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Colophon

Authors: Moritz Daan, Gabe Kwakyi

Editor: Regina Leuwer

Proofreader: Robin Runyan

Book layout: Javier Prieto

Cover design: Stuart Miller

Guest authors: Daniel Peris, Emily Grossman, Pablo Penny, Paul Malicki, Peter Fodor, Sylvain Gauchet

© 2018 by Phiture & Incipia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to ensure that all the information presented is correct.
Some of the facts in this volume may be subject to debate or dispute. If proper copyright acknowledgment has not
been made, or for clarifications and corrections, please contact the publishers and we will correct the information in
future reprintings, if any.
 Table of ConTenTs

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................ 2
About the Authors ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
What to Expect from this Book ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
The App Store Optimization Stack ...................................................................................................................... 6
iOS 11 And More ....................................................................................................................................................... 12
iOS 11 Paradigm Shifts............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 12
What’s New in iOS 11............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Apple Search Ads Creative Testing ................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
Some Data on iOS 11 .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24
Expected Google Play Store Listing Redesign............................................................................................................................................................. 26
Roles and Team Structures in ASO ..................................................................................................................... 31
Increasing Visibility................................................................................................................................................. 34
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Increasing Search Visibility Through Keyword Optimization .............................................................................................................................. 35
Increasing Visibility Through Getting Featured ....................................................................................................................................................... 102
Increasing Browse Visibility............................................................................................................................................................................................... 124
Increasing Visibility in the App Stores Through Store Ads ................................................................................................................................... 137
Increasing Conversion ......................................................................................................................................... 143
Introduction to CRO............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 144
The Conversion Rate Optimization Loop ..................................................................................................................................................................... 148
Reporting on Conversion Rate Optimization............................................................................................................................................................ 252
Ratings and Reviews ........................................................................................................................................... 259
On the Importance of Ratings & Reviews ................................................................................................................................................................... 259
Localization .............................................................................................................................................................. 271
Addressing a Global Audience Through Localization ............................................................................................................................................. 271

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 2 Table of ConTenTs

True localization .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 283

3rd Party Android Distribution ......................................................................................................................... 288
Black Hat ASO ....................................................................................................................................................... 292
Tools ......................................................................................................................................................................... 303
On the Importance of Ratings & Reviews ................................................................................................................................................................... 303
Outside of the store .............................................................................................................................................. 315
Product........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 315
Alternative User Acquisition Sources............................................................................................................................................................................. 318
Content Indexing .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 319
Google App Packs .................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 322
Final Words ............................................................................................................................................................ 332
Glossary................................................................................................................................................................... 335

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01
IntroductIon
01 IntroductIon | ABOUT THE AUTHORS

01
IntroductIon

About the Authors

With app stores nearing their tenth anniversary, the field of App Store Optimization (ASO) has matured, albeit with
added complexity. According to Apple, app store search accounts for 65% of all installs, and nearly half of that traffic
comes from generic searches, with a little bit over half coming from specific searches for brands (e.g. “Facebook”), app
names, and typos or misspellings.

To help ASO practitioners, from those just starting out with ASO to seasoned veterans solidifying their grip on what
ASO is and how to be successful at it, Moritz Daan from Phiture in Berlin and Gabe Kwakyi from Incipia in Detroit have
partnered to write this comprehensive guide to ASO.

Daan and Kwakyi have built up an extensive and intimate knowledge on the inner-workings of ASO over the years.
They’ve condensed their knowledge into this book, along with content from eight contributors, plus insights from
numerous other ASO industry experts.

Moritz Daan and Gabe Kwakyi

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01 IntroductIon | WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK

Moritz, who previously founded and sold two online gaming companies, started working in a full-time ASO role at
SoundCloud in 2014 when the term ASO had just come into swing. One of his first projects at SoundCloud was building
out an A/B testing platform for testing App Store assets (in those days Google Play Store listing Experiments and third
party services like TestNest weren’t around yet). Moritz soon moved on to lead a growth team focused on International
Growth at SoundCloud. In 2016, he started his own mobile growth consultancy with mobile industry veteran Andy
Carvell: Phiture. With Phiture, he’s helped over 30 apps set up their ASO strategies.

Gabe is Co-Founder and CEO of Incipia, a mobile app agency that builds and markets apps for companies and
entrepreneurs. Incipia has worked with apps of myriad categories and sizes, from indie developers to top 100 country
free-charting apps, to optimize their ASO and paid app marketing efforts, including Keepsafe, 5miles, Wordscapes, and
WeatherBug. Prior to Incipia, Gabe worked as a veteran search advertising account manager at Microsoft Bing Ads,
helping clients such as Airbnb, the NHL, and Spotify to optimize their PPC budgets, managing more than $21 million in
annual PPC spend.

What to Expect from this Book

In preparation for this book, we built a framework that we call the App Store Optimization (ASO) Stack, which we
introduce in the first chapter. The ASO Stack is a perfect framework for people just starting out with ASO to quickly gain
an understanding of what elements play a role in ASO. The framework also aims to help the expert take a step back and
analyze their own strategy for further opportunity with a fine-tooth comb.

When Apple announced iOS 11 in June 2017, it quickly became clear that the implications on ASO of Apple’s new OS
were massive. While this book was close to being completed, we decided to take the time to make some edits and
additions with iOS 11 in mind and summarized all of the important changes, their implications, and even some post-
iOS 11 updates in the chapter Getting ready for iOS 11.

For the subsequent chapters we’ll go in-depth on the two main goals for ASO. In Chapter 5 we discuss Increasing
Visibility of your listing in the app stores; this includes everything from keyword optimization to features and even
category optimization. In Chapter 6 we cover Increasing Conversion of anyone who generates a new impression for
your store listing, by optimizing all of the assets at your disposal.

In addition to the core themes of increasing visibility and conversion, we discuss several other topics vital to achieving
success in ASO:

■ Visual Word Recognition, i.e. how to increase keyword rankings by having more people convert on a certain
keyword search term.

■ Localizing app store presence to increase visibility and conversion.

■ Ratings & Reviews, one of the most important factors in convincing people to download, as well as giving a
good signal to ranking for the app store algorithms.

■ Android 3rd party alternatives to increase your share of total available downloads.

■ Black Hat ASO and where to draw the line.

■ ASO tools, including a list of free and paid tools and their use cases for your review.

■ Factors Outside of the Store which can influence ASO success, plus neighboring themes such as App Packs.

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01 IntroductIon | WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK

Thank you for joining us! Your work in sharpening your ASO skills has just begun, and we promise to leave you with
much food for thought in the coming pages.

Along the way, keep an eye out for special icons, which denote topics of particular interest, including:

Beware: These tips help you avoid problems or challenges one may face in managing ASO.

Pro Tip: These tips call out tactics that are unique or generally not common knowledge.

Case Study: Case studies provide real-world examples exploring the ASO topic at hand.

Further Reading: In this section, we offer additional resources for learning about ASO.

Denotes Android content Denotes iOS content Denotes iOS 11 content

AdvAnced App Store optImIzAtIon 4

 02
The App STore opTimizATion STAck
02 The App STore opTimizATion STAck |

02
The App STore opTimizATion STAck
Before diving into the content, let’s take a moment to explore the App Store Optimization Stack (ASO Stack) a bit
further.

The ASO Stack is a cheat sheet for ASO practitioners who want to better understand what levers they can pull to
improve their App Store presence. Here we present a bird’s-eye view of the world of ASO; throughout the chapters, we
progressively unpack the stack, bringing the view down to the squirrel’s-eye view.

In this book we aim to give you actionable guidance on how to effectively optimize each of the elements:

01. Increase visibility: How to get your app in front of more people inside of the store.

02. Increase conversion: How to convince people to download your app.

03. Tools: How ASO tools can help you speed up and optimize your App Store presence.

04. Outside of store: What impact outside influencers have on ASO and how they overlap with your ASO work.

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02 The App STore opTimizATion STAck |

The ASO Stack: Download at [Link]

Phiture partner and former SoundCloud mobile growth lead Andy Carvell created the Mobile Growth Stack marketing
framework [[Link] to help apps develop a holistic mobile growth strategy. App developers,
marketers, and growth practitioners went on to use the framework for their day-to-day growth activities by color-
coding the individual boxes [[Link]
mobile-growth-stack-fdb5c57a98f1].

We built the standalone ASO Stack to offer ASOs the same convenience of a simple and lightweight framework that is
updated regularly as the App Stores change. You can always find the latest version of the ASO Stack on [Link].

The Building Blocks of the ASO Stack

The ASO Stack is divided into four main horizontal layers, which each contain a number of boxes:

1) INCREASE VISIBILITY
How to get your app in front of more people inside of the App Store.

The first goal when doing ASO is to increase your app’s visibility within the stores. You can do that by getting it in front
of more people who are trying to discover new apps or games, or who are searching for a specific app title. Typical
initiatives to increase visibility are keyword optimization, Search Ads (which are paid but also affect organic search),

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 02 The App STore opTimizATion STAck |

getting a spot in the top charts of a category/country, or getting a Feature spot from Apple or Google. Each of these
activities is symbolized by a box in the ASO Stack. These initiatives aimed at increasing visibility are covered in Chapter
5 of this book.

2) INCREASE CONVERSION
How to convince people to download your app.

The second layer of the ASO Stack deals with increasing conversions, which is required in order to turn new visitors into
actual active users. Given that the algorithms of Apple and Google consider whether or not your app is able to convert
visibility into users and reward those that can, improving your conversion rate will pay back into increased visibility as
well. Typical conversion rate optimization activities are improving assets such as icons, screenshots, videos, copy, and
providing high quality localization.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tactics are laid out in Chapter 6 of this book, and include many examples for best
practices as well as how iOS 11 has changed CRO.

Vertical boxes: In addition to the horizontal layers there are vertical columns describing store-related activities that
impact both Visibility and Conversion alike: Ratings & Reviews, Localization, 3rd party stores (Android), and Black Hat
tactics.

3) TOOLS
How ASO Tools can help you speed up and optimize your App Store presence.

This third layer lists ASO tools that enable you to do ASO faster and more efficiently, as well as tools that help out where
the App Stores lack testing functionality or sufficient insights.

We cover the most important ASO tools in chapter 11. We’ve also reached out to the providers of the tools for information
on tool functionality, in order to give you the most update information on each tool and its functionality.

4) OUTSIDE OF THE STORE

What impact outside influences have on ASO.

Finally, there are things that have a strong impact on App Store Optimization, but are often out of the actual scope of
App Store Optimization. We cover these areas in the 12th chapter of this book. Notably, this includes the app product
itself (engagement, retention, etc.), context indexing, user acquisition, as well as the web search presence of an app
(e.g. Google App Packs).

How to Apply the ASO Stack

Similarly to the Mobile Growth Stack, you can work systematically through the ASO stack and apply color-coding to
each element in order to create a report card on the current status of your ASO work.

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Example of a report card for an iOS app where the Android specific boxes are not applicable

Green — The activity is well-executed and producing a strong, measurable impact.

Yellow — The activity is being executed, but with some difficulties.

Red — The activity is failing to deliver satisfactory results, or isn’t measured properly.

Gray — The activity is not applicable for your ASO strategy at the present time.

Blue — More information is needed to determine whether this is worth pursuing for your ASO strategy.

A report card will give you an idea of what you need to focus on next. Because ASO is a long-term play, nearly all of the
different activities will influence one another.

A better conversion rate will give you a better shot at increasing visibility. Increasing visibility will provide you
with valuable learnings on your users’ preferences (e.g. top keywords), which can in turn lead to better conversion
optimization.

Using the ASO Stack helps you to continuously improve on these activities, because it shows you in one glance how all
the pieces of ASO are linked together.

The ASO Impact Chart

Before getting to work on the areas identified in your report card, it’s worth considering the impact vs. effort breakdown

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02 The App STore opTimizATion STAck |

for each of the major ASO initiatives, in order to identify the most low-hanging fruit. Some activities may take a long
time or more effort to produce a measurable impact, while others can yield larger results with much less effort.

The ASO impact chart (download the chart here [ [Link]

png ])

Incipia has created the ASO impact chart to give you a bird’s-eye view on effort vs. impact for typical ASO activities.

While managing ASO ultimately means putting in the effort, smart ASOs will begin with the low-hanging fruit and
gradually work toward the higher effort, higher reward items. For example, Keyword Optimization (KWO) can be done
by the responsible person for ASO (“the ASO”) and marketing department without the need for developers or designers.

The main content of this book starts with KWO alongside other measures to increase visibility, which can be tackled
right away and are a long-term effort. After that, we’ll move on to topics such as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO),
ratings and reviews, and more.

Ahead of visibility, it’s important to cover one more introductory topic —Roles and team structure in ASO —which, if
overlooked, can have a detrimental impact on the success potential of an app’s ASO.

AdvAnced App STore opTimizATion 10

 03
GettinG Ready foR ioS11
 03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | IOS 11 PARADIGM SHIFTS

03
ioS 11 and MoRe
“I know iOS 11 is big, but just how BIG is it?”

iOS 11 offers app marketers and developers one of the biggest updates to the App Store since its inception. The
following is a summary of the broader impact that iOS 11 represents, as well as specific changes between iOS 10 and
iOS 11. We will dive deeper into the mechanics of optimizing for iOS 11 throughout the book, with iOS 11 sections
clearly called out with this marker:

iOS 11 Paradigm Shifts

iOS 11 truly does herald a fundamental shift in the way that app discovery and ASO work. Here are five paradigm
changes brought by iOS 11:

The New Search Results Page (SRP)

The new search results page poses three high-impact changes to be aware of over iOS 10, including:

01. Drastically increasing the importance of using a preview video. Whereas preview videos in iOS 10 required a
user to tap in order to play the video, with videos playing on mute, now every user will see and watch at least a
portion of your video, just as users currently consume more videos on Facebook and Instagram. Apps without
videos will not only lose the opportunity to tell their story in a dynamic manner, but also suffer a competitive
disadvantage vs. apps that do use videos.

02. Placing In-App Purchases (IAPs) and editorial content into the search results is Apple further monetizing a
massive-volume avenue in store-based app discovery. This promotes IAPs not just into the product page in a
more visual fashion, but also as a large surface area keyword search result will enable apps to capture more

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | IOS 11 PARADIGM SHIFTS

downloads and more revenue by greatly expanding the real estate they earn in the App Store. This is only
available if an app has IAPs.

03. By moving from two screenshot/video tiles to three and shrinking the size of each result, the repercussion of
these two changes is that the size of the screen that competitive apps take up increases. This will ratchet up
the level of competition that apps can expect from peers. With apps creeping more into view while users are
looking at other apps (and preview videos auto-playing once in-view), each app will now have more competition
to contend with, and apps which are able to produce more eye-catching and appealing assets stand to gain.
This represents an especially challenging shift for brands, which stand the most to lose from a degrading of
their hard-earned branded search real estate.

