App Store Screenshots Best Practices
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then your app store screenshots are the best way to tell your app’s story and convince users to download your app. In fact, neglecting this aspect of your ASO strategy is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Our complete App Store Screenshot Guide presents the best practices for creating the perfect screenshots for both the iOS App Store and the Android Google Play store.
We’ll lay out the ins and outs for deciding how to choose and create the best app store optimization screenshots for your app. We’ll even give you the most up-to-date ASO screenshots best practices. Sound good? Then let’s get started!
Why are app screenshots important for ASO?
You’ve spent a lot of time optimizing your app store page with keyword-optimized text that’s both compelling and easy to read. Do you really need to work on crafting the perfect screenshots too? In a word: absolutely!
In both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, all of your app store visitors are exposed to your First Impression Frame (everything above the fold).
A majority of these visitors will make a decision based on the creative assets they see there, and they will only spend about 3-6 seconds looking at your First Impression before either dropping from the page, installing, or continuing to explore before making a final decision.
That’s why it’s really important in ASO that screenshots are optimized!
Based on our data, gathered by sampling the behavior of 500M+ users, we can clearly see that the screenshots that appear in the first impression) are the most important as 100% of users are exposed to them.
Before ASO, screenshots were simplistic
The Gallery is an essential component of your app store page. In the Apple App Store especially, the Gallery is the most prominent asset in the First Impression Frame.
Even though Screenshots aren’t fully visible in the First Impression Frame of App Store Listings in Google Play, they still have an impact on your explore and install rate. This is due to the fact that all visitors who scroll through your store listing are exposed to the Screenshots in your First Impression Gallery (all creative assets that can be seen without browsing through or interacting with the Gallery).
When the Apple App Store and Google Play first launched, mobile app publishers weren’t yet equipped with the app screenshot design platforms with which to test their creative assets.
During this time, most Screenshots utilized simple designs and straightforward messaging that namely conveyed the app’s key features and overall functionality. The lack of diversity kept apps on the same monotonous playing field.
Times have definitely changed…
Optimize your app’s organic & paid performance on the app stores with precision for free
App Store Screenshots best practices, trends, and insights
On the App Store, the Gallery occupies the most significant amount of real estate on the page, making it one of the most impactful creatives you can optimize. In fact, we’ve found that a properly optimized Screenshot can increase CVR by up to 28%.
With Google’s recent Play Store redesign, the Gallery is now above the fold and much more prominent since the Feature Graphic was removed from the top of the Store Listing.
Read more: Why Your App Isn’t Ready for the New Google Play Design
In general, visitors are much more likely to look at your app’s Screenshots than engage with other assets, such as its description—even if they’re visible above the fold. How much more likely? According to our research, the average App Store user is 10x more likely to scroll through your app’s Gallery than read its description.
How your App Screenshots are displayed in search results
While many of the above benefits relate directly to your Product Page, on which paid traffic directly lands, your Screenshots also play an important role in the Search Results Page on the iOS App Store.
Although you should focus your testing efforts on optimizing for visitors who click into your app or game’s full Product Page, our data shows that top apps receive around 60-80% of installs from search traffic. This makes it imperative that the Gallery assets they see while searching are appealing enough to either convince them to install directly from search or entice them to click through to your Product Page.
To optimize for search traffic, you should be cognizant of how your Screenshots are displayed. Remember, visitors aren’t just looking at your Product Page. You’re competing for their attention with every other search result on the page, which means your Screenshots need to stand out.
Additionally, the number of assets that are shown depends on your Gallery orientation. If you use landscape orientation, only your first asset will appear. If yu use portrait orientation, your first three assets will be visible.
As you can see in the example above, visitors are exposed to a greater variety of images when using portrait assets. But the Screenshots are condensed to fit within the same amount of space as the landscape assets. This can create visual clutter and make your messaging more difficult to decipher.
Based on those differences, we expect landscape assets to have more of an impact on search traffic, which is an insight that’s also supported by our initial testing.
We found that for one of the leading mobile games, a Landscape Gallery boosted CVR by 42% from the Search Results Page. We’ll get into more specifics about Gallery orientation later on, but you can also check out our Gallery Orientation guide to help you decide which Gallery orientation is best to optimize your app.
Just as there’s a significant benefit to optimizing your Screenshots, there is also a cost associated with not investing resources in testing them. We’ve seen that untested Screenshots can harm CVR by 15-25%.
If you have a video on your product page, that’ll push the 1st screenshot to the 2nd slot (or 3rd or 4th if you have 2-3 videos).
