Hi, this is a minute of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now, this week I want to talk about how to increase your app downloads through localization.
Okay, one of the problems we have as app developers is 'discoverability'. So we release an app,
and we put it out into the market and like, nobody downloads it. Like maybe, you know,
maybe 6, 7 people a day will download the app or maybe even less, and it's one of the
things that really, really bother us. It's one of the biggest problems we have as app
developers. The problem is not that your app is bad, the problem is that nobody's finding it.
Now, there's certain things you can do to improve that,
one of the big things is ASO. So going through and optimising your screenshots,
optimising your keywords, all that kind of stuff. Now one other thing you could do is
localizing it to different languages. Now, this doesn't work for every app, like if you
have something that presents articles or content that's done in English it's not easy to get
all of that translated into other languages, but other things like games and utility apps
are easy to do. Now, we found this with Ear Spy a year ago
and a few weeks ago I took one of our existing apps, Chemistry Allie, which is all done in
English, (it's a chemistry game. It's really good, download it, leave a review). But we
took it and it was getting like maybe 20 downloads a day on iTunes, so here's what we did. You
can see here, up to a few weeks ago, here's my appannie report here, and you can see that
it's got normally 5, 6, 7 downloads in the US, maybe 20 total. And you can see we released
this new version here, and it just shot up, so we doubled or tripled it on a daily basis.
Still not great, but you know, we need to refine that a bit.
Now, here's what I did. I took these, I took the version, I didn't make any changes to the app, except a few bug fixes.
But I took all the app descriptions and as an experiment I ran them through Google translate.
Now, I hate Google translate, Google translate is a terrible way to translate things.
I spent years learning Chinese Mandarin and I know how bad Google translate is, but in terms of app store key rankings I just wanted to see if it worked.
So, as you can see here I went into iTunes, I put in all the major languages, - Korean, uh
I didn't even change the screenshot, didn't change any of the content,
I did put in the description that you need, you know, to be able to speak English to play this game.
However, if I knew this was going to work so well, I would have gone through and hired some people to translate it into those different languages
And that's it, we doubled or tripled overnight. So it was just a very easy way to do that.
And it was mainly these keywords over here. The keywords and the description was able to just, sort of, push that up.
Now, I think that if we had actually got it professionally translated we would have done much better
because, you know, it would entice more people to download it, because, probably Google translate is, like, horrible.
It probably sounds like somebody ran it through Google translate.
Now here's something we did, like, back in early 2014.
We took Ear Spy, which is our biggest app, and it was getting about a thousand downloads a day,
right, and one of the things I wanted to do was, you know, release it in different languages.
We had some good days. So about here, in early, uh,at the end of January 2014
I basically took and created an oDesk job and said, took all the strings, all the descriptions,
all the screenshots. I put it into a spreadsheet and I said "I've got about 8000 words here,
I'll put a job on oDesk saying "these are the languages I want it in, I'll pay, you know, $5 a language",
so get as many people to do it as I can, you know, I don't care if they're kids or whatever, to translate".
So basically, I got everything translated, we put it back into the app, we re-released it
and, you know, within a few months, or within a month we pretty much tripled our downloads.
So I kind of knew this worked, but for a lot of our apps we don't do that.
Now the problem is that you have to code this way from the beginning.
You have to think about not just releasing the app in English.
So you can't do things like put strings inside images and things like that.
But if you're looking to increase your app downloads and you're not making it available to other countries make sure you do that.
And the reason is every time your app gets downloaded it goes up in the search rankings,
every review goes up in the search rankings, and there's a lot smaller markets in the English speaking markets.
You know, Thailand is really good, you know, Portuguese with Brazil is fantastic.
So all those downloads and ratings come in and they really help you out.
That's it for this week's Minute of Overpass.
Way over a minute, I realise that. There was a lot to cover here.
Now, we did something recently this last week where we've taken all these Minutes of Overpass
and released it as an iTunes podcast. I'll leave the link here in the description.
So if you're interested in following more of this Minute of Overpass go ahead and subscribe to our podcast
or subscribe to this You Tube channel and leave a comment below because I'd love to hear from you.
Good luck with your app ratings, and I'll talk to you next week.