| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79QGI8ow2lI |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42tjd3t3watx55gzafejw0 |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42tjd3t3watx55gzafejw0 |
| Date | 2025-04-18 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/79QGI8ow2lI/sddefault.jpg?v=67fea75e |
[Music] What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. Guys, this is the day after my birthday and I’m putting some fresh new fits on for you. So, thank you to the wife who got me all this stuff. But I’m super excited to have our guest on today. We’re going to talk all about ASO strategies, especially I know a lot
I share a lot of content on keyword optimization. We’re going to talk about how to do ASO outside of just the plain old keyword optimization. Got a phenomenal guest. He is the senior growth marketing manager at Frelettics and a freelance ASO consultant. So, you’re going to get the best of both worlds. Whether you’re a 7 figure multi- 10ig, eight figure business and you’re figuring out ASO or you’re just an indie wanting to learn about it and what is
working for a smaller budget. You’re going to get all that right now. [Music] Anton, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I felt like I was stumbling a little bit towards the end, but I do want to say hi to a few people. Nurex is here. Good to see you, bro.
Kevin, good to see you. We’ve got Miguel. Happy birthday. Thank you. That’s all I wanted. I want everybody just tell me happy birthday. Thank you. Happy birthday. Still Stephen doesn’t know. Why would you know, Anton, but I do appreciate it. It was a chill birthday. But yeah, Anton, let’s get into it a little bit. You want to go straight into your presentation or is there anything else you want to tell the audience about all the accolades that you’ve, you know, gone and collected through your career? No, I’m good with the accolades. Let’s go to the
presentation. Let’s try to share some knowledge with people, you know? Let’s try to make it useful. All right, bro. Let’s do it. I love it. All right. Uh, cool. Yeah. Let’s kick off with some ASO trends or I guess tactics I noticed to work quite well. Um, as of late, uh, as Steve said, uh, you know, there is, as usual, keyword optimization, there is AB testing, there’s the classics, all of those you have to do. Um, there’s sort of like
table stakes. I wanted to talk a little bit about stuff which is, I guess, newer or maybe things which people are not thinking about too much. So yeah, let’s try to do that. Uh yeah, basically I’m I’m basing that on a on a LinkedIn post that I did got some good engagement. So from what I understand, people are quite interested in the topic. So yeah, let’s let’s move on. As I said, you know, this will be outside of the keyword optimization, outside of AB testing,
outside of the things you probably already know about. So yeah, trying to have some fresh takes here. Yeah, it’s good stuff. I don’t think a lot of it and I’ve already gone through the content and I don’t think a lot of it is being I think a lot of it’s being underutilized for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and I want to start with custom product pages. Now I I think for people who are like actively doing ASM using custom product pages this is a little bit old news but you would be surprised by how
many people are still not really actively using them. I remember I think it was like September 2021 when uh custom product pages released and back then it would you know it just felt like such a big thing u it was a big update to what you could do on the app store um yeah it just felt like everybody will get on board ASAP and you know we’re in what is it April 2025 you would be surprised by how many companies are either not using custom product pages at
all or are only now like sort of starting to uh dip their their toes into, you know, what CPPs can do for them or custom store listings on Google Play for that matter. That’s another thing like a lot of people don’t even know that there’s not just CPPS, there’s also custom store listings on Google Play. Y um so there is that I guess going one layer deeper on custom product pages, a few things you can do with them. So on Google Play, you can target specific search terms with
Google Play custom store listings. It might be branded, it might be competitors, it might be if your app had multiple features, you know, and people search for you for like one feature or another. You can create a specific page to align with that specific search term. Think about it like if you were doing CPPs for Apple search ads, but for organic search and Google Play. This is really exciting. This is a very interesting feature to try and play with especially if you have significant volume of traffic coming from those
generic keywords and you just like to optimize conversion a little bit. Yeah, Anton, we’ve seen tremendous success with this. Like one of our clients, we it was just a Indian just starting to get going, but we saw some tremendous success through Google Play. It went from like zero to a few thousand dollars with just custom store listings and making sure we got certain keywords to rank there, too. I feel like if you’re on Google Play, custom sort of listings is like a no-brainer, too. And then you can go into your Google console and see
which keywords are driving the most of the downloads and then create custom store listings off of that. Is that your process or you have a different process? Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And Google Play is so good with like um giving you keyword level data. So, yeah, don’t miss out on that, you know, like try to use that. Again, I guess an important thing here is just like try to make sure that there is some traffic on those keywords. Like if there isn’t, it’s just unlikely that it’ll move the needle because, you know, there is no traffic anyway. But if if there are people coming, if it’s
competitors, your own brand, uh, anything. Yeah, try to play with that. As Steve said, you know, I get some really good result out of that. Absolutely, dude. Okay. All right. Cool. So yeah, the second one, uh, app store custom product pages for Apple search ads targeting competitors in some like creative and cheeky way. Um, I don’t think you should be just like going straight after your competitors in your CPPs, you know, like don’t use this app,
use this. It’s a, you know, it’s gray area. Those companies might actually report you. like that’s that’s not something I would suggest but there are different creative ways which you can brainstorm with your creative team designers you know ASO managers whoever that might be uh to try and come up with something creative I think on the next slide if you actually click through yep added an example of what we did at freeexics and I’ve seen a few other companies doing that as well so it’s
like a play on the Google you know like try to get lucky like when you search for something and you have a typo it’s like oops did you mean you know in this case frettics it’s not really like an attack on any specific competitor brand I like it it’s like a workaround but you know it I guess it’s creative you know some people might appreciate it click through on your app download it so yeah experiment with your custom product pages for Apple search ads you know try to be creative for competitor brands but
