01:49 - Wes McCabe Introduction

02:46 - App Store Optimization (ASO) for SEGA

04:09 - Improving Visibility Within the App Store

13:19 - Launching a New App

16:54 - Images and Videos

18:04 - Improving Rank

19:58 - Getting Featured

21:22 - Using SensorTower (Results) 

23:55 - Broad vs Focused Apps/Niches

26:30 - Influencing ASO Through SEO, Press Releases, etc.

27:38 - Downloads

29:12 - Brand New App Boost/Version Releases

30:06 - Appstore Views (Reviewing Analytics)

Picks

NHL94 Online (Jaim)
Podcast Movement (Chuck)
Entrepreneur On Fire (Chuck)
The Eventual Millionaire (Chuck)
Periscope (Chuck)
Alex Malafeev: Increase your mobile app downloads using App Store Optimization (Wes)
ASO Academy (Wes)
Jot (Wes)

 

Hey everybody, and welcome to episode 117 of the iPhreaks show. This week on our panel we have Jaim Zuber.

Hello, from Minneapolis!

I’m Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv.

Couple of quick things, I just got back from Podcast Movement, and I’m really curious to talk to podcast listeners. So, go to iphreaksshow.com/15minutes, and it will give you an opportunity to claim 15 minutes on my schedule. And I’d just like to talk, find out what the show is about to you. So, why do you listen? Is it to get news, to find things to explore – that kind of thing. Or maybe you just listen in the car because you listen in the car – I don’t know.

The other thing I’d like to know is just who you are and what you're about, and what struggles you have and what things you do well and all that stuff. I know that’s a lot to fit in to 15 minutes, but I would love to talk to you. So yeah, go check that out. I’m using Skype, so if that’s a blocker for you then I’m sorry. So iphreaksshow.com/15minutes.

We also have a special guest this week, and that is Wes McGabe.

Hi! This is Wes McGabe from San Francisco, California.

Do you want to give us a little more intro – what you do, what flavor of ice cream you like, whatever?

Yeah, absolutely. So I work at a company called Sensor Tower, and we got started offering app store optimization software. So for those that aren’t familiar, it’s similar to SEO on the app store, so trying to optimize your search results in the app store.

Today, we are the company that also offers services for mobile marketers. We have a downloads and revenues estimation product, and we’re also building an ad intelligence product right now as well. So, kind of a suite of marketing products for app developers and mobile marketers.

I’m just going to pretend you said “sweet” marketing. [Laughter] So I watched the talk by – I don’t remember who. You sent us the talk and I just didn’t write down names, but it was about what you guys have been able to do for SEGA.

That’s right.

And, I remember back in the day they used to make SEGA console, and the little handheld SEGA thingy – I don’t remember – Genesis, was it? But yeah, now it looks like they’ve gone full on mobile.

Yeah, so the Genesis, the Dreamcast, they're now making mobile games. A lot of their classic games – Sonic the Hedgehog – and yeah, we’ve been working with them on the app store and trying to help them get discovered and grow their user base.

Okay, we’ve all got the NHL games, the NHL 95 – is it out there?

I haven’t seen – their sports games, I haven’t seen as many of those. They have one football manager game, but we got to push them to get more of those sports games out. [Chuckles]

Okay. I can hope. I still have my SEGA so I’m doing okay; I can still play.

Nice.

[Chuckles] Besides, NHL – what’s that?

You see in Utah, that’s the national – hmm.

Homemakers?

Horse.

Yeah.

Horse League something. I don’t know.

High mountain – yeah. Anyway, [crosstalk] but yeah I’m trying to make Jaim cry. Anyway, so yeah,

so was that a SEGA game back in the day? NHL 95?

That was.

Ah. So, let’s jump right in on this. So app store optimization is about getting you listed when people search for something, right?

Yes, yeah that is correct. So when you open up the app store you have your featured section, you have your category rankings, and you also have the search section where user are going, maybe that word of mouth they’ve heard about an app, they’re going to go search of it. Or maybe they're just doing an organic search; they want a new alarm clock app and they're going to start searching for keywords related to that. And Apple is pretty confidential; they don’t release a lot of data on where more results are coming from, but from a lot of independent studies we’re finding that majority of the apps are being installed from the search functionality. And so it leaves a lot of room for marketers to figure out how to increase your position in those results.

