Gummicube - An airship company
MENU

Egg Inc App Store Spotlight

July 23rd, 2021

Egg Inc App Store Spotlight
David Quinn

by David Quinn

VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Gummicube, Inc.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? While Egg, Inc. might not answer the age-old question, it does assert that the chicken preceded the space expedition by at least a few levels. Egg, Inc. is a popular idle strategy game, an incremental “clucker” if you will, that challenges users to establish an egg farm empire.

Egg, Inc. has been sitting pretty on the iOS App Store, maintaining rank in the top 20 list in the strategy game category for the better part of 2021. On the Google Play Store, however, Egg, Inc.’s ranking is substantially lower. Let’s take a look at which factors could be impacting this game’s visibility, and how a fine-tuned ASO strategy could help.

Apple iOS App Store

On the iOS App Store, keyword ranking is impacted by three primary fields: the keyword bank, the title, and the subtitle. The words used in both the title and subtitle are combined with terms included in the 100 character backend keyword bank to build relevant phrases that help an app get discovered. Apple provides 30 characters each in these front-facing metadata areas, so it is important to utilize as much space as feasible to include as many relevant, high-volume terms as possible.

Egg, Inc.’s title uses only nine characters, which means that this listing is missing out on a lot of prime space for keyword inclusion. A common best practice on the iOS App Store is to follow a branded title like this with a title tag. Title tags can not only improve ranking by increasing the overall number of terms targeted, but they can also provide more insight into an app’s features and functions, which could improve user conversion from search.

Egg, Inc.’s subtitle, “Egg Farming Idle Game,” does a fine job of communicating the game’s theme while using keywords that are relevant and high performing. While the subtitle might come in a bit short, using 21 of the available 30 characters, it is still a solid piece of metadata that is positively impacting the game’s ranking through high-volume terms like “Farming” and “Idle.”

An app’s description on the iOS App Store doesn’t impact organic keyword ranking, but it is an important area to optimize for Apple Search Ads. Including keywords in the description that users search when looking for similar apps will allow Apple to serve ads to the most relevant demographic, thus the base of users potentially most likely to convert. Egg, Inc.’s description includes relevant keywords and phrases like “simulation game” and “casual gameplay” that can place this app in front of users interested in these themes via ASA.

Google Play Store

App indexation on the Google Play Store works very differently than on the iOS App Store, in that there is no declared keyword bank. Google’s algorithm instead crawls an app left-to-right and top-to-bottom to glean relevant keywords for ranking. Each metadata area is weighted differently, with the most weight placed on the Title, the second most on the Short Description, and the third and final weighted area is the Full Description. Within these fields, terms that are near the front of sentences are prioritized over those that come later.

Egg, Inc.’s title on the Google Play Store suffers from the same visibility issues as the iOS App Store, using a short, branded title that doesn’t provide much information for Google’s algorithm. With a full 50 characters of space provided, a short title like this is missing out on a lot of keyword opportunities by foregoing title tags.

The Google Play Store’s second most heavily weighted field, the Short Description, provides 80 characters of prime keyword real estate. Egg, Inc.’s Short Description, “Build an enormous egg farm!” is using only 27 characters, and is lacking high-volume keywords that could improve ranking and visibility.

The Full Description on the Google Play Store may come in last when it comes to keyword weight, but with a 4,000 character limit it provides the most opportunity to incorporate a wide range of high-volume keywords. Egg, Inc.’s description uses only 1,700 characters, and while there are a few good keywords included, it’s overall structure and keyword density leaves a lot to be desired.

Creatives

Creative assets like the icon and screenshots impact conversion on both the Apple iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. Icons should be clean and memorable, and provide some context as to what an app does. Egg, Inc.’s app icon is high quality, and features a chicken as the focal point. Character centered icons have proven to be attractive to users, so this is a solid icon choice - but should definitely be tested against other characters and in-game elements.

Egg, Inc.’s screenshots provide a great view of in-app imagery and UI, but there is room for improvement. These screenshots are missing the important inclusion of text callouts, which are succinct calls to action, feature highlights, or accolades that can be placed on the screenshots. These text callouts provide opportunities for including the keywords that may have brought a user to the app in search, communicating instantly how the app is relevant to their search term, therefore potentially improving conversion. While there are three screenshots with single words across the bottom on the Google Play Store listing (“Research,” “Drones,” and “Build”) these could do better to more fully communicate the app’s gameplay or value proposition at a glance. Revising the screenshots on both listings to include compelling calls to action could improve conversion and should also be tested.

Overall

Egg, Inc. is an idle strategy game that challenges users to grow their tiny egg farm into a space-faring egg empire. This fun little game is holding rank on the iOS App Store, but falling short on the Google Play Store. To improve ranking and discoverability, Egg, Inc. would benefit from revisiting their ASO strategy, and testing some best practices for optimizing their rankings and conversion.

Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.

Similar Articles