Broader Product Page Visuals

The product page now offers developers a massive opportunity to tell the story of their app with a much wider canvas,
due to the ability to use up to three preview videos, plus screenshots and In-App Purchase icons.

Allowing up to three preview videos triples the total video time that developers sell apps, at no loss to the number of
supplemental screenshots. How to make the best use of the three preview videos will take some time to fully uncover,
but the opportunity is a broad one for the savviest of app marketers/branding managers.

IAP icons also provide an extra outlet for creativity and for retaining users on the product page for longer, with each IAP
able to tell its own mini-story through a 45 character description, name, and icon.

Promoted In-App Purchases

Allowing apps control over promotion of up to 20 IAPs —each outfitted with a name, description, and icon into the rest
of the App Store and beyond the app’s product page —increases the store visibility an app can obtain by 20x (plus
potential for even more visibility via featured placements) and widens the ASO-based acquisition funnel. This means
that the ASO’s job also expands to not only maintaining and optimizing visibility/conversion for one app, but doing the
same for each of their promoted IAPs through A/B testing and pre-post analysis.

Additionally, whereas in iOS 10 IAPs would only rank if the user typed in an [exact match search] (e.g. “500 gems”), in
iOS 11, IAPs now rank for partial keywords and can rank for permutations of the app’s ranking keywords (at least to
some degree, such as “gems” or “clash gems” in addition to “500 gems”).

Feature-First
By adding the brand-new Today tab plus two more feature tabs and placing editorial copy even in search results,
Apple boosts the share of prime App Store impression real estate that featured apps receive.

Additionally, moving the top charts into an embedded view within the apps/games tabs is sort of like placing the Duty-
Free shop at the entrance to the airport. With this move and by continuing to start users off on the Today feature tab,
Apple is able to feature even more apps to users, even if they are only interested in finding the most popular apps or
searching for a particular keyword/app.

Pressure on Google Play

Not only do Apple’s changes bring benefits to iOS apps, but they also put pressure on Google to implement an update
to its store and app discovery model. In fact, Google released a longer title at a conspicuously similar time to Apple’s

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 03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

iOS 11 announcement, and soon after officially announced a move to take more control over AdWords app campaigns
by making its UAC (Universal App Campaign) product the only app ad product, which was not entirely dissimilar to
Apple’s concentration of store impressions into its featured content, or Apple’s late 2017 Search Ads Basic product
release.

That said, Google did not take action when Apple reduced its revenue rake from 30% to 15% after apps attain one year’s
worth of subscription charges from a user.

Keep your eyes peeled for Google’s next big move.

What’s New in iOS 11

Much of the iOS 11 update includes changes to the UX and UI of the App Store itself. These changes represent not just a
facelift in the App Store, but a shift in the way that ASO is managed. From changing the navigation bar, to increasing the
number of variables placed in the search results page, to adding brand new ways to purchase digital goods and more,
it is important to understand the scope of influence that iOS 11 has. Here is a side-by-side comparison of changes
affecting ASO in iOS 10 vs iOS 11:

APP STORE ASPECT IOS 10 IOS 11

Number of screenshots in the search results

2 3
page

Number of featured tabs 1 3

Number of top chart tabs 2 0

Number of preview videos 1 3

Preview videos auto-play on mute? no yes

Top Chart rank shown in product page? no yes

apps, search apps, search ads, in-app purchases,

Eligible search results
ads developer pages, editorial content

In-App Purchase assets name name, description, icon

current, all
Ratings shown alltime
time

A comparison of several App Store aspects, iOS 10 vs. iOS 11

Featured Tabs
One of the most noticeable changes is that the featured tab has been revamped and split from one tab into three
separate tabs:

01. Today: A featured tab for the highest feature visibility apps/games.

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

02. Games: A featured tab just for games.

03. Apps: A featured tab just for non-game apps.

Users initially land on the Today tab and have the option to delve more into games or apps in the next two tabs.

The Today tab allows Apple to call special attention to apps, games, app themes, and developers in greater detail and
focus than the other featured tabs. Apple accomplishes this premium experience via placement (the default tab in the
App Store), size of placement (the average feature square size in the Today tab is the size of about 3 rectangles in the
games/apps tabs), and an expanded UI (allowing the developer to tell a story using lots of text and multiple visual
assets). The Today tab also highlights an app or game of the day, and indexes each previous set of Today features in a
vertically scrollable list.

So far, each day in the Today tab is organized into the following:

01. Editorial spotlight: A showcase piece on one developer (e.g. the creators of “Rick and Morty”) that includes
images and text, plus a link at the bottom to share the story or download the developer’s app.

02. Themed app collection: A set of apps that follow a common theme (e.g. “make parties less awkward”), with a
brief paragraph of text explaining the theme at the start.

03. App of the day: A single, showcased app with a few paragraphs of text.

04. Game of the day: A single, showcased game with a few paragraphs of text.

05. The Daily List: A list of generally featured apps.

06. Quick Look, optional: A single app with a story of text and images that includes a link to download the app
(e.g. ride for a cause, Lyft).

07. Featured In-App Purchase, optional: A showcased In-App Purchase.

The apps and games tabs contain similar content to the featured tab in iOS 10, but with less content and a horizontally
scrollable list. Critically, the top charts are also embedded in the apps/games tabs. Additionally, in iOS 11, featured
apps can earn a video placement instead of just a static banner, and In-App Purchases can be featured.

The segmentation of apps vs. games will also allow for a higher conversion rate for the apps that appear in each tab, as
users are no longer forced to sift through apps to find games, or vice versa. The same conversion rate boost should also
be recognized by reducing the total number of features and increasing the size of each feature placement.

App subtitles also show in the featured tabs, as well as top charts.

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Diagram comparing the featured tabs of iOS 10 to iOS 11

Screenshot showing a featured app with a video Screenshot showing a featured In-App Purchase

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Top Charts
As mentioned, top charts have been relegated in iOS, from their own tab into a space embedded within the games or
apps featured tabs.

Top charts have also been converted from a vertical scroll in their embedded view, to a horizontal scroll, meaning that
only the top three paid/free apps/games now will capture the highest-volume top chart visibility real estate (i.e.
above the fold of the top chart). The horizontal scroll also ends after the 12 apps, forcing users to tap into the top chart
to see the rest of the top apps.

Entering the top chart allows users to see all apps, as well as filter in the same view for different categories.

App icons have been removed from the top chart category icons, replaced by only a default image for each category.

Additionally, there is no more top grossing chart.

Diagram comparing the top chart tabs of iOS 10 to iOS 11

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 03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Screenshot showing the top chart category icons, which are now default icons, rather than icons of actual apps

Search Results Page

One of the biggest changes is that the new search results page shows three images : when screenshots are portrait
mode-based; the first preview video and the first two screenshots; or else three screenshots total. This squeezes the
space and makes reading text in screenshots much harder.

Preview videos also now auto-play on mute as soon as the video is within view (unless a video begins playing further
up screen, in which case the second video will wait to play until the first has finished). Each app result is smaller, and
In-App Purchases, Apple editorial pieces, and developer pages are now eligible to show in the search results page.

Subtitles also appear in the Search Result Page, and related searches have been removed from the U.S. store.

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Diagram of the new search results page

Diagram of search results page for Google Play vs the App Store

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Screenshot showing an In-App Purchase in search results

App Product Page

The product page now shows several new data points:

01. The app’s highest top chart rank (if applicable).

02. The app’s subtitle.

03. The app’s all time ratings (there are no more current ratings).

04. A 170 character promo text that sits separately, on top of the description.

05. An icon, name, and description for up to 20 In-App Purchases.

For apps that a user has already downloaded, What’s New will appear above the screenshots and below the ratings/
reviews for users who have not downloaded the app.

Videos will auto-play on mute in the product page as well, and developers can have up to three preview videos and
five screenshots.

In-App Purchases will scroll horizontally just like the top chart view in the apps/games tab.

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | WHAT’S NEW IN IOS 11

Diagram comparing the top chart tabs of iOS 10 to iOS 11

Diagram focusing on the product page of iOS 11

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | APPLE SEARCH ADS CREATIVE TESTING

Diagram comparing the product page/store listing of the App Store to Google Play

Apple Search Ads Creative Testing

In May 2018, Apple unexpectedly released a creative testing functionality for its Search Ads [Link]
com/advanced/help/campaign-management/#creative-sets product.

Mobile marketers and developers can now test different Apple Search Ads assets in the App Store. In the Apple Search
Ads interface, you can select which app previews and screenshots are shown in the creative set for your Ad Group or
on a Campaign level.

Here you can see a creative set, which uses only screenshots and no preview video, being tested.

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | APPLE SEARCH ADS CREATIVE TESTING

Though this new option in Search Ads gives publishers a way to test creatives in conjunction with positioning and
targeting directly in the App Store without using external services and their landing pages.

There are some caveats, however:

This is not a proper A/B testing functionality (like what Google Play offers). The test is limited to Search Ads creatives,
and there is still no way within the Store to A/B test the Store Page itself.

All the assets need to be uploaded and approved in iTunes Connect (max 10 images). This also means that marketers
need to wait for an app update to submit and test new creatives.

Still, it allows for creative testing by switching in and out pre-approved screenshots and videos on a Search Ads Ad
Group, and then monitor real app store conversion of different ad groups over time.

After setting up the different Creative Sets, developers will be able to measure how different Creative Sets are performing.

Due to Apple now splitting up default text and visual ads, apps get a better understanding on how text ads are
performing. The default text and visual ads can’t be paused unfortunately.

Here are some things this new feature allows to test:

01. Different copy on the same screenshots

02. Video vs. Screenshots: the use of no video with 3 screenshots, 1 video with 2 screenshots, just a landscape
video etc.

03. Ad groups that have different gender targeting with different creatives (ie. a dating app showing different
genders in different ad group settings)

04. Different creatives for different times of day (ie. a fast food chain showing breakfast options in the morning and
dinner options at night)

05. Different creatives for existing / new users (ie. showing a promotion to existing users and more value

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03 GettinG Ready foR ioS11 | SOME DATA ON IOS 11

propositions)

06. Regional targeting (ie. a food delivery app showing food deliveries in SF vs. New York)

07. Highlighting different value propositions of the app for different ad groups with search terms related to those
value propositions (ie. a booking app showing hotels instead of flights for ad groups that target people looking
for hotels)

08. Showing different creatives for your brand keyword campaign in the Search Ads than in your organic Store
listing give you the ability to show up to 6 different screenshots in the results

These tests could not only help app marketers to optimize their paid Search Ads presence, but also affect the impact
on ASO when the learnings can be systematically applied to the organic store listing.

Some Data on iOS 11

As this book was originally published prior to the launch of iOS 11, we have released some updates to the content in
order to stay on top of the latest trends. Here is some data and insights on how the changes in iOS 11 have panned out:

01. In addition to the new developer pages, such as Zynga’s below, editorial results have begun appearing in
non-branded keyword search results, such as this collection of “our favorites” racing games below. Apple has
also placed (clip art quality) category results in the rankings for category searches, such as a search for “word
games.”

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02. Per a TechCrunch article [[Link]

boost-app-downloads/] , Apple has begun offering a “this weekend only” today feature, where apps can offer
limited time discounts on services. This action indicates Apple’s willingness in iOS 11 to push more curated
content and explore new ways to encourage users to download (or pay for) apps that it wants to feature/
promote.

03. With regard to the success of Apple’s new Today tab, several sources have found it to help drive massive
increases in downloads for featured apps. According to an Apptopia [[Link]
stores-app-of-the-day-gets-an-average-download-boost-of-1747 ] study cited in a TechCrunch article [https://
[Link]/2017/10/24/apples-app-of-the-day-featuring-boosts-downloads-by-1747-games-by-792/
], the today feature has racked up an average increase in downloads of 1,747% for apps and 792%. Incipia
internal data pegs the increase at around a 1,000% the normal rate of daily downloads.

04. Also according to Incipia research, iOS 11 portrait screenshots have been found each to be 33% smaller than
iOS 10 screenshots (3 screenshots in iOS 11 vs 2 in iOS 10), underscoring the need for significantly larger
captions. Furthermore, each in-focus app result when scrolling through results in iOS 11 is only 25% larger
than the competitive result in iOS 11, compared to 78% larger in iOS 10. This means that not only is conversion
rate optimization more important for ASO, but it also leads the need to run defensive branded search ads
campaigns as well, as well-designed search ad results can siphon away crucial branded downloads.

05. According to discussion in the ASO Stack Slack group, many app marketers and developers have found that
testing app preview videos against no preview video has lead to no improvement, or even a decrease in
conversion rate.

06. Per Incipia research, a sampling of the top 10 app results for 10 randomly selected keywords revealed that

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only 3 of the 100 results was a promoted In-App Purchase. This indicates that promoted IAPs may not be
valued enough by developers to bother implementing, and or that promoted IAP are a massively underutilized
opportunity. Optimizing for Promoted IAP is covered in more depth at the end of Chapter 5: Increasing Visibility
and in a case study in Chapter 6: Increasing Conversion.

Expected Google Play Store Listing Redesign

Image credit: StoreMaven [[Link]

In spring of 2018, rumours and screenshot of a Play Store redesign were cropping up. By mid-year, these quite
fundamental changes were shown to more and more users and are expected to be rolled out to all Android users
sometime later this year.

Feature Graphic Gets The Axe

From an ASO perspective, this is the biggest change - the Feature Graphic as the central graphical element, and first
thing store visitors see when looking at an app page, is apparently going away.

Experts agree that this asset had the single biggest impact on on-page conversion. It also provided apps with a blank
canvas to experiment with different call to actions, brandings or moods.

In its place, the screenshots are moving up on the screen real estate.

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Store Badges Get a Cleaner Look

Google Play’s Downloads, Ratings and Category Badges that used to take up a lot of space (similar size to app icon) are
getting trimmed down.

Screenshots and Video

With the space freed up, Screenshots move up on the page and increase in importance. This could mean that users will
more likely explore and scroll through different screenshots than before.

This also means that for apps that feature a video in their listing, the video now moves to the first place in the gallery
as the first asset users see.

With video moving from the Feature Graphic placement to the gallery, apps can hope for increased watch rates because
of the more explorative context.

Image credit: Moburst [[Link]

In Google Play, it is possible to upload any image It can be portrait or landscape at any width or resolution. The
different image ratios and resolutions will affect how the screen real estate will be used. As moburst pointed out
([Link] ), this causes some apps to show only two images before
scrolling, and others almost four.

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Image credit: Moburst [[Link]

Feature Graphic Gets The Axe

The developer name becomes clickable - a separate Developer page opens up a new space for promotion.