And so that’s when we come in; we provide data on how to, you know, which keyword is being searched for, which ones can you actually compete on. And then you start to submit a new metadata to Apple to improve your visibility.

That’s good because judging from talking to other developers, the app store is where all our hard work goes to die.

Uh-hm.

Never to be heard from again. So you’re saying there’s a better way? [Laughter]

Yeah, that’s right. And one of the reasons we want to come on the show too is a lot of the indie developers, a lot of really great creative apps that don’t have the huge marketing budget aren’t just going to be paying for advertisements. They get lost in the abyss, so that’s where ASO can really help you out and find your audience through the search functions.

And I’m just going to clarify some lingo here. ASO is App Store Optimization.

Yeah, sorry. I’m just kind of making an assumption there. [Crosstalk] Yeah, so ASO is the acronym yeah.

No, it’s all good. We have a definition so now you can use it. [Chuckles]

Awesome.

So I’m assuming, because I’ve heard a lot of things in podcasting that get us ranked in the app store. And I’m assuming that a lot of the same things apply, the things that we’re filling in on our RSS feeds, I think primarily the big ones for us are title and keywords. I hear some rumblings about description summary but it seems like that’s kind of a hit or miss depending on what else you’ve got. Is it the same for apps?

Yeah, definitely. So it is a different algorithm, but – it is the same but it’s pretty bare bones. We joke around the office here, Apple’s algorithm and search functions is kind of an Ask Jeeves era of search algorithms. It’s pretty basic, it’s – your feeding it keywords and the terms from your title and those who are being indexed, and if someone searched for that term, you show up. There’s definitely a long list of tricks and small other things that your publisher name is indexed. For example, if you in-app purchases in your app that exact string or phrase is indexed, if you show up in Game Center for example, you’ll rank for combinations of ‘game’ and ‘center’. And so there’s a long list of different inputs like this, but the main ones that you're controlling on an update basis are your keyword field and the title.

So you want to create an in-app purchase that’s called Candy Crush Saga then, right?

[Chuckles] Exactly, yeah. Maybe Game of War –.

There you go.

Clash of Clans. [Chuckles]

What’s the most important one? Is it the title or is it the keyword, or is it something that’s –.

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, the one that’s getting the most weight is the title. So if you put the same term in the title versus the keywords and ran a test there, the title would win out nine times out of ten. So the title is definitely the most important.

After that all things are pretty much equal. So, keywords, in-app purchases and what-not, but the title’s definitely where you're getting the most weight. So the most relevant and the most important terms should go there. And you’ll see – you may have seen this but there’s just this general trend in titles getting longer in the last year or two years. So before it’d just be Flickr or whatever the app name might be, but now we’re seeing like Flickr- and then sort of your tagline “a photo sharing collaboration app” whatever it might be. Part of that is conveying what the app does, and the other part of that is they’re putting keywords in there to help with search.

Do you see like really spam-y titles?

Oh yeah. So you have 255 characters to work with, and so people take some serious liberties there and we will see some ridiculous titles that are just what Jaim just said as a joke, you know, people will actually do that. You could have a photo editing app, and then just throw in Candy Crush, Game of War – things that aren’t even relevant. And that’s where Apple’s review process comes in; there’s nothing that’s programmatically going to gang you there or reject the bill, but that’s part of the review process. And we’ve seen some people get away with it where maybe it’s in a smaller market or the reviewer just missed it, but we’ve definitely seen some pretty spam-y titles.

So once we’ve picked a reasonable title for our app, what are the next steps for basic [inaudible] basis that what we’re building can be discovered.

Yeah, so the title’s obviously the most important thing and you want to have some phrase in there or some sort of marketing tagline that’s going to have – bring in some of your key search terms there. After that, some of the features that we have that’ll allow people to dig a little bit deeper is you can – we have a feature called Keyword Spy which allows you to essentially spy on your competitors and see what they're ranking for and what they're using.

That’s always a great place to start and just see what – maybe there’s some other terms or other ways we could acquire users that we’re not thinking of. And so, just start to generate a keyword bank essentially. A list of different test ideas is you might have just who your general audience might be for your app, but there’s always new users or new people that could find value in your app that you might not know about.

