Hi, My team is running a project on making a tower defense game and we plan to release it this January. Despite our excitement at completing the first project, the matter of marketing makes us very worried. Certainly, nobody wants to launch a game with no player, but the limited budget for advertising is a big trouble which prevent us from informing users about our new product. I am looking for cheaper solutions to increase downloads and ASO is the tool making me most interested and also confused now. I think we all learn about ASO and its power. It is said that over 60% installs comes from app store search results. However, it is just a general statistics and no one ever state how it was calculated. How many percent from mobile app was got involved? And how many percent from mobile game? To mobile app, a user might type some functions into search query and get an app from results. But, to mobile game, is “searching” really a popular step in game discovery process? Is it worth spending money on ASO agency such as sensortower, mobiledevhq or should I just do it myself?
I never bother with searches. I come to this site of other similar sites. You could do worse than dole out a few promo codes and then word of mouth can work it's magic.
I could easily see ASO being one of those things that you will want to at least be familiar with because it can't hurt, but I definitely wouldn't pay someone to do it for me. Without being able to see a hit count on your app's page in the store, measuring the effectiveness of ASO becomes sort of a dodgy prospect. All you have are your app's position for various search terms and your eventual download count, which are affected much more strongly by icon, title, price, screenshots, etc... And sites that mention huge numbers from search traffic don't seem to specify how much is general searching ("zombie game") as opposed to people using the search function to look up apps by name (which is exactly what 100% of my searches are.) People in the latter category won't be swayed by ASO since they are going into their search with one app in mind.
