Foreign experts discuss ASO: How do they perform search optimization?

How to do a good job of search optimization ( ASO ) for a mobile game in the app store ? During the Casual Connect Summit held in San Francisco in August, Dean Takahashi, chief writer of GamesBeat, hosted a salon and invited four guests familiar with the field of ASO to discuss this topic. The four guests were Yonatan Dotan, senior vice president of marketing at YellowHead, Alex Malafeev, founder of Sensor Tower, Jeet Niyogi, marketing director of Playtika Canada, and Blake Pollack, chief marketing officer of The ASO Project.

GamesBeat: Can you briefly explain why your company is interested in ASP?

Jeet Niyogi: Since the day Caesars Entertainment acquired Playtika, we realized the importance of ASO. Overall, the use of ASO in mobile games is not widespread enough. We use SensorTower for ASO work, and the results are very good.

Blake Pollack: I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at ASO Project, a competitor of YellowHead. We are also an agency, working with enterprise-level clients and high-end developers.

Alex Malefeev: I am one of the two co-founders of SensorTower. Our core business is to provide a software platform for mobile game and other types of mobile application developers to help them perform ASO for their products.

Why is ASO important? Why should developers care?

Yonatan Dotan: ASO is about whether users can actually find your app in the App Store and Google Play. It is very important to do ASO well, but many developers don’t seem to pay enough attention to it. Large companies tend to spend money to acquire more users and ignore the ASO work. ASO is a collection of technologies that can help developers acquire more users, promote the internationalization of applications, and improve conversion rates .

In mobile app stores, 63% of users search for apps

Pollack: A recent study showed that 63% of users discover apps through search. In addition, the App Store and Google Play currently have more than 3 million apps, and 5,000 new apps are added every day; up to 83% of apps cannot be discovered through search - they cannot be found when users search using keywords or types.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for users to discover an app, and user acquisition costs are becoming increasingly expensive.

Malafeev: On average, there are 300 million searches per week on the Apple App Store. The role of ASO is similar to SEO . If ASO is done well, users will be able to find your app when they search for keywords.

Niyogi: ASO increases the exposure of an app to relevant users. For example, if a user likes to play poker, when he enters relevant keywords to search, he is likely to find your app in the first few search results.

ASO is also a very technical job, right? Can you explain it briefly?

Pollack: ASO works similarly to how SEO works for websites.

Malafeev: ASO helps increase the discoverability of your app, and at the same time, it can also increase your app’s conversion rate. A little different from SEO is that the effects of ASO are often immediate. Let me give you two examples: App A has an average daily player base of several thousand in the U.S. market, and after ASO optimization , its average daily player base increased by 30%. As another example, we performed localized ASO work on App B, which saw its player base surge by hundreds of percentage points in multiple different countries.

ASO has a huge impact, but it cannot exist in isolation. We can use ASO to increase the number of daily players for an app with thousands of players per day by thousands, but it is impossible to increase the number of daily players for an app with a single-digit average number of players to a level of thousands by relying solely on it.

Pollack: Our business is quite different from Yonatan's. We do ASO completely based on results. But developers need to remember that ASO is by no means a one-time thing, and periodic testing and tuning are the basis for its success. Every optimization will allow developers to accumulate experience.

Does anyone want to give an example? On today's iOS platform, what do developers need to consider when setting keywords?

Malafeev: The early development of ASO was very similar to the trajectory that SEO went through in the 1990s: people wanted to cram as many keywords as possible into as much space as possible. As time goes by, things become more and more complicated - on the one hand, developers have obtained more analytical data from Google and Apple; on the other hand, developers also realize that it is necessary to build a brand beyond simple keyword stuffing. Branding helps increase app conversion rates.

Pollack: Let's say you develop a gaming app, but typing "Facebook" into the search box is not going to do you any good. Because there are too many products using Facebook as a keyword, and more importantly, users who search for Facebook as a keyword are likely not your target users. You have to make sure each of your keywords is valuable.

Dotan: From a search perspective, developers need to find the most important keyword groups to increase the probability of an app reaching its target users. Let’s say I developed a mid-core game. It would make no sense to use the same keywords as Game of War or Clash of Clans because my marketing budget and the number of installs of the game itself would not reach the level of these two games.

Let’s talk about the issue of staff allocation. If a company has 700 employees, how many people should be responsible for ASO? If a studio has only 10 people, is it necessary to have a full-time person to do ASO? Or is it better to find an external consultant?

Niyogi: This question involves many factors, including the type of application, the company's development level, etc. For some small companies, the way other large companies do ASO internally may not be applicable. They need to cooperate with third-party companies.

However, in the product marketing stage, the most important thing developers need to do is to increase their attention to ASO. Every marketer should understand the current status and development trends in the ASO field, learn from best practices, do research, find tools , and learn relevant knowledge in the ASO field. By using SensorTower, we have been tracking and studying the performance of different keywords and phrases, instead of blindly following the crowd and trying to game an algorithm.

When you make content updates to an app, or when the app store itself changes, do you reevaluate these keywords?

Niyogi: Exactly. Updating the app is the best time to re-evaluate keyword performance and the best lever we can pull. Just like SEO, the world is constantly changing and what is a key driver today may not be effective tomorrow. Therefore, every time we make a content update to the game, we take the opportunity to re-examine the effectiveness of keywords and make adjustments if necessary.

Pollack: On the iOS platform, developers can modify content such as names and keywords when updating the game version; on the Android platform, developers need to submit some content, which will generally be reviewed and approved after a few hours. Through our research, we found that although Apple’s review time is longer, the effect of keyword changes on the iOS platform is faster than on the Android platform.

Malafeev: Two years ago, it was hard to find professionals familiar with ASO on LinkedIn, but over time, more and more marketing experts have begun to master ASO skills and apply them in their daily work or provide services to other companies. At the same time, many large game companies are recruiting ASO professionals, and ASO is becoming more and more important, which is a development trend.

The effect of ASO (up 30% daily installs in the US and 200% in Germany)

Can you talk about the role of game screenshots in product ASO?

Niyogi: When people discover your app and open the app homepage, it is important to convince them to install the app. The visual effect (of the screenshot) must be highly relevant to the product itself. A first-class screenshot is likely to attract users to play within 5-10 seconds after opening the app homepage. Some publishers also make good use of video previews. In addition, game descriptions and "What's new" introductions are also important, especially in the Google Play app store.

Pollack: Game icons and screenshots should be considered an optimization technique. Developers must ensure that screenshots look good and attract users to the game by conveying marketing information. But the embarrassing thing is that until today, some developers still haven't figured it out, and the first screenshot they put in the app store is actually the game's login interface... This is the case with one of our clients. After we modified the first screenshot, the number of players of its app increased from an average of about 300 per day to 2,500.

Last question, how do you view the localization of ASO?

Malafeev: Localization is very important at the ASO level. For example, the Danes are fluent in English, but they are in the app store. Unlike SEO, when doing ASO localization, in addition to translating keyword texts, developers must also understand the cultural concepts of users in the target market and what the target users are looking for.

We once cooperated with an application developer. Before the cooperation, 85% of their users were from the United States, but after ASO localization, this proportion dropped to 50%-40%. The reason is simple: ASO localization allows their products to reach a large number of users from other countries.

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