Do you have a green thumb? Neither do we. Luckily for us, Lily’s Garden brings the magic of flowers, gardening, and relaxing decoration right to our fingertips without all of the hard work. But is there more to gardening than meets the eye? Meet the puzzle mobile game app featured in today’s App Store Spotlight, Lily’s Garden from Tactile Games ApS.
You may have heard of the Lily’s Garden app on the internet. Recently, their paid ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram have gone viral. Thousands of people recall Lily’s Garden ads on meme pages and YouTube videos – poking fun at Lily’s Garden’s storytelling ads revolving around their main character, Lily, and her various and often cryptic interactions with her great aunt, love interests, and exes.
Does romance await you in this puzzle game? Or perhaps, a criminal mystery? With Lily’s Garden, it's a bit hard to tell from the ads alone. One thing’s for sure: Lily’s Garden knows how to bring captivating storytelling to matching puzzle games in a way no other app has done before.
Despite Lily’s Garden’s captivating mobile ad storytelling abilities, there’s no hiding that its popularity in the puzzle mobile game category has made a splash with puzzle fanatics and gardening enthusiasts alike. However, with such a popular ad campaign focused on adjacent storytelling, Tactile may need to optimize their app to include relevant information in their app metadata and creatives. This would allow Tactile to fully harness and convey Lily’s Garden’s features to its users. Let’s take a look at what Tactile is doing right, and where they have room to improve in their App Store Optimization strategy.
App title tags are an invaluable resource for app developers like Tactile to use for additional keyword indexation opportunities. Currently, Lily’s Garden tags on the keywords “design” and “relax” to their app title. Doing so allows Lily’s Garden the opportunity to rank for additional terms, and target users who may be looking for relaxing games or design-specific game features. Keeping title tags relevant to the user serves an integral part in increasing user visibility, and doing so also helps Tactile build out its keyword phrases to capture multiple game categories and genres. All while staying true to the main app features and functionalities.
App subtitles, much like app titles, are both visible to the user and act as one of the first points of contact with the user. The subtitle offers valuable information for users that helps them understand app features more precisely. With that in mind, metadata for these two assets serves two vital functions – to inform and to increase visibility through indexation. Right now, Lily’s Garden is underutilizing its app subtitle assets with broad and repetitive terms that may mitigate its ability to rank for a broader set of terms.
In either of these metadata assets, it’s important for app developers to understand how metadata indexation takes place on Apple’s App Store. With the help of an ASO company that knows how to harness the full potential of the App Store indexation process, navigating and targeting the right keywords becomes a much simpler undertaking.
Outside of Lily’s Garden’s user acquisition campaigns, organic conversion strength comes from creative assets within the App Store. A creative asset's sole purpose in the process of App Store Optimization is to boost clickthrough rate and conversion. Since creative assets don’t get included in the indexation process, creatives speak directly to the user.
Lily’s Garden uses horizontal screenshots throughout their screenshot sets. However, much like their paid video ad campaigns, they may leave their audience and users with more questions than answers. For users with little familiarity regarding Lily’s Garden’s main features and gameplay, they can’t really grasp what the game offers just by looking at the app icon and screenshots.
Apple’s app store allows app developers to publish up to 10 screenshots onto their app page. Currently, Tactile only has three screenshots in their screenshot set total. While the first three screenshots are the only visible screenshots that populate in an app store search result, Lily’s Garden may need to add more screenshots to their set to inform their users of what the app does, and what the gameplay looks like once the app is downloaded.
Creative assets go a long way in the process of conversion optimization. Tactile should fully utilize their creatives to convey a story, much like their paid ad campaigns do, while simultaneously introducing their in-app gameplay with a feature video or copy that is a little more descriptive.
Tactile managed to garner swift and massive attention from the social media community with their captivating storytelling abilities. However, it takes more than just an ad campaign to shine in the App Store. To sustain organic growth outside of paid ad campaigns, it’s important to fully understand the breadth and impact that organic growth has on long-term app success. With the right ASO technologies, Tactile can better inform their mobile marketing strategy to make Lily’s Garden bloom in the App Store.
Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.
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