App Strategies: Tips for App Optimization on Seasonal Holidays

There is an ongoing debate among ASO experts, marketers, developers, and app owners about whether it is necessary to improve their apps for the festive season through seasonal sales and updates like Christmas or New Year’s special offers. The RadASO agency has holiday marketing ideas on how to promote and boost the app's or game’s traffic during the festive season.

Best Seasonal Marketing Trends For the ASO

If you have a goal to increase the app downloads during the Christmas season, it would be wise to set up a budget for this purpose. Then consider the changes you’d like to make to your visual resources.

Graphic ASO: Icons and Screenshots

Graphic ASO is a way of graphical components' optimization on the app store page. The main goal is to boost rates. When users look for a useful app without entering the actual brand name but using keywords related to its features and functions, they decide whether to download or not according to the visual presentation of the app list (icons & screenshots).

The app icon and screenshots are the basic components of the visual optimization on the App Store and Google Play that have to show the objective of your app when the user finds it. They influence the rate of the application or game. Unlike the App Store, in Google Play, screenshots in search results are only displayed for branded search terms.

Read more about graphic ASO in the article “Instruction-memo for visual ASO”.

The RadASO agency recommends following some rules when changing or creating a new icon for your app:

1. Icons and screenshots should be eye-catching and memorable and show users the core of the app.
2. The design should provide a specific atmosphere during the holidays.
3. Use a simple design to create the icon. Don't put a lot of small details on it.
4. Use the thematic details or backgrounds according to the seasonal holiday.
5. Don't apply the calls to action on the icons. It's not allowed.

If it is an e-commerce app, show the updates and sales during the seasonal festive. It will have a higher impact and provide a great opportunity to become more visual and get more downloads.

Read the article “Which Holiday ASO-Creatives are already available on Google Play and the App Store? List For Your Inspirations” to find out how various niches have prepared the best holiday marketing strategies.

Textual ASO: Events, Promos, and Visual Graphics

Proper graphic and textual optimization helps you display your app higher and get better in-store rankings for user searches. The RadASO agency notes that changing titles, subtitles, and keywords should be done only for niches that are related to festive season marketing. As an example, you can see such applications:

In other applications, it is irrelevant. The traffic will be used in vain, and you can lose positions in the stores for other relevant keywords.

However, in the e-commerce niche, there is a great influence from keywords associated with gifts, discounts, or promotions. For example, if it is a hardware store, we can use keywords associated with a certain product, such as iPhone 15. In such cases, we can change the metadata, as the keywords are related to promotions, which can attract customers.

Promo texts 

They are also an important holiday season advertising for games. Although they are not indexed and have almost no impact on the conversion. But they can be relevant on the gaming app page. Promoting the app will not help us to improve the search visibility or position of the app. However, this type of textual ASO includes motivational texts that provide a call-to-action, which helps to get the user interested in seasonal updates or special offers in games.

ASA Holiday Season Marketing Tricks

First, think about customizing your Custom product pages (CPP). You should do the CPP only if the app offers its users Christmas special offers or gaming updates because you need to have a certain marketing goal that matches the user’s needs.

It will be great to create a separate page specifically for these promotions or sales and get creative with it. Add screenshots and videos as they add more engagement, and allow briefly demonstrating the offer or better introduce users to the application. Also, demonstrate eye-catching promotions that will grab the attention of your customers. By offering a visually engaging and customized experience, you'll increase your chances of higher bids and downloads.

During the seasonal holidays, the app actively operates to manage and improve traffic for specific search terms, as they can change during the season. The RadASO team suggests separating brand, competitive, and category requests into separate Ad groups to control the percentage of buybacks of these search terms. There are the following steps on how to do it:

1. In addition to branded search terms, highlight competitor groups (branded search terms are usually highlighted; if not, do so). This is necessary to protect the brand. 
2. Select the most relevant competitors. If the app has key competitors, create separate groups for them to attract users who are looking for similar apps.
3. Place category search terms (those that relate to the app's category or functions) in separate groups as well. Within the category search terms, create a separate group for New Year's holidays. For example, a widget app makes СРР or has a set of New Year's widgets and wants to increase the number of downloads for the holidays. In this case, search terms for New Year's covers should be separated into a separate group.

RadASO clients can rely on the team to use a self-developed tool RadASO Tech Boosted Solution to increase traffic. In particular, there is a brand protection function that the team activates so that competitors cannot boost their app rating for key brand search terms, and the agency increases the app's traffic.

This will help you to direct the budget to the most relevant groups/search terms and raise your rates and downloads. 

App Visibility Boost By Applying the In-App Events

In-app events are timely activities in games and apps. You can post information about events right on your app’s page on the App Store and Google Play, giving you a new option to attract the interest of existing and potential customers. They can also help promote your app by providing additional visibility in the stores.

In-app events are a highly flexible way to interact with your audience. Create events timed to the holiday season, such as Christmas Eve countdowns, holiday sales, or thematic quests. Consider using in-app events during the holidays this year.

Google AdMob recommends creating an interesting background for your app, for example, snowflakes, during the holiday season, or adding a new game character or quest related to the festivity. You should note that such updates will be displayed for most users instead of screenshots, that is why you should keep in mind the following:

1. It may overlap the graphics developed specifically for the event.
2. The in-app event picture should be as attractive as screenshots.
3. If there are difficulties with the event publication, you can update the icon and screenshots.

Final Thoughts

The great part about apps is that there are so many components that can be optimized during the seasonal holidays. By developing different features of the app, you can achieve incredible results.

The RadASO agency advises you to take the next steps for optimizing your app during the seasonal holiday:

1. Update screenshots and themed images to include holiday promotions and seasonal content to increase the potential rate. Potentially update the app icon, according to the focus of your holiday campaign.
2. Potentially refresh your metadata to include keywords related to the holidays. Do so if the content is highly relevant to your app (and only if it doesn't distract from your main, high-priority keywords).
3. Make seasonal promotional ideas to introduce holiday-related content, sales, or special offers your app provides to users.
4. This holiday season, consider listing in-app events on the Store to increase involvement and visibility.

While many find this time of year challenging due to higher competition, there are many options that apps (both unpaid and paid) can take advantage of using the ASO and ASA strategies.

The text was based on the expert advice of ASO specialists of the RadASO team: Nataliia Kaidanovska, Yevhen Mamin, Yaroslav Vorona, Maxim Melnik, Marianna Herasymenko.