also for generic keywords just as we just now discussed for custom store listings on Google Play there’s so you can do. You know, if you’re already spending significant budget on Apple Search Ad, why not optimize that? Yeah, for sure. And we’ve definitely seen that work pretty well for us too, Anton, especially when like I don’t know, maybe this is like Freletics thing, but if you’re going after abs and then like leading with more ab workout related terms, I mean, we we saw pretty good success and we have one client we’re spending about 60 grand on Apple search
ads a month. 100%. That’s what we call like visual keyword recognition. when somebody’s searching for abs or you know like lose weight workouts to lose weight like if that’s the search term and then people recognize that search term in your creatives it just activates that sort of flywheel uh improving your conversion rate but then also as a secondary effect hopefully that also has a positive impact on your ranking so that’s actually a good tactic not just for CPPs and Apple search ads but for
generic store listing as well hey the yeah I almost called you Emmery but Anton like Emry my my friend Emry who used to be at mobile action but not over there but he custom product pages with competitor terms he showed off this example and I didn’t want to copy him so I took a picture while he was giving this presentation give him full credit but you can see Opera bidding on Chrome ditched the basic browser so I like your way you did the the freletics did you mean and Firefox was like the fox these
are a bit more aggressive I’ve seen That’s really cool. But again, I mean, it is aggressive, but it’s creative as well. Like, you have to give it to them, you know. Yeah. Okay. Do you want to go back to the Yeah, returning users one. And yeah, the last one, Google Play custom store listing, uh, targeting returning users, you know, making it as simple as either just saying right away like, you know, welcome back to whatever app you have, um, or like calling out
the new features which you might have added in the past like month or half a year or so. This one will be effective if you have a large percentage of returning users. So that is more often like a more established app which you have on the market for like multiple years. Those apps tend to have a large percent of returning users. Sometimes over like 50% of those users might actually be returning rather than new. Um, so maybe a better tactic for bigger companies, more established apps, but
still just like a very interesting, you know, way to play with those since Google Play gives you an opportunity to target the custom store listing by the install state, I guess it is. So you might have just a new one for like new users. You might have a page for just returning users. Try to experiment with that. Again, similar to the store listing for generic search terms, just see if there’s any traffic, like if optimizing for that audience group will actually move the needle, like if it’s big enough, you know, if the users are
actually coming. So, those would be the custom product pages ones. Steve, do you have anything to follow? Can you do Google custom store listings targeting return users and keywords or is it just returning users without keywords? Yeah, I mean you can but you you can just set up two. So you can set up one custom store listing which will target both but you can have it the same store listing targeting returning and keywords. I guess if you want to if you
want to target people who are like coming only returning users only from specific search terms. I’m not sure you can do that. Okay. Just curious. Uh, but that’s an interesting that’s an interesting The only reason why I was asking was like if you could do it, do you do you recommend select, you know, starting with maybe just your brand because it is probably going to be for more established brands anyways. Yeah. If you don’t have to do it and you could just target all returning users, then yeah, what’s the point? Yeah, but I guess for more established brands, most
I mean the majority of traffic is branded anyway. So, but yeah, that’s a good point. I’m not sure you can do that. Not sure you can do that. Okay. Well, on this term basa, I think that’s right. Did you test the specific search terms for uninstall users, too? I guess she’s asking the same thing, like, have you tested with keywords for returning users? Yeah. So, no, like usually if I set those up, it’s either or, like it’s
either based on a keyword or for like new returning users, that kind of stuff. We never really mixed them together. Again, in my experience, for the apps where it would make sense to set up a custom store listing with returning users, like 80% of that traffic is branded anyway. So, if we’re talking about setting it up for like branded keywords, might just as well create like one custom store listing. It will target those users and then some extra ones which which might come as a nice bonus. So, yeah, that just was not a need for
that so far. Agreed. We got a question from business marketing and skills. All right. All right. He saw that you normally get an ASO boost within the first week on and I think he’s talking about so one guy on YouTube talking about if you want ASO you’ll get a boost in the first week when you launch and but next time when your ASO starts to grow it’s only in six months. Do you have any intel on like this boost thing? Yeah. Yeah. So, as far as I know, indeed, like if you launch a new app,
especially on iOS, there is like a week to two week sort of boost where the store tries to give you more visibility as an indie app. I mean, if you launch without it, you’ll barely get any visibility. So, there is some boosting. I don’t know about like this second one in six months. I don’t think it’s like scheduled like that. Like, you might get a boost in the first few weeks, but then it’s all a matter of your ASO, like market dynamics, you know, what’s happening, if you’re running any paid. I don’t think about I don’t know about the six month thing. Yeah. Meaning the first
time I’ve heard about it too. Yeah. Okay. You want to move on to inapp event? Yeah. Let’s go. Yeah. Second one. Inapp events. Uh pretty interesting one. Um there is a lot of again if you’re doing those you’re probably doing those like ongoingly. It’s not news to you. Uh however inapp events I’ve just seen quite a lot of success with them. Um on both App Store and Google Play. on the app store they’re a little easier to make and they’re just more accessible to a lot of companies but inapp events are
pretty big also because if you notice like especially for Google like if you’re at any of their conferences they put a lot of focus on well not inapp events they call it promotional content but if you’re trying to get featured inapp events and promotional content is like a must now like if you want to do it they would very often ask you hey are you also setting up a promotional content card for it or like an inapp event for it. So, it’s a pretty big feature and it seems that it’s also
considered important from like the Apple and Google side and you usually want to do like whatever they think is important because then you kind of have a higher chance of extra boosting, more visibility, more chances to get featured. So, inapp events are pretty important and there’s like a few things within those which I wanted to talk about. Bring that up. So the first one is this is only for Google Play. Promotional content allows you to promote discounts and offerings.