So, just start on that research phase and that’s where we come in to help with that, and start figuring out what other terms might be relevant and might help us out. So we show you the traffics or how often the term’s being searched, and the difficulty, too. So Candy Crush or Game of War – those terms are being searched all the time, but the probability that a small app would be able to rank well for that term is pretty low. So it’s a balancing act of picking terms that have substantial traffic, but that you can also compete on.

Okay. So my Candy Crush fishing app, probably not going to work out.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, but what if your app is legitimately like Candy Crush Tips or Candy Crush Strategies or something like that? I know with SEO, it takes a lot of different things into account and so it’s usually three to six months before you start to rank. But if you’re just being indexed and then searched on that index, could you rank immediately by putting something in there that is both relevant and has all those keywords in the title and keywords and stuff?

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, you’ll rank in some capacity right away just by putting it in the title. Like you mention with SEO there’s things that – there’s parts of the algorithm that you need to build over time, so one of the biggest parts of the algorithm is download velocity. So if you get featured or you have a press release or any sort of viral thing where you're getting more downloads than usual in a certain time frame, you’ll see your ranking for that particular keyword go up.

We found reviews claim a part of the algorithm as well, so if you have a period where more people reviewing your app and giving feedback that way so volume of reviews. So yeah, the answer is you’ll rank right away but you do need to build a history in the app store to really start to improve that ranking.

Now was that history specific to the keyword or is it just in general, [crosstalk] you’re getting more downloads or less downloads or whatever.

Yeah, just in general. We have done some test and research around that as a separate question though, whether or not you can own a keyword on history. We’ve seen some evidence of that, but I think what we’re seeing there is more of the conversion, so Apple is accounting for conversion.

So if I search for Sonic the Hedgehog and I tap into the first app on that page which is Sonic and install the app, Apple’s tracking all of those user’s paths.

Okay. So that’s a vote for Sonic on Sonic the Hedgehog.

Exactly. And so if Sonic has been ranking for that term and that search query for five years, they have this huge history of conversion there. And so if I just go ahead and put Sonic in my app even though I have a lot of downloads, I’m not going to rank as high because they have this history of conversion there.

So if you're Sonic Restaurant and you’ve got your new app what are you going to do?

Yeah so, the first rule is definitely on your brand so you obviously need to include it in there, you need to go after Sonic. We have seen some anecdotal evidence that repeating a term in the keyword section can give you a slight boost. So you have Sonic Restaurants in the title, you repeat sonic in the keyword; it’s usually fairly marginal though. And it’s not really enough to move you from two to one but we’ve seen that help from say position 50 to maybe 40 or something like that.

So it’s just going to be a combination of a lot of little things that – beginning to gain history with that term and improving your reviews. You can also do some stuff with localization too, so localizing that title, I guess Sonic’s not a great example because their restaurants aren’t all over the world but –.

McDonald’s maybe.

McDonald’s, yeah. So you can localize say ‘restaurant’ for example and to translate that into different languages, and localizing your app will certainly improve your visibility in the US as well.

Oh, it will help your US rankings to rank better in other places or get downloads to other places?

Yeah, so there’s a few correlations at how that works. So the first one is some stores are linked, and so for example Spain and the US are linked together in Apple’s algorithm, and part of that is just – I think Apple saw that we have a large Hispanic population and a lot of people were searching in Spanish on the app store. And so rather than have the developer dedicate 50% of their keywords to Spanish and 50% in the US, they said, “Hey, in the US just focus on English keywords, but then what we’ll do is that we’ll take your Spanish metadata and we’ll index that in the US as well.” And so basically what happens there is anything that you do in Spain counts for you and the US as well. And then there’s other overlaps like that around the globe.

In Canada, for example you have French Canadian and English Canadian, so localizing can definitely help give you an extra set of terms.

That’s really interesting. So are there any other tricks like that? And I don’t say tricks, I mean it seems smart if you know that [crosstalk] the Hispanic population to put stuff in there for them too.

But I think most of us focus on the demographic as the largest in the country that we’re targeting.

