then the last thing again kind of

relates back to the first point but you need to capture the messaging of this you know Season Spirit um again for Christmas for example it's going to be cozy giving warm uh for Halloween it's going to be spooky and then for Black Friday you're going to want to uh you know maybe use the black uh you know backdrop for your app icon so that it gives a little bit of Elegance but uh you might want to also use red for example to create a sense of urgency in your users to you know make their purchases during the season so you need to make sure that you're messaging matches the season basically if we had to start between like local you know doing a seasonality for app icons or screenshots it's bailing is there one that you would start off with hey do the icon we've seen good results with that I would definitely say icon actually you gave the perfect example because it's basically the first thing that a user

sees um so anything that the user is going to see first is going to be our first Focus because again we just want these to be attention catching at first I like it okay yeah me you broke it down for us app icon free video screenshots and then the in-app experience I like that let's say that you uh you know sort of uh made your app icon uh according to the season you changed your screenshots you change your preview videos whatever so your product page completely reflects the season let's say Halloween but then the user comes into the app and there's absolutely nothing about Halloween the you know in-app experience is the exact same so that is going to lead to a very high bounce rate um the user will you know be kind of misled by your product page at that point and that is going to create again the opposite effect let's say you have a game and the in-app experience like the gameplay is actually like sunny and

bright and you know uh bright colors uh if the user sees that you know after coming to your app from that product page it's going to uh you know create frustration or you know at the very least they might just close the app and delete it um in the next slide we actually have a very good example of this uh Subway Surfers the did a great job of leveraging seasonality for Halloween so they did change their app icon they did change their screenshots to you know match the theme of spooky but then if you go into the app they actually change the gameplay as well so the sunny backdrop had actually changed to something more creepy and they also had in-app events for Halloween as well um I put two here but they had like three or four I believe and so they really really optimized for this season it's you know you can tell that they prepared really well for this and so this is something that's going to

increase the retention rate as long as it's done right and I just wanted to put it here as a good example so you need to match uh the creatives with the in-app experience for sure yeah and I think you know the there's an old marketing saying that says it's easier to like sell existing customer than trying to find a new one and that's what these in-app events are all about like Hey look it's telling me hey you want to come back into the app like you know what I mean like do you want to come back in on these some of these apps that you used to have on your phone it's a great way to re-engage with your users rather than always thinking about how do I find new customers like what about the ones that actually took an interest in you and left it's you know it's a great way to just bring them back in here so and Subway Surfers shout out to them 10 years running insane still in the top charge everyone it's crazy

exactly they are it's very nice to see actually yeah I know all right we're still here I like it awesome so moving on to keyword optimization uh so again as I mentioned different keywords tend to gain uh popularity during certain Seasons you might actually need an ASL tool such as mobile action to actually discover these Trends but here you're seeing a screenshot of mobile action actually and we're seeing in the shopping category the keywords that are getting more and more popular are obviously Black Friday and so what we need to do again as I mentioned if we want to gain visibility for these seasonally popular keywords we need to either place them in our metadata or our search as campaigns so um the problem with the metadata here especially if you have a relatively successful app and if you have relatively good organic rankings you're not going to have that much space to place these keywords because you know

the moment you delete a keyword to add something seasonal instead you are losing right Kings for that other keyword and so this is sort of where Apple searches will come in and help us if you can go to the next slide I also put an example of how many variations of a seasonal keyword there can be so for example looking at Halloween related keywords these are just a small portion of them these are not all of them but I just wanted to put here the ones that have a relatively good search score which is basically their search volume so you can see we have for example ghost games we have Hocus Pocus we have some different typos of you know Halloweens Halloween games for adults Halloween games free and so you're not going to be able to place all of these in your metadata obviously because organically we have very very limited space so what we need to do here is we can actually put these in our Apple search as

campaigns so that we can bid on all of them and while we are doing that we can also create custom product pages for these keywords as well um these cpps obviously will be seasonal so they will reflect the you know theme of the keyword You are bidding on and this way you're going to be taking advantage of all of the seasonal keywords but another thing here is that you need to do this in advance so that you can actually collect data I like it and the bad thing about seasonality is it's only once in a while that happens to figure out oh that didn't work and wait another year for that that's why I'm like look let's just go hard on uh Black Friday stuff and let's see what happens because why wait till next year let's just try it this year while all these things right exactly well um actually that brings us to our next Point um so there are some things that you need to look out for when you're