You cannot do that on the app store. It’s not allowed. Usually if you have like a an inapp event promoting some discount or like if you have a paid tier that inapp event would just get uh rejected. But on Google Play you can do that. So why not do that? you know, if you already have access to promotional content, which not a lot of companies do, but if you do have it, you know, consider testing it. I’m not saying it’ll like it’ll increase your revenues by a lot, but it’s a free way to promote
your paid plan essentially on the product page. Try to play with it, you know, try to run a promotional content like that for a short period of time. You can select by market. It doesn’t have to be global, but that’s one use case which I think a lot of companies are not yet aware of and it might bring some interesting results. Yep. Anton, we’ve seen really good success with and like you said, it’s doesn’t take that lot much time. All you need are a couple of images and it’s a no-brainer. And you know, for one of the clients we saw when
promotional content first came out, we were pretty much able to rank that promotional content with that keyword. So we’re already ranking well organically for that keyword but if you kept scrolling which one month do you our inapp event our promotional content started showing up for that main keyword too. So I I feel like we started just more like having more presence in the search results. It gave us multiple ways of showing up. Exactly. I did not add that note here but you know inapp events
and promotional content are indexed. So also a good way to get some extra visibility. Uh cool. No, that’s that’s a great point. For the second one, yeah. Uh, so inapp promotional content, they can be created for a lot of reasons which you can frame as a content update or a major update. It doesn’t actually have to be that major, you know, it doesn’t have to be a rebrand, a massive feature launch or like a content update
if you’re like a a book app and you added new content. No, if you’re a fitness app, you know, add a new workout or if you have like a maybe like a I don’t know FAQ section, you can just add something in there and position that as a new content update. There is so much you can do. Those tags like content update and major update are actually really flexible. So, if you’re really keen to run an inapp event or promotional content, I can almost guarantee like there is a way to do it
if you just frame it properly. And it’s very rare that uh inapp events or promotional content get rejected. So try to use them. Again, as Steve said, like you don’t actually need much to create an inapp event. You know, it’s a few uh a few sentences, a few images. You set it up quickly. You’re not guaranteed to get a lot of visibility, but it’s also a fairly easy lift. So, you know, it’s just a good thing to test at least every once in a while and then if you see some traction, you know, you can make it like a
systematic process and do that over and over again. Yeah, I love it. All right. And then the last one, this one is actually not necessarily about ENAP events, but iOS on the App Store. Apple just released, well, not just released, but fairly recently released the featuring nominations tab. So basically a like a way for you to nominate your app for a featuring. Now I know that if you’re an indie app,
chances of getting featured are fairly low and that has always been like that. But again, it’s easy to do. Try to pitch it, you know, try to frame your new release for which you want to get featured interestingly. You know, make it seem like a big deal. if it’s really innovative, uh, you know, just tell Apple everything you can about that and hopefully you’ll get featured. This also ties back into my point about inapp events and promotional content being almost like a
must to get featured. Now very often what I see on the app store is they come like we create inapp events and then Apple instead of like writing an editorial story about us they just take our inapp event and they like boost it on the today tab as a feature in uh on on Google Play the same thing like you can when you create promotional content on Google Play there is a button saying like do you want to nominate it for a feature or like pitch it for a feature
something like that and it might get featured. It very often gets featured not in like tier one markets, but you get quite a lot of visibility still. You know, you capture a lot of traffic. So, the benefits of using this feature are pretty big, especially if you’ve never used it before. Like you’ll you probably should see like a good before and after when you do your analytics at the end of the year. So, you know, to wrap up, use your inapp events and promotional content. It’s great. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Especially if you’re an
established brand and I see most established brands Anton using the inapp events all the time like they’re always there but I never it makes sense and it’s like I love these little tactics that take like 15 minutes you know at most and that can get you the big maximum results whereas like you know pouring over Facebook ads like three hours into it and you know trying to figure out. I like these type of strategies too. Love it 100%. All right, bro. Well, Ben loves this too. Ben, I’m
a fan of this obviously too. Always a great pod when they come with the slides. Already taking so many notes, so he’s enjoying all this stuff as well. The business marketing and skills and the he sees many apps using only two subscriptions now yearly and weekly like filters, editors, and so forth, but not using three subscription methods like monthly, weekly, and yearly. Why is there a point to do something like this? you have any thoughts on this? Um, as far as I’m
aware, this is not necessarily ASO, but as far like from what I’ve seen, it’s just a matter of, I guess, testing how you frame your subscription. There’s so much that goes into, you know, subscription optimization. It’s your onboarding, it’s your payw wall. It’s like where the traffic is coming from, what’s your ad creative? There’s so much go going into that. But I mean, yeah, I guess you know, some company ran some tests and they saw that it doesn’t actually make sense to to have like a monthly. They just stick to yearly or basically longer
periods, which I can see is beneficial from like the business point of view. So, why not? Steve, you probably have like a better answer to that. Yeah. Well, the the answer I have is certain types of apps, and he pointed out them. It’s photo and video apps, AI apps, like especially onetime use AI apps, tend to do better on a weekly subscription. So that’s why like one of my AI apps, Anton, we had a subscription plan where it was a 7-day on the yearly, right? We then switched it. The payw wall changed
as well, but we switched to a 3-day only on the weekly. Seven. Now yearly does not have a trial anymore. So the before was the yearly had the 7-day trial. No other plans. We had the yearly, monthly, and weekly. No other plans had a trial. We then switched the payw wall to show weekly and yearly and did a three-day trial on the weekly. And then finally the sales started climbing cuz what we noticed with the 7-day trial on the yearly no people are activating the trial but nobody was paying. But now on the weekly people are activating trial and paying us too. So right it really
depends on the category of apps. I think most apps and even fitness apps what we’ve seen is monthly three months and yearly be the best like cadence the best three plans to have. I don’t know if you can share some I don’t want to get you in trouble. So you share what you want to share on that. I’m good. I think it’s a little bit outside of my like sort of circle of expertise. So okay, I’ll leave it to you. Well, let’s get back to this then. Octa Hub said, "How do you do ASO
for branded apps? They can change the title too often. What tactics they can use?" Uh yeah, I mean I think for branded apps, it’s a lot about it’s a lot about creative. It’s a lot about conversion optimization. you can still AB test short descriptions for example and it’s also a lot about I mean if you’re a big branded app if you’re established most likely there’s quite a lot of traffic sources coming in it’s not just ASO it’s not just organic search so it’s also
about alignment between the product page with the traffic source through custom product pages through analytics just like exchanging data between ASO and paid UA teams is just I guess like more granular deeper work but I if you want like a simple answer yeah you can’t change the title too much but it’s primarily then becomes about creative you know you can try to and I know it’s difficult but very often you can find really good results with like changing
the icon one good tactic is we’ve seen quite a lot of wins with big like super bigname apps where you actually add the brand name into the icon that is working quite often like quite often we’re seeing wins and the reason for that is probably what we just discussed at the very very start of the session like the visual keyword recognition if you’re searching for I don’t know like name me a big brand like Uber and you see Uber logo or like saying Uber I don’t know
maybe Uber is not a good case because like you actually know the logo but you got my point like you you recognize the brand name you want to download like the thing you’re not in the mood of like selecting between Uber and Lift you just want the thing and just showing that is exactly the app you’re searching for either in the icon or in the screenshots tends to work quite well. Yeah. No, we saw the same thing with I forget who it was a past interview guest. I forgot what the it was a like a crypto tracker.
