You’ve poured all your sweat, money and tears into building a great, game-changing app. Now, it’s time to unleash it onto the world. So you pick a launch day to get it listed on Google Play, maybe you buy a bottle of champagne to toast the first ten thousand downloads. The big day comes around then…nothing. Frustrated, you scrape together more money and pour it into some quick marketing. Then…slightly more than nothing but the champagne remains corked.
What can you do now?
Should you put more money into marketing?
Should you now cut your losses and give up?
Or, should you try something else?
It’s an incredibly common dilemma for app developers. The answer is to be smarter with both your planning and how you execute your app marketing.
Let’s start by going back a bit to understand what the average app developer is up against. According to Statista, around 5,000 apps are released on Google and Apple’s app stores every day. There are nearly 3.5 million apps on Google Play Store alone. In 2018, Statista calculated around 64% of Android apps had less than 1,000 downloads – 29% of which had less than 100 downloads. There are a lot of apps and very few of them are successful.
The first thing to realize is that although your app needs to be great to be successful, having a great app won’t make you a success. It needs to be aligned with clever marketing. Crucially, more money doesn’t always equate to better marketing. It’s how you market and optimize your app that really counts. As a result, any developer can have a fighting chance with even a limited marketing budget. Here, the key is testing.
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In a nutshell – the idea behind app store testing is to create one or more variations of your store listing, split your audience in line with these variations, and see which one has the best performance.
To get up and running, the first step is to optimize your listing.
Every aspect should be considered thoroughly, from the images you use to every line of text. Including keywords is very important, but so too is ensuring simple standards are met such as proper grammar. There is a wealth of resources online and specialist app development companies that can provide advice and support.
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Next, you need to know what you should test, and for that, you need to do research.
Here are some tips to get started:
Spying on your competitors is a great source of inspiration. The idea is to understand what is working for them so that you can also apply it to your store listing. It’s also good for figuring out what you can do to be different.
You can experiment with several aspects of your store listing. Take a look at the apps within your category. This way, you can understand the industry standard and get some ideas on how to stand out from the competition. Also consider what is happening outside of app stores. Remember that your potential user is consuming other media besides app stores. For example, if your target audience likes science-fiction books, take a look at covers of books like that and get inspiration for your product screenshots.
After you do some thorough research it’s time to create your first testing hypothesis. A hypothesis is an assumption, an idea that is proposed for the sake of argument so that it can be tested to see if it might be true. There are two questions that help you to create a good hypothesis:
- What do you want to change in your store listing?
- What do you want to achieve with these changes?
For example, this would be a good hypothesis: “I want to optimize my screenshots to increase conversion. Since my mobile game is played in landscape mode, if I change the orientation of my screenshots to landscape, I’ll get more downloads.”
What should the hypothesis be about?
There are three main aspects that you should consider experimenting with:
Screenshots – These are great elements to test; you can experiment with orientation, colors, background, caption, order, and even social proof.
App Icon – The icon is one of the main elements that make your app stand out in a crowded marketplace. You can for example test a female or male character, background colour, logo or no logo, and elements that represent your USP.
App Video– “To have or not to have an app video” is already a good experiment. Why? Well, not every app store listing benefits from a video, some even experience a decrease in downloads. You can experiment with two videos presenting different features to test which feature showcase brings you more downloads.
Be sure to only test one hypothesis at a time so you can get precise results. Remember that testing too small details won’t help you that much. For example, changing the fifth screenshot wouldn’t give you enough insights since people usually don’t scroll that far.
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Now it’s time to put into practice your research together with your hypothesis. You can create one variation to run an A/B test or more than one and run a split test. It’s really important that your test runs until you receive enough data – which is usually at least seven days and ideally 14. Do not be tempted to stop the experiment if you start seeing results early as things quickly change.
The final step is analysis. Based on the results, you can make your decision. You can take into account the following KPIs:
- Traffic volume per variation: did you have enough traffic to have an accurate result?
- Conversion number per variation: how many visitors saw your store listing (impression), actually viewed it (store view) and then tapped to download it (conversion)
- Improvement metric: this metric shows you if the variation increased or decreased your conversion rate.
Bear in mind that a variation is one that is statistically significant and this depends on your dataset size and how much traffic you allocate per version. If you are unsure about the significance of your result use an online calculator to confirm. Don’t be upset if your new variation loses. That’s the idea of app store testing.
After implementing the results, allow it one to two months to see improvement. In the meantime, you should think about a new experiment. There is always something to experiment, and there is always room for improvement.
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