ASO trends in App promotion in 2019!

The promotion war between Baidu and Toutiao for the Spring Festival Gala has just ended. Just as we predicted at the beginning of 2018, direct rebates: giving cash to users, this form of promotion will become popular.

My original words at the time were: App promotion will become more and more "money-throwing" . By the end of 2018, this form of promotion reached its climax. Billions of cash back amounts in an era of channel sinking have forcibly attracted a massive amount of new additions. The result directly reflected in the App Store's overall ranking is that whoever gives more money to users will be number one in the overall ranking, and whoever's whole family bucket will dominate the top ten of the overall ranking.

The promotion effect (volume and cost) of "throwing coins" is far better than the various means of gaining volume that have become fiercely competitive. Even the information flow promotion that is unanimously optimistic in the industry cannot withstand the huge demand for new users. If Toutiao did not rely on rebate incentives, the overall new users would have long been unsustainable.

During the Spring Festival Gala, a large number of users went to major app stores to download Baidu products, which directly caused the App Store and some domestic stores to fail to respond many times and were stuck for a considerable period of time.

In a blink of an eye, 12% of 2019 has passed. Although the overall economic environment is not widely optimistic, each of us should still work harder to make money and develop our careers and not let time go to waste. After all, companies that grow up in adversity will be more powerful .

Therefore, the editor gets up early on the weekend and takes advantage of sending the child to cram school to write something and share some useful information. Time cannot be wasted.

I believe that many parties in the industry who are responsible for promotion are paying more attention to how the ecology of App promotion will change in 2019. App stores are still a battleground for App promotion, and ASO is a battleground for App stores. Here I will give you an outlook on the ASO field that I am good at, and mainly discuss the following issues.

01. Will Apple’s market share drop sharply, causing ASO to enter a cold winter period?

At the end of 2018, due to issues such as Sino-US relations and the lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, the overpriced price of Apple's new phones resulted in Apple's sales in China falling far short of expectations, which had a significant impact on the ASO effect, which had already been declining. Students who do optimization have clearly felt that the volume-carrying capacity of Apple Store keyword searches has significantly decreased. Let me insert my previous experience here. As the mobile Internet traffic dividend disappears and user usage time is taken up, the keyword search traffic of Apple App Store will basically decline to one-third of the level of the previous year every year.

To illustrate: if there are 3,000 people searching for "Three Kingdoms" on the App Store every day to download the game in October 2016, then the number will drop to 1,000 in October 2017. Similarly, by October 2018, the number will drop to more than 300.

In the past, this rate of traffic attenuation was still acceptable to everyone, and the response strategy was to continuously improve the ARPU value of the product, so that the value generated by each user could be increased to more than three times the previous level in order to balance the problem of traffic decline.

The sales problem of Apple mobile phones in 2018 caused the traffic to decline faster than before. There may be less than 200 people searching for "Three Kingdoms" to download the game in 2018. This will make the competition for the limited traffic more intense and the cost will rise rapidly. Therefore, Apple’s sales volume will directly lead to changes in the amount of traffic that apps obtain on the App Store.

From a macro perspective, the US strategy of restricting China's development will only continue to strengthen in 2019, not weaken. This will lead to the long-term continuation of the game between China and the US. Restricting Apple's development in China has become a card of the Chinese government, which will be played when necessary. This is a bad aspect. The good thing is that the country will not allow Apple to completely lose the Chinese market. First of all, it will lose a decent trump card in its hand. This card is still very useful and must be used at critical moments.

Secondly, if Apple withdraws completely, Android will become stronger in China. Android is also controlled by the United States. If there is a lack of competition, Android will also be restrained by the United States. Such a market will become more unbalanced, causing greater losses to China.

Therefore, the editor believes that the Apple ecosystem will definitely continue to be affected by Sino-US relations, but it will not lead to a sudden drop in traffic. (Traffic mainly depends on Apple’s new users, and existing mobile phones contribute less to traffic.) In addition, old man Cook has recently come to China to actively solve Apple’s sales problem. Apple’s selling price has been lowered recently. If sales cannot be increased, the old man will probably take further measures to stabilize the situation.

On the other hand, Apple is also actively resolving the lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, and there will soon be an ideal solution to completely resolve the issue. So keep up the good work, old man. It depends on whether you can get through this hurdle with Apple smoothly, so that companies like us that rely on the Apple ecosystem can continue to maintain stable profits.