Apart from these big changes, Anatoly Sharifulin listed a few more detailed ones, especially interesting for games on
the App Follow Blog: ([Link]

01. Recommendations: More game genres (from 70 to 200) allowing Google to suggest more relevant apps and
games.

02. Editor’s Choice: The Editor’s Choice tab design is now different than the Recommendations tab.

03. ‘Premium’ games tab: Giving paid games more exposure.

04. ‘New’ tab for games: The best new games will be featured in the “New” tab.

05. Search suggestions: Users will be able to filter search results. After looking for “racing games”, users will get an
option to add a tag — for example, “motorcycle”.

06. Milestones for games with Pre-registration: Developers can define a pre-registration milestone and unlock
new content if the goal was reached.

07. News and updates from installed games: Google Play will announce events in installed games: new content
updates, limited-time campaigns.

08. What’s New: Users will see “What’s new” release notes right after the Short Description if a game or an app is

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installed. The notes have also been added to the Updates tab.

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 04
Roles and Team sTRucTuRes in aso
04 Roles and Team sTRucTuRes in aso |

04
Roles and Team sTRucTuRes in aso
“What does a successful ASO team structure look like?”

Having the resources to manage an ASO strategy requires the combination of a multitude of unique functional areas.
While management of ASO at a larger marketing operation (e.g. a game studio) may be spread between several people,
at a smaller marketing operation (e.g. an independent developer), one person may have to fill each role as best he or
she can, or else decide to outsource one or more roles. In any case, knowing about all of the unique roles that exist
within the remit of ASO can help you plan, delegate, and prioritize ASO at your marketing operation, whatever the size:

■ Keyword research: Pulling keyword ideas from myriad sources, prioritizing a full keyword list into an app’s
limited metadata space, analyzing changes in keyword rankings based on ASO, and determining the next
course of action all belong to one of the most fundamental and more scientific roles in ASO: the keyword
researcher.

■ Copywriting: Copywriting comes into play not only in figuring out the best text to use in a text-based metadata
element, but also in the overlaid text on visual elements such as screenshots, and even writing the text to be
used in review prompts.

■ Graphic design: A core component of every ASO strategy, graphic design is a mix of scientific direction and
art-led creativity. It is key to improving your app’s conversion rate by making a good first impression and
standing out from the crowd. While basic visuals (e.g. the actual screenshot of an app) may sometimes suffice,
custom designs often make a critical difference in driving ASO results.

■ Video production: The product of another scientifically-informed, art-led role, a well-made video stands to
significantly improve an app’s conversion rate, especially in the wake of iOS 11; however, the opposite is also
true, as poorly made videos often harm conversion rate. This means that an expert’s eye is truly valuable in
leading the role of video production.

■ Analysis/data science: Ranging from the simple end of measuring the change in installs after an optimization,
to ingesting data from multiple ASO data sources across multiple countries, the analyst must help inform the
ASO lead in targeting, reporting, and continuous optimization.

■ Development: Without the blood, sweat, and time of developers, there would be no ASO; yet a developer’s
role is not finished once the app is launched. To ensure the success of an app, the developer(s) must maintain

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and grow the app by adding features, fixing bugs, reducing file sizes, implementing technology such as
engagement SDKs for the ASO lead, and leveraging other technologies such as Apple’s iOS 10.3 review prompt.

■ Customer service: The best products are those made by teams who listen to and take care of their customers
by quickly capturing and acting on negative feedback, addressing product needs, and responding to customer
service issues in the app and via reviews. As reviews are surfaced in a prominent location for all apps, customer
service is an important role for keeping ASO conversion rates high.

■ User acquisition: The more highly desired a top chart spot or keyword placement is, the higher the level of
competition for that ranking, and thus the higher the bar for an app’s total user base required to earn that
ranking. For apps competing for these top spots, a significant user acquisition effort is a must to support an
app’s organic ranking power, as discussed in the Outside of the Store chapter.

■ User retention: Related to user acquisition, user retention has taken on a larger and larger importance as the
ranking algorithms factor more and more for active and retained users, versus simple install states. Without
retaining users, an app has little chance of earning or maintaining a top rank spot.

■ Project management: In some cases, such as a large app that is localized in many countries, a project manager
role may be required in order to oversee the various projects and coordinate communication between the
various individuals owning each aforementioned ASO-related role. Project managers take ownership for
keeping the entire operation on the right track and running smoothly.

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 05
IncreasIng VIsIbIlIty
 05 IncreasIng VIsIbIlIty | INTRODUCTION

05
IncreasIng VIsIbIlIty
“How do I get more people to be aware of and download my app?”

Introduction
As the starting place for ASO, improving your app’s visibility in the App Store is of paramount importance and can occur
from several specific activities. In this chapter we describe all the ways you can get in front of a potential customer from
within the App Store.

Following the ASO stack, in the first two subchapters we will talk about how to increase visibility on Search through
keyword optimization and how you can leverage more Feature-traffic by pitching Apple & Google. Following that, in
the third subchapter, we will discuss more briefly what other levers you can pull to increase other casual Browse traffic.
The last subchapter tackles Store Ads which, while not an organic ASO topic, definitely has to do with optimizing your
paid visibility within the App Stores.

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Increasing Search Visibility Through Keyword Optimization

“How do I find and implement the right keywords for my app?”

Introduction to Keyword Optimization

Just about every app can benefit from Keyword Optimization; it’s just a matter of finding the right keywords. To get
there, however, it’s important to understand first of all what words people would use to search for your app if they
didn’t know it existed.

Asking the following questions can help with this assessment:

■ Does your app solve a certain need? (e.g., “flashlight app” or “baking recipes”)

■ Is the market for this app already well-defined? Do people already know how to search for it? For example,
“period tracker” is a well-known use case and keyword search term, so period tracker apps will benefit from
tapping into this awareness. Whereas for a niche use case like “plumber invoice scheduling,” people would
probably have to be educated first of all that there actually is a reason (i.e. an app) to search for plumber
invoice scheduling; this involves educating users by tapping into similar, but more general keywords like
“invoice.”

■ For games: does your game belong to a certain category of games that people know to search for? (e.g. “puzzle
games”)

If the answer to all of these questions is no, keyword optimization can still help your app leverage search traffic to some
extent. That said, building awareness for your app’s use case in this scenario will also require supplemental external/
inorganic sources of traffic in order to achieve rank on similar, but more general (and thus more competitive) organic
keyword downloads.

To recap, while nearly all apps may benefit from keyword optimization, it’s important for expectation-setting purposes
to understand that apps which solve specific, well-known needs will see the most significant visibility benefits from
keyword optimization. This is because the nature of keyword searches in the App Store are “shorter tail” (e.g. invoice)
and less likely to be web keyword searches to be “longer tail” (e.g. plumber invoice scheduling).

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Babbel (left) will see a bigger benefit from keyword optimization, while Snappii’s app (right) will see
benefit less from keyword optimization.

Understanding the Search Algorithm

Understanding the inner workings of the App Store ranking algorithms is the million dollar topic, and one that puts the
ASO industry at constant odds against Apple and Google, in order to capture clues, tips, and tricks.

There are three things to consider when looking at the question of how the algorithm ranking algorithms work, and
whether your app will rank for a keyword, and if so how well:

01. Are you eligible to rank for a certain keyword?

■ Often this requires specifying the keyword in your app listing’s metadata.

02. How relevant is the given keyword to your app?

■ While influenced by “secret sauce” factors, this is mostly defined by the location where the keyword sits
in your metadata.

03. How much ranking strength does your app have for the keyword?

■ Strength is defined by factors outside of your metadata, such as install conversion rate and keyword
retention.

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KEYWORD RANKING ELIGIBILITY AND RELEVANCE

Now, imagine if App Stores were to suddenly start with a clean slate by losing all of their historical data; how would they
decide on how to list the results for a keyword search query of, say “photo editor”?

The first step Apple and Google take in determining search results is to identify which apps are eligible to show for
the keyword, based on the metadata all apps provide. That is, whether or not the keywords “photo” and “editor” are
contained within an app’s metadata.

The next step would be to decide how much relevance your application has for the specific keyword. To unpack this
second step, the algorithms primarily look at the location of a specific word in an app’s metadata in order to determine
the relevance. As a rule of thumb the algorithms look at:

01. How visible the metadata is (e.g. app title has a higher visibility than the keywords field).

02. How many characters a piece of metadata allows (e.g. the App Store title only allows 30 characters).

03. How often those keywords appear throughout your metadata (Google-only).

Pro tip: Keywords mentioned frequently, earlier in the full description on Google Play have been found
to be considered more relevant, and thus earn a better rank than those found in later lines in the
description. For example mentioning the word “restaurants,” five times in the first few sentences of your
long description would assign your app a better relevance weight in the Google Play Store algorithm
for restaurant, than mentioning the keyword the same number of times, but throughout the entire long
description.

The following factors are commonly accepted as keyword ranking signals throughout the ASO industry:

Keyword Eligibility & Relevance

ELIGIBILITY Not eligible Eligible

RELEVANCE ●○○○○ = low relevance ●●●●● = high relevance

METADATA SOURCE App Store Play Store

Title ●●●●● ●●●●●

Short description ●●●●○*1

Subtitle ●●●●●

Keyword field ●●●○○

Long description ●○○○○

Developer Name ●●○○○ ●●○○○

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Keyword Eligibility & Relevance

Package Name/Bundle ID ●●●○○

In-App Purchases ●○○○○

Primary category name ●○○○○

Secondary category name ●○○○○

Similar apps ●○○○○

User reviews potentially*2 ●●○○○

Developer replies to reviews

What’s new text

Visual assets: OCR*3

Visual assets: File names*4

Backlinks (SEO) ●○○○○

When it comes to the relevance of your metadata for a keyword phrase such as “photo editor” (and this holds true
specifically for Google Play metadata and for Apple title/subtitles), the algorithm also assigns more relevance weight if
your metadata contains an exact match.

*1. Per above, Mobile Action published a blog post [[Link]

keywords/] on the fact that keywords in your short description have a higher impact than your long description.

*2. While we don’t have evidence for reviews being indexed in the App Store, there have been instances in which black
hat ASO keyword stuffed reviews appeared in the App Store, preceding an increase in keyword ranking (thanks to Luca
Giacomel).

*3. The idea being that Google might be able to recognize text in the assets that you upload and then indexes you for
these, has been disproven.

*4. A test was run to name files from [Link] to [Link] and test if Google would pick this
up, yet the test failed to produce an improvement in keyword rank.

Pro tip: As you can see in the screenshot below, Apple returns all apps in a category if searching for one
of the words in the category name. Make sure to count that in when deciding on your category.

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Screenshot of AppTweak showing ± 158.000 results for all search terms with “Travel” in them, meaning all the apps in the “Travel”
category rank for this keyword, plus those that specify it.

Now and then, you may come across a situation where you didn’t specify a keyword but are nonetheless still ranking
for it.

Google’s algorithm employs machine learning, including embedding neural network models like skip grams in order to
determine relevance associations for keywords beyond metadata (e.g., synonyms, similar context, misspellings/slang,
etc.). The algorithm matches similar words and then the search engine ‘guesses’ the intention behind a search. This
means that if a search keyword is algorithmically linked to another keyword found in the app’s metadata, it can cause
your app to rank for that linked search keyword, even if that keyword itself is not found in your app’s metadata.

Apple has a much simpler algorithm, but also provides several keywords that you didn’t specify in your app’s metadata
to rank

“FREE” RANKING KEYWORDS IN THE APPLE APP STORE

We’ve found the following keywords to index your app without you needing to specify it:

Free App Store Keywords

These don’t need to be included in your metadata

KEYWORD/KEYWORD TYPE APP STORE

yes (even, say if the app is just an

ipad Spotify Music iPad
iMessage extension)

free yes (but only for free download apps) Spotify Music free

app yes*1 Spotify Music app

apps yes Spotify Music apps

iphone yes Spotify Music iphone

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Free App Store Keywords

These don’t need to be included in your metadata

KEYWORD/KEYWORD TYPE APP STORE

primary category word (e.g.

yes Spotify Music utilities
productivity, utilities, weather)

second category word (e.g. lifestyle,

yes Spotify Music entertainment
entertainment, business)

the yes the Spotify Music

and yes Music and Spotify

for yes Spotify for Music

a yes Spotify a Music

an yes an Spotify Music

by yes Music by Spotify

plurals/singulars yes Spotify Music

Root > variant sometimes Spotify Music Player (Play > Player)

Variant > root seldom Spotify Music Play (Player > Play)

misspellings mostly Spotify Musix

when the keywords (“Audio books”)

compound words are part of the title, and in some other Audio books <-> Audiobooks
edge cases

numbers (one-ten; 1-10) rarely Spotify Music one

*1. Luca Giacomel correctly pointed out that not in all cases you will rank for keyword + <”free match” keyword>‘app.’
Luca comments “it’s a difficult topic actually. First, these free matches might vanish if the other term accompanying
(for which alone you rank) them are not highly relevant to your app. Second, if you look for the results of a generic
search and the same generic search with app added, you will notice that Apple roughly shows only 50% of the results
overlapping between the two searches, so clearly the match cannot be always automatic.”

H O W TO F I N D O U T W H E T H E R A P P L E M ATC H E S M Y K E Y W O R D I N P LU R A L /
COMPOUND?

While Apple is getting better at matching plurals, Apple’s understanding is certainly still far from fully-baked, especially
when it comes to non-English searches. Therefore, for best results it is important to test, rather than assuming.

The first test to perform is analyzing both singular and plural variants of the root word (e.g., fox, foxes) versions of your
keywords, as well as compound words (e.g., audio books, audiobooks), using your favorite ASO tool.

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Screenshot of AppTweak showing singular/plural and compound word rankings

For this research, it’s most important to look at the sheer number of results. In our experience, if a set of one type of
variation (e.g. compound words) closely matches the rank of the root word (i.e. the discrepancy is less than 15%), then
it’s highly likely that they are matched by Apple and that you will rank for both by just specifying one. You can see this
being the case for audiobook & audio books (compound) and podcast & podcasts (plural). The reason for which
these variants never match up entirely is because there are likely other matching rules at play. For example, an app may
have a very high conversion rate for podcast, but not as high for podcasts.

Yet for the plural/singular forms of mice & mouse for instance, we see a huge discrepancy: only about 50% of the
number of apps ranking for mouse also rank for mice. It’s therefore highly unlikely that Apple is matching plurals
between the search keywords mice & mouse, so to rank well for both terms, you will have to add both variants in your
metadata.