Exactly. Yeah, and people have definitely abused that system because even though it’s the Spanish section, if you're not targeting the Spanish population, we’ve seen people put a different set of English terms in the Spanish section knowing that they’ll be indexed in the US. And again that just comes down to the review process – some people will get rejected for that, other people we’ve seen approved, and they're essentially getting two titles and double the characters of keywords. So it can kind of be gamed in that way.

But in terms of other tricks I mentioned the in-app purchase is one; I think they definitely seem like tricks, but yeah just knowing all the inputs and sort of how they can manipulate those to improve your search.

Right. So then if you do a Sonic app then you also, instead of having an in-app purchases that’s like uber awesome membership that’s uber awesome Sonic membership and so you get that keyword slipped in there where it’s still relevant but you’re getting that extra vote or that extra juice.

Yeah, exactly.

I’m wondering a little bit too about the images and videos. Does that play in at all? Just having them, I’m assuming, helps but –.

Yeah, that’s a great question. This just came up on a call recently with one of our clients. This is on – I know this podcast is focused on iOS but this is on Google Play actually; there’s a quick side note that they found that Google was doing image analysis on the icons, and so really popular icons for a lot of the slot – casino game slots is the triple seven. And they found that they would rank for this as search of triple seven without having it in the title or description or keywords just from that coming through on the icon, so that was really interesting.

Google’s definitely a lot further ahead than Apple in the search – in their search functionality. It’s a lot more robust and harder to gain and understand. But on Apple, image, screenshots and icons are strictly about conversion.

So, we’ve seen amazing studies of people tweaking their icons or screenshots and seeing the conversion of their page go way up, but in terms of the search functionality it’s not going to really help you there.

So let’s say that I’m writing a gardening app – just to throw one out there – and I want to start doing some of this optimization. So my title can be ‘Green Thumb’, and it has a tagline ‘the best app in gardening’ or something, and I can put ‘gardening’ in my keywords; but how do I evaluate whether or not I even want to try and rank for gardening or if I even have a shot at showing up there?

Yeah, that’s a great question. First up would be just pull out your phone and go to search and type in ‘gardening’, start to get a sense for who’s ranking there. And then with Sensor Tower one of the things we provide is we’re going to show you all the apps that are ranking for Gardening. What we do is – it’s a little bit harder if you’re just launching. If you already have a history on the app store –.

Right.

What we do is we are able to look at all those apps say in the top ten and compare a lot of the metrics that impact ranking to your build in your app. So we look at how many reviews do they have; what is their estimation for downloads per day for that app; does this app have ‘gardening’ in the title. And then we compare them to your app and we’re able to give you a pretty successful percentage on whether or not you’ll rank in the top ten for that app – I mean, sorry, for that keyword.

So yeah, if you’re using Sensor Tower that’s kind of the way we do it; if you’re not, yeah, it’s just looking at who’s ranking there already and trying to get a sense for whether or not you could compete.

One of the things I always look for too is how many in the top ten have ‘gardening’ in the title, because as we’ve mentioned in the start, the title’s the most important factor. So if I’m looking at a keyword and the first 20 apps all have that term in the title, right away that’s already going to be pretty tough to compete with. But if you can find a keyword where not that many people are using it in the title, that’s a pretty ripe opportunity that if put it in the title you're going to jump up there.

One other thing that I see on the app store is apps get featured, and they get featured in general, they get featured under specific categories. Are there ways to get featured or is that not app store optimization?

Yeah, it’s funny you bring that up I was actually listening to your talk with Ben Johnson about a year ago –.

Yeah.

On getting featured. That was really interesting.

We had a lot of good thoughts too but I’m kind of curious as to what you guys do.

So getting featured is, we provide some data on the impacts of getting featured and how that kind of impacts your visibility on category rankings and searches – it’s all kind of [inaudible]. But in terms of getting it featured, that’s something that’s still kind of a mystery out there. I think Ben had a lot of good thoughts but it’s first and foremost a curated part of Apple. They have their picks and they have a list of apps that they're going after.

So that’s still kind of a secret, like hidden part that people haven’t been able to crack other than just building a great app then Apple likes it. They also seem to follow a lot of patterns too, sort of other curated popular websites. So if you’ve been featured on Product Hunt or get a press on TechCrunch, a lot of times shortly after that you’ll see – you’ll be seeing that app on the Featured section, so there’s definitely some sources that they pull from.

