So I decided to develop a mobile game.
But the path to success looked nothing like the original plan.
What product should I create?
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
I immediately decided that I wanted to make a game.
This was an opportunity to revisit this old hobby.
I spent two weeks identifying and studying popular game niches in app stores.
Make an arcade game about trucks.2.
Launch it on Google Play.
Transform theoretical knowledge about ASO into applied skills using $1,000 for the products launch and its promotion.4.
Make some money (if Im lucky).
It took us about a week to come up with a concept.
In the end, we decided to make a game based on a famous Volvo commercial.
In this ad, Jean-Claude Van Damme did a split on the side windows of two moving trucks.
We thought it would be fun for players to try being the driver of the right truck.
The goal of the game was to go as far as possible while keeping Van Damme from falling down.
The task was complicated because the left truck acted unpredictably.
It could accelerate and switch lanes.
The player driving the right truck needed to adapt to the left truck and keep Van Damme standing.
It was a casual arcade game with fun hardcore gameplay that drove some of the players mad.
We developed the game on Unity over a weekend.
It was time to start learning how to get organic traffic through ASO tactics.
Our first target was organic search traffic in the app store.
We had $1,000 to outpace our competitors and capture search traffic.
I realized there was no chance to win the top keywords right away.
Therefore, at the start, we aimed at low and medium competition search queries.
Some keywords that could be simultaneously placed in the title were promoted together.
This query was eurotruck simulator 2.
As part of this campaign, we also promoted the query euro truck simulator to influence both search queries.
In some other countries, the game landed an even lower position.
Epic Split Truck Simulators ranking began to gradually decline in search results for all the keywords we had used.
The downloads dropped too.
After a couple of weeks, the game stabilized at 50 downloads per day.
We exhausted our entire budget, we earned some experience, and we froze the project.
But we still let the game stay in Google Play.
Finding out the reason behind the sudden growth was not easy.
After some research, I didnt find a single mention of the game in any tech publication or blog.
It turned out that the game had somehow found its way into the student community.
After discovering Epic Split, these users started to compete and tried to beat each other in the game.
Epic Split began to spread through word of mouth.
It also made sure the product was picked up by the app stores recommendation systems.
Google Plays recommended app mechanisms cannot be considered a part of featuring.
They are personalized for each user.
Thats why it was so difficult to identify them.
On the right is the original icon.
On the left is the new icon we designed for the game.
The effect of this work was much greater than direct attempts to win over the top search results.
The growth that started in CIS countries gradually spread to others.
Consequently, the number of downloads increased dramatically.
We had over 30,000 new users on our best day.
The decline was strongly correlated with the decreasing conversion of the app page.
The conversion rate sank, which made Google Play promote the game less.
Summing it up
This article was originally published onMediumby, Oleg Yakubnekov.
He was in charge of analytics at MSQRD, a selfie filter app.
The company was acquired by Facebook in 2016.
Workplace reached 2 million paid users in less than 2.5 years.
Oleg helped develop the services of API.AI (now Dialogflow) as a product director.