Beware: From our experience an exact match weighs more than the matching rules that Apple offers. If
a keyword is one of your primary keywords, and both bring in substantial volume (i.e. podcast = 62 and
podcasts = 53), we suggest that you target both the plural and singular forms in your metadata for best
results. Over the course of metadata iterations, you can test to find out whether you’re safe to remove
plurals, but the safest default mode in this scenario is to add both.

THE 7-DAY KEYWORD BOOST ON THE APP STORE

The first seven days of your app’s launch are not only a testing time for its credibility and ability to flop or fly, but they’e
also the only time when Apple artificially boosts your app’s visibility, and during which your marketing efforts will
produce more fruit.

For Apple, it is a guessing game of how good a new app is, as well as how relevant it is to the keywords in its metadata.
In order for the algorithm to gauge metrics like retention and conversion rates from search terms, in the first seven
days, your app is placed artificially high in the results for keywords you provided.

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Example of a graph supplied by ASO Expert Ido Schoonen, of Lab Cave Games. On the graph you see the initial boost in keyword rank
in the first seven days after launch, after which the average keyword ranking drops.

In this graph you see the impact that the first seven days after launch had on App Unit volume, filtered for App Store Search.

To take full advantage of this boost, you could either target vaguely relevant, but super high volume keywords in the
pursuit of capturing more downloads, or make sure that you cover the most relevant keywords from the start, so that
your performance history on those keywords is high, and your app has a better chance of retaining your high rank for
those keywords beyond the seven days keyword boost.

KEYWORD RANKING STRENGTH

Earlier, we discussed a theoretical situation in which the App Stores began with a clean slate and no ranking history.
Lacking historical data to improve the search results, the stores would have to rank apps purely off of their metadata.

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But what makes up that historical performance data that Google and Apple do have and do use to serve better quality
search results to their searchers?

Here are the factors that the ASO industry has identified as the major ones in Apple’s and Google’s keyword ranking
algorithms, along with a note to indicate which stores utilize the signal:

Primary Ranking Signals

Stores: Apple + Google

App downloads are the strongest ranking signal, specifically downloads of that app that were sourced from the keyword
in question. Moreover, download velocity is a major attribute of overall app downloads. The concept of download
velocity will be illustrated in further detail in the subchapter on top chart ranks.

Downloads are especially important for Apple. If a high-volume music app publisher were to decide to insert
“Audiobooks” into their title, they would likely pick up a decent rank for that term, just by virtue of having a lot of
downloads of the app overall. Because the stores tend to rank high-volume apps for high-volume keywords, indie
developers should begin by focusing on long tail or otherwise lower volume, but lower competition keywords.

Another factor of significant influence in the ranking algorithms is having a high star rating and a high velocity of
reviews and ratings. These signals indicate that users are fond enough of an app to take the time to rate it or write a
review, and that effort required is what makes this factor a bigger one. Both Google and Apple have officially commented
that star ratings, user reviews, and the number of ratings are factors that their algorithms consider when ranking apps.

Conversion Rate for a Keyword Search Term

Stores: Apple + Google

One of the leading indicators of whether your app will rank well for a certain keyword is how well your app has
historically converted searches into Installs, for that keyword, as a percentage of total changes (i.e. impressions). Apple
and Google want to show apps which have a higher likelihood of being downloaded, so that users are satisfied with the
store experience, and thus are likely to return to search for and download apps in the future.

Retention Rate for a Keyword Search Term

Stores: Google (Apple for retention rate overall)

Over time, Google’s keyword ranking algorithm has gradually moved away from leaning so heavily on downloads and
download velocity to calculate an app’s keyword ranking strength. This came to a head with a Google Android team
blog post and algorithm update in late 2016/early 2017, wherein the retention rate of users was officially announced to
be a much more important signal for keyword ranking.

While download velocity can still cause initial swings in keyword ranks, the retention of users that download after
searching a keyword is the most important long-term signal for keyword ranks in the Play Store. In fact, if your app is
unable to retain users, then driving more downloads can be a detrimental signal, causing your app to rank progressively
lower for a keyword, as your app proves with more and more data that it is not worthy of being placed in front of future
people searching a keyword, because those users will not use the app for long, as compared to other apps downloaded.

While not officially confirmed, most ASOs assume that Apple also employs user retention rate (or at least uninstall
rates) as a factor in its keyword ranking algorithm.

App performance

Store: Google

Announcements by Google indicate that its algorithm also factors for app performance (e.g., crashes/stability or
consumption rate of the phone battery), considering it as a potential negative signal, and ranking poor performing

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apps lower than others.

Additional, unconfirmed algorithm factors put forward by the industry:

■ User engagement with app indexing (Apple and Google): iOS apps can be indexed in Apple’s spotlight
mobile search user experience, and Android apps (as well as iOS apps) can be indexed in [Link]. This
data offers an off-page signal for determining the quality and popularity of apps, and thus is within the realm
of possibility for factoring into in-store ranking, especially for SEO keywords that occur in-store. Additionally,
as Apple and Google want to ensure that apps are adopting the latest technology, it may be a positive signal
simply to set app indexing up.

■ Does the app have a video (Apple and Google): For quality productions, preview videos are able to provide
users with a better understanding of an app than screenshots, and are recommended in best practices by Apple
and Google; thus, the presence of a video could sensibly be used as a favorable ranking signal for keyword
ranking, especially with the release of autoplay videos.

■ Is the app localized: (Apple and Google): It would make sense from a user experience standpoint to rank
localized apps before non-localized apps for a keyword search, though this behavior has not been confirmed.

■ Size of app (Apple and Google): Size can be a subjective measure to use when considering which apps to rank
for a keyword, however when considering the fact that users often have limited bandwidth and storage space,
it’s possible to imagine that size can play a role in determining keyword ranks.

■ App ARPU (Average revenue per user) (Apple and Google): In a similar vein of thinking to AdWords and
Apple Search Ads (i.e. ads from apps with higher bids are shown more than ads from apps with lower bids),
Apple and Google earn revenue from paid downloads and In-App Purchases, and thus could reasonably be
inferred to favor apps in keyword rankings which earn a higher revenue per user. Indeed, this sentiment is
shared by many across the industry.

■ Average app session duration or number of launches (Apple and Google): As a more in-depth user
engagement factor to the less complex (and less telling) number of launches data point, the total time spent
in an app or the number of launches could sensibly factor into keyword rankings.

Beware: Downloads from one country will not affect keyword (or top chart ranks) in another country.
That is, even if an app has one million Installs from the keyword “chat” in the United Kingdom, an
app will not automatically earn a higher rank for “chat” in the United States or Canada. However,
the keyword field of some localizations can affect an app’s relevance for keyword rankings in other
countries (see chapter 8 on localization for more details).

The Keyword Optimization Cycle (KWO Cycle)

For those apps and games that do stand to benefit from keyword optimization, we’ll now go through how to set up
a solid keyword optimization strategy based on the framework “The Keyword Optimization Cycle” (KWO Cycle) by
Pablo Penny, Consultant at Phiture.

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Pablo Penny is consultant and ASO lead at the mobile growth consultancy
Phiture. He has conducted ASO for large clients such as Skyscanner,
Axel Springer, Headspace, and Idagio and focuses on developing more
analytical methods and frameworks for App Store Optimization. He holds
a PhD in Innovation Management from the University of Westminster
where he researched startups and lectured on entrepreneurship. Pablo
has experience in tech and strategy consulting and is passionate about
growing mobile apps through mobile strategy, data analytics, and ASO.

Twitter [[Link] | Medium [[Link]

pablopenny]

The Keyword Optimization framework

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In the KWO cycle, the four different stages essential to keyword optimization are displayed. The repeat symbol is shown
in the middle, as the process of keyword optimization is iterative and continuously tweaking an app’s metadata is
essential to success.

The four stages have been defined for both App Stores, although some steps are only relevant for one of the two (e.g.
keywords field for the App Store).

The four steps of the KWO Cycle include:

01. Research all keywords and place the most relevant keywords into a backlog.

02. Prioritize the backlog based on volume, relevancy, etc.

03. Target keywords by inserting them into your app’s metadata.

04. Measure keyword performance, calculating organic uplifting.

KWO Step 1: Keyword Research

Before you can start drawing people to your App Store and Google Play Store listing by targeting high volume, relevant
and low competition search terms, you will need to create a large list of keyword search terms with which people could
reasonably expect to find your app.

The initial step in this process is to create a fresh keyword search term backlog. The backlog can be just one column,
but you can also expand on this with another column mentioning the source from which the keyword originated. That
source might be, for example, “Brainstorming session,” “Google Keyword Planner Tool,” or “Competitor.” Tagging the
source of your keywords helps you keep track of what methods you have already tried, and where you sourced the most
useful keywords from.

Next, we’ll cover various ways of finding new search terms for your backlog:

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■ Brainstorming

■ Ranked Keywords

■ Competitor Keywords

■ App Store Auto-Fill

■ Apple Search Ads

■ Google Keyword Planner Tool

■ Other ways such as surveys, thesaurus, related searches, and reviews

BRAINSTORMING
Before diving into tools, try creating your initial keyword search terms list based on some common sense. How would
you search for your own app?

Here are a couple of pointers to get started:

■ Check your existing non-optimized metadata. In other words: what keywords are found within your description?

■ Check your website for keywords.

■ Get your colleagues into the room and ask them to name some keywords they would search.

Once you have a base seed keywords in your backlog, you can move onto more scalable keyword search term discovery
methods.

Pro Tip: We have found that a team brainstorm works really well when everyone must independently
come up with as many keyword search terms as they can within 5 minutes, physically and individually
written down on post-its or paper. Then collect and group each post-it by themes. Apart from the fact
that you will find that the important search terms stick out because everyone jotted them down, the
grouping will also help find distinct topics and ways how people would discover your app that are
useful in your efforts to increase conversion.

COMPETITOR KEYWORDS
Of course you want to make sure that you’re ahead of (or at least not behind) the competition when it comes to ASO.
Start by analyzing their descriptions, long and short description, and especially their titles and subtitles, in order to
get a grip on what keywords might be relevant for your app, too.

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Screenshot showing AppTweak competitor title comparison

While in the Google Play Store you can see exactly what your competitor inputs into their metadata; for the App Store
it’s a bit trickier. Because iTunes Connect hides the 100-character keywords field, it’s a guessing game as to what
keywords other apps have used.

Pro tip: an easy way to test whether an iOS app ranks for a keyword is by searching the app’s brand
name (or other individual word that they you are certain they rank for), plus the word you want to test.
For example, searching “Spotify streaming” will decrypt whether Spotify has the word “streaming” in
its metadata.

This is where ASO tools come to the rescue. As ASO tools are often tracking millions of search terms throughout the
App Store, they tend to know what terms are used by which apps. By faking a real search request for a term (i.e. “photo
editor”) and listing who ranks on what position, they infer that an app which is ranking for “Photo editor” but doesn’t
have that in their title, is actively targeting both “Photo” and “Editor” in the keywords field.

Screenshot showing the keyword spy feature from Sensortower

Another method for analyzing competitor keywords is to use an ASO tool in order to “spy” on what keywords they
may be using, such as in the above screenshot. Yet, as mentioned in the prior pages, this overview is not complete, as

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sometimes you also rank for certain keywords that you didn’t specify in your title or keywords field in the App Store
(e.g., misspellings, category names, synonyms in the Play Store, etc.). Still, it’s helpful to get a good handle on your
competitors’ strategy and see which keywords they target.

AUTO-FILL
One of the best ways to find search terms that aren’t only relevant, but are also high-volume is to look at auto-fill
keyword suggestions in the App Store or Play Store.

While you can find auto-suggestions in the App Store or Play Store on your iOS or Android device, you can also check
out [Link] from your computer or accessing iTunes from your computer; but beware that the keyword
trends can sometimes differ between the mobile and computer stores.

Screenshot showing a Google Play website keyword search

Additionally, some ASO tools like [Link] and [Link] also offer auto-suggest data:

Screenshot of [Link] Screenshot of [Link]

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APPLE SEARCH ADS

In addition to using Apple Search Ads for prioritization (covered later on), you can use Apple Search Ads to come up
with keyword ideas. When creating a new ad group or adding keywords to an ad group, you can get keyword ideas from
Apple.

Screenshot of Apple-suggested keywords in Search Ads (add keywords to new ad group left, add new keywords to ad
group right).

GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER TOOL

The Google Keyword Planner Tool provides web keyword ideas and traffic estimates and is actually intended to help
you build an AdWords campaign. While the traffic estimates are web-based and therefore not super relevant for ASO
prioritization, the tool can nonetheless provide some generally helpful keyword ideas based on your seed list.

As the Google Keyword Planner Tool is part of AdWords, you will need to sign up for AdWords first. Once in the keyword
tool you can search for keywords based on:

A description of your product / service

If you enter “food delivery app” you will get the following (701) results, many of which will be relevant to your app, and
which you thus should add to your keyword backlog.

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Screenshot of the Google Keyword Planner Tool

Your website

The Google keyword tool will pull in keyword ideas directly from your website content.

A specific product category

The Google keyword tool can also create keyword ideas based around product categories.

Pro tip: For those who don’t have access to an AdWords account, “Google Trends” is available without
the need to log in to AdWords or even have a Google account. Google Trends is covered in chapter 11.

OTHER SOURCES FOR KEYWORDS: SURVEYS

The risk of the purely finding search terms within the team or by yourself is that you represent only one slice or a few
slices of your target customer. Additionally, you and your team may be so tied up in your own product that you may
be susceptible to perspective bias, and identify search terms which are not entirely representative of how users will
behave “in the wild.”

Surveying existing users or potential users on how they would search for an app like yours can often give you refreshing
insight into how people search for an app that solves their need/urge.

Take for example a VPN app. A developer might think that users who are actually in need of your app search technical
terms, such as “VPN,” “virtual private network,” “change IP,” etc. While these will indeed be your most qualified searches,
the concept of VPN and IP are known to just a fraction of your total would-be users. Running a survey could, for instance,
uncover that a lot of people would actually search for terms like “unblock netflix” before stumbling across a VPN.

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Pro Tip: Ideally, you’ll want to run this survey by a slice of your target audience that isn’t familiar with
your app yet. Try the following:

1. Set up a survey via UserTesting ($$$) or Mechanical Turk ($).

2. Describe a couple of scenarios in which the user might actually need/want your app. For example, if
you have a VPN app, describe the following problem statements.

“You want to be able to surf the web without anyone knowing about this”

■ Try to avoid naming the issue with a common term, such as “anonymous” as this will prime
your respondents and interfere with their suggestions.

“You can’t access television from some European countries as they restrict this.”

■ In the case of a game, you can also show screenshots or a video.

3. Ask your respondents how they would search for an app that would solve the stated problem.

4. Categorize and quantify the respondents’ answers. That is, do a lot of people answer with “Unblock
netflix” or “Unblock youtube” or are they going straight in with search terms like “VPN?”