Okay. It’s a popular crypto tracker. But when they added Bitcoin to the app icon, it was then it wasn’t their technical brand, but they saw an increase in downloads by test by just adding Bitcoin to that icon, too. I love that. Cool. All right. You want to move on to inapp events, Anton? I mean, I’m sorry, win back offers. Yeah, I think we’re good with inapp events on winback offers. Just Yeah, a quick thing. Maybe I can go to the next slide if I have a next slide.
Win back offers is a fairly fresh feature. It’s basically a way to re-engage your well re-engage returning users to provide a discount to people who are coming back to your app. Winback offers are very easy to set up. They might be a little complicated to set up to set up if you have a lot of SKUs on the store, but generally it’s an easy setup. you don’t need any creative assets for those um as far as I
remember. Maybe you need like one image. Point being like you just go to the console, you set them up and we’ve seen pretty good pretty good results out of that. Again, similar to inapp events, it’s one of those things where it’s easy to set up. It doesn’t require much. You can do it in like I don’t know an hour maybe. Um unless of course you have to like you know approve it with like half a company then it will take a while but the setup itself is quick and then yeah you can just track it over time see how
it works. Uh app store connect provides a win back eligibility report where you can actually get the numbers on like how many people claim those just see if it works for you. Uh, this is a really good ASO tool, you know, usually like ASO and revenue or like hard to connect. With this specific one, the direct connection, you know, you set it up, you see whether or not it works, and then you can play with like what kind of SKUs you promote, what are the discounts, you
can be fairly flexible with it. So, that’s just a good one. I wanted to bring it up because I think not everybody yet knows about that feature. So, keep that in mind. Agreed. I love it, man. Let me see. Was there anything else in this? Yep. I don’t think so. Yeah, I think that was it. All right. Well, Anton, we got some questions for you. I know I saved some, so let’s go into it. Yeah, let’s go. I don’t know if we can answer it here, but let’s try it here. LinkedIn user says, "Can you please explain custom store listings targeting specific
keywords?" Yeah, I can. So you can go on Google Play Console and when you create a custom store listing, there is a bunch of ways you can target them. You can create a custom store listing for your Google ads campaign. You can target them for returning or new users or you can create a custom store listing which will be connected only to specific search terms. So if you are let’s imagine you have like a an a game for kids like an educational game for kids and you have
math you have reading you have writing etc. You can only create a specific custom store listing which will have like creatives talking about math games for kids and you can connect that custom store listing only to math games for kids keywords. So that’s in a nutshell that’s what it is. Now you can create a bunch of like you can select a lot of keywords. The console actually suggests those keywords to you or you can also add your own keywords if the console
does not suggest them. So it’s a fairly flexible setup. Uh pretty easy to do. Also if you want to do one of those like it’s also one of the things some companies do like don’t redesign your whole page. Adding one or two new screenshots at the start is like enough. That’s fine. The rest can be as they are. Just, you know, a few screenshots at the start of the set might might make a huge difference. Yeah. And I think we just did it for one of the keywords that we were actually going after and we saw
a tremendous increase in downloads because we just created a custom store listing and optimize for that particular keyword, too. So, yeah, it’s it’s a no-brainer. I love how all your tactics, these seven tactics, they don’t take much time and frankly hands on a little bit of skill obviously, but if you know a little bit, you know how to best leverage those things, too. Yeah, it’s not too difficult. I love it. All right, hands on. What about this? Leonardo says, "For new apps, which KPIs do you focus on early, and what approaches do
you use? For each KPI, which milestones do you go after? Do you use app store category benchmarks, for example?" Oh, yeah. as one guy said like we need a bigger boat for this one. I’m not sure we can answer that shortly but okay. So one which KPIs you focus early on ASO is generally about visibility and conversion rate. So visibility is impressions conversion rate as well conversion rate by everything by traffic source and then you want to look at downloads as well. Um, if you just
launched, you want to look at first-time downloads. And that’s I mean, when you’re starting out, I think that’s enough. Like you just look at your impressions or store listing. What is it? Store listing visitors on Google Play. Uh, by traffic source on the app store, you look at impressions, uh, conversion rate, downloads by traffic source, by country. You know, you measure those. You just track them as you go. And then as you you know as you’re deeper as you as you are getting deeper into the apps life cycle then you
can add some extra KPIs to measure but that should be enough. As for the K uh benchmarks I’m actually not really using app store category benchmarks. I find them a little too generic. Um you know if you open productivity category it’s all kinds of apps in there like it’s a calculator, it’s an AI app, it’s a recipes app, it’s a bunch. So App Store I’m not really using that much. Google Play are a little more sort of you can make them a little
more niche, a little more specific to your own peer group as they call it. I do look into those sometimes when I need to kind of roughly benchmark my performance by traffic source versus competitive set. But as uh Thomas Petit said like your best benchmark is how you did yesterday. So just try to get better. You know your app is very specific. your traffic mix might be specific. You might be operating in a different local. It’s it’s very different
circumstances. It’s very case by case basis. If one app does better or worse, it doesn’t mean that you know that they’re doing ASO better. It just means that maybe they are not getting any paid traffic. Maybe all of it is branded or maybe vice versa or god knows what may be happening. So benchmarks are tricky. I think it’s valuable to look into those every once in a while, but don’t use that ongoingly as like a way to measure your performance. Just try to measure it versus your own historical performance. That’s a better indicator. Yes,
completely agree with that. So, what I would say, I agree with Anton. Look, Leonardo, if you don’t have downloads, it doesn’t really matter. So, what I would try to aim for is at least try to get to like some revolence of like 30 50 downloads a day so that you have some data. And then the KPIs I look at right after that downloads number one KPI install to paywall view. So you want to make sure 100% of your installers are seeing the payw wall views. Obviously payw wall and trial most apps have trial periods. Trial to paid LTV or average
order size. So which plan are they buying the most? And then obviously your LTV to CAC ratio is the last one. So each stage is important but downloads if you can get downloads we can fix the rest of the problem. So, I figure out downloads because I think that’s the most problem with most new apps, Leonardo. But then once you get to that point, then it’s really the install to pay wall view, pay wall view to trial, and trial to paid. Those are the things that I would be paying attention to and then eventually move on to LTV. And then
if you’re paying some ads, LTV to CAC ratio as well. All right, Anton, anything you want to add to that or next question? Next question. All right. I thought you know Ivon had a great insight on this. So it was not this slide. Let me bring it back. I think Ivon is talking about here. He says you can do number three with CPPs for ASA if you target them separately too. So if you’re using ASA campaigns are by the fact by the way
you’re you know you know a lot about ASA too. Apple search ads are you using any of this like on ASA the returning users? I’m not but I agree with Ivan. Yeah, you can definitely do that. Uh no no like this specific one on ASA I did not leverage myself but you know doable if you’re running Apple search ads if there is enough volume why not. Yeah plus like von this is free and they say you got to pay so I like the free option there.
