In early 2021, we hosted our friend David Bell, cofounder and CEO at Gummicube for a Lunch & Learn on his favorite topic: App Store Optimization. Gummicube is the leader in App Store Optimization, offering both the technologies and services to help apps rank.

So far, we’ve discussed How to Rank in the App Store and Optimizing Metadata to Rank in the App Store.

In Part 3 of this 3-part video series, we’ll share what we learned, including:

• Meaningful creative that’s consistent with your other app store metadata drives conversion

• Fresh metadata is key

• Paid search can reduce your indexing time and garner better insights about what users want

• App store optimization is a process

Creative consistent with other metadata drives conversion

David: “Creatives are a very big aspect of what drive conversion in the stores, and the creatives have to align with your metadata. You can't focus on one feature in your metadata and then focus on another feature in your creative because you break the funnel and break the experience. We want to evolve creatives over time.

Be sure your app store creative is meaningful

David: “When designing creatives, some people get what I call Facebook disease.

“Basically they're launching a new app in the store and because Facebook had a simple icon with a letter in it, they feel that everyone will recognize their app if they take a similar approach, the problem is Facebook was a brand that the world recognized before they had that. Everyone knows what that is.

“If you're launching an app and the icon is some unrecognizable character, the world will not know what your app is about. It's important to understand what will drive conversion for your specific product or your core features before you make that decision about your icon. Half of the apps in the store have an icon that is not the same as their company logo.

Test and update creative to stay competitive

David: “Sometimes you'll encounter companies that are building creative and they're acting as if they're creating a box that's going to sit in a shelf at Best Buy for a year and never change. In the world of the App Store and Play Store if you're in a competitive category, people are updating and testing new creative sometimes as frequently as two or three times a month. They're thinking of this as a constantly evolving process. Where we are learning what colors work best, what layouts work best, what features have the most organic demand.

“They're adapting to seasonality. They're adapting to their competitors who are running A/B testing all the time and evolving their market position in the store and they might have to evolve along with that. You can have creative that converts well enough to get you into the top five on a keyword that has a lot of volume and next month, your competitors could change the background of their screenshots from red to blue, catch a 2% conversion lift from that and then you end up in the top 10 instead of the top five, because they took oxygen away from your app. They took market share and clicks away from your app.

“ASO is a process by virtue of the fact that other people are aggressive. You have to be aggressive because as they change and evolve and learn new things that work better, if you're not evolving your store positioning, you essentially, are watching your app sink in the rankings over time because they're getting better conversion rates than you are.

“Always be experimenting. Always be A/B testing. The App Store and Play Store are unique because you get one landing page unlike the web, where you can send users anywhere to go experience product or a feature. Everything that you do on that landing page impacts your merchandising in the store. It impacts the cost of your user acquisition because everyone goes on that page, even something as simple as seasonality.

“We worked with an app and we changed their icon to have a pumpkin in it for Halloween, and it increased their conversion for 28 days by about 30%. And then we took that out. We replaced it with something out for the next holiday. Those kinds of things are really important and, and we want to adapt to them.”

Don’t let your app store metadata get stagnant

David: ”The other thing is that when you think about recency: a lot of people say Apple and Google prefer apps that are updated more recently.

“It's not about updating with new features and adding code to the app. What Apple and Google are really doing is they're saying, how old is your metadata? How old is the information that you've provided us on your store listing?

“Over time as your metadata ages, Apple and Google devalue it. They give a demerit points, essentially. You could have a great optimization today, and if you don't touch it for six months, simply because you didn't touch it, you're going to perform less well compared to other people that might've updated more recently. That doesn't mean you have to dramatically change the apps positioning every month, because that wouldn't make sense, but it does mean: You have to evolve. You have to iterate. You have to keep things fresh.”

Use paid search to rank to accrue conversion data and get indexed in half the time

David: “It's also important to know paid search. If you're a new app to the store, the difference between running search ads and not running search ads is the difference between getting fully indexed and ranking for keywords that you care about in a meaningful way in 90 days versus waiting six months for it to happen.

“When you launch a new app, Apple and Google have no conversion data about your app. Your focus should be on channels that drive more click data in that Apple will understand. $25k of spend in search ads is more valuable than a $100k of spend in Facebook because Apple and Google do not care about data that comes from Facebook, but they do care about data that comes from their own paid search channels.

“That's not to say Facebook's not a great user acquisition channel; the challenge is the only value Facebook or ad networks provide when it comes to the store is, if you achieve a certain volume and velocity, you might get a higher chart ranking. That's okay, but to maintain that kind of volume and velocity, if you're not organically generating a lot of downloads in the store can be extremely costly. You have to keep that spend going every day, whereas with search, if you can build up relevancy, that has more staying power, it's less transactional.

Use paid search to access more granular data

David: “You do get other benefits from paid campaigns. Let me give you an example. If you run a search ads campaign, Apple will actually tell you what your conversion rate and click rate per keyword is. They won't do that if you're just looking at their organic console. If you're doing search ads, you get to run A/B testing in the search result by testing different creative sets against different ad groups and keywords.

“You can't do that organically in the Apple App Store. If you run a Facebook campaign, you get great demographic data about which audiences convert better. That's valuable. But Apple and Google won't give you that kind of data in quite as useful of a way if you're just running paid search campaigns. There are data-driven reasons why you'd want to try these channels, but it's important to understand from a marketing strategy, what your priorities are before you start spending money.”

Why ASO (App Store Optimization) matters

David: “At the end of the day, we look at ASO as a foundational piece of mobile marketing. What you do on that page, because it is the only landing page you get determines whether your cost of user acquisition makes sense. It determines whether your organic coefficients makes sense. If you're spending money on paid marketing, and your competitor is getting two organic installs for every paid install, but you're getting none.

“You're essentially paying a lot more for your marketing than they are, and then they can afford to outspend you. Even if your focus is getting a lot of scale with paid marketing, what you do with your store listing really matters. And that's why everyone pays attention.”

About Gummicube

Gummicube has been been in the App Store Optimization space for 11 years. Based in San Jose, they’re the “oldest” ASO company in North America. They have contributed to the success of more Top 10 apps than anyone else in the world. Their large and experienced team is trained in App Store Optimization, Conversion Rate Optimization, Paid Search, Mobile User Acquisition, Mobile Creative Development, Data Analytics, App Launch Strategies and more.