When it comes to running the survey, you can basically ask anyone on the street, or even better, if your
company does user tests on a regular basis, try to squeeze it in during one of the surveys you ask your
beta testers.

If you want to run your survey via Mechanical Turk or in Europe: Clickworkers - follow Jay Van Buiten’s
step plan [[Link]
keywords-and-2x-your].

OTHER SOURCES FOR KEYWORDS: THESAURUS

If you want to search for groups of synonyms and related concepts, you can also use a thesaurus.

[Link] and [Link] have thesaurus functionality that you can use to find synonyms:

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Screenshot: [Link]

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Screenshot: [Link]

OTHER SOURCES FOR KEYWORDS: REVIEWS

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of surveying potential users, see how existing users describe your app or a
competitor’s app in their reviews.

For example, you might find that if you own a travel app like SkyScanner or KAYAK, reviewers might use the phrases
“multi-city trips” in their reviews. This might very well be a keyword search term that could need to be added to your
search term backlog if it’s relevant to you.

Some ASO tools like SensorTower, Mobile Action, as well as the Google Play Console provide reports on the density of
certain popular words in reviews. Tools that try to understand the semantic level of words, such as AppBot, provide
even stronger insight into what your users might be looking for in your app.

LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is used by Google and other search engines. LSI keywords are semantically similar.
This doesn’t mean they are the same, synonyms or even that they are similar in meaning. The idea is that the search
terms are nevertheless related at some core, relevant level. You can use [Link] to find these related concepts.

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Screenshot: [Link]

While the Google search algorithm is extremely involved when it comes to latent semantic indexing (they are after all a
search engine), so far the App Store is still lagging far behind (as of June 2017).

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Screenshot depicting Google’s ability to return relevant search results for search terms the apps themselves haven’t specified in their
metadata.

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KWO Step 2: Prioritize

In the previous step we described how to compile a large backlog of potentially relevant keyword search terms. In this
chapter, we’ll discuss how to grade those search terms and generate a prioritized list of keywords, based on metrics
such as volume, competition, and relevancy.

SEARCH ADS CONVERSION DATA

It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but Search Ads have brought a lot of good for data-driven ASO. Sure, in terms of organics
you may be feeling the pain of Apple adding the search ad slot front and center in the search results, and you are not
alone. But the data that Apple started returning with the introduction of Search Ads can really give you a competitive
edge. This includes the higher-level search popularity scores that Search Ads has brought, as well as one level deeper
by providing what we call “Search Ads conversion” data: your ability to convert a search query to a (paying) user. This
was first reported by Thomas Petit just days after the launch of Apple Search Ads.

Take for example a fitness app. You may see that “fitness app” brings in more search volume than “weight loss tracker”.
However, with a bit of Search Ads budget and data from a mobile measurement partner (MMP), you may see that
“weight loss tracker” actually brings in higher LTV users than “fitness app.” You may therefore want to prioritize this
search term in your ASO strategy, rather than the higher volume and likely more competitive “fitness app” search term.

SEARCH TERM BUDGET IMPRESSIONS INSTALLS CPI/CPA ARPU REVENUE

Fitness app $ 2,500 500,000 5,000 $ 0,50 $ 1,00 $ 5,000

Weight loss
$ 500 100,000 1,000 $ 0,50 $ 8,00 $ 8,000
tracker

An over-simplified example of what your MMP might return, illustrating the outcome (prioritizing search terms as keywords, based on
their value to your marketing strategy).

Without an MMP you can still look at the metrics that Apple provides out of the box. The metrics Tap-Through-Rate
(TTR) and Conversion Rate (CR) on a search term level can be a good indicator for relevancy of a certain search term.

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Beware: Apple reports on downloads, which are not the same as first-opens. This will cause a
discrepancy between conversions recorded by Apple (whether via the Search Ads UI or via the attribution
API) and Installs or first-opens recorded by your MMP. Thomas Petit from 8fit estimates the discrepancy
somewhere between 25-50%, and Incipia pegs this discrepancy at ~56%. Also, Apple’s conversion click-
through attribution window is 30 days, meaning that a keyword which has displayed an ad, say no later
than on June 1, can still record a conversion on June 28.

SEARCH VOLUME DATA

Whether or not you should include a search term in your ASO keyword strategy depends first and foremost on whether
people are actually searching for that term in the App Store. While for web, approximate search volumes have been
provided by Google to help advertisers spend more on search ads, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store have
been a black box for a long time.

For this reason, in the early days of ASO, experts used data from the Google Keyword Planner tool to estimate search
term volume. As we’ll see, even up until today in the world of search popularity, some ASO tools still use web-based
data at least partially in their traffic scores. While this may seem sensible at first, search behavior on a small screen
with onscreen keyboard will by definition be different from desktop searches. To cope with this, you can filter web data
for mobile web rather than computer-based web. Yet even then, people still search entirely differently in mobile web
than in the App Stores. On the web, one might search for a “Smoked Salmon Pasta Recipe” and indeed, the Google
Keyword Planner Tool shows thousands of monthly web searches. But hardly anyone would search like that in the App
Store. An App Store-type search would look more like “recipe,” or perhaps a bit more specific, such as a “pasta recipe
app.”

Pro Tip: One useful tactic that you can use to make the Google Keyword Planner more relevant for app
traffic is to add “+ app” to web keywords. People don’t search in the App Store for a “Plumber,” but they
do on the web. Using web search volume data could mislead you into thinking that there are a lot of
users search for “plumber” in the App Store; by adding the word “+app,” you will get more directionally
accurate data. Don’t use this data for looking at the absolute searches, but do use it to make relative
scoring decisions for your backlog keywords.

Fortunately for ASOs, Apple offers valuable insights into App Store search behavior, using the following two metrics:

Priority: While search popularity has been the talk of the town, the priority data point has been available for years, and
is a hidden gem, hardly discovered by ASO experts.

Search Popularity: Introduced with Search Ads, and the most popular method for prioritizing App Store keywords.

We’ll discuss these two metrics first and then show you what most tools are using for their own search volume scores.

APPLE PRIORITY INDEX

Let’s start with the Priority index, which comes from a call to the iTunes Search API. It’s been around since at least 2014
and it offers insights in the order in which auto-suggestions are displayed. All appearances in these auto-suggestions
get a priority score from Apple. These correlate strongly with Search Popularity, but not 100%, partially that is also
because not all search terms are displayed.

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Sample call:

[Link]
hints?clientApplication=Software&e=true&media=software&term=language

Sample response:

Screenshot depicting a sample return from the iTunes search results API uncovering the priority index

If you want to switch the store front, you have to use corresponding Storefront IDs and add them into the call with
parameter ?s=143455 (Canada).

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NAME COUNTRY CODE STOREFRONT ID

Australia AU 143460

Brazil BR 143503

France FR 143442

Germany DE 143443

Japan JP 143462

Turkey TR 143480

Full list available here: [Link]

While some ASO tools are believed to use this priority score in their traffic scores, one of the few tools that actually
display the priority score along with the popularity score is the fairly new tool [Link]:

Screenshot: [Link]

Ido Schoonen points out another tool, [Link], which returns the top 10 auto-suggestions of a keyword with a
“weight” volume that corresponds to the Priority score from Apple.

SEARCH POPULARITY
With the launch of Apple Search Ads in October 2016, Apple began publishing a set of indexed search scores for the
popularity of any keyword search term.

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Screenshot showing the search popularity numbers in the Search Ads interface, using a Chrome extension [[Link]
com/webstore/detail/apple-search-ads-search-p/ihggdihemilfdammomlckdocaodobcbb] released by the team behind TheTool.

Apart from the fact that this data is not available for Google Play, there are three other caveats to Apple Search Ads
“Search Popularity,” making the search popularity scores a little less useful than they appear on first sight:

1. Search Popularity returns relative numbers: Whereas Google AdWords offers insight into absolute average
monthly searches on a specific term, Apple Search Ads only offers an index popularity score from 5 to 100.

2. These numbers are only available in select English-speaking markets: At the moment search volumes are only
available in the U.S., UK, AU, and NZ.

3. These numbers only return a real search score for keywords that have an SP of six and higher: Likely to encourage
advertisers to bid on low volume keywords to increase ad inventory fill rates, Apple does not show the difference
between a keyword that literally receives zero searches per month, and a keyword with low, but still some volume.
Therefore, it’s incredibly hard to know if a long-tail keyword should just be ignored or whether there is something to
be gained by targeting that keyword.

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In this screenshot from AppTweak, we pull United States App Store Volume Data, which corresponds 1:1 with Search Popularity scores
from Search Ads.

OTHER TRAFFIC ESTIMATIONS

Because of the fully black box environment of Google Play as well as the continued issue that Apple doesn’t have
Search Popularity scores for most App Store Territories, ASO tools have been trying to fill this gap with their own
volume estimation data for a long time.

In order to make a judgement on whose data you trust most, you need to know a little bit more about how these tools
are providing their estimates. We asked the following tools how they calculate their search volume score, and here are
their responses:

Volume estimates by the tools

APPLICATION #1: APPLICATION #2:

APPLICATION #3:
APPLE APP STORE REGION WITH GOOGLE PLAY STORES IN REGIONS
TOOL APP STORE & PLAY STORE REGIONS
SEARCH POPULARITY SCORES (US, WHERE APPLE SEARCH POPULARITY
WHERE SEARCH ADS ARE NOT AVAILABLE
UK, AU, NZ, MX, CH, CA) SCORES ARE AVAILABLE

Search Popularity from

AppFollow Not providing estimates Not providing estimates
Search Ads

Search Popularity from Search Popularity from Search

AppRadar Not providing estimates
Search Ads Ads

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Volume estimates by the tools

APPLICATION #1: APPLICATION #2:

APPLICATION #3:
APPLE APP STORE REGION WITH GOOGLE PLAY STORES IN REGIONS
TOOL APP STORE & PLAY STORE REGIONS
SEARCH POPULARITY SCORES (US, WHERE APPLE SEARCH POPULARITY
WHERE SEARCH ADS ARE NOT AVAILABLE
UK, AU, NZ, MX, CH, CA) SCORES ARE AVAILABLE

Proprietary formula based on: Proprietary formula based on:

1. Keyword’s frequency in the 1. Keyword’s frequency in the

store (app titles, description, store (app titles, description,
reviews, etc.) reviews, etc.)

2. Keyword’s frequency in the 2. Keyword’s frequency in the

hints (auto-suggestions) hints (auto-suggestions)

3. Keyword’s frequency in the 3. Keyword’s frequency in the

spoken language spoken language
Search Popularity from
AppTweak 4. Keyword’s length 4. Keyword’s length
Search Ads
5. Keyword’s volume on the 5. Keyword’s volume on the
mobile web mobile web

“A score is given for each keyword “A score is given for each keyword
on each of these elements, on each of these elements,
which we will bring into a 1-100 which we will bring into a 1-100
scale indicator, where higher scale indicator, where higher the
the number means higher the number means higher the volume.
volume. Available in 12 languages Available in 12 languages (using
(using native dictionaries).” native dictionaries).”

Search Popularity from

ASO Desk Keyword suggestions Keyword suggestions
Search Ads

Search Popularity from

Mobile Action Proprietary Algorithm*6 Proprietary Algorithm
Search Ads

Priori Data –
Search Popularity and Search
data sourced Mobile search volume
Ads
from

Sensor Tower Proprietary Algorithm*7 Proprietary Algorithm Proprietary Algorithm

Proprietary Algorithm based

TheTool on Search Popularity from Proprietary Algorithm Proprietary Algorithm
Search Ads and own data

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Volume estimates by the tools

APPLICATION #1: APPLICATION #2:

APPLICATION #3:
APPLE APP STORE REGION WITH GOOGLE PLAY STORES IN REGIONS
TOOL APP STORE & PLAY STORE REGIONS
SEARCH POPULARITY SCORES (US, WHERE APPLE SEARCH POPULARITY
WHERE SEARCH ADS ARE NOT AVAILABLE
UK, AU, NZ, MX, CH, CA) SCORES ARE AVAILABLE

Proprietary formula based on:

Proprietary formula based on:
1. Apple Search Popularity
Search Popularity from 1. Autocomplete data
Tune 2. Autocomplete data
Search Ads 2. Review keyword frequency data
3. Review keyword frequency data
3. Mobile web search
4. Mobile web search

*6. Aykut Karaalioglu from Mobile Action wrote on Quora: “Search Score: It is a logarithmic estimation of how many
times this keyword is searched for. It ranges from 0-100, 100 being the top score. A higher score (e.g. above 40 for single
words) means your app can reach more people if you rank well for that keyword. Only a few very popular keywords like
“Facebook” have a score of over 90. We pull data from a number of sources, like frequency of word usage in common
crawl data, trending searches, length of terms, traffic estimates from the web, autosuggestions when typing in the
store, etc. and refine it to find a very good estimate.”

*7 SensorTower writes in their help center [[Link] “Traffic score

is calculated from a number of sources, like autosuggestions when typing in the store, frequency of word usage in
common crawl data, length of terms, difficulty of typing on the iPhone keyboard, traffic estimates from the web, etc.“

WHAT VOLUME ESTIMATIONS SHOULD YOU USE?

While all of the various estimation methods could potentially be used to base your keyword prioritization on, we
recommend using Apple’s 1st party data, whether search popularity or priority, which has the highest level of integrity
available to ASOs.

Regions with Search Ads Search Popularity or Priority

Search Popularity or Apple Priority
(U.S./UK/NZ/AU) adjusted for auto-suggest
Regions w/o Search Ads Apple Priority
Apple Priority
(Rest of World) adjusted for auto-suggest

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Pro Tip: For Google Play, it’s important to confirm these auto-suggestions manually because Android
users do from time-to-time search slightly differently than iOS users. Reasons for this might, for example,
be different platform features, differences in purchasing power, lower-end Android devices with limited
space or connectivity, and also the fact that Google Play offers a more thorough search functionality
that helps users find a type of app quicker.

Screenshots depicting how search results may differ in the App Store vs Google Play

CURRENT KEYWORD RANKS

From the start of the KWO cycle, you will likely have picked up at least a handful of high volume keyword search terms,
which may or may not be the most relevant keywords for your app. As you go through the keyword optimization
process, however, you will want to make sure that you don’t throw out those high volume search terms.

With an ASO tool you can not only check the volume of those search terms, but also your current ranking.

Pro Tip: As a rule of thumb: while painful to acknowledge, keywords for which your app ranks in
positions worse than position 10 (i.e. 11 or worse) will most likely not get you any meaningful
amount of traffic.

With the above in mind, when reviewing your list for high volume keywords make sure to flag those high volume
search terms for which you rank 10 or better. This will help you to remain vigilant and not make changes that affect
these high volume, high rank keywords when making changes to your metadata.

