Creative Optimization & Localization With AppTweak

How do you make sure your app stands out from international competitors? And as the mobile app market continues to grow worldwide, how do you ensure your app resonates with foreign audiences?

Creative optimization and localization are crucial to ensure an app’s success in international markets. In this blog, we explain the importance of optimizing and localizing your creatives, highlighting a use case from Supersolid, an award-winning independent mobile games studio, to understand successful creative optimization and localization in practice.

What is creative optimization?

Creative optimization is the systematic process of adjusting the visual elements of your app’s product page (icon, screenshots, preview video, feature graphic (Android only)) to effectively attract your target market. Creative optimization is a key part of any App Store Optimization (ASO) strategy; it goes hand-in-hand with conversion rate optimization (CRO), ensuring a maximum number of store visitors download your app after seeing it in search results or visiting the app product page.

Creative optimization is also important to help increase the visibility of your app in the stores; both the App Store and Google Play consider an app’s conversion rate when deciding which app to show where in the stores. As such, optimizing your creatives helps to:

• Make your app stand out from the competition
• Prove to the store algorithms that your app appeals to the market and should be displayed high in the search results
• Increase your chances of getting featured as you follow the stores’ best practices to design strong creative elements

Follow these tips, guidelines, and best practices to optimize your creatives on the App Store and Google Play

What is app localization?

As the app stores cater to global audiences, localizing your product page is necessary to develop and maintain your app’s international presence. App localization is the process of adapting your app’s textual and visual elements for all the different languages and cultures that you want to target.

Localization goes beyond simply translating your text, but rather analyzing the cultural differences between markets that might affect search behaviors, mobile preferences, and competitive landscapes around the world. Similar to creative optimization, app localization is also very important to increase the visibility of your app in foreign markets and improve your chances of being featured on international stores.

Read this step-by-step guide to boost your app downloads with localization

How Supersolid optimized app creatives for Brazil

Having recognized the importance of the Brazilian market to its games, Supersolid recently changed the icon for its Home Street game in Brazil based on AppTweak’s actionable insights.

To successfully localize the game’s creatives for Brazil, Supersolid began with a market analysis of the locale: the team first looked at several variables to identify the best strategic plan of action. Then Supersolid’s artists got to work – they created alternatives of the Home Street icon to test variations of the character, her outfit, and the house.

Icon for Supersolid’s Home Street game in Brazil: the icon on the right won A/B tests in Brazil and differed from the icons that performed best outside of Brazil.

Supersolid’s icons may also change depending on the season. At Christmas 2020, Supersolid conducted a market analysis to update Home Street’s seasonal icon to better reflect its audience. Thanks to its research, the team decided to feature a house that looked cozier, including heavy snowfall in the background and a Christmas hat on the lead character to evoke the Christmas period.

Icon for Supersolid’s Home Street game on the Brazilian App Store: seasonal icon (right), updated in December 2020.

To identify best practices for its own visual assets, Supersolid uses AppTweak to compare the creatives of the top 10 apps on iOS with those on Android. Accounting for AppTweak’s App Power feature can help this process if the studio is less familiar with the target market. The team is also in the process of establishing a more frequent metadata update cycle of continuous monitoring and iterations to maintain its success in the market.

Competitor analyses help Supersolid understand international market preferences for localized creatives. AppTweak’s simple interface allows the team to quickly toggle between competitors’ icons, screenshots, and feature graphics to gain a holistic understanding of the marketing messages popular in trending games. On AppTweak, the competition analysis process is especially efficient as it allows Supersolid to easily interpret results and quickly compare different games and variables.

Use AppTweak to monitor your competitors and gain valuable insights to improve your ASO strategy

Supersolid normally selects its key markets and competitors based on internal analytics considering lifetime value, download volume, and/or retention. To understand trends and behaviors within the market and among competitors, AppTweak’s Explore tab also helps the team better understand the complex interactions between different apps and areas on the app stores.

Outside of its game development, AppTweak also helps Supersolid get every team member, including artists and nontechnical employees, more familiar with the app stores. AppTweak’s #1 ASO tool helps to educate the entire team on what is popular in the market in terms of icons, screenshots, and other creative elements.

About Supersolid

“Supersolid is an award-winning independent mobile games developer with over 90 million downloads, based in central London. Our team builds games we love for players around the world, putting our players at the heart of our creative decision-making and working with a “test and learn” mindset.

Our games range from infinite runners (Super Penguins) to resource management (Home Street and Food Street) and arcade PVP (Snake Rivals); we thrive on creativity and experimentation. We’re currently working on a broad variety of titles in production and are proud to release our first Roblox game, RoPets (summer 2021).”

Discover Supersolid’s leading games on the App Store and on Google Play.

Learn how AppTweak can help increase your app’s downloads with actionable insights in a simple interface.