Is Bigger Better?

Making small changes to your Google Play store page and testing the results is one of the keys to long term success as a self-publisher. Sometime a change that seems quite minor can have unexpected results. Luckily Google have made it easy to test different assets on your Play Store listing by giving us a built-in tool to run A/B tests to compare candidates, The store listing experiments tool allows us to upload a new version of a particular asset, a new app store icon for example, and show that new asset to a given percentage of our store page visitors.

Leave the experiment running for a few days and after a week or so you'll get a report on the performance of your new asset versus the original. This is a great tool for optimising the number of installs your game or application achieves.

The Experiment

When browsing the search results for various keywords associated with Pish Pish Penny Pusher, I always try to look at our game listing and its associated assets with fresh eyes. While doing this I started to notice that our game's icon had more white space around it than other similar games on the store and it got me thinking, should it be bigger?

Of course there is a very easy way to answer this question, run an app store experiment!
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Original Icon, lots of white space.

New icon, much bigger.

I released the new, larger version to 50% of people that visited the store and waited to see what happened. What difference do you think it would made?
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The Results

During the five day testing period, the larger icon achieved nearly thirty percent more installs than the smaller icon.

That's a massive boost to the number of installs from a seemingly minor change to the icon. It really underscores how important the app store icon is to your app's success and shows how important it is to test every variant for performance.