My presentation at Mobile Developer Summit Oct 16, 2015 in Bangalore India around choosing your app icon colors, writing an app store description, growth hacking the App Store and more.

1. What I Learned
Studying the App
Store
Stuart Hall
@stuartkhall
Co-founder & Chief Bot

2. + many more

3. 3

4. 4
Secrets of the
App Store

6. Market

7. Capturing The Market

8. 8
“For the average app, search actually makes up
the vast majority of installs,”
“12 percent of daily active users (DAU) search for
apps daily, 50 percent of DAU search for apps
weekly and Google sees six million unique phrases
searched monthly”
— Ankit Jain, Google Play
App store search

9. App store search
• Average app store rating
• Rating/review volume
• Download and install counts
• Uninstalls
• App usage statistics
• Growth trends weighted toward recency
• Keyword density of the app's landing page
Ranking = fn(Rating, Rating Count, Installs, Trends)
https://moz.com/blog/app-store-rankings-formula-deconstructed-in-5-mad-science-experiments

10. SEO
• Still important
• Landing pages
• “Best app to do X”, “download app for Y”

11. App Store Features

15. Featured App Age
• 6 days to 2382 days old
• Median 1.3 years!
• 21% launched < 1 month ago

16. App Store Features
• Stores want to feature you
• Connections - Events like WWDC, Google IO
• Remind them - a lot
• Great app
• Great reviews
• New tech

17. PR
• Connect with journalists
• Help them
• Conferences & meet ups
• Don’t use templates
• Create a story

18. 18
Mailing Lists
• Collect on:
• Landing pages
• Within apps
• Blog
• Every email helps

19. 19
Cross Promote
• Multiple apps
• Affiliate program

20. 20
Social
• At the right moment
• Don’t forget email

21. 21
Word of Mouth
• Successful apps nail this
• Comes back to making an app that’s so
amazing users want to become the cool one
that tells their friend first.
• Wow moments

22. 22
Paid downloads / Advertising
• Effective when:
1. When you are trying to get early users for
feedback.
2. You have reached massive scale (e.g. Candy
Crush, Clash of Clans) and have a proven
monetisation model.
3. You are a platform selling a SaaS offering.

23. 23
Top Charts
• Downloads
• Ratings & reviews

24. Top Charts - Free Categories

25. Top Charts - Paid Categories

26. Top Charts - Grossing Categories

27. Top Charts - Free Age

28. Top Charts - Paid Age

29. Top Charts - Grossing Age

30. Top Charts - App Age
Free Paid Grossing
Median Age (days) 1013 887 658
Median Age (years) 2.8 2.4 1.8

31. Converting App Store Page Visitors

32. 32
App Icon
• First thing a user sees when they land
• Great icons pop
• Memorable
• Makes you want to tap

33. 33

34. App Icons
Analysing

35. App Icons
Free Apps

36. Paid Apps
App Icons

37. Newest Apps
App Icons

38. Google Play
App Icons

39. 39

40. App Icons - What Colour?
• The conformist - red or blue
• I like to be different - green
• The rebel - pink (sorry, salmon) or purple

41. App Store Descriptions
• The first few lines are key
• Social proof
• Tell a story
• Localize
• Experiment

42. Great App Store Descriptions
Clear

43. Airbnb

44. Localise : Most reviews by country
Country Major Language(s) % Of Reviews
USA English 21.64%
China Chinese 17.38%
Japan Japanese 6.00%
United Kingdom English 5.30%
Russia Russian 4.06%
Germany German 3.90%
Canada English & French (21%) 3.62%
France French 3.32%
Italy Italian 3.05%
Brazil Portuguese 2.70%
Australia English 2.56%
Mexico Spanish 2.38%
Korea, Republic Of Korean 2.04%

45. Most reviews by language
Languages % of Reviews
English 33.33%
Chinese 19.64%
Japanese 6.00%
Spanish 5.03%
French 4.41%
German 4.36%
Russian 4.06%
Italian 3.10%
Portugese 2.70%
Korean 2.04%

46. Localising
• Languages You Must Do
• English and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) - 53%
Coverage
• Second Round
• Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese
and Korean, this will get you to almost 85%
• The Long Tail
• Thai, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Malay, Danish, Vietnamese
etc

47. Screenshots
• Extremely important
• Pick your best screens

48. Screenshots - Annotating

50. Annotating

51. Device Frames

52. Device Frames

53. Orientation

54. Number of Screenshots

55. App Names
• Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine
• Minecraft - Pocket Edition
• SoundCloud: music & audio - discover and stream
songs, artists, podcasts and news
• TracknShare - A universal life management diary
tracker to journal, track, analyze, improve & share
chronic health symptoms, such as pain and sleep,
my work life, food, weight, wellness & the
Quantified Self.

56. App Names
Total Apps Surveyed 8400
Max Words 49
Median Words 4
Average Words 5.4
Maximum Characters 255
Minimum Characters 2
Median Characters 24
Average Characters 35.2

57. App Names - Words

58. App Names - Characters

59. App Names

60. App preview
• Important to get featured
• Look at great examples
• It’s not as hard as it seems

62. 62http://www.slideshare.net/ASOBarcamp/asobarcamp-2-ratings-and-reviews-aso-impact-and-leverage-of-review-optimisation-thomas-petit-8fitcom
App reviews

63. 63
Reviews and ratings are a very
strong signal for us on Google Play
– Ankit Jain, Google Play

65. App reviews - improving them
• Great UI & UX.
• Test, test and test some more
• Send to beta testers
• Get notified when your app crashes
• Check your app before you release it
• Don’t get slack with a ‘quick’ update

66. App reviews - listen

67. App reviews - listen

68. App reviews - listen

69. Review workflows

70. App reviews - replying
• Reach out to those having issues

71. One Market or All?

73. Top Grossing Apps
Count %
All Countries 8 4%
USA & China (Excluding All) 4 2%
USA & Australia (Excluding All) 103 52%
China & Australia (Excluding All) 6 3%
USA Only 85 43%
China Only 182 91%
Australia Only 83 42%

74. One market or all?
• You can be successful in a single market
• Localize?
• Test a market

76. https://appbot.co/books
Secrets of the
App Store
Secrets of the App Store - Free eBook
@stuartkhall
http://blog.appbot.co