App Store Audience Testing

What is App Store Audience Testing?

App Store audience testing is the practice of testing different segments of an audience and measuring how they respond to app store marketing creatives. To explain simply the process of testing, it involves sending different segment groups to a product page from a paid ad and tracking the conversion rate of each segment. And the only way to discover who that audience is is by deducting them down into segmented groups according to what factors or commonalities align them. These could be anything from age, interests, gender, location, language, etc.

Let’s take a dating app as an example. Audience testing would involve tracking / measuring how a certain age category responds to a certain creative, then using that data to make informed decisions on what needs changing in order to meet the strategic marketing goals. It’s possible that by testing one segment of the audience, other segments are pushed to one side for the purpose of that particular test; but it’s par for the course and a calculated step in order to achieve a specific marketing goal. 

Why App Store Audience Testing is Important?

The heart of App Store audience testing is understanding who the most valuable members of the App Store audience are and what their needs are in order to drive them to the product page. Effective audience testing should define who the audience is for a particular app or game to deliver users of high-value who will lead an app to improve growth.

Audience testing is important because it provides insights that marketers use to construct their marketing ‘language’ (marketing / creative assets) which allows them to communicate with their audience on a more relatable and engaging level. 

App Store Audience Testing and ASO

ASO isn’t interested in ‘the gist’ when it comes to data, it’s interested in detail, and minutiae. For the mobile app industry, optimizing for the ‘average’ user  is too broad and a sign of an ineffective marketing strategy, it would be a challenge to blanket optimize and audience testing exists to avoid that circumstance. And if you’re successful you might have increased conversion rates for a low-quality audience

Attempting to create, let alone optimize, an important element on a product page without any background on who the audience is, what they want, what they respond to and why, is a recipe for disaster. Segmenting an audience must occur in order to know exactly how a particular user / group responds to a marketing asset, as opposed to how everyone responds to it. Only by gathering that data is it possible to pinpoint what may be pushing away the desired audience and what’s bringing in an undesirable audience. 

Audience testing provides the opportunity for ASO people to optimize messaging for particular users on their particular journeys.