leveraging seasonality um so the very first thing that we you know should mention is the high bounce rates so there will be some users um who will be you know coming to the app from all the hype around that season if you optimize well and then they might leave the app uh and another you know issue here might be that if the in-app experience again as I mentioned doesn't match the new assets that you have so that is one thing that we need to look out for another thing that we need to do is at the end of the season you just need to go back to normal you cannot leave your app seasonal all year round I think this should be obvious but if it's been Christmas and then you know a month later you still have Santa Claus in your app icon when your app has nothing to do with Christmas it's just going to look bad it's just gonna signal to your users that you're not really taking care of this app um unfortunately it's going to Signal

the same to Apple as well so it's gonna both directly and indirectly hurt your visibility on the App Store so that's something that we definitely don't want and for us to be able to do that we need to have a very clear roadmap and calendar for how we're going to be doing things so first you need to really research the market research what your competitors have been doing if they started doing anything what did they do last year maybe what did they do that you know the year before that so you also kind of have an idea of what worked for them in the past years not just one year so you can kind of see how they are evolving their strategy as well once you do that um again you know for you to be able to do a research like this you need a an ASO tool for like mobile action uh you know where you can see all previous updates of an app and then you need to start planning so um how exactly are you

going to execute things because you won't have that much time to execute actually uh you need to also test in that phase so again you need to start testing in advance because if you use for example product pages product page optimization you're going to need like two three weeks at least um to collect enough data but that also means that you cannot update your app at all during that time so if you don't want to go for product page optimization you can also use again as I mentioned custom product pages which doesn't really divide traffic as well as we want in the sense of a b testing but we can just do uh you know we can just see what users are kind of inclined towards and if you start in advance you're going to have more data and then you need to execute at exactly the right time uh and then analyze your results and you know start planning already what to do for next year so this is not really a set it and

forget it practice um and you know considering there's not just one sort of event in the whole year you kind of need to be doing this constantly if you're gonna leverage any type of seasonality I was on mute okay sir all right I like it feeling you're gonna go to the next slide that's it um yeah that's it I love it so guys if you wanted to learn more go check them out mobile action is a great ASO tool and search ads tool that I've been really using utilizing your search ads.com to automate a lot of the bidding that you might have to do great it's sort of like almost like Palin said it and forget it because you can set up a bunch of rules and Automation and the worst thing about search ads is it literally managing the bids you know making sure that those bids are hitting your cost per acquisition goals and so that's one of the things that we we have to do that manually we do where we go into the client and just adjust

the bids based on the CPI goals and search ads.com will take care of that and then mobile action for the ASL ASO side they've got a free plan for all unds out there who want to just get started it's a great tool I use the search ads like research tool to see which which apps have the most impression on a particular keyword so I love that one the best so it is mobile action in searchads.com hey Palin I want to kind of talk up about the seasonality and for those if you are a game I know dataology I know you got the jigsaw puzzle game we're working together so I've a bunch of stuff like you the analogy sounds familiar if you're a game it's sort of like a no-brainer right you can see all the top games like Temple Run and then Subway Surfers they still have some of that up that seasonality you know going on and so it's sort of like a no-brainer and I think it's just an easy quick little win rather than focusing on all these little

things of like oh I need to do this I need to do that like just try it out you know see what happens it should improve it it's been something that games have been doing for so long and it just makes sense I think it's a great way to read users and be like oh what's this oh cool and then almost like on your phone you're like oh it's a new app icon that's kind of cool right like let me let me check that out again because they're it's in line with what's happening right now in season so yeah exactly yeah I agree and also I want to mention one more thing about like Subway Surfers I think it makes sense that they are still at the top because they are still you know very actively taking care of the app like I was gonna check out their Halloween creators and then I saw that they already um you know uh changed their assets based on another sort of a special holiday and I was really surprised to see that like these guys never sleep

yeah right yeah it's amazing to see them in the top charts to this day like no game has that much and so many clones too of Subway Surfers like there's been plenty of clones that have come come and gone as well all right let's take a look at the anything else you want to cover from the ASO side of things seasonality I think we're good we're good and we're going to do an app audit as well now I go live on YouTube for those who aren't familiar with my channel I go live on YouTube every Friday and then we take a look at your apps we have a guess on and so we already have we're filled we're overfilled actually for this virtual Summit that with all the app audits but if you want us to take a look at your app in the future YouTube live stream just go to appmasters.com audit all right we've got gonzalo's app pulled up Palin DaVinci kids fun learning so it looks like fun specially curated kids content we're winning shows