Fair enough. Yeah. All right let’s see if we can answer this. Basa it’s a long question. And there’s a new update on Google Play. Anton, they’ve removed the square image and replaced with animated videos. I haven’t tried it yet, but because I’m currently learning how to do low files. Tonchu is shaking his head. I have no idea what’s going on. The requirement is JSON file. Have you seen or tried this update? Do you know any apps that are already implementing it? What is this thing? Uh, okay. So, no, I
did not use that yet. As far as I know, this update is like super fresh. Maybe they rolled it out like last week or like two weeks ago. It’s very very new. Basically, um the what what this is about is like when you create a promotional content card on Google Play, they’ve added an option to add an animation. So, it used to be you just add two images and that’s it. Now, you can add a animation. They basically added an animation and removed the need to upload like a square video.
Uh sorry, square image. So, you can add you can add an animation. I did not do that yet. Uh you can also on the app store you can also upload videos instead of images but less companies do that because it’s harder to produce a video. So yeah I mean try it out you know as always it’s all about testing. It’s a boring answer but like you know run your promotional content test. If you know how to create an animation do that. I still think that most companies will be sticking to images just because you can
pump them out way easier way quicker. But, you know, it’s a welcome update. One thing I was thinking yesterday is say all you want about Google, but like their work with Google Play Console is like pretty good compared to the App Store. Like there’s just quite a lot of useful things. They’ve added this little thing where like if you go to promotional content, there’s like little dots on top which say like out of five slots for featuring, you’ve only claimed like two. So, you like see right away
that you have three. It’s like such a small thing, but like just shows you that they kind of think about people doing ASO. So that’s I guess for an ASO manager, that’s just something things I appreciate. No, I agree with you too. Giving my props to Google here. Yes. And like why I actually see down downloads by keyword. Thank you Google. Come on Apple. That seems obvious. Anton, we couldn’t even AB test for the longest time on Apple. And even now we can and it still Yeah. And it still does not work even when we can’t. I know. I
haven’t seen any like screenshot AB test. Most screenshot AB tests are like the same. There’s very few where I’m like, “Whoa, it won.” I feel you. Yeah. All right. Business says, “We’re we’re building a few multi-tools to quickly create app clones about one every 3 days, then boost them with ASO and ASA planning around 70 clones. Is this strategy worth it?” I don’t know. you’ll I don’t know
business marketing and skills. It’s uh on some personal level I’m just not a fan of that because I like apps that deliver value and they’re like new and you know there’s like real people behind them just like pure clones boosted with ASO and ASA something in me does not like that. But like in terms of tech technically like whether or not it will work I guess like if you’re really good in ASO and you have a solid budget for Apple search ads yeah you can boost those apps and probably you know optimize your pay wall and make some
money. But that’s just not the business model I’ve I’ve ever been a part of. So can’t say much. Personally, I wouldn’t do it too. Like it’s up to you. But this is feels like 2015 when reskinning was a lot. And I used to take part in that way back in the day. But it’s just way more competitive now. And I rather for me Anton rather cup focus. like I’d rather have like don’t say 70 clones, but can you find you know a good 15 and then out of that 15 can you find the really the two or three that are going to probably
drive your revenues forward and I’ve talked to Whoops sorry I unmuted you but the I’ve talked to a couple of different indie app bootstrap founders that found success and have a big portfolio and I was you know I point blank asked them I was like hey you have a lot of apps like how many of those apps are making like legitimate money and it is that 8020 rule. It’s 20% of all his apps are making like 80% of the revenue. So that 100%. I love it. All right, Anton. Well, let’s
get into our app audit section of our show. And I know there’s a few more questions. I will get to them, but we got to do some ad we got to do some app audits and we got to do some dad [Music] jokes. All right, Anton. I got some good ones here that my daughter prepared for me. It was my This was part of my present. So, I have Yeah. Whenever it’s like Whenever it’s a handwritten note, I’m getting I’m getting nervous. You should be my friend. Okay. So, since I
know you’re nervous, what will we say? We’re playing for coffee, some drinks. What? Loser. Loser owes the winner some coffee or drinks. Yeah. How about that? Okay. Let’s try that. Let’s try that. I’m not a You know, I was thinking like I was very nervous about the dead jokes. Uh, I’m like like I’m I’m sort of like a wine taster where I like I can appreciate a good one. I’m not good enough to make one, but you know, I just I just find them on the internet. All right, Anton. So, do you want to go
first or do you want to go second? I mean, listen, it’s uh I don’t know if I told you before, I’m I’m a pretty big uh music fan, like rap music fan. I’ve been in New York two years ago. Yeah. And I’m coming into this restaurant and I see the the legendary 50 Cent. And you know what he did? What? 58. I love it. Okay. Yeah. Look guys, we want you to vote. So get get ready. Anton, why did the fisherman order the
halibit? I know why. Just for the hell of it. There it is. All right. Just for the hell of it. All right. All you got to do if you want a free indie app Santa promotion worth $300, all you have to do do is vote for your favorite dad joke. Put S in the comments if you thought my joke was better and put a in the comment. It’s if you thought Anton jokes was better. And my buddy Isantu is going to pull up the
winner and give you a free Indie App Santa promo as well. All right, here we go. Let’s get into our app audits. Anton, we’ve got this from Dominique. He’s got a workout app that’s gified. He wants help on ASO and keywords. So, he’s got two reviews. Anton, what where would you start? You got to get more reviews. I mean, yeah, two ratings, 2.5. Ratings are
important for an app. Um, try to look into, well, first of all, the app quality, like why the rating is so low. Is the app actually good? Uh but then in terms of optimization, I guess try to optimize your rating prompt in a way where it’s visible by a lot of people during their like happy moment. So try to get more ratings. Um workout quest, gamified gym, gamified workouts, level up. I mean, the keywords look okay. Uh I’m not
