You’re most likely rushed by way of your final tasks in 2021 on a superb notice. The top of the yr is a time with excessive seasonality results on the App Store and Google Play; relying on the sector you’re in, you’ll count on both a rush or a a lot calmer interval. With insights from our upgraded Market Intelligence interface, this weblog will show you how to be taught the next:

Table of Contents

• App Seasonality Trends
• buy keyword app installs
• buy app installs online
• buy ios app ratings

What’s seasonality on the App Store and Google Play?

Seasonality on the app Store refers to fluctuations in person habits, akin to site visitors, spending, and conversions, brought on by time-based exterior components. As with every market, app shops are impacted by seasonality and its consequential modifications in person habits.

For instance, clients would possibly care extra about offers and reductions round holidays like Black Friday and Christmas, making these occasions prime alternatives for buying apps to advertise their vacation promotions. Equally, clients would possibly care extra about getting in form, shedding pounds, or hiring a coach throughout the weeks main as much as and following New Years’, because of their New Yr’s resolutions. Journey apps, conversely, might even see a downtick in site visitors throughout the winter vacation season when many individuals are spending time at dwelling with household; however those self same journey apps would possibly discover natural curiosity for his or her product rise in the direction of the top of spring, because the summer time season approaches.

Past the time of yr, there are additionally category-specific seasons; for instance, streaming providers would possibly observe a selected present whereas it airs and need to advertise of their screenshots whereas a season is dwell. Equally, apps within the sports activities class would possibly select to characteristic basketball throughout the NBA season, soccer throughout the NFL season, and the Olympics main as much as and throughout the occasion of their app creatives.

Finally, incorporating seasonality into your product web page facilities round curating your content material to match your clients’ particular pursuits at any given time.

Why does seasonality matter to App Store Optimization?

An app’s product web page is commonly the final level of contact clients have earlier than deciding whether or not or to not obtain the app; each factor in your product web page has the potential to make a distinction in a person’s choice. Failing to align your app’s product web page with exterior advertising campaigns and seasonal choices represents an enormous missed alternative to spherical out a cohesive advertising expertise at a important touchpoint for patrons.

The affect of optimizing your product web page to replicate seasonality may be seen within the actions of the highest 10 “buying” class spots throughout the 2020 Black Friday and Christmas season:

• Firstly of November, buying apps that ranked within the prime 10 had been the identical as in earlier months. By the twenty ninth, nonetheless, half of these apps not ranked within the prime 10 (Poshmark, eBay, Shein, Arrive, and OfferUp), as many opponents had risen in rankings, fueled by Black Friday and vacation key phrases and campaigns.
• Whereas each Amazon and Walmart didn’t make investments particularly in ASO, they each ran seasonal advertising campaigns and made positive to align their app Storepages with their holiday-branded imagery. They each maintained their prime positions in class rankings.
• Greatest Purchase and Adidas invested extra particularly in ASO modifications, as they up to date their screenshots, promotional textual content, and descriptions to replicate their seasonal campaigns on the App Store. In consequence, each of those apps noticed their highest progress in downloads (Adidas +582% and Greatest Purchase +454%) between the fifteenth and twenty ninth of November, touchdown them within the prime 10 class spots main into December.
• Apps that dropped out of the highest 10 class spots throughout the vacation weeks by and enormous missed out on alternatives to align their app product web page with their seasonal advertising campaigns throughout a excessive progress interval.

As seen with Amazon and Walmart who maintained their positions, aligning an app’s product web page to match or resonate with its seasonal campaigns is a crucial piece in delivering a cohesive person expertise and sustaining class rankings. Taking the additional step to optimize your app’s metadata and have season-specific content material creates a singular alternative to develop natural site visitors and improve visibility throughout the vacation season, as seen with Greatest Purchase and Adidas.

Find out how to get your app prepared for the vacation season

1. Analysis seasonal themes, offers, in-app content material, and so on

Step one in getting your app prepared for the vacation season is analysis. Think about your alternatives:

• Are you planning to run any promotions, like Black Friday offers or vacation reductions?
• Are you updating your in-app options to replicate the vacation season, akin to winter environments, visible options, or holiday-themed challenges?
• Do you could have holiday-specific content material to supply, like vacation music or films?
• What has your competitors accomplished to face out up to now throughout the vacation season? What potential alternatives are there to face out towards them?

