Archive for 'Marketing'

A couple posts today about performing SEO for your App Store listing; since that’s pretty much the only thing you can do to market your app to casual App Store browsers — well, unless you buy your way on to the charts I suppose — it does behoove the struggling developer to keep abreast of evolving thoughts on the subject.

Over at How To Make iPhone Apps there’s a discussion of leveraging your app description

Seeding your app description with keywords is one technique that I have not heard discussed often. People who run marketing oriented websites know that they can find out what search terms that users type into browsers to find what they want. You can do the same thing with the App Store’s search engine.

If you do this you are more likely to reach users who already know what they want and are actually looking to buy something. For example, I have an app that is for wine tasting. So, I made sure that I included search terms that wine drinkers are likely to include like “tasting note”, “wine journal”, “wine’ and so on.

This approach may be better for niche audiences and some of it may occur naturally if you simply write a coherent description. However, take extra care to include words that are likely to resonate with your audience. As time goes on you will want the sales coming from people searching out your terms because it will get increasingly difficult to stay at the top of the release date lists.

Indeed. And then, check out this Clever Twist post organized by 6 tips:

• Tip #1: Learn the Basics
• Tip #2: Learn to Love Keywords
• Tip #3: Don’t Waste Your Time or Money on Google Search
• Tip #4: Give Your App a Descriptive Name
• Tip #5: Study the Successes
• Tip #6: Piggyback on the Successes

Although we will warn you to consider most carefully before you decide to follow tip #6,

… If you have a great game that is somewhat similar to a game in the top 10 of the iTunes store, there’s no shame in writing a description that reads something like, “For fans of [successful app], we present [your app].” This way, anyone searching for the first app will come across yours too.

First off, we’re not so sure we agree there’s no shame in this strategy. But more importantly, this is an SEO keyword strategy that a number of developers have stumbled across as being effective and promptly taken to insane lengths, throwing in the names of top ten apps into their descriptions whether or not they actually had anything to do with the application category, never mind the application specifically. Apple quite rightly figured that was a bit rich, and so there’s been some stories of apps being rejected/disapproved because of mentions of applications not published by you in your descriptions. So be warned that if you do try this strategy, you’re taking at least somewhat of a risk. It depends on how blatantly you’re playing the search engine rather than providing some useful comparative information, most likely…

[EDIT: And just a few days later ... Apple adds a keywords field to your application information on iTunes Connect!]

A little light humour for you today … or possibly, keen insight indeed into the dynamics of Internet advertising. Take your pick.

See, there’s this browser-based game that is known for questionable ethics on a variety of fronts, but it is particularly fascinating and downright amusing to examine the evolution of their advertising. To save you the trouble of clicking, here are the advertisements that have appeared for this game, in chronological order:

That looks pretty reasonable an advert, yes? Plays up the free, straightforward CTA button, informative as to the game’s milieux, looks like the kind of thing we’d probably do. But apparently that didn’t work out so well for them, so they moved to

Still not particularly objectionable we’d say, unless it’s your image they appropriated. But this was a bit too subliminal it seems, the followup was

Now we’re starting to get a bit disconnected from the actual game. But the theme must work, as we see in the next installment,

You armchair psychologists can go to work on what that layout is implying, we’ll just leave that alone. But the effectiveness of this can be deduced from the fact that they had to add to their FAQ “no, there actually is no queen to save in this game, we just made that up for the ad”. Maybe that’s why they dropped it and moved on to

Less and less subtle all the time, aren’t they? But this is as nothing next to the current ads they’re running. No, this is not a joke or a parody, we saw these ourselves all over a file sharing site this morning:

Yes, innuendo is truly a lost art. As is, apparently, even a vague correlation to anything relating to the actual game.

In the few minutes of googling which is all the attention to this that the WTF? moment of seeing that last ad this morning induced, we couldn’t find any analysis of how this progression correlates to actual subscriber growth, so we can’t say for certain that this is actually working out for them. Although you’d imagine that if they weren’t seeing positive results from this advertising strategy, they wouldn’t keep doubling down on it. And hey, it did eventually motivate us to make this post. Although you may notice that we didn’t actually link to the site anywhere here, which is definitely not an oversight.

But although we don’t endorse blatantly deceptive manipulation as an advertising strategy, we think it’s interesting to be aware of just how effective it apparently is. So if you do want to go after the Pavlovian boob-clicking market segment, well there’s how to do it!