Tell us a little about your role at Yodel Mobile and what a day to day looks like.
My role at Yodel Mobile as a Senior Growth Manager is quite a multi-faceted role. I work across different departments within the business, primarily the growth team, who work on creating strategies for launching and growing apps across our client base. Primarily, I oversee how our strategic services are delivered to our clients. This could be anything from delivering the bespoke growth program that we put in place for them or actioning immediate issues or challenges that the client encounters during launch or as they are looking to scale.
ASO and app growth are fairly niche expertise, how have you built these skills over the years?
I started off my career as an Innovations and Insights Executive, and my primary responsibility was interpreting data to extract specific insights that could lead to strategic decision making. Back then, ASO was still in its infancy and starting to gain its buzzword status as the app stores saw rapid growth. I was tasked with understanding what ASO entailed and how it could be leveraged for our clients. Since then, my understanding of ASO has developed by working across dozens of apps whilst continuously optimizing and testing hypotheses. Leveraging ASO for our clients, I gained invaluable knowledge of what worked and what didn’t.
Most importantly, research and educating myself on ASO has been most fundamental in developing my skills. The app space is constantly evolving. The big operating systems, Apple and Google, continuously innovate and change the way they do things. This means that I’ve had to keep on top of these developments and adapt my approach to optimizing for the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
Can you tell us about a time where ASO made a big impact?
To isolate the impact of ASO is tricky because there are so many other factors that can impact the way your app performs. However, I think the biggest impact we’ve seen has been for apps that are newly launching, start-ups that don’t have much brand exposure or visibility in the app stores. In those cases, conducting strategic ASO has always shown positive uplift in discoverability, impressions and importantly, conversions.
How do ASO and wider app growth coalesce in your strategic support work?
ASO works in line with our strategic growth offering because it is so intrinsically connected to wider app success. In other words, changes to your app store front can have a direct impact on the way your app performs, from initial discovery to conversion.
As previously mentioned, staying on top of current affairs regarding the app store space is really important. I utilise a number of ASO tools to understand how they’ve been innovating or how they interpret data. This has allowed me to keep on top of those changes to ensure that learnings are injected into our clients’ strategies.
There is a lot to gain from analysing your ASO performance because it consists of connecting multiple data points. The app stores provides us with analytics and insights, but layered with third party ASO tools, you can achieve a more accurate picture of your app’s performance.
All of that can be translated across to the type of strategic work that we undertake at Yodel Mobile. For example, we may have a view of the best converting keywords and transfer these insights to the copy used for our user acquisition campaigns. Alternatively, we could transfer those learnings over through to optimised onboarding journeys, or to a push notification campaign. It is essential to utilize ASO learnings across both the acquisition and retention strategies that we execute. We call it ASO 360.
Where do you think ASO is heading over the coming years?
ASO is now a discipline that should no longer sit in isolation of your app marketing efforts, especially as some app businesses have departments that work solely on ASO. ASO is most effective when viewed holistically. Various learnings can be transferred into various areas of the business. The modern-day marketer should think about how ASO integrates with the app’s acquisition and retention activity and many other parts of their app marketing efforts, whether these may be paid, owned or earned.
Want to know more about ASO? Check out our ASO video explainers:
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