Google Play ASO: 4 Simple Ideas on Icon Experiments
It is advised in all the best practice guidelines to have a simple, clear, unique, well-designed icon, relevant to your app. Let’s assume you already have all of that. What else can you do to get more store listing visitors, better conversion, and as a result more downloads?
In this blog post, I will share how you can experiment with your listing icon. All written is based on my personal practical experience of doing ASO for various Android apps (non-games), and also on my observations and research that I’ve done. I’ve tried almost all the ideas by myself. Not all of them showed good results, and some performed better only in specific countries.
However, all the apps are different. What works for one app will not work for another app; what works for one country might not work for another country. So it’s all the matter of testing :)
Not all the examples I provide here are nice looking and/or well designed. But I am sure they can become an inspiration to experiment with your app icon. And in fact, not everything that you think looks fine will provide great results. Sometimes unattractive but clear images bring more downloads than modern-looking icons created by successful designers.
When it comes to an icon, you can test it for your default language, as well as for localized listings. Before applying the new icon, I recommend testing different versions locally — at least in your key countries. You might see that users from different countries like different images.
Using a badge on the icon
I am pretty sure you’ve seen badges on the app icons in the listings. With badges I mean additional elements showing the year or stressing that the app is free, etc.
While designing any type of badge, don’t overdo and remember that the corners of your app icon will be rounded. It doesn’t look nice when a part of the badge is “eaten”.
Let’s have a look at what kind of badges you can test for your app (if it’s relevant).
- Notification
If you search for email apps or messaging apps, quite a few of them will show you the icon with a notification. It helps users understand how the product icon will look when he/she gets the message in real life. At the same time, it can make the icon more visible.
2. Recency
People like the new stuff — the newest phone is the best, the newest laptop is the coolest. Maybe it can work the same with apps? Maybe users prefer apps marked as “New”, or “Updated”, or “2019”, or even “2020”…
In my personal experience, recency badges haven’t shown great results. But other apps use them, so why not try it by yourself.
3. Special features / advantages over competitors
Some apps would like to stress they are free. Indeed, in some countries, people tend to use free services more and don’t like to pay for anything online.
As users get annoyed with in-app advertising, you might want to display the advantage of your app if you don’t show ads.
In some countries, users are in favor of lightweight apps. If you have a “lite” app, you can also try to show it on your icon.
Here are some more examples of utilizing badges to show the apps’ features.
Some app developers put keywords on their icon badges, logos or brand names.
4. Social proof / Award stamps
Needless to say that if people / experts / friends say this specific app is the best, the user will follow the advice. The same with awards: if the app won some prize, users will be more likely to download it.
If you have got an award, you should definitely tell your users about it somewhere — and the icon can be an appropriate place.
While some apps have won real awards, others may just utilize images and small signs to show their superiority and advantage over competitors.
If you decide to experiment with this type of badges, keep in mind that the icon should not be misleading. I don’t recommend using phrases like “the best” or “top” if you cannot prove that. Google may also punish app developers who are misleading users.
Generic design VS Unique design
If you search for a caller ID app, your results will probably look similar to mine:
You can see that quite a few icons look almost the same. Is it good or bad? The best practice is to have a unique icon, different from competitors. But the truth is you will never know until you test. For some users, a handset on the icon and blue color might mean that this is a true caller id app, and they will not download an app that doesn’t have that on the icon. So, if you are launching a caller id app, you might want to look similar to a “true caller id” app. On the other hand, a different and more creative approach can draw users’ attention.
If your icon looks similar to competitors, try to create a different version and test it. At the same time, if your icon looks very different and you feel it doesn’t perform well, test an icon that would look more similar to the peer apps.
You definitely will want to go with the unique design for your icon if you are building up a brand. A unique icon / logo is a part of the brand identity.
Let’s search for notes apps in Google Play.
Evernote’s icon does not resemble any of the top apps that are listed when you search for “notes”. Nevertheless, the app has over 100M downloads, and the icon is very well recognized.
Using national flags and national symbols
If you have a language app, it is very handy to use the national flag to identify what language the app is teaching.
If you have an app targeting users from a specific country, the flag, some national symbols or colors can also help you.
If you’d like to localize your app listing, you can try using a flag or some national elements on your icon. It can bring good results, but not in all the countries. So if you had a successful experiment in one country, keep testing in others one by one (you will need to use custom store listing experiments for some locations). All countries have a different level of patriotism, attitude to national symbols, culture, etc. And before launching the experiment, I recommend doing some brief research about the country, its culture and current state in general.
Using the text on the icon
We got used to seeing images on icons where we try to depict graphically what the app is about. But I discovered that sometimes text on the icon works much better. For one of the utility apps I worked with, we changed an image with a short word — and it brought us sufficient increase of store listing visitors, higher conversion, and more downloads. To be honest, I thought this was the ugliest icon in the world :) And how surprised was I to see very promising results of the winning text icon in the A/B test.
I looked through Google Play listings and saw that some app developers also write text only or use text along with the image on their icons. And yes, I agree, some of them don’t look nice at all. But to grow your app and its users, you should rely on A/B test results, and not only on your taste.
Try out different shapes of your icon… Actually, no, you can’t do that anymore.
Previously, you could upload an icon of any shape to your listing — square, round, triangle, whatever form you wish. This was one of the things that could differentiate your app from the competitors. However, in March 2019, Google presented a new app and game icon specification. According to the new guidelines, all the icons are supposed to have the same shape — square with rounded corners.
Until June 24, 2019, developers were advised to implement a new-spec icon. All the icons that were not updated were supposed to be displayed in a so-called legacy mode. However, even now you can still see the icons of different shapes in the Play Store. Most developers applied icons according to the new guidelines. But those who didn’t, are still having their unique shaped icons, instead of the legacy-mode images mentioned by Google in their guidelines.
It doesn’t mean, though, you can keep uploading original icons. As of now, all the new icons uploaded to the Google Play Store listing or the icons you’d like to test should adhere to new specifications.
Finishing this long blog post I’d like to remind you that when you test your icon in Google Play, your product icon remains the same. So you probably don’t want to go too crazy with the new ideas for experiments. Users might get confused when they download one app, and see something completely different on their phone screens.
Thanks for reading :) And if you have any other ideas about icon experiments, you are welcome to share them in the comments.
