Me and my partner decided to make a game based on the Volvo commercial, where Van Damme was making a split on the side windows of two moving trucks. Scope of the game is to drive as far as you can and not let Van Damme fall down. The problem gets more difficult, because the left truck acts unpredictably – it accelerates and rearranges. The game came out quite fun, but complicated, which made some of the players really angry.

What was waiting for users:
- Realistic and complicated 3D euro truck driver simulator
- EPIC SPLIT Trucks competition with players from all over the world
- Great speeds, world records, and dangerous falls
- Impressive dusk and inspiring music.

Truck simulator market is rather large. Top games get about a million of downloads a month. This is not a monopoly niche – there are a great many of such applications in the App Store. There are clear leaders and a lot of average apps, while most of the games of this genre are low-quality.
Truck simulators live only on organic ASO traffic. Because of weak monetization, such mobile apps can't afford buying users and, thus, fighting with them is going to be easier, than with the games boosted by purchased traffic.

The plan on conquering the top listing was as follows:
· Create an arcade game about trucks.
· Launch the game on Google Play. Google Play's search and recommendation mechanisms work much better, than those of App Store, so we chose the former for our experiment.
· Turn theoretical knowledge about ASO optimization into practical skills. We have secured 80,000 rubles for conquering search query traffic. I understood that we've had no chances of getting to the top by keywords. At the very start we targeted long-tail and mid-tail keywords.

Detailed semantic core analysis via ASOdesk allowed us to outline three of the most prioritized queries with moderate competition and sufficient traffic.
From then on, keywords were processed according to the following algorithm:
1. Keyword was included in the name of the game. Presence of a keyword in the name was giving it the highest weight.
2. We launched an ad campaign with motivated search traffic in ASOdesk in order to climb up to the needed keyword. Final performers were getting money for downloading the game. This goes against Google Play's rules, but we have consciously chosen this promotion method: the budget was seriously limited without accessible traffic sources, while the risks were minimal.
3. Motivated traffic was purchased only in Russia. Due to the peculiarities of Google Play algorithms we were able to see the effect in other countries, as well.

Mobile app promotion by each keyword continued for several days (depending on how fast search results were getting to the top). After getting the top 3 Google Play listing, we were adding a new keyword to the name of the app and conducted the same campaign for it.

Then we started experimenting with the game, trying to develop the success. One of the changes was a new game icon that has made an unexpected effect on the product. The new icon had a higher CTR. Henceforth, one small change of the icon led to the threefold increase in the number of product downloads.

Our goal was to test a hypothesis that you can launch a product that is capable of growing into a big project on the super-competitive mobile app market only via ASO promotion. I will say straight away that I proved the hypothesis, even though the road to success was drastically different from the initial plan. Mobile game that was created on the weekend today has about 2 million downloads and was getting 30 thousand new users a day in its peak performance.

ASO is not just about fighting for search traffic, but as well about optimizing all key steps of the funnel along user's path towards application download. We launched an ad campaign with motivated traffic in ASOdesk to get higher via the needed keyword. In this case, the effect of such optimization was much more apparent, comparing to direct fight with competitors.

В пике в игру приходило по 30 тысяч пользователей в день. Потом на несколько месяцев показатели стабилизировались на уровне 5 тысяч новых пользователей в день, далее упали до 1 тысячи, а сейчас опять вернулись к 100 скачиваниям в сутки.
В целом у Epic Split почти 2 миллионов скачиваний, реклама в мобильном приложении нам принесла более миллиона рублей прибыли.