Now one thing to remember when you are asking freelance designers for app icons is that never just ask 1
for one 2
icon. Always ask for at least 5 or 6 and have some slight variations to those icons. 3
So for example, you know the one in the left hand corner you can see these are on a similar theme but 4
slightly different. 5
And the reason why you need this is because you will need to split test your app icon. 6
Now what does that mean? 7
That means that you are essentially experimenting to find out which app icon performs the best namely 8
which ones produce the most downloads which ones are most people drawn to. 9
So that means that ideally you want 50% of your visitors to see variation A 10
and you want 50% of them to see variation B and then you look at the two groups and compare which 11
ones had higher conversions namely which app icon produced the most downloads. 12
So then after you've done that, you will find that one out of these five or six icons tends to perform 13
the best and then you go back to your designer and ask them to make micro variations on that app icon 14
and then go back and test again and again and again. 15
And the idea is that by the end of all this testing, you will end up with the perfect app icon or as perfect 16
as can be 17
that produces the most downloads. 18
Now a lot of marketing, you know, no matter if its internet marketing or social media marketing or app marketing, 19
it's all about experimentation. And you will have some hypotheses as to what may or may not work, 20
but at the end of the day all that matters is trying it out on actual users and see which ones produce 21
more revenue or more conversions. 22
So do A/B split testing is actually relatively straightforward 23
on the Google Play store. All you have to do is upload several app icons and Google will automatically 24
display a random icon to new users who are viewing the app download page. And based on the conversion 25
rates i.e. whether if that particular icon led to a download, they will reveal to you the data that shows 26
which icon performs best. 27
And funnily enough in my experience it's usually not the one that you think looks nicest. 28
So this kind of experimentation is really really good for pointing out those unintuitive gains. 29
For example did you ever notice that most of the top strategy games on the app stores all have the same 30
app icon and its basically the main character with their mouth open looking like they're shouting something 31
and looking far into the distance? And I mean there is a little bit of psychology behind it because there's 32
nothing that draws a human in more than another human face or human esque face. 33
And then having the human face looking far into the distance you're wondering oh what are they looking 34
at? 35
And then having the so-called raw face or action face means that you know there's a lot of emotion going 36
on in that image. 37
Now some of this is cause and effect 38
namely the app icons for Clash of Clans and game of war. 39
Both have this kind of app icon so there's a lot of-- 40
so there's a lot of copycats. 41
But at the same time, I can bet you that these app icons have been split tests to death and they have 42
found through data that this is what draws people in in those fraction of a second while you're scrolling 43
through the App Store. 44
So my point is not necessarily to find a main character, open their mouth and make your app icon just an action 45
mouse. 46
My point is is that the data can sometimes be really revealing and give you unintuitive conclusions. 47
But seriously though, check out the top grossing strategy game and check out how all the icons are essentially 48
the same. 49
So for Google Play, implementing split testing is very easy. 50
But for the iOS App Store it's not so easy. 51
Despite promising us the same feature for years and years now, iOS app developers still don't have access 52
to this experimentation feature or split testing feature. 53
And instead, what you have to do is manually update your app with a new app icon and compare say month 54
to month how your app is performing and presumably based on the change in the app icon or the change 55
in your screenshot. 56
Now there's two problems with that. 57
One is that if you've done any sort of science you'll know that that is not a valid comparison. 58
It has to be side by side because you know this month you might have been featured in Product hunt whereas 59
you know last month nobody heard about you. 60
So there's a lot of confounding factors 61
basically. On top of that, there's a website called App Review times which tracks on average how long 62
it takes for an app update to go through. 63
So at the moment looks like it takes about 4 days for your iOS app update to actually be reviewed 64
and then released because on the iOS App Store it's done by humans and it can be a little bit- 65
It's sped up in the last year compared to before. 66
Previously like two years ago we were waiting something like 2 weeks to 3 weeks 67
for every update to actually get reviewed and pushed through. But still 4 days is a long time and 68
that means you can only really do two experiments a month for example. 69
So it's not really ideal. An alternative to that is using a service like STOREMAVEN. 70
And essentially the idea here is that you send your traffic i.e. people who potentially download your app towards 71
a page that looks identical to the app store download page. And based on their conversions i.e. whether 72
if they hit the download button or not, you can compare how different icons perform, how your app screenshots 73
perform, how your description perform. 74
So essentially allowing you to split test your app download page and bypassing the app store itself. 75
Now the downside to that is that it's an extra click for your user to potentially give up on downloading. 76
But on the upside, you do get a lot of useful data that will improve your download rate in the future. 77
And they have a 30 day free trial. So check it out if app listing optimization is something you want 78
to get serious about.