Since there are more than two million apps and games on the Google Play Store already, getting yours noticed is a challenge in itself. There are those that offer App Store Optimization (ASO) but of course not all developers believe in it. A quick study conducted by Novoda, an app development and optimization studio, shows that in several countries, including an emoji in your short description may actually increase your downloads and eventually, your profit. However, not all countries showed that result.
Taking advantage of the Google Developer Console and its A/B testing tool, the company conducted a a multivariate test, adding three different emojis to the short descriptions of existing apps. The three were the rocket, the 100, and a blue “bin” emoji. They said the study was conducted between two and seven days and each variant rolled out to 16.6% – 25% of visitors. The copy wasn’t changed and the tests were localized in several languages to check on the consistency of the findings.
They used seven different languages to run the test on and saw that the results varied across countries and language groups. In Germany, Italy, and Poland, the apps with emojis in the descriptions saw an increase of 20% in terms of downloads. But in English speaking countries, the previous version without the emoji generated more downloads. In Russia, Spain, and France, the differences were too minute so you could not find a conclusive report.
The conclusion in this study is that adding emojis to your app short description may increase downloads, but it still depends on the country and language as well. What is probably more important here is the fact that you need to do A/B testing when you release your app to maximize its optimization.
SOURCE: Novoda
Interesting findings. Just curious, what is the user sample size of the test?
Short description is indeed very important. Statistics show only an average of 5% users will click the “read more” button below the first few sentences of app description on Google Play. It is therefore very interesting to see A/B tests and their findings on short description like this experiment of emoji.
About other aspects of app store optimization, I’ve written a mega post (>5000 words) about 35 tips to increase app downloads in 2017 ( https://www.meatti.com/blog/app-seo-increase-app-downloads/ ). There is also a case study of how to increase the app downloads by a massive 1478%.
I hope the readers here can get a kick out of it 🙂
Either way, thanks for the awesome content. Keep up the great work!