After two COVID years, the ASO conference in Berlin has returned in 2022, on May 11. The event is dedicated to ASO education and knowledge sharing within the community, covering many hot topics and ASO insights through a series of talks and workshops. This article is about the summary of ASO conference 2022 in Berlin. 

What's new about ASO Conference in 2022 which worth attention for app marketers?

ASO conference is an event for exchanging ideas and knowledge between ASO experts and all the ASO industry. This year, the topic of the conference focuses more on mobile marketing and promotion, also the biggest challenges that all the industry face. Here is the content of this ASO Conference: 

● How to keep creative ASO teams inspired
● Black-Hat ASO Techniques
● Making the Most of PPOs
● ROI measurement for ASO campaigns
● Balance between branding and product development



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How to keep a creative ASO team-inspired over the long term?

The day started with  Phiture’s Design Lead, Stuart Miller, sharing his tips for maintaining and re-boosting creativity within the ASO team. According to Stuart, idea optimization is an ongoing process - even great ideas need to be refreshed regularly and should be challenged with further improvements. To produce creatives who stand out from the crowd, Stuart advises marketers and designers to rely on three pillars: culture, people, and process.

Culture

Culture is an important part of the creative process, as good ideas are not reserved for some select features of a company. Don't be afraid to invite colleagues from different departments for creative brainstorming sessions. To get the most out of these meetings, Stuart advises against analyzing proposals on the spot, so that people can share ideas and be able to document all contributions; in Stuart's own words, even an initially bad idea "can become the fertilizer for a really good idea."

People

By leveraging their passion, people also have the ability to unlock creative improvements. This is especially valuable when your app's functionality and benefits could benefit from creative updates. For example, when Stuart's team asked a Phiture designer with a passion for illustration to come up with a new visual treatment for Norton 360, moving from a lifestyle-based design to city-based graphics (and adding localization to the design, as shown below) allowed Norton 360 to maintain a sense of trust and security in their screenshots, while also reinforcing the app's image of technology and modernity, which helped increase the app's conversion rate.

Processes

Processes are a great way to support creativity; before the brainstorming session, having each contributor write some ideas in a shared document and present them to the group is a great way to help everyone get involved. Other processes include assigning individuals to review new PlayStore or AppStore features to gather new information or to help individuals (having a rest, exercising, etc.) and a team (grabbing a drink, having show-and-tell sessions at work, etc.).

Black-Hat ASO techniques and their threats

On the second topic of the day, Natalie Drozd (User Acquisition Manager at Fabulous) shared insights on the effectiveness and risks of black-Hat ASO.

In Google Play metadata: keyword stuffing

As one of the oldest black hat techniques, keyword stuffing in the full description is not only explicitly banned by Google, but is generally ineffective. This is because Google is able to detect these attempts and can reject metadata submissions and cancel or penalize applications that try to improve their search results rankings in this way.

Targeting other brand names: keyword misuse

While Natalie admits that some apps may successfully rank higher than certain brands by targeting them in the Google Play description or iOS keyword fields, she believes that success is deceptive, ranking improvements are far from guaranteed and highly unlikely to lead to searches.The resulting location actually offers any additional application installations. At the same time, risks include refusing to submit metadata and being warned before the store eventually suspends developer accounts.

Paid search installs

Natalie underscores the delusional efficiency of buying installed services from specific search queries. Two factors undermining the technology are the app's ability to divert users' initial search intent, and the damage the technology does to retention rates, which Google Play takes into account when determining top search positions. As a result, the cost of this technique is much higher than the developer realizes, and the ROI is low, while the risk again includes the developer suspending the account.

Incentivized installs

Incentivized installs are generally ineffective, as campaigns designed to help apps break into the leaderboards in their respective categories only serve executives who promote this metric. Additionally, users no longer rely on leaderboards to find app downloads, and bots can negatively impact app retention.

Review operations

Finally, on comment manipulation, Natalie explained that most fraudulent comments are flagged and removed based on duplicate text, unusual comments from older app versions/devices/OS versions, or user profiles. What's more, Natalie says companies that offer such services don't hesitate to extort a flood of fake negative reviews from their customers if they decide not to use theirs anymore.

Making the most of PPOs - turning trash into wealth

Next on stage was Marina Roglic, Popcorn Gaming's ASO Manager, who shared her advice on how to get the most out of AppStore's native A/B testing tool, Product Page Optimization (PPO). Since its release, ASO practitioners have gone through various stages of dissatisfaction, considering the feature isn't yet able to compete with Google's Play Store experiment.

Improve collaboration between product and marketing

The first pain point discussed by Marina is that PPO testing ends automatically when a new app version is submitted on the app store connection. While this pain point especially hurts apps that rely on short release cycles (weekly or bi-weekly), which can affect all ASO practitioners, a lack of coordination with product teams can cause marketers to waste time restarting testing by an app release.

Therefore, Marina recommends that ASO practitioners use this opportunity to better coordinate and communicate, so they can inform of any release cycle changes (or other product issues that might impact ASO), and even try to negotiate release frequency with the product team. An important gem shared by Dock is to remember that you want your PPO test to live for at least 9 or 10 days to ensure at least a week of data is considered when calculating statistical significance, and app stores often take two to three days to aggregate data correctly.

