The great days of ASO hacks are over, in my opinion. However, there might be an interesting one I’ve learned from a new client of ours recently. They uploaded two app previews to the iOS App Store: one landscape and one portrait, which led to the videos being shown on different places on the product page. This part was not entirely new for us. But the new mechanics is that the organic listing doesn’t show the first three default screenshots if they are already can be seen on the Apple Search Ads ad banner.
This seems to result in having two videos looping one after another on the same page because on the organic listing you see the portrait video with two first screenshots and on the ad above search results – the landscape one. And what I mean by that is prompting happy users to leave a review when they achieved something inside the app, whatever that might be, and build a mobile focused support system alongside for negative or maybe just constructive feedback with in app messages, chat bots, FAQs and all that kind of stuff. So that people know you care about support and there is not just an email where someone can send feedback, and they may never know if it even gets read. On the contrary, it’s very easy for users to stay in contact with a publisher. Also, as for the happy users who tend to not review an app at all because they are satisfied and don’t have any intent to do so – you will be able to push them to write reviews in the app stores.
I think that’s really important. Without MMP data, we would be sent back to the dark ages of analytics. But at this point I’m quite confident that the MMPs will develop some kind of workaround. Probably with a new SKAdNetwork API, I don’t know. I’m not a fan of this death of something culture, if you know what I mean, because I heard this too often in the last years, and it was never true: for apps, and for some marketing channels and so on.
But it’s very likely that our industry will change in the next few years due to this . And I think if Apple enforces this and I don’t see any reasons why they shouldn’t, then Google will come under pressure and maybe have to do the same thing because users will demand it. Yes and yes. I always grant those permissions because I know how hard this is not only for marketers, but also for product management, and development, and in the whole – to build a sustainable company. I am always giving the opt in for the limit ad tracking as well.
But I also know that only very few people think like that. I don’t expect opt ins to be higher than 10 20%. Therefore, I think that a hash solution they’ve suggested recently could be a point in the right direction: just to relieve the IDFA on the device and create a hash upon that they can use for attribution of their service. But we have to wait how Apple’s answer will look like. Personally I would prefer further placements inside the App Store, like with UAC, to get with the first three tabs where featurings are now, since it’s very difficult for some apps to get featured because there’re so many submissions every day.
And to get a little bit of a visibility in those first three tabs would be great. But not with UAC analytics and targeting options, we don’t need any of them . So a display component on Apple Search Ads could do a lot for businesses that have a hard time scaling their campaigns with search only, because obviously, there are apps that are not that search driven. This is important for Apple Search Ads right now. So this way would be good but depends on the placements and the value of traffic and analytics marketers can get out of this.
