When working on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CVR), you should have in your plan a phase dedicated to testing various screenshot hypotheses. Alongside the app’s name and icon, this is one of the top three elements in your app store listing that can influence your CVR the most. According to the CRO loop, when optimizing your listing’s conversion rate, the first step is researching, and –– perhaps most importantly –– analyzing your competition.
It’s always good to know what techniques are being leveraged by your competitors when they present their apps in the stores, particularly concerning messaging and eye-catching visuals.
While analyzing each of your competitors’ creative assets is extremely useful in theory, in practice, finding, exporting, and analyzing those assets is time-consuming –– unless you’re using a smart solution that automates 90% of the dull manual work. Here at Phiture, we’ve created a useful internal tool to simplify the process and save a lot of time for our consultants. Here’s what it looks like:
Our automated spreadsheet scrapes all the screenshots from each of the apps you add there and places them together in one sheet, so you can review them or easily transfer them to a presentation to perform further analysis.
All you need to get started is:
- Follow this link and make a copy of the spreadsheet
- Choose the locale (cell C3) you want the app’s data to be scrapped for
- Add the individual App Store/Play Store URLs of your competitors’ apps
- Done! The built-in script will automatically scrape the app’s title, subtitle, icon, and screenshots
Pro tips:
- Alternatively, you can add app IDs from the App Store.
E.g. add a list of top charts with app IDs in a new sheet and mirror the IDs in the sheet - Create one for your core market and duplicate the sheet or use the equation formula for other markets by changing the locale
How can the Scraper help you analyze and understand important trends?
Scraper makes copying and pasting screenshots into the presentation/canvas easy, so you can analyze the findings in detail. Another great benefit is seen in the storage feature, which enables you to store icons and screenshots that you can come back to at any time in the future.
Some aspects that you might want to consider while carrying out your analysis are:
- Key visual aspects of the screenshots & icons (used colors, image elements, orientation, ordering, caption placement, etc.)
- Voice (active or passive), tone (formal or casual), used conversion tactics (social proof or authority, etc.)
- Commonalities and trends (recent or upcoming events linkage or popular content)
- Presented value proposition and/or main features, as well as call to actions
When you’re finished with your analysis, write down your observations, and formulate a hypothesis following the CRO Loop, Phiture’s framework for systematic conversion rate optimization: Building a Systematic Process for ASO with the CRO Loop
Thank you Maggie, Anton and Phiture team who have been involved!