02. Can machine brushing and human brushing recover this year, and will the points wall compete for existing resources?

Machine brushing and human brushing were very popular around 2016. Due to their low cost and insufficient supervision by Apple, they were highly competitive in the ASO field. In 2017-2018, Apple began to strengthen supervision. In addition, the IOS10 system, which could only be cracked before, gradually lost its ASO effect, resulting in the gradual withdrawal of machine brushing and human brushing from the stage of history, and some individual teams became tools to supplement the volume. At the end of 2018, teams successively broke through the IOS12 and IOS11 systems and were able to produce some effects. The most significant effect was achieved by the team that managed IOS12, but in terms of cost, the cost of machine flashing has increased significantly, and the gap can no longer be narrowed by the optimization of the points wall.

In addition, on the security level, due to Apple's increasingly strict review policy, every online App package is very valuable. Machine brushing may cause the product's keywords to fall out of the top 1,000 after machine brushing, which is very harmful to the online package, so it is difficult to become a mainstream form of promotion.

However, apart from China and the United States, where the effect of machine flashing is not good, other countries in the world can still perform machine flashing ASO optimization. These are regions where Apple does not restrict machine flashing. So we make a bold prediction. In 2019, machine brushing will be effective for some words, but it will definitely not be able to achieve the same cost-effectiveness as in 2016, thus becoming the biggest competitor of the points wall.

03. Can ASM enter China and crush ASO in terms of effectiveness and market share?

ASM has been launched in many countries. Since 2017, there have been constant calls for it to enter China, but it has not yet been launched. At present, the country with the most mature application of ASM is still the United States, followed by Japan, where the effect is also very obvious. I believe that if ASM enters China, it will definitely become a battleground for traffic and will greatly affect the effect of ASO.

Although it will not lead to ASO's complete withdrawal from the stage of history, it will at least take away more than 50% of the market share. Moreover, most of the market share will not fall into the hands of companies currently engaged in ASM business, but will fall directly into Apple's pocket. The first question just now analyzed the China-US relationship, and the key to this question still depends on this. 2019 is an important year for the game between China and the United States. The ASM business is a business in which an American company has taken away a 10 billion market from a Chinese company. The Chinese government will certainly not easily allow this business to enter China.

In addition, issues such as related taxes and advertising review are not so easy to negotiate, so this is closely related to the operational ability of old man Cook. The editor here still hopes that the old man will solve Apple’s sales problem first, and ASM will then start to implement it. After all, I love making profits and currently put all my efforts into ASO^_^.

04. How will the landscape of the points wall change? Do new players still have a chance? Where are the opportunities?

Many people think that 2018 is the most exciting year for the points wall. In fact, the editor feels that the competition has gradually become fierce in the second half of 2018. In 2019, the industry will see a watershed. This year, the environment will be criss-crossed, the situation will be unprecedentedly complex, and the situation will definitely be difficult.

First of all, the overall economic situation in 2019 is very pessimistic, which reflects that business in all walks of life will not be easy to do, and Internet promotion will also be affected accordingly.

Many forms of promotion have been over-developed and can no longer generate more traffic and profits, resulting in more players in the industry entering this small ASO field which still has some profits. Whether they are people who used to work in media agency business, data analysis, or game development, a series of teams and companies may hope to make money through the ASO business to withstand the cold winter. These companies and teams either have advantages in customer resources or have product and technical capabilities, which will intensify competition in the ASO field.

ASO is a business where the more players there are, the worse the effect and the higher the cost. Because the ranking positions are limited, as more and more players join in, it will definitely drive the entire App ecosystem to do ASO. If everyone does it, it is equivalent to no one doing it, and the cost is indeed not small.

At this stage, the role played by ASO skills may become smaller and smaller. It is estimated that under saturated competition, the role played by ASO skills can only account for about 10%. The rest is the game of resources, information integration capabilities and money.

Therefore, existing players need to quickly establish their own advantages, whether in terms of customer resources, technical capabilities, or the scale of points wall users. Otherwise, once competition intensifies, small players may easily be unable to continue due to rising costs.

Although ASO has developed to this point, there are still many pitfalls. Among them, there are problems such as fake traffic, users cheating on the points wall, deduction of traffic, non-settlement, overdue payment, and fierce competition for customer resources, all of which require response plans.

For example, in September 2018, Aiyingli led the entire industry to switch to a prepaid model. To put it bluntly, we had encountered too many cases of debt repayment before, and we had no other choice. As far as we know, there are still many peers in the industry who are accepting orders after payment. Although it is developing faster, it hides huge risks. The overall economy is not good in 2019. If you still don’t upgrade your sales strategy, you will definitely suffer a big loss.

