Past Sessions

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• Event: MAU Vegas 25
• Date: Thursday, May 22, 2025
• Speaker: Anthony Asuncion, App Growth Consultant Team Lead, AppTweak
• Estimated read time: 6 to 8 minutes

 

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Quick Read Summary

Seasonal app growth is not a last minute creative swap or a budget spike, it is a compound advantage that starts weeks or months before demand arrives.

When you treat seasonality as a system, not a campaign, you can build relevance early, defend your brand when users search, and convert rising intent into efficient scale. TurboTax’s tax season dominance shows what happens when timing, Apple Ads, and App Store Optimization are orchestrated around the same outcome.

The playbook also applies beyond the obvious tentpoles. Smaller moments like vision board creation in January can produce meaningful incremental growth when you validate the demand signal, update metadata early, and use paid to accelerate the organic lift.

What follows is a practical seasonal app marketing framework you can run every quarter, with specific examples, thresholds, and execution patterns you can lift into your next plan.

 

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Seasonality is a competitive advantage, not a calendar reminder

The core strategic shift is simple. The teams that win seasonal app growth do not wait for the moment, they manufacture an advantage before the moment becomes expensive.

“Your seasonal strategy really needs to be well thought out and very planned. I always say the seasonal battle is won early.” Anthony Asuncion, App Growth Consultant Team Lead, AppTweak

That line is not motivational, it is operational. In the App Store, relevance is earned through signals that take time to build, including historical performance, conversion rate, and sustained engagement with the keywords that will later spike.

Practical implication for growth leaders

Set a planning horizon that matches how the store works, not how internal teams prefer to work.

• For major tentpoles, plan at least 8 to 12 weeks ahead
• For mid tier moments, plan 4 to 6 weeks ahead
• For emerging micro seasons, plan 2 to 4 weeks ahead, but commit to fast iteration

 

Build relevance before demand arrives

Seasonal spend gets blamed for being “too expensive” when the real issue is timing. If you start bidding at peak demand, you are paying premium prices without the historical relevance that makes those bids efficient.

TurboTax is the clearest proof point because tax season is predictable, competitive, and short lived, which is exactly when disciplined preparation pays off. Asuncion highlighted two moves that matter more than any single creative refresh.

First, TurboTax implemented its first in app event for the season in December, well ahead of the peak.

Second, it began bidding in January to build relevance early, rather than trying to buy relevance at the peak.

The impact shows up in share of voice and presence across the results page. For the keyword “tax,” AppTweak estimated TurboTax’s ad would appear 88 percent of the time. For a competitor term like “H and R Block,” the estimate reached 100 percent on some days. For “Free Tax USA,” a competitor without an App Store app, the estimate was 94 percent.

Interpretation

This is not just spending more, it is spending earlier, long enough to become the default answer when intent spikes. Once you own that mindshare, you create a reinforcing effect, you get more taps, more installs, and more organic lift, which then improves paid efficiency.

Practical action

Adopt an “early relevance” launch sequence for seasonal terms.

• Start bidding while competition is low, even if volume is still modest
• Add an in app event during peak season to protect your listing footprint for installed users
• Plan your highest impact changes, screenshots, metadata, custom product pages, to go live right as the demand curve turns upward, not when it peaks

 

Treat Apple Ads and ASO as a single system

Many orgs still run Apple Ads and App Store Optimization as separate teams with separate targets. That division costs you efficiency, especially in seasonal windows where every day matters.

The growth loop Asuncion described is the strategic model senior marketers should align around. Paid increases download velocity, better velocity and conversion improve organic rankings, improved rankings increase keyword relevance, and relevance improves paid performance.

Interpretation

This is why seasonal app marketing needs one integrated plan, one timeline, and one shared definition of success. If paid is pushing seasonal terms that ASO is not supporting, you pay more than you should. If ASO is updated without paid reinforcement, you may never generate enough velocity to capture the full opportunity.

Practical action

Run a seasonal “one plan” workshop with three outputs.

• A shared keyword set, seasonal, adjacent, defensive, and competitor
• A timeline that pairs ASO updates and Apple Ads ramps, with exact go live dates
• A measurement plan that ties paid spend to organic lift, and isolates incrementality later

 

Use data to find your category’s hidden seasons

Not every seasonal lift looks like Black Friday. The most scalable teams build a repeatable method for discovering, validating, and prioritizing seasonal demand signals.

Asuncion’s research sequence starts at the macro level, category level trend analysis, then moves to micro level signals like keyword patterns and app level performance shifts.

His examples show what that looks like in practice.