all in one he wants help with keyword positioning store listing Improvement opportunities and that's why I said okay I know who to talk to if you have that question so that's why I brought it to your attention feeling what do you what do you see here uh the very first thing that I'm noticing is that we have kids both in the title and the subtitle um since in iOS uh you know things uh keywords only get index once uh that is a complete waste of our space so um we can just you know rule out kids from our subtitle not only for the space but also I don't think it as much uh you know just because we already have it in the name like DaVinci kids I don't think anybody is going to think that this app is for adults after that and so my first recommendation will be removing the four kids from the subtitle I like it have you guys noticed any you know there's been some articles written on this and some we experience like have

you seen anything with duplicating these keywords you know back in the day having a keyword duplicating the title actually did help your rankings and I'm testing out if it's still maybe it's true today like you know Apple's always changing their algorithm so I'm like I wonder if it's back true again most of the time it's you don't need kids but have you guys noticed any data on your end where duplicating does help or does it hurt um actually we have not seen any sort of benefits from duplicating keywords in iOS uh actually the exact opposite we've seen the benefit of removing duplicate keywords and replacing them with higher volume uh you know some popular keywords that are really generic has brought also a lot of rankings and we didn't really lose any rankings for our original duplicated keyword and also for example if you add something that is going to you know make it long tail keyword with

the duplicated keyword that actually really helps as well from what I've seen I'm going to take a look at Gonzalo real quick Mexico right I know this trick still works Bailey Spanish Mexico you want a whole different title a whole different subtitle as well because the Spanish Mexico localization is indexed by the US App Store so if you're gonna use English anyways Gonzalo you might as well have different keywords so whether it's fun learning here it could be you know I don't know educational TV for kids or educational content and then when I'm looking at the screenshots Palin I'm kind of thinking through like what kind of content is this I get that you're especially curating but like what is it you know what can my kids learn whether it's painting whether it's you know I would like to know all types of things they might be learning and it feels like it's YouTube that's being shown but we'll figure out

once we get into the app that's what the sense I get so is it like especially curated but also like hey we've original content it doesn't seem like original content but I would like to know what kind of things if I'm you know I'm a little bit as a parent I'm going to be a little bit more guarded in downloading this for my kids because I want to know what's exactly in this before I even download it exactly yeah I agree and I think you know different screenshots could have maybe like if they are covering different subjects like one of them could be based on maths one of them could be science um whatever the app's coverage is I think we really need to show that well in the screenshots because at like like you mentioned we can't really understand what that content is okay yeah and you know he has it in the description it's like science technology engineering art math science all this stuff learning brain boosting game so I

don't see that in the screenshots and frankly I think your screenshots could be updated a bit they seem a little bit old what is this two thousand twenty two thousand three foreign and I know with parents you know one of the things we've tested is having these trust symbols is pretty important Kids Safe certif I you might want to put this one into the first three like you can just literally have it as a batch right here versus just one screenshot that's buried later on so then you know maybe having some testimonials in the screenshots too all right again anything else on the ASO front like the keywords on the App Store page that you want to cover um yeah sure so about this app I would just like the description the long description to be a bit more parted up I think it looks a bit too clustered so your eye doesn't really go anywhere when you look at it it just sort of looks you know like a big paragraph

um so I would just recommend making it a bit more um you know in bullet points the eye goes to the value propositions immediately um just make it a bit more readable and make it you know more attention grabbing because you know at first glance I can just see stem there and I think that's the only thing my I went to First just because it said you know uppercase uh but my eye should go to all of the value propositions one by one so that would be a recommendation from my side one more thing I would like to mention is the screenshot you want to move to the forward uh with sort of um the parent and the kid um we don't really use the color red so much in kids categories our clients usually don't prefer this color too much um so we usually especially for educational kids apps like these we usually go for more blues and purples and greens um are the more popular colors of this category but usually not you know bold

colors like red I like that I like that Insight yeah I've noticed that mostly it's blues and yellows they're bright still but not necessarily red all right George did have a question for you Palin George says when do we when we do change the keyword relevant Fields how long until we should see the results how long does it take for us to see the results um in about two to three weeks um you should have a pretty good under keyboard rankings are gonna go um if after three weeks you're still not performing well for a keyword you can just safely take it out what should we do should we do anything besides just put it into the meta field like I don't know run some search eyes I don't know what else should we do um basically there's not much that we can do to get you know better rankings from these keywords other than putting them in our metadata um you know one thing you can do let's say you have a