sure how many people search for like level up. Um maybe you can just do better uh better keyword research. Um the icon is I guess good enough. You can AB test it if you have Google Play. Uh the app is very small to rating. So you probably don’t you probably don’t have a lot of traffic. So if you’ll be
AB testing anything just like apply that stuff on the store and see whether or not it works. And if it doesn’t just go back to the original screenshots. I would. Yeah. I mean, screenshots are very basic. Like, if you’re a niche app, you want to stand out somehow. This app is, it looks pretty clinical. Like, it’s not also gamified. Like, you’re all about gamifying, all about excitement, you know, try to look up some exciting, maybe even go into like just see what games are doing. Like, try to bring more color, more, you know, engagement, make
it look less clinical. like this is supposed to be an exciting gamified experience, but the screenshots are not. They’re just not um they’re very plain. So, I would work on the screenshots. I can is actually okay. Like, if you want to go for this like kind of workout warrior type of thing, fine. Um and maybe look into the keyword optimization, just at this stage, you know, try to make sure that you target as many relevant keywords as possible
within that like niche. It’s it feels like a niche app, which is not a bad thing. You might get successful in a niche, but you know, I would do some iterations on the keyword optimization as well. I like it. What’s your favorite way to do keyword research? I’m just going on the ASO tool. Um, your favorite one, Anton, that you want to talk about? I like app tweak. It’s just the fastest. It’s Yeah. Isn’t the fastest. It’s
uh it has all the features you need really and I’m I’m also just used to working with it. App follow is pretty good as well. Uh so app tweak app follow one of those two. Uh I used to I think we had like sensor tower they have ASO features as well. That one I did not like. It’s very like just the UI part of it is very hard to use. Yeah. You support app tweak. App tweak is good or
check app follow. Appollow has a really good AI review AI review reply features as well. So that’s interesting. Yeah, I love app follow as well, especially when it comes to keyword research. And so I don’t know what you think about this, but like let’s say you were doing keyword research for this. Do you how do you like to use app follow? I can sign into app tweak too, but I would love to Yeah, I mean first first of all I would just like
literally either brainstorm or just like add all of the keywords I think are important like okay workout gamified workout like whatever you have uh for that specific app I would just add those then I would go competitor by competitor tag some of their keywords as well u then I think quite a lot of tools I don’t remember if app follow has that I know app tweak has that it has those like AI sort of mix and match features where you can add a bunch of keywords
and then it like gives you a lot of longtail keyword suggestions. So you just like you compile this massive backlog and then you go through it. You filter it out. You actually leave the keyword which are relevant. You remove the ones which are irrelevant and then within those you start digging deeper and deeper and deeper unless you land at like a short list of the most important keywords you want to target. For a small app, you probably want to target keywords which are like
uh longer tail and have sort of small to medium volume of traffic. You will not be competitive for the the the biggest keywords like this app will not rank for a keyword workout just because y just because it won’t. Um but for a small niche one, you have a better chance. So yeah, uh for indie apps, you know, try to look for those longer tail um medium volume keywords like try to find that perfect perfect spot for you. Where is it in app tweak, Anton?
Where did you find that that keyword where like you can go to the AI? I want to figure that out. Can I I’m saying I know where it’s on. Uh oh, yeah, you’re on. Yeah, I’m up now. So, you need to add like an app and then into go into their like keyword. Let me try to find his app. What is this called? Workout quest. But workout quest or is this like should I So, I did gamified workout right here and I got Walker. Maybe I should go into Walker. You can add any
like if we just want to check the feature just go into any app. Walker. Go into Walker. Let’s see. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Okay. Come on. Do you want me to hit follow? Yeah. So, uh I’m not sure you Well, yeah, try that. Okay. Then if you go into keywords on the left side, yeah, keywords and then yeah, on top you see keyword suggestions, you have metadata, top rank, top installs,
da da da da, and then on the right there’s like AI generator. So, you can click on that and it gives you a bunch of ideas. I think based on the metadata you can also do like keyword clusters. There is a shuffler thing like which is all the way to the right hand side where you can put like fitness gamified workout abs and it will just mix and match those keywords as much as possible to give you like multiple variations. So usually what you want to do is like for
the sake of speed you can just click on the right hand side of like analyze all just create like a big big uh list of keywords and then stage two you like sift through them you remove the ones which are irrelevant the yeah see like there’s a bunch of things there’s a bunch of things okay I’m glad I did this see Anton I’m very selfish I just want to know I want to know how to do stuff like That’s That’s You’re welcome. Yeah. Thank you for this, man. I want to
see what dude and I can see the live search. Is this branded or not? Fantasy hike, but the conquer challenge, too. It’s branded, but again, like fantasy hike is generic enough, so you can also target that. Yeah. And I I love finding like tools like this where you can find different keywords that they I have never thought about. So, I love it. Okay. Thank you for that. AI generator app tweak. Shout out app tweak. All right, this is good. Awesome. Okay, anything else on
the Dominic that you want to recommend to him? No, I really want them to like have more reviews to be honest and better ones. I love it. Okay, Sanji, how how are you doing? Are you ready for to pick the winner and tell us who won the dad joke round? You need more time? He’s ready. Okay. All right, Sanji, come on in then. or do you I’m pretty I mean I’m pretty confident in mine to be honest. All
right, you first. Come on. Give Give a little bit more of a dramatic effect. Who won that round? The dad joke round. The winner is Ste. Yes. Sorry. What was the score? I Oh, very close. Very close. Close enough. I’m still upset. All right. All right. So, for all those who voted Oh, I got to remove mine.