In general, it is impossible for new players to start from scratch and learn as they did in the past two years. Because the market will not give you time to learn and grow, you must enter with a lot of resources, hold on to enough thighs, and at the same time not make any serious mistakes, only then will you be able to slowly stand out in the competition.

Therefore, the editor here does not recommend that teams without experience and resources blindly rush in. If you have unique resources and abilities, please feel free to chat with me first. ^_^ I believe that in 2019, Aiyingli’s agent support policy can help many capable new players quickly make money in the ASO field.

The competition among Party B in 2019 is ultimately a competition for talent. The competition for talent ultimately comes down to a competition for recruitment and training. In 2019, Aiyingli will recruit a large number of outstanding newcomers to the industry, and use its own advantages to carefully train newcomers to win future competition.

05. As Party A, how should CP customize its promotion strategy in 2019?

Although the App Store is becoming more and more centralized, big companies have gradually taken over Apple's top rankings and best-selling lists. But what is gratifying is that at the beginning of the new year, there are still some domestically produced super-light games like "Eliminate Viruses" that have emerged and ranked first in the overall game rankings. This shows that small and medium-sized manufacturers still have a chance to seize the opportunity of light games and make a comeback.

However, the editor analyzed the promotion methods of this game from various aspects, and felt that it was much more gameplay-intensive than previous games such as Snake and 2048, and the average customer acquisition cost was also higher. The media and efforts invested in buying traffic were not small. In addition, the R&D team of the product itself had a certain reputation and accumulated a lot of loyal users. In addition to buying traffic, the operation team also guided hardcore players to upload their own game videos to Tik Tok , and finally got Apple's official recommendation position . Therefore, there is still a certain threshold to completely replicate the success of eliminating the virus.

Previously, a large number of Chinese teams wanted to copy Voodoo's ultra-light game mode overseas, but no one has been able to do it. The successful case of eliminating the virus proves that there is still hope^_^. This hope is not limited to games!

When it comes to the App promotion ecosystem in 2019, the situations of big and small CPs and new and old CPs are definitely different, but there are a few common points that can be extracted for your reference. I will mainly talk about the ASO field:

• Find a reliable, high-quality and well-known channel for long-term and stable cooperation

You can test multiple channels when you start promoting, but try not to continue to run multiple channels until the middle and late stages of promotion. If there are too many channels, once a problem occurs, people will blame each other and it will be difficult to trace the source. Another key issue that is closely related to the cost-effectiveness of the delivery is that it is impossible to achieve perfect deduplication across multiple channels.

For example, there are many ways for users to take advantage of points walls. The most common technique that most users have mastered is to switch idfa on different points wall platforms to complete tasks for an App product multiple times. Currently, there is very little cooperation between points walls to eliminate duplication through udid (device code). Therefore, if different points wall tasks are placed at the same time, it is easy for a large number of repeat users to take advantage of the situation, resulting in good product promotion effects in the early stage, but gradually worse effects in the later stages (in fact, a large number of repeat users are consuming their own promotion funds).

Therefore, it is recommended that CPs try to find a point wall with a larger scale and better reputation to cooperate with, and use UDID to perform external playback, so as to avoid being fleeced in large quantities.

• Pay attention to cost-effectiveness, but don't worry too much about unit price.

There are 1.5 and 1.6 on the market, but I will never use 1.8. You should know that some companies have spent a lot of manpower and resources on user quality. If this company has a very good reputation, you don’t have to worry too much about the unit price of a few cents. Please believe that your overall delivery effect will definitely be much better than those small channels that can only attract users by price.

Therefore, I suggest that you pay attention to the overall promotion effect and cost, and don’t pay too much attention to the unit price, and end up buying a lot of fake volume at a low price.

• Try to do it in the front position, and if you want to be the first, don't do it in the third.

Try not to think about Top 5 or Top 10, as they really have no volume and will just waste costs and budget. We also try to move up the rankings, striving to be in the top 3 on the paid rankings and the top 30 on the free rankings. In addition, there are not many score walls on the market that can make it to the top of the rankings^_^.

06. When will Android ASO enter a bigger stage?

I am more and more optimistic about Android ASO. Although it is restricted by CPD, with the increase of Android's market share and the increasing cost of traffic, CPD output is decreasing, and gradually ASO's traffic will be noticed by everyone.

Moreover, the market environment is becoming more and more mature, and the real-person Android points walls on the market are becoming more and more perfect. My family has also made an Android points wall. I have personally tested that among 200 real-person search and download results in the mainstream market, we can rank first or in the top 3 for many words. The effect is quite obvious, you might as well try it when you have time.

Source: Operation Xiaokaxiu