keyword in your app store connect field but you definitely want more um you know better rankings for that keyword you can try moving it up so either to the title or the subtitle which have higher uh ranking factors if you're already bidding on this keyword which again uh is the best thing we can do aside from you know adding our and removing keywords from our metadata it's just fitting them bidding on them on on Apple search ads and increasing their bids and basically if you're you know tap through rates are low you can try optimizing your product page a little bit more um and if your conversion rate is low for example you can just try uh you know for example optimizing your long description or you know just description for iOS um so those are sort of the only things you can do basically okay Palin uh I'm gonna ask you this question I got this question from a client of mine it's like how do we increase the

search volume of our brand um that's a really great question uh so one new thing that you can do as apple is coming with you know with the new placements so today tab we've actually seen great results uh in terms of The Impressions so it brought like multiples of what our regular campaigns are bringing us so you can definitely try that to create more of a brand awareness for sure so the today tab has worked especially well I like that and I think maybe like influencer marketing because you know people aren't going to be searching for that particular term anyways that but I like that today tab idea all right you want to get into the app real quick well we got about four minutes left let's see how fast we can go all right here we go let's help out Gonzalo you may hit don't allow it asks for push notifications enhance what I would do is and it versus enhance their learning you know what I mean just

I like using terms like your things that say personalize it to me but any thoughts on this page right now um yeah I completely agree with you I think it's a bit still awake Interactive Learning these visuals seem a lot better than the screenshots feeling yeah I agree with you see you got the perfect testimonial right before I got our create account awesome right what's your child's age let's go Chloe maybe I shouldn't just publicly announce all my online all right Chloe loves my daughter Chloe loves this okay sign in with the Apple everything's good so far foreign your screenshots not so amazing that's like a a d and this is like an a all right okay seven days I like this reminder set a plan but this one doesn't oh still we both have trials yeah anything here that you want to add I like this paywall I think it works yeah I think it comes in a good time just you know put the testimonial in

your screenshots and I think we are good to go yeah I I think nothing here that I would add I like the paywall sometimes I like to go longer but I think if you're not going to go along paywall then this the blinkist model is what I'll call it works the best all right how exactly X while hitting X takes forever I love that little animation okay I love that too oh wait did I not so it looks like it's a hard pay wall I don't I know hard payable I'm I'm actually a proponent of hard paywall but what I don't like is you kind of tricking me in having the X and then giving me this I mean oh maybe they're just giving okay so that was not that was confusing did you know that that we would get this for free this content for free uh no exactly no okay yeah I didn't know that either I thought I'd have to pay but you know this is cool that you're giving me some free content but I had no idea this was actually paid I thought I

I mean free I thought I'd have to pay because this little thing up here looks like it's a lock without like really getting into it Gonzalo he's like hey here's a sneak peek you know yeah free episodes before you know here's what I would change on this Palin is call it our most popular episodes for free just for you and then people can go but like reword it I didn't know what this meant watch 3x free episodes before you start your trial no our most popular episodes for you before you start your free trial that's it you know fomo popularity people love that do that remove this little star thing because it looks like a lock I really thought it was a lock but then yeah just say this is all free you could be better about that all right I agree 100 . all right once again it is mobileaction dot Co or search ads.com if you want to learn more check it out really really we still use the tool okay cool if you're an indie developer

they're really making a big push and trying to help the indecent Community you can start get started for free and as you scale and start making those Revenue you can scale up for that and then go to searchats.com if you need an automated way to manage your search ads a Time Saver and a lifesaver really worth it set up those automations and you'll be like thank you Steve that was awesome all right Caitlin if the audience wants to connect with you you want to send them anywhere else uh they can just connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at pillanet mobile action.com anytime they want yeah I love it all right Arielle has one glass question that maybe Palin can answer how does the phrases work in the keywords should I type all the phrases together or create several phrases with the single create keyword uh you can actually do the second one so uh you don't need to put the phrases together

you can put a keyword in the title another keyword in the keyboard list and they are just going to combine with each other especially for iOS it's kind of the same for Google Play but um putting the phrases together kind of has a better effect on Google Play from what we've seen but in no way do you have to put them together