We’re going to pick a winner. And Sonu is going to spin. He’s put all your guys’ name into this spinning wheel thing. Go ahead, Asantu. Give it a spin. Yes. Let’s go. Let’s go. And it’s Marco again. Marco. Marco again. All right, Marco. There you go, Marco. I think he’s won two a couple of times, but congratulations, Marco. I feel like this spinning wheel favors the same
people as you, but congratulations, Marco. I know, Jordy was so close. So close. All right, cool. Let’s move on to the next. You got any more, Anton? You want to redeem yourself or should we move on to the next app? Let me open my notes. I may have one. All right. I know you don’t like they have I mean I just want to do it for Jordy to be honest. Okay. If they have like another another shot at winning
whatever they can win. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I have one more. I have one more. All right. Let’s go. One more then. You want me to? No, no, no. I’ll go. I’ll go Steve. Um you know I got fired from the keyword factory. Oh yeah. How come? Yeah. They said I wasn’t putting enough shifts. All right. Okay, I like it. Enough shifts. All right, guys. And get it. Get the voting right. It’s just S or A. It’s simple. It’s our names. S or A. I’m trying to make it easier for you. Anton,
I was wondering why the Frisbee kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then it hit me. There you go. All right. Steve, A for Anton. That’s it. No B’s. Okay. But I don’t know there was B’s coming in, but that’s all we need. I like says, “Hey, Steve, can you please talk about the best community chat platform for suggestions on new apps and what users would like to see in an app?” You got any of your favorites?
I think less about the I think it’s less about the platform and more about the community where you are. Yeah. Like there are some communities on Slack. Uh there is actually an ASO community by feature called ASO stack. You can try to apply to join that one. It’s fairly big. It’s ASO focused, but you know there’s a lot of people and the community is fairly active. But yeah, I don’t know about the platforms. I feel like it’s more about just like the specific community of engaged people who would be
open to give you some feedback. Yeah, I like it. Thank you, Nurex, for the birthday wishes. Matthew, great work guys. Got getting Marco. Getting downloads is so critical. Leonardo says, “How do CSLs, custom store listings affect ASO? Does including different keywords in your Google CSL description affect your rankings for those keywords?” I have to be honest, I did not test it like that. So, usually custom store listings for me, I see them more as like a visual conversion rate
optimization tool. So, by default, I’m like not really playing with keywords too much there. I don’t think it will affect your ranking too much but to be honest like I did not really test so I don’t want to I think we’ve tested some things and then it’s I can’t say with complete confidence but I do that’s how we normally create these custom store listings it is for those keywords Anton and we’re seeing pretty decent success but that’s it it’s also in line with your conversion rate optimization
obviously the I that’s the thing I’m not sure it’s because you target those keywords I think it’s because the way for the algorithm to know if your app is relevant for the keyword is how well people convert for it. So if you create a page that converts well for the keyword taxi uh conversion rate goes up. It’s just a signal back to the algorithm that like hey you know the app is getting traffic there are downloads and the conversion rate is high then you might increase your ranking. So it’s
less about targeting that keyword in your metadata and more about yeah conversion rate optimization on the keyword level for that specific search term. Completely agree. All right, let’s see one more joke before we go to the next app. Zenap says, “What do you guys think about Apple’s new launch on AI summary on reviews? Do you think it’ll affect organic rankings?” I think it will affect conversion more than organic rankings because on Apple apps do not like as far as I’m
aware your app reviews are not indexed on the app store. So whatever summaries there will be they’ll be visible on your product page which means that people who come to the product page and see them might or might not read them and so that might affect conversion rate for them. I don’t see how that will affect rankings unless there will be some changes to the algorithm. Okay, I like it. All right, let’s get into Sandor’s app. The oops, sorry, Sanji. Let me
remove that. Add this to stage. Here we go. So, she or he’s got an app that is a fun fact did you know type of thing. You can discover new facts every single day. It looks like a pretty simple app. Wants help on some ASO and onboarding and payroll. So, we’ll get into the app as well, but anything on the ASO front you want to highlight. Maybe even here what what I would say, Anton, what I learned from you is like maybe put facts if that’s the keyword you’re going after, put fun facts in the icon. Yeah, try
putting fun facts. I actually like the icon is like playful enough. It’s, you know, it’s a game, so it it looks good. Fun fact, did you know? I think there’s definitely room for improvement in terms of conversion, uh, keyword optimization. I don’t think did you know is a keyword. Maybe no is a keyword, but like did you I don’t think about. Yeah, I don’t think it is. So, if it’s like fun facts guessing game or guessing party game, that might be a better fit. Um, so I would look into
that. Um, and then the again the screenshots like if it’s a party game had some images of, you know, people around the table enjoying their time, you know, playing that game. Screenshots themselves are not too bad. Um, I don’t understand why everything is in bold except the word new. I guess you wanted to like you wanted to highlight discover facts every day, but because it’s the whole caption, like everything’s highlighted. So, um, not maybe not do
that. I would just honestly I would make them a little more playful, a little more like aspirational. So, add some photos, you know, make it seem fun. Also, on Google Play, screenshots appear three times smaller than on the App Store. So, if you open the product page from the Android phone, the captions will be barely legible. You will just not be able to read anything. So, what you want to make sure is that people can understand what your app is.
So, try to make either your, I don’t know, captions larger or change the orientation, you know, make your screenshots landscape. You can also make them like squareish um and test that. But overall, I was gonna show it off. Fun fact already, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go. Fun facts. So, Oh, yeah. It’s actually it’s actually now it’s ranking it’s ranking number four. So this what you mean by the screenshots like barely
barely they’re they’re pretty small like you can’t really read what the app is about. If the if like this the first screenshot even if you can’t read anything but there would be like a bunch of people around the table having fun showing phones they’ll be like oh okay I guess I kind of you know get a sense of what the app is. So you could do that. Um again landscape might work better. If you go for example to frettics page, we use landscape screenshots on Google Play, but we use portrait on the app store. That is for a reason. I was gonna
ask that, Anton. I like that. Oh, see, I like that. Quite a lot of apps do that. Uh, and like eventually gives you more space to, you know, have a larger copy, like zoom in on some UI, just easier to read. Uh, tends to be a better fit for for Android. I like it. I’m going to steal this one. I never know how to do screenshots on Android like we can take it offline.