2. Think about learn how to replace your app metadata for the vacations

When you lock down what you propose to supply, contemplate the modifications you’d wish to make. Icons and screenshots are extremely seen and impactful in serving to apps stand out; copy modifications are particularly influential in including new key phrases and optimizing your metadata for the vacation season:

Icons

Icons are extremely seen belongings you’ll be able to replace throughout the holidays as they permit your app to face out amongst its prime class opponents. Icon modifications are significantly impactful on Google Play, the place solely the icon and duplicate seem within the search outcomes.

Screenshots

App screenshots ought to spotlight your app’s worth proposition and key options; optimizing these photographs is important for app installs and standing out towards opponents. Screenshots could be a great spot to visually replace your app with season-specific content material. You’ll be able to utterly refresh your creatives like Rowme did throughout Black Friday and Christmas final yr, or you may make refined modifications, like how Starbucks merely up to date the featured drinks proven in its first screenshot:

Rowme up to date its screenshots and featured photographs for Black Friday and Christmas.

Whereas Starbucks didn’t make an enormous change to its photographs, the group switched the featured drinks of their graphics in addition to some copy (“This approach to holi-yay”) to replicate Starbucks’ seasonal choices with out detracting from its conventional branding.

Copy & Key phrases

Incorporating key phrases like “Christmas”, “Black Friday”, “presents”, and so on. to your metadata may be significantly influential for buying apps throughout the vacation season. That stated, until your app has a selected deal with holidays like “Christmas” or “Black Friday”, concentrating on key phrases like “vacation”, “Christmas”, or “Santa” probably won’t work effectively in your app.

For instance, should you looked for “Christmas music” on the app Store throughout the month of December 2020, mainstream music apps weren’t on the prime of the rankings. Regardless of selling holiday-themed music to their clients inside their app listings, their general class positioning prevented them from placing an excessive amount of emphasis on a selected vacation inside their app metadata with out dropping their place of their foundational market.

In such instances, it might not be worthwhile in your app so as to add vacation content material to your key copy slots (title, key phrase record, and so on); as a substitute, you would replace your screenshots and creatives with holiday-themed content material, and spotlight vacation gives in your promotional textual content or brief description area, as each may be up to date with out considerably impacting your general ASO technique.

Promotional Textual content

Promotional textual content is a robust potential lever to drag with iOS, as you’ll be able to change the textual content everytime you’d like with out updating your app and having to resubmit it to the App Store. Promotional textual content will not be listed however may be helpful to advertise gives that maybe don’t draw back out of your major app’s function and key phrases used within the title and subtitle/brief description (a great way to advertise particular offers, options, and so on). Think about including a way of urgency to your seasonal replace, akin to “countdown to christmas” or “flash sale for black friday”.

3. Plan (KPIs to observe, A/B checks, localization, and so on)

Subsequent, plan. The vacations can get loopy quick; individuals take off time for work, schedules are packed, and customers’ ears are stuffed with advertising campaigns and promotions. Planning your questions, copy, creatives, and timeline is important to efficiently navigating the vacation season. Ensuring you have your KPIs locked down prematurely is equally necessary so you’ll be able to analyze the efficiency of any modifications you make. Be sure you have solutions to those questions:

• What do you need to change in your product web page?
• When will you make these modifications?
• What do you hope to see from these modifications? (Elevated conversion charge, elevated rankings, elevated natural site visitors, and so on).
• Are you working any A/B checks?
• Will your modifications be localized to completely different markets?
• When will you are taking down your vacation modifications and what’s going to they alter to?

4. Make seasonal modifications to your App Store Optimization

Lastly, it’s time to execute your seasonal modifications. Listed below are a few issues to bear in mind alongside the way in which:

Cohesion

No matter whether or not you make plenty of modifications to your app’s product web page or only a couple, it’s essential to align your app web page along with your general seasonal marketing campaign messages. Assembly buyer expectations issues; because of this when you’ve got a social marketing campaign with a seasonal provide or imagery, then your app icon and screenshots ought to replicate the model imagery and messaging of your exterior campaigns. Thus, when customers click on by way of to your app itemizing, your product web page will ship on its guarantees and replicate the vacation imagery that led them to your itemizing within the first place.

As seen in this case examine of Deezer throughout the 2019 vacation season, Deezer labored with French artists to cowl a number of well-known Christmas songs and created a playlist referred to as ‘Le Grand Noël’, which it launched alongside updating its app creatives to align with a broader vacation advertising marketing campaign executed outdoors the App Store. This marketing campaign was significantly profitable and Deezer’s app downloads elevated by 300+ further installs every day, for 2 weeks straight.