But yeah, there’s not much on the ASO side that you can really do to help out in that section.

Do you want to talk a bit about what you’ve done for some of your clients as far as the results that you’ve seen from implementing some forms of app store optimization?

Yeah, definitely. So it sounds like you’ve watched the SEGA video.

I did. And the thing is is that I think I’m fully behind you promoting the company work floor because I think it’s a service that people are going to need, but I also want to know what kind of results people can expect if they go in and do app store optimization either on their own or by using Sensor Tower.

Yeah, so I guess the end line goal here is that by making your app more visible, you’re going to be getting more organic discovery, and more installs at the end of the day – that’s what everyone’s after and that’s the end goal.

So with a lot of our clients, it’s [inaudible] the process so when we were measuring results, it’s not so much after one update – changing a few keywords and then looking installs. But we saw with SEGA and what we see with a lot of our clients, it’s over a test cycle of typically three to six months where you're slowly making tweaks, like we’ve mentioned so far on this show, to the title, keywords, in-app purchases. And then over time there’s more discovery points for users to find your app.

So in general, we’re seeing on average about a ten to fifteen percent increase in organic installs, and that’s just across all of our enterprise clients right now. It also definitely depends on where you're coming from; some companies we worked with have really done nothing, and so we’ll start working with them and they’ll have two keywords in the keyword field. And so there’s a lot of room for growth there and so we’ll max out that keyword field, suggest a better title and see pretty substantial lift in installs.

Other apps have already been doing this for a while and are just trying to maximize their optimization and so there can be a little smaller. But I would say all off our clients are seeing, on the whole, increases in their installs from anywhere from five percent at the very bottom to fifteen at the top. So it’s not going to be your driver, but it’s definitely a way to increase the organic discovery.

Yeah. Look at your website – right, front and center you have a way to – you can search your app. So if you're working on an app and like, “Oh, how am I doing on these scores,” you can actually do that. That’s kind of a nice feature.

Yeah, we could be a little letter grade there, too. [Chuckles]

Uh-hm. Now with all the different keywords you can have – I mean if you’ve got a very big app with a lot of broad reach, is that a better approach than like a small focused app that may have just a smaller amount of keywords? Or will it hurt to be an app that does a lot of things? Or does it make sense to be more focused?

Yeah, so we recommend getting pretty broad. Relevance is definitely the most important thing because even if you're ranking really well for a term, if it doesn’t have to do with your app, no one’s going to actually tap in, look at the screenshots and then install your app. So the relevance of the term is definitely the most important thing, but you have a hundred characters to work with and it definitely makes sense to use all of that space.

There’s also just a lot of interesting things with singular and plural, so even within – if we go back to the gardening example – even within just one topic, you can really quickly get a list of keywords that are – that is pretty long just from doing ‘garden’, ‘gardening’, ‘gardens’, and similar terms. So we find that it’s usually a case of not having enough space than feeling like you're just stretching it a little bit.

Okay, that makes sense.

One thing along the same lines though is that a lot of folks that I see where they have a general appeal thing where it’s, “Oh, you know I should go after every keyword that exists.” Well, a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll focus on a particular niche, and then once they feel like they’ve got attraction at that niche then they change. But if you go and change all your keywords and re-jigger your title so that you can go after a different demographic – is that a good idea or a bad idea? Or maybe there’s some tradeoffs you should be aware of? What are your thoughts there?

Yeah, I think with that you’d want to test it, and a year ago that would’ve been hard to do. But recently Apple, they’re getting better and better with providing data to the developer with this iTunes Connect in to Linux, you are now able to see page views to your app store page which is pretty interesting. And from there, with your install number you can actually calculate the conversion rate of your app store listing.

And so I would look at it that way, you're going after this one demographic area, sort of optimize fully there, get your base conversion rate and then maybe change out, switch things up and try a new demographic and look at your conversion rate there and see what’s working – what works better.

So yeah, I would recommend you testing that out.

Are there ways to influence app store optimization through things like SEOs? For example if you have – you make an announcement on your website, or you have a press release or something like that. Can you use that to influence how you rank in the app store?