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Screenshot from ASO tool TUNE, which offers great insights into for how many keywords you rank.

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KEYWORD RELEVANCY
It may seem great at first if you are able to rank for a high-volume keyword search term like “movies,” but if you have
a real estate app you won’t get any meaningful impact from ranking this term as it’s highly irrelevant, and your poor
conversion rate due to low relevance will likely drag your keyword rank back down at any rate. You therefore need to
make sure that you target relevant search terms.

Relevancy is ultimately decided by whether or not your app addresses the intent of the searcher, as measured by their
downloads. Ideally, you should put a relevance number on every search term found to bring in any meaningful amount
of search volume. And that’s exactly what we do in our attempt to filter out the best search terms for use in our keyword
strategy.

Screenshot: ASODesk

Let’s take the app “Zillow Real Estate - Homes for Sale & for Rent” as an example in determining relevance. If we were
to grade the relevancy for a set of keyword search terms, it would be something like:

■ “Houses for sale:” starred; extremely relevant and high volume (5/5)

■ “Home:” low relevance (1/5)

■ “Real Estate:” extremely relevant (5/5)

■ “House:” irrelevant (0/5)

■ “Property management:” irrelevant (0/5)

As you will see, the more long tail and specific the search term, the easier it is to grade it for relevancy. It’s with short
head search terms like “Home” and “House” where it’s harder to really understand the intent of the searchers’ behavior.
In the case of “House” we aren’t able to discern whether the user is looking for a house simulation game, an interior
design app, or an app to find houses for sale.

Now that we have put a relevant number on this, we can start playing with what we call Search term score: a search
term like “Home” that has lower relevancy (i.e. 2), with a high search volume (e.g. 50) will also have a score of 100. A

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search term like “Real Estate” on the other hand, that has less volume (e.g. 40) but is extremely relevant (i.e. 3) will get
a score of 120.

As you can see, we can now sort our search terms accordingly which helps us focus on those that bring in a lot of
meaningful search traffic.

Starred search terms

A good keyword strategy targets as many search terms as possible. You will want to target and track at least 100+ search
terms for your app, and monitor them from time to time. However, when you have 100s or even 1000s of search terms
that you track, it can become quite daunting to monitor or optimize these terms.

For the reason of focus it’s good to star about 10 search terms that are your “rock stars.” You know that these select
few high-volume, super relevant search terms can convert a lot of App Store searches into downloads, if you rank well
for them. Selecting just a few will help you focus in reporting and also with visual word recognition optimization,
covered later on.

Retrospective relevancy

Ultimately, you are not the one deciding whether a search term is relevant or not: the App Store algorithm will do that
for you based on how many people searched that term and converted into a (retained) user.

One method of keyword optimization is to try adding a keyword, then seeing whether your rank trends higher or lower
over a period of a couple of weeks. If you trend up (and especially if you hit the top 10), then it’s a high relevance
keyword. A stable ranking indicates medium relevancy, and a decline suggests the search term isn’t relevant enough
for your app.

KEYWORD COMPETITION
The more apps that compete in a store for the same keyword search terms, the harder it will become to acquire a top
rank for that keyword search term.

To decide how fierce the competition is on a certain search term and whether you want to compete on that term
depends on three questions:

01. How many apps target the search term?

02. How relevant are the top 10 apps to the search term?

03. How strong is the top 10 competition?

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The question “How many apps target a certain search term?” is relatively easy to answer for the Apple App Store due
to the nature of how keywords work in the App Store. If an app is targeting a certain search term, it will show up in the
results, independently of whether it ranks #99840 or #11 (except in case of brand names, in which case Apple may block
certain apps from ranking). Most ASO tools out there show you the absolute number of results, which can be a good
indicator for the App Store as to how many want to take a piece in the search pie.

Google Play, by contrast only returns the top 250 results. Most common search terms will therefore just return “250”
making it a less useful number. If there are less than 250 results this can indicate an opportunity, whereas if there are
more than 250 results, it’s still possible to target it.

The question then becomes: how difficult it is to achieve a meaningful rank. We have already established how you
can decide whether a search term is relevant to your app. If it’s extremely relevant, chances are that you can get
and maintain a decent conversion rate on that search term and thus have a shot at slowly, but surely outranking the
competition (if your app is more-so relevant and appealing as the competition, that is).

Therefore, it makes sense to look at the top 10 results to see how relevant those apps are and of what quality they are.
This can be a bit of a manual operation as ASO tools do not create a “relevance score” but for your top opportunity
keywords, this exercise will be extremely useful in prioritizing them for prime spots of your high-value visibility and
visual word recognition tactics.

Screenshot: AppTweak showing the actual apps that show up for a keyword search. The app “SignNow” can compete for the keyword
“doc sign” as many of the results aren’t entirely relevant (i.e. “Trulia Real Estate”).

Finally, you want to know how strong the competition is quantitatively. If the competition brings in a lot of downloads,
it will be harder to knock them off their throne, as the algorithms also take overall downloads in account.

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Most ASO tools aim to help you to solve this question under the banner of different names (e.g., “Chance”, “Difficulty,”
“Competition” score, etc.).

ASO tools can also estimate the size of the apps that are competing with you based on their rankings, and can deduce
from that how hard it might be to compete on that search term. Different tool providers have different approaches to
calculating this number. Priori Data, for example, also looks at the weekly average of newcomer apps that entered the
top 10 for a keyword. One thing that is standard is that all tools consider only the top 10 ranks for these scores, and try
to predict how much opportunity your app will have breaking into the top 10 ranks.

PrioriData uses their download estimates for the broader app economy also for their difficulty metric.

You can also calculate your own difficulty score. Here’s how:

When doing research on the competition for a keyword, you can look at two factors to quantitatively determine the
app’s difficulty score:

1. The top chart rankings of the top 10 apps that return for a keyword. Average the top chart rank of the top 10 apps
to get an overall competitor top chart strength reading for each keyword. Be sure to compare country and category
separately. How far away from the average rank of those keywords is your app’s top chart rank?

2. Determine the volatility of each top 10 rank sport for a keyword. This means determining how many rank spots
each of the top 10 apps has moved for that keyword over the last 1-12 weeks. If the top 10 apps have moved less
frequently, then it can indicate that the competitors will be hard to usurp; if the apps have a high volatility in ranking
spots, it can mean that there is more of a chance to bump competitors, yet it may also indicate high competition, given
that many apps are shifting into different positions for the keyword.

VALUE ESTIMATIONS OF SEARCH TERMS / KEYWORDS IN YOUR

BACKLOG
Before moving to the targeting phase, there’s one last step that you may want to consider for prioritizing individual
keywords and search terms, which is to calculate a search term value score:

Search Term Value = Volume score x Relevancy score x (Lowest Competition Score of the set of
terms / search term’s Competition Score)

Take for example the following calculations for this search term value score:

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TERM VOLUME SCORE RELEVANCY SCORE COMPETITION SCORE SEARCH TERM VALUE

Movie editing 50 4 40 200

Movie maker 35 4 60 93

Photo maker 20 3 40 60

Movie 70 1 70 40

We see from calculating the score that “Movie” scores worse than “Movie maker” despite a higher volume, because of
lower relevancy and higher competition.

As for a lot of the metadata that you can target, you’re restricted heavily by character length. You will want to make sure
that you target as many keyword combinations with as few characters as possible. A character optimization formula
like the following might help you with this process:

Word Value = COMBINED VALUE OF KEYWORD PHRASES SEARCH VOLUME / KEYWORD LENGTH

COMBINED VALUE OF
WORD APPEARS IN TOTAL
WORD KEYWORD PHRASES WORD LENGTH WORD VALUE
KEYWORD PHRASES
SEARCH VOLUME

Movie 3 653 5 131

Editing 1 350 7 50

Maker 2 268 5 54

Photo 1 105 5 21

As you can see here, even though “Editing” has a higher combined value as it appears in “Movie editing,” the seven
precious characters that it costs make it worth less in character optimization terms than the keyword “Maker.”

KWO Step 3: Target

In this subchapter, we’ll be discussing in the order of importance: Title, Keywords set (iOS), Short description, Long

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description, Developer Name, In-App Purchase, and Package names. We’ll also cover useful tips and tricks and the
important topic of visual word recognition.

TITLE
Both the search algorithm from Google Play as well as the App Store search algorithm treat the title as the mostly
heavily weighted metadata element. That means that any search term that you pack in there gives you the highest
chance of ranking meaningfully for it.

The app name is now a maximum of 30 character, as touched on in the iOS 11 chapter, Google started allowing for
50 characters from June 2017 onwards (previously 30 characters) in the Google Play title. Yet, app marketing agency
Yellowhead reported in their blog that there is no indication that keywords are ranking past the 30th character point
[[Link]

As this is such a precious space, there are some developers that go so far in the name of maximizing title characters as
removing their app name from the title in order to increase their space for keywords. Generally, this is not a great idea
for apps with significant brand goodwill as they not only could lose brand recognition for visual word recognition, but
also because they might actually lose the #1 spot on that brand search, if trademark protections don’t prevent other
apps from using the brand name in their titles/subtitles.

Other ways to save space including targeting only root words (e.g. run vs. running), omitting commas and other less
crucial grammatical technicalities such as using a colon (:) rather than the traditional dash (–) to separate an app name
and tagline or an ampersand (&) in place of the word “and.”

In addition to being a boon for visibility, adding keywords into your title is also by and large a positive tactic for CRO,
too. That said, while a keyword-containing phrase can help you communicate your value proposition better, a keyword-
stuffed title may decrease conversion rate and therefore also decrease keyword ranks. A good example of placing a few
relevant keywords into the title is the Waze app below, where the keywords help make it clear to App Store browsers
what the app has to offer:

Screenshot Waze App Store product page showing some well-placed keywords in the title

Beware: Apple’s guidelines urge developers not to “include terms or descriptions that are not the name
of the app” in the app title. Strictly speaking an app name like “Google Maps - Navigation & Transit”
would not be allowed. That said, the tactic is still widely practiced.

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Screenshot: Section 2.3.7 of the App Store Guidelines

In the previous chapter we touched on the idea of ‘starring’ search terms that are high volume and have very high
relevancy. It’s likely that one well-placed such search term or a combination of these search terms can help you
significantly increase your visibility. Try to use exact keyword placements, as these can help with search term
conversion as well as helping rank your app better in the search results.

Screenshot from ASOdesk showing that for Google Maps, the keyword “traffic alerts” might bring more search volume than “offline
maps;” but if Google Maps is relevant for “offline maps,” that’s the keyword they should favor.

Even a strong brand like STARZ with a lot of brand-awareness should realize that not all App Store browsers know the
brand, let alone the value proposition of the app. Changing the title or subtitle to something like “STARZ - Movies & TV
Shows” might not only help with increasing visibility, it might also help with conversion.

Screenshot: Starz App Store product page showing no keywords in the title

The character limit can oftentimes be very restrictive and result in titles with fewer descriptive words in them due to a
longer brand name, such as TripAdvisor below. Often, even the somewhat clunkier/fewer keywords title can still help
the user identify what the app is about and serve the purpose of keyword optimization, too.

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Screenshot: TripAdvisor Google Play app search result listing showing a clunky title, where the brand name leaves room for only two
additional words with no punctuation

“Brand-swap” (Google Play)

Really big apps with a lot of download velocity and a high conversion have the benefit of showing up in Google Play
searches as an icon-containing app result before the search is finished. For example, if you type in “De...” , you will
already see an app result for “Deezer: Music & Song Streaming.”

Screenshot: Google Play keyword search for “de” showing Deezer ranking first with a visual result

Needless to say, this is a great experience for such apps, and also a moat that helps prevent other apps from siphoning
visibility away from the app. Some apps game this by putting their brand at the end of their title, making sure they show
up with a generic search query such as “Cheap flights”:

Screenshot: Google Play keyword search for “cheap fli” showing Momondo ranking first with a visual result

SUBTITLES (APP STORE)

This metadata element is 30 characters and shows up everywhere across the App Store under the App Store Title.

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In accordance with the rule “the more visible the metadata, the more it weighs,” the subtitle seems to be weighing more
than the keywords field but less than title.

Screenshots depicting the app name and subtitle character limits; Waze search engine result

Two tips to take into account about the subtitle include:

■ If you set the Subtitle and a title, be aware that anything post-30 characters in your title will be ignored.

■ Don’t repeat words in your subtitle that are in your title.

KEYWORDS FIELD (APP STORE)

In iTunes Connect you can provide a list of “keywords” (often referred to as the “Keyword field”) for each localization
that you select.

Screenshot: the keywords field in iTunes Connect

The best practices of the keywords field include:

■ Separate keywords by commas: Do not add spaces.

■ Do not duplicate keywords within the keywords field: Repeating keywords does not improve rank and is a
waste of space.

■ Do not repeat keywords that are in your title: You won’t give extra weight to a keyword by adding it in both
your keywords field and your title/subtitle.

■ Order does not matter: A keyword at the end of your keywords field is just as important as the one in the
beginning.

■ Targeting exact phrases does not help: i.e. “Photo, filter” will have the same rank influence as “filter, photo”
for the search term “Photo filter.”

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■ Plurals/Singular: You often get the plural or singular for free, but may rank lower for it. Is it one of your starred
search terms? Does Apple not rank the plural/singular variants per the earlier subchapter? If yes and no, then
add it in.

■ Free words: Stop-words (e.g. “the/a/by” etc.) or words that can be derived from your category (e.g. “Health &
Fitness”) or the word “app” don’t have to be added to be eligible to rank on those terms, but adding them can
help improve your ranking.

■ Less = less: Not using the 100 characters in order to give more weight to those keywords that are being used is
a bad idea. You won’t go up in ranking for certain keywords if you remove the rest of the keywords.

Now that you have the basics covered, return to your keyword backlog. You can move past any keywords you’ve added
to the title/subtitle and start adding the next highest words into your keywords field.

What’s most important to understand in the process of selecting words from your search term backlog for use in your
keywords field is keyword combinations. If you have a language learning app with 30 languages, you won’t be able
to fit all those languages (say ~ 10 characters each) in the keywords field. You must pick and choose and see what
keywords can make the most combination of search terms. You might need to cover your top five languages (“Spanish,
English, German, etc.”) and the search terms that result in the most combinations with these. If you have broken this
down already with a formula like we suggested in the end of the previous chapter, placing the keywords becomes fairly
easy.

SHORT & LONG DESCRIPTION (PLAY STORE)

In this subchapter we refer only to the two types of descriptions that the Play Store hosts. While the App Store also has
a long description, this isn’t indexed by the App Store algorithm. That said, as we’ll see in the subchapter on App Packs
you will want to still apply some keyword optimizations logic to your App Store description as it’s indexed by Google.
com

For Google Play, the short description ranks after the Title and perhaps on par with the Developer name in terms of
keyword weight.