• Lent, Hallow begins bidding around February 5, before interest peaks, then activates its in app event and seasonal creative when volume starts rising
• The Super Bowl, FanDuel prepares outcome specific screenshots in advance so it can update immediately after the championship games decide the matchup
• Prime Day, TEMU effectively invents its own moment, bidding early, then reframing the peak as “TEMU Week” with a sharper offer and updated visuals

Interpretation

These are not three unrelated anecdotes. They are variations of the same discipline, detect the curve early, build relevance before the curve steepens, then synchronize creative and conversion assets when intent is rising.

Practical action

Use a quarterly seasonality sprint, even if you only staff it lightly.

• Identify 3 to 5 macro moments for your category
• Identify 5 to 15 micro moments via keyword trend spikes and competitor behavior
• Write a one page hypothesis for each micro moment, what is driving it, which keywords signal intent, which feature should be the landing experience

 

Win without a blockbuster budget

A large budget helps, but it is not the entry ticket. The leverage comes from early, focused changes that let you rank, convert, and defend efficiently.

Asuncion described a client who could not support a full seasonal campaign, but still moved from unranked to positions 4 through 6 for priority seasonal terms through an early metadata update alone.

Interpretation

When you update metadata early, before competitors flood the same space, you are effectively buying a cheaper auction, organic relevance that is not priced per tap. Paid can then be used surgically, to accelerate what is already working, instead of brute forcing an uphill bid war.

Practical action

If budget is constrained, prioritize in this order.

• Metadata updates for the seasonal keyword cluster, shipped early
• One to three screenshot updates focused on the seasonal intent, especially the first three screenshots that influence search results scanning behavior
• An in app event that refreshes your visual footprint and communicates the seasonal value prop clearly

 

Make creative and automation your leverage

Creative throughput is a universal bottleneck, which is why the best teams design seasonal systems that reduce creative load while increasing relevance.

On creative, Asuncion’s guidance is blunt. You do not need to redesign everything, you need to align copy and imagery to the seasonal moment.

On paid efficiency, he outlined automation patterns that translate seasonality into controlled ramping. The logic is to start bidding as soon as keywords begin rising, increase budgets as CPMs rise, then continually adjust bids using impression share and cost thresholds.

He gave concrete thresholds teams can adapt.

• If impression share is between 20 and 60 percent, conversion is above your minimum threshold, and cost per tap is below your maximum threshold, increase the bid
• If impression share rises above 80 percent but cost per tap is above your maximum threshold, decrease the bid

Ad variations are the bridge between creative constraints and relevance. They let you tailor screenshots, app preview, and promotional text to the specific keyword set you are bidding on, without forcing your entire default product page to be seasonal.

The SoundCloud example illustrates the upside when research drives the variation. AppTweak identified “unlimited skips” as a repeated differentiator in reviews, built an ad variation around that claim on competitor terms, and saw a 58 percent increase in conversion rate alongside a 39 percent savings on ad spend.

Deep links then close the loop by sending users to the most relevant in app experience, which improves the journey and supports retention, a key lever when the seasonal window is short.

Practical action

Build a seasonal execution kit you can reuse.

• A template library for ad variations, where only copy and key imagery change
• A ruleset library for seasonal ramping, keyed to CPM and impression share
• A deep link map for each seasonal feature so paid traffic always lands on the promise

 

Prove incrementality so you can invest again

Seasonal work dies in budgeting meetings when teams cannot prove it created incremental outcomes rather than shifting demand that would have happened anyway.

Asuncion positioned incrementality reporting as the antidote. The model compares predicted performance without the seasonal strategy to actual performance, isolating the lift you can credibly attribute to the seasonal work.

Interpretation

This is the governance layer seasonal app marketing needs. It turns seasonality from a recurring argument into a repeatable investment case, which is how you earn more runway for the next cycle.

Practical action

At the end of each season, report three numbers.

• Incremental downloads attributed to the seasonal strategy
• Efficiency change, including CPI, conversion rate, and impression share movements
• Organic impact, ranking improvements on the seasonal cluster and any spillover to evergreen terms

 

Conclusion

Seasonal growth is not about catching a spike, it is about building relevance early, then using Apple Ads and App Store Optimization as a coordinated system to convert rising intent efficiently. When you plan months ahead, you can defend your brand presence, tailor creative without overwhelming your default page, and use automation to scale bids without losing control.

The real advantage is compounding. Each season you execute well becomes historical proof, better relevance, better learnings, and a cleaner business case, which makes the next season easier to win.

 

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About the Speaker

Anthony Asuncion, App Growth Consultant Team Lead, AppTweak.  Anthony leads the Americas App Growth Consultant team at AppTweak. He has more than ten years of digital marketing experience and five years specialising in App Store Optimization. His work spans Apple Ads strategy, in app events, creative optimisation and data driven seasonal app marketing. He has supported hundreds of apps and games across almost every category, helping brands grow through smart planning and tightly coordinated paid and organic strategies.