Yeah, that’s interesting. So I mentioned before that some of the differences between Google Play and iOS. Google Play, since Google started as a search engine, they have a lot of that built into their algorithm where – back links to your Google Play page from a press article, or even from your Google+ page can really help improve your ASO.

On Apple, it’s not the case. It can help just from a multi-buyer effect. If you're featured on a press you're probably going to get an increase or spike in installs, and that download velocity is part of the algorithm so that’s going to help you out. But there’s nothing in terms of just back link to your Apple – your iTunes page.

So one process I've seen developers use – especially games – to get more downloads is you can slip drive to a service that you can pay for downloads. You’ll be integrated into some other app where they can download your game or whatever. Is there a way to integrate that type of thing where you're getting downloads and to get that into a better search score? Or are they completely separate?

Yeah. I’m sorry, are you just asking if a download from an ad is any different from an organic download in terms of search?

Right.

Yeah, so that’s a good question. We found that it’s just – Apple’s really just rewarding and looking at the install, and they don’t really care where it’s coming from. So I think SEGA mentioned this in that talk which I’ll link at the bottom of this for my pick but that can definitely be a good launch strategy.

Even for an indie developer on a small budget, is to do a little burst campaign to give yourself some momentum in the app store because paying for an install will reward you with your keywords and category ranking. So that can actually be – obviously these big studios are doing it constantly and have ridiculous budgets. But even with a small budget right around that launch date, or with an update, you can get a little momentum.

Okay. So even though they didn’t search the app store and download it Apple can track it that way, they know that [crosstalk] this app’s been downloaded, people think it’s a thing and –.

Yeah.

They give a thumbs up.

Exactly.

So one other thing that I’ve heard may affect search rankings, or maybe you could just confirm or deny any knowledge you have. But I’ve heard that if it’s been released more recently it’s more likely to be ranked higher. Is that true?

Yeah. We do have some evidence of – we used – started calling it like this honeymoon effect, but an app that is brand new, the first built, first submission to the app store does get a little bit of a boost. So we’ll see this downward trend and every app keywords has slight downward trend after about the first two weeks after launch. So they do have something built in that rewards a launch, that rewards a new app to try to help it get discovered. So that is something that we have seen.

What about new version releases, does that affect it at all?

No, so we haven’t seen that in version releases.

Here’s a question I guess we can ask and that is, so you have iTunes Connect or Apple Connect or whatever the heck it’s called, or you can go and you can see how many downloads you got, and they give you some trend information or things like that. How do you look at that and know when you should tweak something?

Yeah, so the one thing you want to look at, especially the new iTunes Connect analytics, is the app store views. That’s quickly becoming one of the new app store optimization metrics that can really help you out. So that’s just how many people have found your listing and are looking at your page, and nod and saw it, yeah but just review. And you can look at that on a historical graph and you can see how it’s – how it changes day over day, and how it’s changed before and after an update.

And so one thing we recommend doing is after you’ve submitted a new set of keywords, a new title, maybe a new strategy that you’re going after, go in and look at your app store views. And the goal is that there are – you're reaching more people and it’s going up, so start tracking that. Typically, maybe look it two weeks before, two weeks after and get a relevant sample of data there. And if it’s not, then you might want to iterate again.

And then the other thing is, or you know a product like Sensor Tower can help is you want to look at where you're ranking for these new keywords. If you’ve submitted a new set of keywords, and you're ranking over a hundred for every single one, it’s probably too soon to even go look at the app store views because no one’s going to really be scrolling down to the hundredth position to find your app. So we always recommend the first step to be track your keywords, how are they performing, and then if those are in competitive positions, then you should be seeing a lift in your – the number of people that come to your page.

Alright. Well I don’t know if I have any other questions. Do you Jaim?

Nah, I think I’m good! A lot of good stuff.

Yeah, and definitely I recommend the listeners to go check out the video. Sounds like Wes is going to put that in the picks.

Alright, well let’s go ahead and do some picks. Jaim, do you have some picks for us?

Yeah, I’ve got one pick. So since we’re talking about SEGA and old NHL games, someone actually took the NHL 94 game and hacked the RAM so you can play it online.

Oh, wow.