Deezer up to date its app screenshots for the Christmas vacation, and importantly, matched these creatives to its Christmas TV marketing campaign working on the time.

Relevance

Seasonal updates are an amazing alternative to shine throughout the vacation season, however be certain the content material stays trustworthy and related to the expertise and worth of your app; merely tossing a couple of snowflakes into your screenshots is unlikely to make a big distinction, so don’t waste your time on meaningless modifications. Ideally, should you use vacation imagery or messaging to steer individuals to your app, you’ll have truly integrated some associated seasonal options, content material, or promotion into your app atmosphere as effectively. Altering your textual content and pictures to be holiday-focused with out reflecting any modifications in your app can simply come throughout as an inexpensive advertising ploy if you’re not thoughtful of product relevance in your updates.

Testing

In the event you’re uncertain about updating your creatives for the vacation season, run A/B checks (or A/B/B checks) on Google Play or the App Store to check out your seasonal messaging on a smaller viewers, with out committing your whole branding to a vacation theme.

Find out how to use Apple’s in-app occasions for the vacations (iOS 15)

As of October twenty seventh, in-app occasions at the moment are out there inside the App Store. In-app occasions are well timed occasions inside video games and apps, akin to challenges or competitions, live-streamed experiences, film premieres, and extra. Now you can characteristic these occasions immediately inside your app itemizing on the App Store, providing you with a brand new approach to attain present, lapsed, and potential clients alike. They might additionally assist in getting your app featured, permitting for added App Store visibility. Think about using Apple’s in-app occasions for the vacation season this yr.

For instance, as a health app, you would spotlight a neighborhood problem to exercise ten days in a row, following New Years’. As a enterprise app, you would spotlight a dwell stream provided to customers questioning learn how to steadiness their funds going into the New Yr. As a buying app, it could possibly be a reduction code you obtain for Black Friday should you save ten gadgets in your ‘want record’.

Which apps are most affected by end-of-year seasonality?

As we will count on, buying apps see their greatest numbers on the finish of the yr. Particularly, we will determine two spikes in downloads for these apps:

• The primary improve in downloads occurs between the center and finish of November. As individuals get nearer to Black Friday, they have an inclination to obtain an increasing number of buying apps. The development continues with Cyber Monday after which slowly begins to fade in December.
• The second wave (not as massive as the primary one) is expounded to the Christmas season and winter holidays. It begins round mid-December and lasts till mid-January, with a powerful peak in downloads sometimes on December twenty sixth.

The top of the yr can be the time for New Yr’s resolutions. Most individuals deal with resolutions that may assist them lead a more healthy way of life, together with:

• Train extra
• Shed some pounds
• Meditate each day
• Give up smoking

And what higher approach to fulfill resolutions than to obtain an app to maintain observe of objective progress? For this reason the interval between mid-December and mid-January is the busiest season for well being and health apps. We are able to clearly determine two spikes in downloads: one on Christmas Day and an excellent stronger one proper after New Yr’s.

One other widespread New Yr’s decision is to be taught a brand new ability, like a brand new language or a brand new music instrument. Let’s discover whether or not this development can be translated within the seasonality for the Music and Training classes.

January is unquestionably the most effective month for the Music class. Nonetheless, we additionally see a powerful spike in downloads on Christmas Day which could possibly be defined by two components:

1. Individuals obtain new units like telephones, tablets, and audio system for Christmas. Naturally, one of many first apps they obtain could also be devoted to streaming music, akin to Spotify, Deezer, Soundcloud, YouTube Music, or Sonos.
2. Individuals obtain new musical devices for Christmas. This could result in an elevated demand for music studying apps akin to Yousician, Merely Piano, and Final Guitar, but in addition guitar tuners and different instruments for musicians.

The very best month for the Training class is September (“again to highschool”). Nonetheless, we additionally see a second wave in downloads beginning on January 1st, most likely due to New Yr’s resolutions (Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Busuu) in addition to the return of scholars in school rooms (Photomath, Kahoot!, Moodle, Mathway).

Whereas the market traits between these classes are related round January, the weekly traits are utterly completely different. Music apps are predominantly downloaded on weekends whereas Training apps are primarily downloaded on weekdays.