After a successful post about designing game icon we’ll continue with ASO topics.
As you already know (if not take a look at Mobile Game Marketing post) ASO takes a very important role in increasing organic installs. It does that by making your store page more attractive to players and maximizing its visibility in organic search by ranking your game higher.
Today we’ll cover topics such as: Long Description (App Store & Play Store), App Subtitle (App Store only) and Short Description (Play Store). All of these are under the full control of developers and can be modified within App Store Connect or Google Play Console.
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So… How to write game descriptions with ASO in mind?
Long description (App Store & Play Store)
Character count: 4000 for both stores
To be precise its “Long description” on the Play Store and “Description” on the App Store. Its main purpose is to sell a game to players who weren’t convinced by other store elements.
On the App Store, description doesn’t play an important role for algorithms – it won’t index keywords from this description.
On the Play Store on the other hand, a long description plays a significant role for algorithms. Play Store takes into account keywords used in the description when it ranks a game in organic search. Try to use your most important keywords more than once, but don’t try to stuff too many keywords in a very unnatural way – it just hurts the eyes and can discourage potential players. Try to make the sentences look natural. This way the game description will be both attractive to the readers and relevant for the algorithms.
Description should be: informative, easy to understand, and clearly structured as it provides information on what your game is about. Show the value of your game and don’t forget about the powerful Call to Action (CTA). A good practice is to mention awards, contests, or review snippets from major sites. On the Play Store, you can be a little more creative and use emojis 😎, bold, underline, etc.
Right: example of trying to stuff in keywords a little too hard.
App Subtitle (App Store only)
Characters count: 30
App Subtitle affects keywords rankings (it refers to the position in search results for a specific keyword) so use this field to add some more keywords. App subtitle is visible right under the games’ name so it’ll highly affect CTR. Try to turn those who found your game in search results into visitors of your product page. Or even directly convince them to download the game as the “GET” button is nearby.
Short description (Play Store only)
Characters count: 80
Same as for App Subtitle but with more letters available. Compel players and convince them to install or read more about your game. Short description is also significant for algorithms so use some of your main keywords here as well.
A/B testing
If you want to improve descriptions based on hard data you need to know how to conduct experiments on them by using A/B tests. You need to test different variants and see which one works best.
So far store A/B testing is much easier on the Play Store. It has its own free A/B testing tool integrated within the Google Play Developer Console and you’ll automatically receive statistically viable results in the end.
As for the App Store, you’ll need to make necessary changes manually with each new release and monitor if it improves or worsens impressions, downloads, or any metric of your choice if you want to save a buck. But soon it should change, as Apple announced an A/B testing tool coming to the iOS App Store later this year (Q3/4 2021).
Summing up
Now you know how to write game descriptions with ASO in mind for your mobile games. We hope that those tips will help you with improving your organic installs and conversions rates. Good luck! 🙂