So I’ll give that a pick, and I tried doing that this winter. And back in the day I was pretty good with these games – 94, 95. I was more of a 95 person because someone stole my 94 game when I was in college but that’s how it goes. But these people are really into this game and I was pretty good back in the day. And I got online, they play through – I think there’s some emulator [inaudible] play. I did go through Windows, trying to run through parallels to get that running. There’s a Mac emulator [crosstalk] but – I know, it was terrible. Luckily I have it but I got a couple of games with just people I [inaudible] games and I just got destroyed.

So these guys are pretty serious; they’ve been playing this game for 20 years. But I just find Sophia used to play this game, and it’s fun to get together with your friends. If you can’t get together you can play online. It’s pretty cool.

They take it pretty seriously so you don’t have to join a league or anything, but you can do a pickup game. So, NHL 94 Online.

Nice.

My pick.

Alright. Let’s see I’ve got a couple of picks. So I did go to Podcast Movement which is a conference for podcasters, and it was way awesome, way fun. So I’ve got a few picks there. The first one is Podcast Movement.

The second one is, I actually got to meet several people that I admire whose podcast that I listen to, and so I’m just going to throw a few out there. One of them was John Lee Dumas. I actually picked up his badge and thought seriously about stealing it because he left it sitting on a table. He has EnterpreneurOnFire so if you're interested in hearing interviews of entrepreneurs it is awesome.

His mentor who got him into all of this is Jamie Tardy, and she has a podcast called The Eventual Millionaire. It’s also an interview show, she interviews millionaires and they talk about what made them successful, which is also very cool. And I got introduced to her by one of the conference organizers, and she turned around and said, “I have a couple copies of my book that I don’t want to take home,” and so I got an autographed copy of her book The Eventual Millionaire.

So anyway, lots of positive things there. My final pick is going to be one – I’m going to be playing with this quite a bit over the next week or so. It’s Periscope, and I don’t know if you guys know what Periscope is, but basically it’s a video stream that people can join. You have to have the Periscope app installed on your phone, and then it holds on to the video for 24 hours and then it’s gone.

Twitter bought them and so when I’m going to be doing a Periscope, it will notify you if you have the Periscope app, it’ll also post it to Twitter. So if you’re following me on Twitter and you want to hear me talk about stuff, then go check that out.

The next few are going to be about just podcasting in general and where I kind of see these shows going and things like that, because I’ve been thinking a lot about that. So if you want to be involved in those conversations then by all means go install Periscope.

Wes, what are your picks?

Awesome. Yes, I have three picks. The first one is linked to the SF Agile Marketing Meetup. There’s a video on there, sort of a case study done with SEGA and just a good primer for the – for ASO and for any developers out there that want to learn a little bit more and see it in action, a developer talking about how it’s worked for them; it’s definitely a great place to start.

And the second is just a free course that we give away here for anybody wanting to learn more and brush up their ASO. It’s called our Academy and I’ll just link that, free to anyone here that wants to check that out.

And then the last one I thought it’d be great to throw in an app for this show. One of my favorite apps, it’s called Jot. And pretty bare bones, basic app. Basically it’s a note-taking app that – you’re walking around, you have a thought and you just want to remember that, you write it in Jot and you hit send, and the next day it shows up in your inbox. So one reason that’s been great for me is the problem I always have with note-taking app is that I would take all these notes and then just have a note of action or reminder to go back and check them out. Weeks later I’d open up notes and be like, “Oh, I forgot I even took this note.” And so with Jot it allows – the next morning when I’m in my inbox I then have to act on that note and do something with it. So it’s a cool productivity app that just kind of become part of my routine. That’s it for me.

Alright Wes. Well, if people want to follow up or check in, or see what you're up to or learn more about Sensor Tower, what do they do?

So definitely go to sensortower.com and check us out. We have many plans for any type of budget, a free plan to just check it out and get started optimizing your app. You can follow us on Twitter, we’re pretty active there. We’re happy to reach out and chat with you there.

And if you're in San Francisco we are having a meetup next week on app store optimization, so look for some details on Twitter and maybe we can meet in person.

Very cool. Alright, well let’s go ahead and wrap up the show. Thanks again, Wes!

Thank you!

Yeah, thanks!