Top 10 games lists are rather exciting. Aggressive advertising and sudden trends make these lists very volatile. Unlike other categories, major players do not dominate the entirety of lists. Even though Among Us seems to keep its place at the top of the free mobile games list for some time, the rest of the list is still very dynamic. As usual, this month we are faced with many newcomers.
In the overall lists, we only see 3 of the apps that were present last month. Among Us, Chat Master! and Join Clash 3D. We have 7 newcomers to the overall list.
This month’s most powerful newcomer seems to be Shortcut Run. In all three most downloaded game lists, it is the second most downloaded app following Among Us.
Another successful app seems to be Project Makeover. Even though it’s available only on the Apple App store, it has managed to be third on the overall list, which indicates an incredible amount of download volume.
Let’s take a closer look at Shortcut Run and analyze their success.
Campaign Analysis of Shortcut Run
The Ad Intelligence tool allows us to see the campaign metrics of Shortcut Run. They currently are currently ranking 25th on the Top Advertisers list which is quite high considering the number of apps available. However, we can see that they are using 14 Ad Networks to increase their impressions. Facebook, Admob, and Mintegral seem to be the most preferred ad networks as combined their distribution is 67%.
When we look at their Ad Publisher count, we can see that it is close to 10,000. This is a very competitive number. To put things into perspective, Toon Blast, an app with a very aggressive paid growth strategy uses approximately 11,000 ad publishers.
Taking a look at their creatives, we can see that in total they have 1,538 creatives while 972 of these are being actively used. It indicates efficient use of creatives even and it can be considered slightly above average for the category. To clarify; for Shortcut Run the Active/Total ratio is 63% while the ratio is 56% for Project Makeover and 57% for Toon Blast respectively.
When we look at their creative distribution, we can see that only 1% of their creatives are playables. This is a bit lower compared to most games. A ratio of 4% playables can be considered the average for this category.
Through their creative distribution, we can see that the app is focusing on a wide-spread strategy. Taiwan, Korea, Brazil, and the US seem to have a little more emphasis compared to other countries. But for the rest of the world, creatives are almost uniformly distributed.
It is also visible that the app is translating its creatives according to the region. They have creatives in 7 languages.
Estimated Impression Distribution for Shortcut Run
Their translation efforts seem to have worked. When we look at their language distribution, we can see that 5% of their creatives are in Arabic. In return, 7% of their estimated impressions come from Saudi Arabia. Korea is also a similar case.
ASO Report
Through MobileAction’s ASO Report, we can take an overall look at the App’s ASO health. They are currently ranking on over 2000 words. Considering the competitiveness of the gaming category and the aggressive campaigns that the apps conduct, these keyword rankings are quite impressive for Shortcut Run. Also, their visibility score of 85 indicates that they can be considered successful on the ASO front.
Because hyper-casual games usually do not have strong Brand names, ASO optimization is critical for user acquisition. By increasing your overall visibility in the App Store, you can secure users that are not specifically seeking your app. The next part of this post will elaborate on this topic.
Keyword Intelligence
Using the Keyword Intelligence tool, let’s examine where the organic downloads of Shortcut Run are coming from. Especially when a hyper-casual game is just released, your brand keyword most likely will not be used often. Meaning that people will not just suddenly start searching for “Shortcut Run”. That is why the overall visibility of the app should be increased as much as possible to attract new users. When we look at the dashboard above, the keywords “games”, “free games”, “roof rails” and “game” are at the top. These keywords account for almost 65% of the apps organic downloads.
It appears that people go into the App Store searching for games, and thanks to its high visibility they are faced with Shortcut Run. Of course, getting impressions is just the first part of the user acquisition process. You also need to be able to convert these impressions into installs. Only then you can start growing your app.
Final Words
This is all for the top 10 games of November 2020. Gaming is a tough category to develop an app in. First of all, it is hard to determine if the users will like your idea or not. In addition to this, there are big companies with large budgets who tend to run very aggressive ad campaigns for their apps. Standing out in this category requires very careful planning and execution. Shortcut Run is only one example of a successful app. Still, they should be congratulated for entering both the top ios games and the top android games lists from second place.
By combining strong App Store Optimization with an effective advertising strategy, you can boost your growth and increase your revenue. Schedule a demo with us and let us show you how MobileAction’s tools can be used to get ahead of the competition!
