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Case Study

App Intelligence Case Study: ASO Drives Organic Installs for SEGA Background:As more gamers continue to transition from dedicated consoles to mobile devices, industry trailblazers such as SEGA Networks–SEGA’s mobile division in the West—have followed suit. Today, SEGA is a leading mobile publisher, having brought its popular licensed IP such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Crazy Taxi to the mobile ecosystem. As publishers compete for a share of this growing market, the cost of acquiring mobile users has skyrocketed. For this reason, SEGA has looked to maximize its organic user growth. SEGA investigated multiple App Store Optimization (ASO) solutions before deciding to partner with Sensor Tower to help grow its mobile user base. “Sensor Tower was the best solution for us,” says Spiros Christakopoulos, Director of Growth at SEGA, adding: “We selected Sensor Tower because the platform was the most user-friendly and because of the quality of their data.” What follows is a look at how the Sega Growth Team uses Sensor Tower day-to-day to drive the organic growth of its expanding mobile portfolio.

SEGA had numerous questions regarding general App Store best practices. How should it name its apps to optimize for search? What keywords should it be using? Do reviews and ratings effect overall app rankings in the store? Additionally, SEGA’s IP drove significant installs, but the revenue from in-app purchases (IAPs) was not at a level that could justify large-scale paid User Acquisition (UA) in today’s competitive marketplace. “If you’re not generating the top revenue, then you need to focus on organic ways of acquiring users,” says Christakopoulos.

Every time SEGA submits an app update to the App Store, its Growth Team revisits ASO. SEGA decided to focus on keywords initially, since this has the most immediate and direct impact on organic traffic. Ahead of each submission to the App Store, SEGA reviews its tracked keywords in Sensor Tower to determine what needs optimization. SEGA keeps an evolving keyword bank for every app it examines each time there is an update. It has also found success using seasonal or trending keywords that capitalize on high search volume queries around events such as Halloween or Christmas, for example.

Customer

Key Titles

Sonic Dash Crazy Taxi

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Sensor Tower Product Used

App IntelligenceAd IntelligenceStore Intelligence

Results

SEGA routinely sees 15 to 30 percent lift in organic installs for its largertitles with high download volumes.

Solution:

Challenge:

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Case Study

When performing ASO on Android, SEGA primarily focuses on the short and full app description. Mentioning a keyword three to five times throughout the full description helps SEGA rank for the keywords it has chosen to target. Christakopoulos has also found that “backlinks to the Google Play page can help improve ranking. This is a widely known best practice on Google web search when doing SEO, but page rank can affect your search ranking on the Google Play Store as well. We try to put links anywhere we can. I put a link in my email signature so that it will help us build more backlinks.”

Since partnering with Sensor Tower on ASO, SEGA has routinely seen thousands of additional organic downloads each day, simply from performing ongoing optimization and adhering to ASO best practices. Utilizing Sensor Tower to drive its ASO strategy, SEGA has been able to take Sonic Dash from an average category rank in the 200 range to the 80 range in the Top Free iPhone Apps in the U.S. “We were able to do this by iterating on our keywords, screenshots, and icons—without any paid user acquisition,” says Christakopoulos.

ABOVE: Sonic Dash went from Top 200 to Top 80 without any paid user acquisition.

SEGA has found that ranking well for targeted keywords is much more important than simply going after the highest-traffic keywords and ranking outside of the top 20 results. Instead, SEGA identifies quality keywords through a balanced approach that accounts for the difficulty to rank, length of keywords, relevance, top 10 chance, and traffic score.

SEGA’s KW Formula = (relevance x traffic/length x difficulty) x top 10 chance

Solution (continued):

Results:

“ Sensor Tower was the best solution for us. We selected Sensor Tower because the platform was the most user-friendly and because of the quality of their data.Spiros ChristakopoulosDirector of Growth SEGA

”

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Case Study

ABOVE: This table illustrates the process SEGA goes through to select its keywords. SEGA calculates a total score for each term given the inputs on the left. In this example, “Durant” would be the selected keyword since it receieved the highest score.

By utilizing this formula to select keywords, SEGA routinely sees lifts in organic installs from 15 to 30 percent for its larger titles with high download volumes, and between 5 to 15 percent for titles with low download volumes. SEGA’s success demonstrates that ASO requires attention each time a publisher updates its apps. It proves that updating an app’s keywords, screenshots, icon, title, and description is an ongoing methodology that delivers results through improved organic growth—and that Sensor Tower App Intelligence provides actionable insights which make the process more effective at every step.

Drive organic installs with the world’s most robust App Store Optimization (ASO) platform. With App Intelligence, you can monitor all aspects of your app's global storefront. Track, test, and optimize your own keyword strategy. All while keeping a close eye on your competition. Increase the visibility of your apps and grow your user base today with Sensor Tower’s App Intelligence.

Results (continued):

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We were able to go from an average category ranking in the 200s to the 80s simply by iterating on our keywords, screenshots and icons—without any paid user acquisition.

Spiros Christakopoulos, Director of Growth{ {“

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