How to Leverage App Store Seasonality for Sports?

The summer sporting season brings a wave of major events like the Summer Olympics, Euro Cup, Wimbledon, and the Tour de France, attracting sports enthusiasts worldwide. This period of heightened excitement is an opportune time for app marketers to capitalize on app seasonality for sports.

During these blockbuster events, the surge in public interest can significantly enhance app visibility and drive downloads. Recognizing and leveraging this seasonality in your marketing efforts can lead to substantial growth for your app.

In this blog, we’ll explore strategies to transform the increased attention on sports into more traffic for your app by effectively harnessing the power of seasonal trends. Get ready to score big!

Maximize app visibility with seasonal updates

Seasonal updates are a strategic approach for maximizing app visibility and user engagement. By aligning app content and features with current events, holidays, or seasons, developers can keep their apps and games fresh and relevant. This not only enhances user experience by providing timely and contextually relevant features but also increases the likelihood of being featured in the App Store and Google Play.

The current sports season creates prime opportunities to put your app in the spotlight in the app stores.

Streaming, news, and sports betting apps will see increased interest, but with the Olympics and Euro Cup coming up, many people will be traveling. This opens up opportunities for travel, transportation, food, and drink apps to promote their apps in the app stores.

Check out these expert tips to align your app’s product page with seasonal offerings

Hype for the Olympics & Euro 2024 builds up in the app stores

The big sporting event of 2024 is the Summer Olympics in Paris, set to begin on July 24, 2024. Slowly, excitement for the games is building up.

In the App Store, search volume for “olympics” is starting to grow across Europe and the United States.

How to leverage sports events for seasonality?

Optimizing your app store presence to align with major sporting events like the Olympics and Euro Cup is crucial. A well-optimized product page can significantly increase your app’s visibility and conversion rates during high-traffic periods.

1. Build keyword relevancy early

To increase your visibility on sports or season-related keywords, start by incorporating these keywords into your app’s metadata.

AppTweak’s Keyword Cluster feature is a great tool to find keywords related to certain trends and events.

Even if your strategy focuses on Apple Search Ads (ASA) to reach your target audience, including these keywords in your metadata signals to Apple that they are relevant to your app.

This increased relevancy can improve your position in Apple’s auction, potentially helping you win more auctions and achieve a lower cost per install (CPI).

Learn more about the synergies between ASO & ASA

2. Align creatives with seasonal events

To win the seasonality battle, it’s essential to align your app’s screenshots with the search intent and keywords you are looking to rank on.

Just adding keywords to your App Store keyword field isn’t enough!

Especially, if you want to reach users beyond your core audience, updating your screenshots to reflect seasonal relevance and appeal is crucial. This makes your app more attractive and relevant to its audience, boosting engagement and downloads.

3. Accelerate with Apple Search Ads

To expand your reach on seasonal keywords, consider running Apple Search Ads campaigns.

Timing is crucial – start early before the hype and competition in the App Store builds up.

We’re already seeing apps bidding on the keyword “olympics” in various countries.

BBC Sport (UK) but also travel apps (GetYourGuide, UK) and navigation apps (komoot, US) have started leveraging the Olympics to promote their services in the App Store.

Depending on your app’s offering and the goals of your seasonal campaign, you can bid on a wide variety of keywords during the Olympic games. These can range from general terms like “Olympics,” “Olympic Games,” and “Paris 2024” to specific sports. Additionally, you can target users traveling to France with keywords like “Paris transport,” “Paris metro,” or “Paris guide.”

4. Optimize campaign performance with CPPs

Competition will heat up in the App Store, especially leading up to the Olympic games. To improve your ASA campaign performance, we recommend creating custom product pages (CPPs) tailored to Olympic-related search terms and user intent.

This is a prime opportunity for apps and games to get creative, capture the excitement and interest surrounding the Olympics, and travel to Paris. For instance:

• Trainline is targeting the keyword “Paris metro” in the US App Store. It has developed a CPP tailored for American travelers, updating its value proposition and emphasizing “Americans” in the second screenshot.

• The sports betting app Betclic has created CPPs in France that showcase soccer images when bidding on Euro Cup-related keywords.

5. Reinforce your seasonal efforts with in-app events

Sporting events are the perfect time to leverage in-app events and promotional content.

Apps and games can showcase special events such as competitions, challenges, new content, major updates etc. in the app stores via special event cards. These event cards appear in different places on the App Store and Google Play and provide an additional opportunity for marketers and developers to engage with new, current and lapsed users.

Sports apps, news apps, streaming apps etc. are already leveraging in-app events and promotional content to catch the wave of increased interest and traffic during these high-profile sporting events..

On AppTweak, we found the following in-app events related to different sports events:

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TLDR

The 2024 sports events offer a prime opportunity to enhance your app’s visibility and attract more downloads by capitalizing on seasonality. Here’s how you can effectively leverage this opportunity:

• Update your app’s product page to reflect the themes and spirit of the upcoming sporting events.
• Incorporate relevant keywords related to the sporting events into your app’s metadata. This helps improve visibility during searches related to these events.
• Begin these updates well before the events kick off to capitalize on the pre-event hype, ensuring your app is positioned prominently during this high-traffic period.
• Apply findings from creative research to make your CPP visuals and content appealing. Add the right seasonal keywords in your CPPs as well.
• Leverage in-app events & promotional content to engage users with special event-related content and promotions.

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