Withdraw and resubmit PPO submission after 2 days

Her second advice concerns the asset review system: While your PPO testing can't begin until Apple approves your PPO assets, app submissions that only contain new store assets tend to require only a few hours of review. Therefore, she recommends withdrawing and resubmitting any PPO submissions that are not approved after two days, and avoiding submitting PPO tests before the weekend. She also noted that the test on the sequence of screenshots does not require any approval and can begin immediately.

Leverage lessons learned from the play store experiment

Third, Marina shared her solution, which does not provide a breakdown of data per country or language when running multiple regions at once. Instead of running tests on completely separate app stores and stores, she recommends that ASO practitioners learn to experiment and validate from stores that they first apply the default area of the store, then the primary marketplace (if successful), and finally apply the winning concept to all marketplaces without after testing less important regions (instead only monitoring their console conversion rates).

Pay attention to your unique impression

Finally, Marina warns viewers that online sample size calculators are unlikely to help determine whether a test has sufficient statistical power because Apple's PPO sampling method relies on the Bayesian model, which means you may not get that on all of your tests the same number of impressions. Her advice is to run your tests until the winning variant drives at least as many as your app's average daily unique impressions.

ROI measurement for ASO campaigns & how to know how much to invest

Next, Aleksandra Zivkovic (CRM & ASO Manager at Nordeus) shares his insights on measuring ROI and effectively investing in ASO resources.

The first thing she pointed out was the importance of planning and prioritizing an app/game prior to launch, starting with aligning the various marketing teams with goals, value propositions, and brand guidelines. Then, (still before release) the ASO team should develop a creative test plan based on strong assumptions and the full value of each test, based on:

•Test the visibility of the asset (i.e. the icon is visible to all users; after that, you should consider which screenshots, videos, and functional graphics are actually visible to the user without scrolling).
•These games or apps are expected to gain the most traction in the market.
•Partially tests the time required to reach statistical power in each market.
•Expected consistency with other marketing campaigns before and after testing.

Once your plan is executed, along the life cycle of the application, ROI measurement can be achieved in two ways: holistically or focused on a specific activity.

What are the benefits of holistic ROI measurement?

Holistic ROI measurement makes the most sense for collaborative marketing teams who regularly adjust their campaigns, amplifying each campaign across all channels, and therefore can agree to measure ROI across all channels simultaneously. The benefits of this approach are the ease of calculating cost, sign-up, and average revenue per user (ARPU), and the possibility to use predicted lifetime value (LTV) modeling to make decisions. Alexander pointed out that in the absence of a forecast LTV model, the day 7 LTV and multipliers for each market can still be used, although this method may not be as precise.

What are the benefits of activity-specific ROI measurement?

At the same time, campaign-specific ROI measurements help marketers better assess the impact of specific teams. It relies on the same logic as ARPU and LTV estimates, but adds the challenge of calculating a baseline for each campaign, thus requiring complete knowledge of marketing timelines and possibly a "freeze" period for marketing teams, in order to better prepare for their respective activities set the baseline.

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The balance between branding and product development: Challenges in mobile marketing

The first-panel talk of the day was moderated by Edo Heijnen (Key Project Account Director at Phiture) who asked Dimitris Drakatos (SEO & ASO Lead at Peanut), Dora Trostanetsky (Growth Marketing Lead at the Trade Republic), and Elia Moliner Cantavella (ASO Manager at Socialpoint) to shed light on how their companies navigate three essential challenges in ASO: reporting, communication, and structure.

The panel of experts unanimously showed the connection between these three challenges. For example, in the absence of reporting and clear metrics for individual marketing campaigns, companies are better off adjusting the timing of activities related to a project and then measuring their impact as a whole. This leads all stakeholders to accept, in most (if not all) cases, a multifactorial explanation for improvements and losses. Therefore, after identifying an event in the overall data, it becomes easier to formulate a hypothesis about how a single activity is reflected on multiple measures.

Elia also said that Social Point has had great success with this, especially by creating ad hoc groups for each marketing project and calling on individuals from different teams to collaborate toward specific goals. Despite the additional challenges of managing resources from multiple teams at the same time, Elia was able to legitimize her company's ASO and strengthen a dedicated ASO team instead of discussing ASO ownership between the brand and product teams.

By comparing the structures, Dora explained that Trade Republic worked closely with the ASO and worked closely with the paid team (for Apple Search Ads) to maximize skills by having the same creative designers in charge of store and website assets. She also noted that the company's executives must not only clarify ownership of different tasks but also build a culture of involving people from different backgrounds on the same project.

Dimitris explained that for small companies where the ASO team is usually one person, the key is to first educate various stakeholders (such as designers) about ASO, taking the time to properly introduce the topic and before inviting colleagues to start working on a specific project. Provide context. He also stressed the importance of aligning the ASO team's work and KPI with the company's global goals and continued efforts to maintain transparency and communication to gain goodwill and increase interest.

In the end, the main recommendation from the panel is to break down the silos around ASO and think more of the funnel metrics from the user's perspective, so everyone's work helps deliver clear value.