Unlike in iOS, repeating words from your title in your short description has been found to provide a positive impact.

Screenshot showing the short and long description entries in the Google Play Console

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Pro Tip: The long description can hold up to 4,000 characters and is indexed by Google Play. That
might seem great at first, but filling up the entire 4,000 characters does not necessarily give you an
edge in ranking. What’s more important than the number of times you’re repeating a keyword is the
density weight that you’re giving to a keyword. If you repeat “music” 100 times in a 4.000 character
length description, it offers less weight than repeating “music” it five times in a 300 character length
description.

To find the right balance you can use follow this YouTube tutorial [[Link]
optimization-for-the-google-play-store-how-to-video-752f6dc824a7] that makes use of our Google Play spreadsheet:

Other Metadata

DEVELOPER NAME
The developer name (Google Play) or seller name (Apple) have been found to be indexed on both platforms and is
especially used in Google Play used to target keywords, such as [Link] here:

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Screenshot: [Link] Google Play app search result listing

Screenshot: Developer name editing view in Google Play

But with Apple it’s a tougher process to change the developer name as it’s tied to a D-U-N-S number, so be sure to pick
the right name at developer enrollment [[Link]

IN-APP PURCHASE NAMES (APPLE)

In iOS 10 and earlier, In-App Purchase (IAP) names would rank only for the exact match search, meaning your app
would show up in search for keywords in your IAP, but only if someone typed in the exact name of your IAP’s name.
Some ASO’s used this to their advantage, but since it had to be a full exact match the benefits were fairly small (e.g. an
IAP called “maps” would only match “maps” and not “offline maps”).

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Screenshot depicting that, pre-IOS 11, only exact matches would return an app

In iOS 11, Apple begun indexing In-App Purchases in search results for partial matches. As discussed in the introduction,
this was big news for the App Store and represents a paradigm change in the app discovery model through organic
search.

Screenshot depicting how broader keyword matches show both the app and In-App Purchases in search results

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The exact details of how In-App Purchases affect search results are yet unknown and will be studied in detail after the
launch of iOS 11. Stay tuned to the Phiture and Incipia blogs for more details on IAP-based visibility optimizations.

PACKAGE NAME (GOOGLE)

First off, the Bundle ID for Apple is not something you can rank for. But in Google Play you can actually rank for the
unique package name that you’ve chosen for your app.

It is growing belief that the impact on the package name can’t be overstated on Google Play. While there hasn’t been
research published on the impact so far, without a doubt Google Play does index the package name.

Daniel Peris from TheTool wrote a blog post [[Link]

ranking-factor-35c4ce938bdc] on a discovery he made regarding “Super Mario Run.” A search for “Zara” yielded Super
Mario Run as #11th result on Google Play, whereas Nintendo hadn’t mentioned Zara anywhere in their metadata:

Screenshot: Google Play keyword search for Zara showing Super Mario Run

It then turned out that Nintendo had used Zara in their package name:

Screenshot: Google Play URL for Super Mario Run showing zara in the package name

With regards to the impact, there is anecdotal evidence that the field is quite important and treated as an exact domain
match in SEO. Big titles with tons of traffic, extremely high relevancy, and converting assets often seem to have a hard
time competing for a search term if they don’t have it in their package name. For example, out of the #10 games ranking
for the search term “bubble shooter,” seven apps have it in their package name. Even games by publisher titans (King’s
“Bubble Witch 3 Saga” and Rovio’s “Angry Birds POP Bubble Shooter”) only earn positions #9 and #10, respectively.
While King’s app does not have bubble shooter in its title, Rovio’s game does, and both apps do not have bubble
shooter in their package names.

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Screenshot: Priori Data keyword search showing Google Play results for bubble shooter.

Developer Candy Bubble Studio (rank #34) might have realized that this field might indeed have some impact, and
named their package “[Link]”

Screenshot: Google Play URL for Candy Bubble Studio’s app

Now, these results might also be skewed because of other tactics such as an exact match in the title or because of black
hat ASO tactics.

Pro Tip: While you can change the “manifest package name” in [Link], Google Play will
treat your app as a new listing and you will lose your entire history (reviews/downloads). It’s therefore
recommended that you think carefully about the keywords you want to target ahead of launching the
app. A solid naming convention would be [Link].keyword1.keyword2.

Visual Word Recognition

Visual word recognition refers to the app of users to recognize visual words in your app listing elements, such as the
title or screenshot captions. In other words, if a user searches for “learn Spanish” they are more likely to convert if they
see that the app has to offer what they’re searching for:

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Google Play web search showing that, apart from Duolingo, four out of five top results start with “Learn Spanish” in their title and
have a Spanish flag in their icon.

Both Google and Apple look at the keyword-level to determine how well you are able to convince a user into clicking
through to your App Store product page and/or downloading the app. It seems that the App Store primarily only looks
at CTR and install rates, whereas Google Play appears to look at retention and engagement on a search term level.

If your app isn’t able to convert impressions from a particular keyword search into users, then your app’s rank score for
that keyword will decline. While your app’s overall conversion rate can represent the overall health of your conversion
rate in aggregate across search terms (especially when using Apple’s App Store Search data source), it does not always
accurately represent the story at the individual search term-level, and can obscure what is a wasted opportunity for
better performance.

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Screenshots depicting how apps optimize for visual word recognition

The arrows above point to examples that increase relevancy (and with that, CTR) to the search term.

Two challenges to visual word recognition optimization include the lack of search term-level organic attribution data,
as well as the fact that your app must present the same listing to each keyword search term, without customization.
Your optimizations, therefore, must be done using the data you have on-hand (such as keyword rank and search
popularity) and without negatively impacting conversion rate from other searches, or keyword-agnostic impressions,
such as those from ads or top charts.

The most effective current approach is to sort by the keywords that are most important (remember our “starred”
keywords?) and then manually review the search results page for each search term and assess your app listing’s relative
appeal for people searching that keyword, compared to the competition.

Pro tip: just like when optimizing your app’s keyword mix, when prioritizing search terms, focus on
search terms that are most important, based on your KPI. For example, using Apple Search Ads data,
you can determine which keyword search terms yield the most subscriptions, and focus on raising your
visual word recognition for that keyword and other high sub-converting keywords.

Optimizing your app listing for search terms can be applied for any of your elements (e.g., screenshots, icon, description,
etc.), but is done via some of the following tactics:

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■ Directly mention the search term in your listing elements: During a study [[Link]
marketing/aso-study-how-to-earn-a-top-10-keyword-rank/] that Incipia did on the top 10 iOS apps ranking
for seven different keywords in the health and fitness category, we found that apps which included the target
keyword in an app’s screenshot captions saw a 2.4x better average rank than apps that did not do so.

■ Speak to the user’s intent behind the search term: The more latent approach to directly mentioning the
keyword, which requires more creativity, such as speaking to the idea of losing weight or using imagery that
relates to dieting for the keyword “diet.”

■ Out-position the competition for that search term: This is a similar approach to general CRO, but with
a more specific competition set. Figure out what messaging or visual design would make your app more
appealing to more users searching that keyword, such as using a different screenshot style if the competition
all uses the same screenshot-style. But again, be careful not to over-optimize for one particular search term at
the expense of losing conversions from other sources.

■ Make sure your important keywords are not truncated in your title or subtitle.

More Keyword Optimization Tips and Tricks

Before moving into how to measure the impact of your targeted keywords, we still want to call out a couple of tips and
tricks on how to target even more keywords and drive more searches to your app.

CATEGORY NAMES
Selecting your primary category should be done with careful consideration and needs to be the right fit for your app.
The App Store secondary category, however is not something that impacts your visibility in the store from a browsing
perspective, and can be picked with adding keyword visibility in mind.

We’ve checked all the App Store category keywords for volume in the US and listed them in descending order:

Volume for App Store Category Keywords

# IOS CATEGORY KW SEARCH POPULARITY # IOS CATEGORY KW SEARCH POPULARITY

1 games 83 16 social 46

2 music 76 17 finance 45

3 video 64 18 newspapers 44

4 news 62 19 productivity 44

5 photo 62 20 business 43

6 shopping 62 21 entertainment 40

Snapshot July 21, 2017 - App Store United States

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Volume for App Store Category Keywords

# IOS CATEGORY KW SEARCH POPULARITY # IOS CATEGORY KW SEARCH POPULARITY

7 fitness 59 22 medical 40

8 social networking 58 23 magazines 39

9 food 57 24 photo video 37

10 health 57 25 lifestyle 36

11 sports 56 26 utilities 36

12 navigation 54 27 drink 31

13 travel 52 28 networking 28

14 kids 51 29 catalogs 22

15 education 47 30 reference 21

Snapshot July 21, 2017 - App Store United States

Pro tip: While an Android app’s Google Play category name does automatically rank for that keyword
in the Play Store, conserving metadata space is less of a problem in the Play Store, and it may also be
advantageous for ranking purposes to mention that category keyword once or more in the metadata.

TARGET COMPETITORS THAT HAVEN’T DEVELOPED AN APP FOR

IOS OR ANDROID
Targeting competitors could generally be a good idea; however, as the search intent of the searcher is really to download
your competitor’s brand, you will likely have little chance of converting these searches to downloads even if you come
in second in the results.

That’s entirely different, however, for competitors or other apps that have a brand name, but have yet to develop an
Android or an iOS app. You will find that targeting those names can help drive substantial search traffic.

GOOGLE PLAY INDEXES LISTING EXPERIMENTS

First publicly reported by Lukas Ballé in the ASO Stack Slack community, is the fact that A/B tests are also indexed. This
is surprising. What’s more surprising is that members of the Slack community pointed out that while Google detects
brand infringements in title, short, and long description, this doesn’t seem to be the case in the A/B test variants.

What makes it even more of a breeding ground for Black Hat ASO is that you can run the A/B test on a 0.1% audience.

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That means that virtually no one needs to see the keyword heavy description.

Screenshot depicting a black hat A/B test purposed for keyword stuffing. Only 1 in 1.000 Store Listing Visitors would see the keyword
stuffed variant.

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KWO Step 4: Measure

After all of your hard work researching, brainstorming, and implementing for your ASO strategy, it’s time to measure the
fruits of your labors and analyze your impact. While the most common and direct goal of an ASO strategy is to increase
the number of organic Installs that your app is earning, there are myriad metrics that will be useful in tracking your ASO
progress. Each of these play a unique role in ensuring that you are on the right track; and when you aren’t, they can
help raise warning flags and point your attention to the right places or troubleshooting.

TRACKING
Tracking involves using an ASO tool to track the rank of your keywords throughout your visibility optimizations. ASO
tools track hundreds of thousands or even millions of keyword search terms across the different App Stores. While
many tools will also offer historical data for these search terms, it’s a good exercise to track your keywords prior to
changing your metadata, so that you know which keywords to focus on and don’t need to waste time in reporting.
Tracking keywords also helps you to determine the impact of the changes you made in not just high-level App Store
analytics data, but in the more granular specifics of keyword ranks.

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Keyword tracking in [Link]

KEYWORD MONITORING
Once you have selected your tracking tool, you can monitor the rankings of your app for the keyword.

When a new iOS app version is approved and becomes live in the App Store, the latest keyword rankings will update
same-day. Any keywords which are no longer included in the metadata will immediately lose ranking. For Google Play,
the algorithm can take a little longer to index your keywords.

A keyword picking up rank immediately after the release of a new update (Screenshot: AppTweak)

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Pro Tip: In measuring the success of visibility optimizations, it’s useful to think about the difference
between metrics and KPIs. Metrics are data points that help focus your attention by calling out areas
that have a lot of activity (e.g. App Store Impressions); but metrics are typically not the most important
data point for measuring success. KPIs are the data points that are most important to your goals or
objectives, which you should use to measure success (e.g. Installs).

KPI: Keyword ranks: When measuring performance from visibility optimizations, report on keyword ranks for a direct
analysis before and after your visibility changes. Specifically, look for keywords that attain a top 10 rank. Ranking
outside of the top 10 results generally does not receive a material amount of visibility.

Unlike the App Store, updating your app’s keyword metadata mix in the Google Play Store may not always cause an
immediate or significant change in keyword ranking. Sometimes, Google may even continue ranking keyword phrases
after the phrase is removed from an app listing! This is because Google’s algorithm is more advanced than Apple’s
algorithm, and factors for signals such as the skip gram analysis and others mentioned in the prior pages.

And, while in the App Store your keyword ranks will update instantly after releasing a new app version, it’s important to
note that your keyword ranks will continue to fluctuate over time, and will likely not remain at the rank that they earn
initially for long. Watch to see where your keyword rankings shake out for the week following an update and then adjust
your keyword mix as appropriate after giving your new keyword ranks sufficient time to fully adjust.

Apart from looking at individual keywords, you can also look at your aggregate keyword ranking graph, which is a
feature some tools such as App Tweak, Mobile Action, or Tune provide.

Screenshot: Tune’s “Rankscape” feature

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Screenshot: Mobile Action showing keyword ranks

VISIBILITY MONITORING
While an uptick for some search terms might seem great, it can also be caused by switching around a keyword from
your keyword set to a keyword in the title. It’s to be expected that search terms with the keyword in the title will rise in
rank, while those relegated to the keyword set will fall. By looking at visibility you can you be sure that the net is still
positive.

Metric: Impressions (App Store only) are a great initial metric for measuring whether your visibility changes
are causing an effect. That is, did your changes cause your app to rank for significantly more or fewer keywords, in
significantly better or worse positions?

Impressions are defined by Apple as: “The number of times your app was viewed on the App Store for more than one
second. This includes search results, Featured, Explore, Top Charts and app Product Page Views. Apps listed in Updates
in the App Store app are not included.”

Be aware that each product page view in the App Store counts as a new impression, meaning that someone clicking
through to your Product Page from a search result will count towards impressions twice. You can select “Unique App
Store Impressions” to avoid the numbers being skewed.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect App Analytics Dashboard depicting a bump in impressions after a visibility optimization

Measuring changes to a Google Play app’s impressions can be more nuanced to understand, due to the fact that
Google reports on Store Listing Visitors (i.e. product page views in iOS terms), rather than search impressions. That
means you do not get the full view of how many people actually saw your app appear in the search, just how many
people tapped on your listing.

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Screenshot: Google Play Developer Console, which will let you see Store Listing Visitors but not impressions of your App Icon. To get a
better grip on visibility in Google Play, you can look at your keyword rankings and ASO tool visibility.

Pro Tip: Consider impression velocity (impressions / time period), product page view velocity (PPV
/ time period) and download velocity (downloads / time period) to measure the impact of visibility
optimization in a more forecast-friendly manner.

