It’s the most wonderful time of the year: the high season is just around the corner, and ASO practitioners do their best to update their app creatives to get into the holiday spirit and get extra downloads. 

As exciting as it is, replacing icons, screenshots, and app video preview can be challenging, especially if you have too many ideas flying around. The secret to great seasonal ASO is to find that one trend that will help you stand out from the crowd. In a nutshell, it’s no longer enough to give your female character a random Harley Quinn makeover during Halloween or decorate screenshots with several Jack-o’-lanterns just for the sake of it. You should know exactly what is going to work. 

This is where A/B testing comes into play. We at SplitMetrics always encourage you to test and validate your concepts before going with them to the app stores. With seasonal ASO, your decisions should be not only holiday-driven, they should also be based on data. 

To make things easier for you and honor the upcoming holidays, we created this SplitMetrics’ Holiday Special guide to ASO and A/B Testing with creative trends and tips for 2022-2023. No tricks, only treats!

The Data Behind This ASO and A/B Testing Seasonality Guide

Before we dive into creative trends and tips for holidays in 2022 and 2023, it’s necessary to point out how SplitMetrics’ team created this ASO and A/B testing seasonality guide.

We collect and analyze the information from real A/B tests of existing apps via our in-house solution, SplitMetrics Optimize, an advanced mobile optimization platform for data-driven decision making, validation of concepts, and features for iOS and Android. 

SplitMetrics Optimize enables you to cut risks, run tests during the pre-launch stage and discover the winning combination of creatives that will definitely steal the attention of your audience. The platform is SplitMetrics’ foremost tool for gathering ASO benchmarks and mobile trends (by the way, you can checkout the latest benchmarks here).

For this article, we’ve run over 1000 A/B experiments to understand which trends bring you the greater amount of downloads.

Seasonal ASO: What to A/B Test?

Seasonal ASO can be compared to a trickster: everyone wants to benefit from it, yet not everyone succeeds. The truth is that successful app store optimization for holidays depends on multiple factors, and your app’s category plays an important role in it.

Let’s take a look at the apps that, according to our data, run seasonal A/B tests most often:

• Photo & video apps
• Lifestyle dating apps
• Casino games
• Casual and hyper-casual games
• Simulation games
• RPG
• Adventure games.

Each of these app categories and game genres has their own specifics. For instance, a photo editing app may want to promote a new in-built feature that allows users to transform themselves into magical creatures during Halloween. In this case, it’s not enough to change an icon, it’s also worth showcasing the feature through screenshots or video preview. 

Since we’ve already mentioned page elements, time to reveal which of them get their holidays makeovers on a regular basis this year. There are no surprises here, the most influential creatives take lead one more time:

• Icon
• Screenshots
• App Video preview

The most popular holidays and events for app store optimization in 2022-2023 are also quite predictable:

• Halloween
• Black Friday & Cyber Week
• Christmas 
• Saint Valentine’s Day   

Of course, the popularity of a certain holiday heavily depends on the storefront you operate in. The region will directly affect your ASO efforts as the customs and perceptions of some colors and attributes varies by location. 

During one of our A/B tests for the Chinese storefront, we’ve noticed that green and blue colors are a poor choice for creatives as they don’t spark an interest among users. In general, the winning color for the region is red. Pale pink also proved to be an appealing choice in one of the tests resulting in a 5.2% conversion rate boost.

Seasonal ASO: Creative Trends in 2022 and 2023

We’re finally getting to the most festive part of the guide! This section aims at exploring the most popular ASO creative trends for the holiday season in 2022 and 2023 and will provide you with actionable tips for different high days.

ASO Tips for Halloween

Halloween is an ancient holiday originated in the Celtic celebration known as Samhain. It has both a dark, Gothic side, and a fun one — with masquerade parties, mysterious games, and cheap thrills. 

As a result, mobile marketers can draw inspiration from multiple sources and attributes connected with darkness, death, and pop culture. It’s only natural to wonder what attribute to go for. Should you depict your game’s main character as a vampire? Or explore the holiday’s roots with the Celtic symbols? 

We’ve run A/B tests to find the most engaging creatives and shaped our findings into the trends below.

Be scary. The attributes of fear will send shivers down your users’ spines, and they will love you for it. Consider using images of skulls, mummies, and ghosts on your creatives. 

What’s more, having your characters show emotions of fear or making them look creepy is a good idea to arouse users’ curiosity and motivate them into downloading your app. Creatives based on visual salience tend to influence human behavior. We’ve explored the phenomenon in our two-part research. Read the first part here and then follow up on the second one to understand how visual salience for app store optimization works.

Iconic horror movies can be a source of inspiration not only for you, but also for your audience. Try to turn your app’s characters into a chilling flick like Joker or Scream.

Go for a gothic fairytale. Users still love haunted castles, creepy places, bats, and vampires, and the app stores are no exception.

Don’t cast aside traditions. The orange color and good old pumpkins are a classic, yet beloved creative twist.

ASO Tips for Black Friday

Black Friday typically takes place on the fourth Friday in November and opens the holiday shopping season in the United States.