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Cats Are Cute App Store Spotlight

July 30th, 2019

Cats Are Cute App Store Spotlight
Anh Nguyen

by Anh Nguyen

COO & Co-Founder at Gummicube, Inc

There’s no denying the popularity of cats on the internet. Between videos, memes and cats achieving celebrity status, it’s no wonder that there are plenty of apps dedicated to cats as well. For this week’s App Store Spotlight, we take a look at the aptly-named app “Cats are Cute” and see if it’s optimized to succeed on the App Store and Play Store. Does it roar like a lion, or has the cat got its tongue?

iOS

Cats are Cute is the #8 app in the Family category on the Apple App Store. It ranks #1 for the “Adorable games” and “cute cats” keywords, as well as #4 for “adorable” and “the kitty clicker” and #9 for “Neko,” which is Japanese for “cat” and also a keyword for the competing cat app “Neko Atsume.” Its rankings begin to fall after that, ranking #15 for “cute cat games,” #22 for “kitten simulator” and #36 for “cat games.”

Creatives: Cats are Cute uses eight screenshots, each one displaying different aspects of the game. The screenshots show the unique design of the app – it uses minimal colors and a hand-drawn style that makes the cats and surroundings look like little doodles. At the same time, they show things like the stats of the cats, feeding, and variety of cats.

The screenshots are lacking callout text, so each image is presented without context. While some of the images are evident, others are unclear at first glance. For instance, a screenshot showing a street with certain spots marked with X does not provide information about the app’s features or benefits, although callout text might make it clearer what it’s for.

Callout text is useful for engaging with users, telling them information about the app in bite-sized form and elaborating on the connected screenshots. Additionally, using keyword-focused screenshots can let users know what terms the app is connected to, establishing relevance for their searches.

Title & Subtitle: The app’s title, “Cats are Cute,” is only 13 characters. It has 17 more characters worth of space to use to expand on the app’s features and purpose, such as “relaxing game” or “kitty simulator.”

The subtitle, “Cuteness Overload!” does not utilize high-volume keywords or provide information about the app, aside from the fact that it’s cute. If it were to adjust its subtitle to focus on keywords, it could highlight terms like “Relaxing kitten game” or “town building game” to elaborate on the app while targeting more terms.

Description: The description for Cats are Cute starts off short; three lines of one sentence each, providing a little information about the app. While the lines are sufficiently short for users to read them at a glance, they need to be spaced out properly for ease of reading. The second paragraph is a bulleted introduction that provides more information about the app, such as how users collect cats and build a town.

Following the introduction, it has a short feature list. While this is formatted properly, using a header and bullet points to convey the information properly, it is also very minimal. It could expand the features into a few short sets, each one providing information about how the game works. While it does have a “How to Play” section, it also skims over the information quickly, so the full features and gameplay are left unclear.

Google Play

On the Google Play Store, Cats are Cute only ranks #1 for its name, although it does rank #2 for “adorable games” and “cute cats.” The app ranks #11 for “free cute games” and #15 for “cute cat games,” although it only ranks #61 for #26 for “cats game” and “cat games.”

Creatives: Cat are Cute begins with a video on Google Play, showing the app in action. It’s accompanied by relaxing music, while the video demonstrates how the game works. However, any text on the video is in Korean, so US users will be unable to identify what the video is trying to tell them unless they can read the language. Localization is important for ASO and conversion, so if the video is going to include text, it should have different videos for different territories and languages.

The video only shows in-app footage, so it would work for the Apple App Store as well as Google Play. Before it goes on to the other store, though, it should localize the video for its audience.

The screenshots are identical to the iOS version and also lack callout text. Including that could help provide more information to users, especially since the video text does not properly convey the information it intended to.

Description & Metadata: The description is the same on iOS and Google Play, so the areas in need of improvement remain. The introduction can stand to provide more information about how the app works, while the feature sets can be expanded to delve into the various aspects of the app.

It is also important to remember how Google Play indexes apps for keywords. If a keyword is not used near the front of a sentence or line, it will take longer for Google’s algorithm to identify it. Cats are Cute begins lines with phrases like “Super easy to play” and “What’s going on in the Meow Town?” which does not help keyword indexation.

There are some areas where it does begin with keywords, such as “Collect” (it ranks #189 for “collect games”) or “look after adorable cats” (it ranks #8 for “Adorable”) but it does not utilize them with enough frequency to fully target them.

Overall

Cats are Cute is a game that capitalizes on the cuteness of cats but does not capitalize on a few key App Store Optimization best practices. If it were to add callout text to its screenshots, localize its video and expand on its description for keywords and information, it could potentially increase its conversions.

With how popular cats are on the internet, ranking in App Store searches for cat-based keywords can be a challenge. App Store Optimization can help Cats are Cute, and any other cat app, face that challenge.

Want more information regarding App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.

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