I’ll give you a few ideas. Ah, dang it. All right. Anyways, let’s go into the app because they put in it. Hey, ask for what you want, Dominic. You just wanted ASO and keyword, not onboarding payroll. So, for the sake of time, I’m just going to go through since Endor asked for it. I’m going to go through this. Did you know studies have shown that individuals who engage in continuous learning are more likely to Okay, great. Wants a reminder. This feels like that motivation app that I’ve done. So, I’m going to hit allow for now. Uh, start fun conversations. Have a fun break.
Yeah, I like that. What topics do you like? What do you like? Uh, let’s do history. Business. History, too. You know what? Let’s take business out of it. Nature. Sure. Geography, food, why not? Sports, culture. Okay, I did a lot. Let’s see. Good onboarding. I’m liking everything. Okay, now we got the payw
wall. Yeah, not bad. I say the first screen is like super textheavy where where it was like the fact I I get the point like it’s a fun fact app. you want to start to start with a fun fact, but I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, it was a lot of word words. You could have broken it up to three different screens. I’m almost finding that if you you know, like if you have long text, just break it up and it’s working a little bit better. So, I’m going to show off this because we do
have some data now, Anton, that I will share with you here on this pay wall since using the same type of payw wall that Blink has popularized, right? We’re seeing this way of doing stuff is better. So I think on Android it would work pretty well for you Sandor. I don’t have enough data to say what I think is what I’m telling you. So just lead with one screen that says hey we want to offer you don’t even have to put three days but we want to offer the our funfax app for free to you so that you can
learn and try it out. They try for free. We’ll remind you even if you don’t do this I think it’ll be fine but you can say I will remind you so try for free again. Then you hit them with your payw wall, but then optimize your payw wall so that you can really highlight these features because this feels like too much text is going on. So I would almost just break it up and talk about the free trial right here, that one screen, and then use this last payw wall screen to really highlight some of the benefits you have. And then you could, what we’ve
noticed is continue for free works probably pretty well. That’s probably better than start free trial. But on Android, we saw start free trial work better than continue. But I think continue for free probably work would work better than start free trial. But anyways, you’re kind of blending the both things there. Oops. Sorry. Wrong. But what do you think, Anton? Anything else you want to add on to this onboarding and pay wall? No, I think you got it all. All right. Looks Otherwise, it looks really good. I mean, $10 on Android, not bad. The only other thing
is maybe think about adding discounts, especially on Android. Most people don’t want to pay, so maybe add some discounting features in here, too. Oh, this is a pretty fun fact, Anton. The Eiffel Tower was originally intended for Barcelona. The Spanish city thought it was too ugly, so Gatou pitched it to Paris instead. That’s awesome. Good to know. Yeah. What would it be called then? I guess the same because it’s the guy’s name, right? Yeah, it’s the guy’s name. Yeah. Always
want to call it his name. All right, Anton. Good. It It’s a This fact is way more fun than the first have than the first fact you had on your on boarding. Yeah, that’s a good idea. An ancient Rome people put toast in their wine for health. Starting the tradition of raising a toast. Oh, these are actually pretty fun. Oh, all right. We can just spend like half an hour scrolling through those. It should be like a new section. That’s fun.
Raising the When when you hopefully owe me my drink and we will drink to something where we both go, “Ah, okay. If we both do it, we drink.” Yeah. Nice. Only 10% of the population is left-handed. Okay. Huh. Whatever. All right. Yeah. The currency in Vietnam is solely composed of paper money with no coins. Okay. I’ll drink. What do you think, Anton? If it was only If it was only coins, that would be fun. Okay. Yeah.
Okay. Deal. Good drinking game. There you go, guys. That’s a good one. Fun facts drinking game that we just made up for you. All right, that’s a good one. Isn’t I win it all or did Anton redeem himself? Yeah. So, the score is eight and three. And Steve, you won this round as well. Yay. Where’s my job? I’ll give it to you, Steve. yours will. I also think I mispronounced a few words in mine, so you know, I didn’t make it easy for
myself. There you go, Anton. I’ll give you that sound effect. All right, Anton. All right, you let’s pick one more winner, shall we? Sure, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s remove Marco’s name. Marco, that’s enough. We’re rooting for Jordy, right? Come on, Jordy. All right, I’ll take Nora. She voted. All right, Nora. There you go, Nora. Congrats, Nora. It is. Congrats. So,
Nora, just email me, stevemasters.com. And then the other winner was Marco. I already know Marco. You can email me as well. Sorry, Jordy. We will we’ll hook you up with something. How about that? All right. Just email us and then we’ll hook you up with something since you seem disappointed and I hate disappointing people. All right, Nora. Nora says, “Yay.” All right, cool. Anton, anything I missed that you want to make sure we talk about before we say goodbye and finally let you go on with your day this holiday, by the way. No, honestly had a
lot of fun. Um, I hope it was useful to people. We shared some, you know, some good takes, some insights. So, it’s just a pleasure. Steve, thanks for inviting me. No, Anton’s a great follow and a lot, one of the main reasons I f I reached out to him was he shares so much great content on LinkedIn. So, his LinkedIn profile is linked up into the YouTube description into your favorite podcast app. Definitely go follow him if you haven’t done so. And then, yeah, he’s just a a lot of great content
coming from the ASO standpoint as well. So, recommend that. And then check out Freletics if you’re into working out and checking that out as well. 100%. Anton, anywhere else you want to send the the audience, they want to connect with you. No, it’s good. Go to my LinkedIn. I have a website, 41 Anton. might be easier to find me. Yeah, 41A Anton is easy, too. There it is. All that is linked up in your favorite podcast and YouTube description as well. All right, next
week it might we’re going to try to see if we’re there are other people guests, but it might just be you, me, you, and me. And so, I’ll kind of break down some of the things that we’ve been working on, but if you got any questions, maybe we treat it like an AMA AMA as well. It’s on you. And we’ll get join up. We’ll send you a link. Ask me anything you want and then we’ll kind of break down everything just for you as well.