Metric: Product Page Views (Apple) or Store Listing Visitors (Google) are the secondary visibility metric after
impressions, and another important intermediary (or the only intermediary in Google’s case) to measure between the
first view of a user, and acquiring that user’s download.

■ Product Page Views are defined by Apple as: “The number of times your app’s App Store page has been
viewed on a device using iOS 8 and tvOS 9 or later”

■ Store Listing Visitors are defined by Google as: “Unique users who visited your app’s store listing on Google
Play, but haven’t installed your app previously.”

Beyond simply knowing that your optimization produced more visibility, it’s important to determine whether that
visibility was a positive change or not. This is easier to gauge in the App Store than on the Play Store. For example,
say that you switch out a relevant but low-volume keyword such as “plumber” with a high-volume keyword such as
“movies” but your Plumber-app has nothing to do with movies. You might get an initial peak in App Impressions via
source type App Store Search. While this looks great at first, you will find that very few of the people that see your app
in searches related to Movies will download or click-through to your app page.

By looking at how the ratio of Product Page Views / Impressions (Search), you can spot in the below example that the
keyword update has lowered that ratio a lot.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect App Analytics Dashboard depicting a decline in TTR after an optimization

While the changes indicate a clear drop in relevancy at May 29, as identified by the TTR (Tap-Through-Rate) metric,
ultimately what matters (KPI) is your organic uplift from the change (Installs).

ORGANIC UPLIFT
While visibility is a lead indicator for ASOs to quickly get a grip on their keyword optimization efforts, ultimately what
matters is the organic uplift that the keyword optimizations caused. Installs might be the easiest KPI to measure, but
are definitely not the only one:

KPI: Installs. The classic KPI for measuring the impact of an ASO strategy, Installs are a middle-of-funnel KPI that falls
in-between a visitor seeing your app page, and your ranks improving by acquiring more Installs. Yet, not all App Units
or even Installations will translate into active users.

When it comes to measuring organic uplift from inorganic downloads, you can do this one of a couple of ways:

01. Manually, by subtracting the known inorganic downloads from all downloads and subtracting the benchmark
number of organic downloads. For example, if out of 2,000 downloads on one Thursday there were 500
inorganic downloads, and the moving average of the prior four Thursdays’ organic downloads was 1,000, then
the organic uplift would be 500, or one new organic download for every one inorganic download.

02. Alternatively, several ASO tools offer estimations of organic uplift.

KPI: Active users. While Installs are the most classic ASO KPI, active users have become de facto ASO KPI, as the store
ranking algorithms have become more attuned to engaged users, rather than Installs which turn out to be non-active. A
combination of Installs, uninstalls, and user retention rate, active users recently replaced current Installs in the Google
Play Console, and are now the most important metric for measuring the impact of an ASO strategy.

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Pro tip: You can determine active users, unInstalls, and retention rate at a keyword level by running an
app install campaign with exact match keywords for either Apple Search Ads (iOS) (Google replaced
keyword search app install campaigns with UAC-only campaigns in November 2017). You can also use
this advertising strategy to determine which keywords are producing Installs and other post-install
conversions and would make good KWO candidates, as well as figure out which keywords should be
added to your app metadata for better relevance and thus ad impression share.

Beware: When optimizing, recall the ASO tenet of being careful not disturb the placement of high-
volume, relevant keywords that are earning top 10 ranks.

Other KPIs useful for measuring the impact of visibility:

■ In-App Purchases and revenue

■ Ratings and reviews

■ Retention rate

While these metrics are less directly affected by your ASO strategy, they are still important to measure for several
reason.

These metrics matter more than ever not just for the business model of an app, but also as ranking algorithms factor
for engagement of users, meaning that your strategy will fail if these metrics decline.

REPORTING
Once you’ve gathered all the data, it’s time for the final step: draft a report.

While ASO tools track keywords, using a template customized to your needs for tracking keyword ranks can provide
more insight for managing your KWO. The following template image is one example of a keyword rank template that
includes the following data points, which are useful for sorting keywords and comparing performance via snapshot
(i.e. the latest rank) as well as trending view, so that you are able to understand and react to macro as well as micro
ranking shifts.

■ Count of your keywords earning top 10 ranks.

■ Average rank of all keywords you’re tracking, per platform.

■ Keyword search score, per platform (in-line with each keyword for comparing keywords across both platforms;
but iOS and Android can be separated for a more compact view, or you can use only Apple’s search popularity
score for both platforms).

■ Rank of each keyword per week, per platform.

■ All-time minimum keyword rank with comparison vs the latest week, per platform

■ Change in keyword rank vs the prior week, per platform.

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Pro tip: You can increase the utility of this template by adding retention rate, sales, or other applicable
KPIs per keyword, based on Apple Search Ads exact match keywords for iOS and AdWords search
exact match keywords for iOS/Android. This will allow you to analyze which keywords offer the best
opportunity for growth in your KPI based on their trends, rather than just rank alone.

When building reports, leverage Apple’s new sources data, and include the metrics/KPIs that are most important to
your goals.

When building reports, it’s also a good idea to create a summary or dashboard view that condenses the report down
into only your KPIs, which can make performance reviews more focused, easier, and less confusing for stakeholders.

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Pro Tip (Google Play): In January 2018, Google has released new organic search data in the ‘User
Acquisition’ section of the Google Play Console (available only for selected beta-testers at first).

This allows splitting organic Play Store traffic into Search and Browse (i.e. if a user has found the app
listing via a search query vs. browsing the store). It also provides data around installs generated per
keyword for the first time. However, this data is available globally only, not broken down by country.

By selecting ‘Play Store (organic)’ under ‘Search’ in the ‘User Acquisition’ reports, a separate section
opens containing the search terms.

Google is showing the top 1,000 search terms the app is ranking for, along with their individual
conversion rate, broken down into store listing visitors, installers, retained installers or buyers.

See the Google Play section of Chapter 10 for more details on this report.

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Going Into the Next Cycle

The practice of putting all of these strategies and tactics into play is an ongoing and iterative activity. Your initial
keyword mix is informed by research from the tactics listed in prior chapters. Your analysis is centered around the
aforementioned metrics and KPIs. Lastly, your optimizations are based on the trends revealed in your analysis and the
marketplace reaction.

Due to the amount of work involved in managing ASO, you may ask yourself why it needs to be an iterative process,
rather than a one or two-time activity. The following are several reasons that may help explain why continuous
improvement is necessary for ASO:

■ Searcher trends: New keywords are popping up every day (e.g. words like “meme” or new apps people begin
searching for), which naturally requires tweaks to your keyword mix to remain relevant. Even without the
impact of changes in searcher vocabulary, the relative popularity of various words will also shift over time
(think of trends in seasons or big events like elections or the World Cup).

■ Related keywords (iOS) and autofill changes: As searcher keyword patterns and what they click on change,
so too will keywords shift in and out of the related keywords field and auto fill keywords, which can cause
changes in the priority of keywords in your keyword mix.

■ Competitor changes: Other apps change their own keywords mixes, rise and fall in popularity, and as new
competitors enter the rankings, your own performance on keywords will change. This requires adjustments,
such as giving up on keywords that become too competitive or moving in on an opportunity left by an app

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struggling to maintain downloads or a high rating.

■ Algorithm updates: Occasionally, the ranking algorithms on which KWO are predicated will shift, causing
shifts in relevance, ranking strength, and even eligibility in general.

■ Changes to the App Store and Play Store UX: Yet another reason to update your keyword mix may occur as
and when the UX of the store apps themselves change, as they change the way that app discovery occurs. Two
major examples of this include the release of iOS 11 and the expansion of the Google Play title to 50 characters.

The best way to optimize through change agents such as those above is to let the data guide you. By knowing your
metrics and KPIs and using regular reports to check on your app’s performance against those data points, you can
identify issues or opportunities and adjust your keyword mix as appropriate.

When it comes to analyzing and optimizing keyword ranks, it’s also important to not only consider the snapshot data
points (e.g., single day’s rank or the current day’s visibility score), but apply a trend-based approach. In KWO and ASO
in general, keywords and apps can experience regular fluctuations in rank on a very wide scale from fleeting to years-
long. If you base a key decision on one of the more ephemeral fluctuations, you run the risk of using bad data to inform
your decision and lose performance because of it. Tips for optimizing by trends include:

■ Analyze keyword trends over time and calculate a trailing week, month, and three-month average. These
longer data points can help you determine trends which are easy to miss when using snapshot data, and
identify which keywords are consistent in either good or bad performance.

■ Analyze data points using an industry benchmark OR use a prior time period when industry data is not
available, by comparing the previous day/week/month/year to the prior week’s day/week/month/year.

■ Be aware of changes in the search popularity of keywords. ASO tools now show changes in search popularity
over time, and can help you ensure that your top keywords have not lost popularity due to changing trends,
auto-fill adjustments, or other reasons. For example, searches for “tennis” may peak around big events such as
Wimbledon, but decline between large events.

And remember that successful ASO requires time devoted to conversion rate optimization in order to yield the best fruit
from KWO.

Other Keyword Tactics: App Bundle Keyword Optimization

(App Store)

APP BUNDLING
In addition to the presence of a paid apps top chart, another benefit of offering paid apps is that it allows for bundles.
App bundles are a great way to improve the amount of real estate that your apps capture across keyword ranks. Yet,
bundles can also be used to manipulate Apple’s keyword ranking algorithm, as covered in the black hat chapter.

By offering a bundle, your apps are able to rank multiple times for keyword searches that they are already ranking on
via each individual app. Apple determines which keywords your bundle is eligible to rank for based on the metadata
from each app. This means that your bundle automatically captures keywords your apps are using, and that you also
have a chance to optimize for new keywords using your bundle’s title.

With bundles, the order of the bundled apps matters for both the icon and screenshots. The icon of a bundle is by
default a combination of the first four apps bundled, unless the bundle is given a custom icon. The screenshots of the
bundle will include the first screenshot from each of the bundled apps.

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Your bundle is also allowed to have a custom description, which should explain to users the details of the bundled
offer and what special value users are receiving.

Bundles also have their own rating and reviews, yet a bundle’s star rating only shows in the bundle’s product page.

Apple also shows the price of the apps if purchased individually, meaning that users can easily see whether a bundle
is a good deal or not.

Lastly on the topic, bundles are also a channel to link users to a developer’s total portfolio, making them a great tactic
for cross-selling not just the bundled apps, but any app in your portfolio.

Screenshot: Bundle of paid apps in the App Store from developer Surf City

PROMOTED IN-APP PURCHASES

Below are a few findings from an Incipia study on the way that promoted IAPs rank in the App Store search results page.
The study was performed a set of 10 random keyword searches, and looked at the top 10 app results, which included
eligible promoted In-App Purchases.

One of the findings was that most keyword results were regular apps (and other editorial content), and that promoted
IAPs represented only 3/100 results. In expanding the research to other keywords and rankings beyond the top 10,
Incipia observed that, while the promoted IAP itself did return for a couple keyword searches, for the most part when a
promoted IAP appeared it was directly following the app that the IAP belonged to.

Moreover, Incipia observed that promoted IAP did rank for both partial and full phrase matches of keywords, which is
a welcome departure from the exact match-only IAP ranking eligibility of iOS 10. Yet, the only app metadata elements
that returned promoted IAP were the app’s title or IAP name; promoted IAP did not rank for partial/full matches of an

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app’s subtitle, keywords field, or developer name. Incipia did find instances where the promoted IAP ranked for a partial
match of the app’s title and a single word from the promoted IAP name, despite the app result itself not showing.

Some distilled learnings from this study include:

■ Make sure to select the right price point for your promoted IAP - test different price points and measure
engagement with the promoted IAP UX.

■ Do not name your promoted IAP “premium” or “monthly.” This only makes sense for a non-promoted IAP or
for users who have become familiar with what a premium purchase may entail after downloading your app.
Understand that the users to whom you are promoting your IAP in the App Store are likely to know nothing
about your app or its premium features.

■ Make sure your IAP is easily understandable via a 30-character title and a 45-character description. Again,
do not name your promoted IAP “premium” or “monthly” without also explaining what features/benefits are
included.

■ If you cannot effectively describe your promoted IAP’s features in the space of the promoted IAP’s metadata
elements, consider breaking it up into smaller promoted IAPs that can be effectively described within the
limited space available. Even if you need to charge a premium for each smaller promoted IAP, it will allow you
to use your promoted IAP as a fishing line to draw users into your app’s product page, where you can really
explain to them what your app does. You can also continue to offer your bigger, premium offering for users to
purchase.

■ Do not repeat messaging from your promoted IAP name in the description. Leverage your space to explain as
much as possible of the key and unique value that your promoted IAP has to offer.

■ Per the fact that promoted IAP rank for keyword searches, be sure to use important keywords in your promoted
IAP name!

History of Known Algorithm Updates

Ranking algorithm updates happen periodically, and when they do, they can cause massive disruptions in ranking for
huge swaths of apps, including popular and top-charters like Facebook, Google, and Apple’s Best of the App Store 2016
honoree, Prisma. The main purposes of algorithm updates is to:

01. Create a better app discovery experience for users.

02. Rebalance the order of legitimate apps.

03. Prevent spamming and other efforts to game the ranking algorithms (both in the top charts and keyword
results).

Below is a timeline of some of the algorithm updates according to both industry reports and official releases from
Apple and Google. Please note that this is not an all-encompassing history of ranking algorithm updates.

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APP STORE ALGORITHM UPDATES

February 2012: Apple acquires Chomp, an App Store discovery platform. Reports surface throughout 2012 of various
changes in apps returned for keyword searches.2

August 2013: Reports of Apple testing top chart algorithm change to favor ratings and user engagement.

July 2015: Reports indicate Apple updates keyword algorithm specifically to crack down on keyword stuffing in app
titles.

November 2015: Reports of Apple keyword algorithm update to factor partial keyword phrases, contextual keywords,
and competitor app names.

September 2016: Apple reduces title character limit to 50 characters. Keywords beginning beyond of the 50th character
cease ranking, though keywords spanning 50 characters continue to rank.

Screenshot of App Annie, depicting Prisma’s loss of ranking from keywords located past the 50th character

January 2017: Reports of Apple updating its keyword ranking algorithm to change the way apps rank for competitor
terms.

February 2017: Apple adjusts top grossing algorithm to rebalance paid apps vs. subscription-monetized apps.

May 2017: Apple begins proactively ranking apps for more competitor app names.

June 2017: Apple begins indexing apps with subtitles set.

July 2017: Apple update hits the store causing large keyword fluctuations; hypotheses center on Apple rejiggering its
ranking based on an updated understanding of relevance of similar groups of keywords for apps.

2 [Link]

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GOOGLE PLAY STORE ALGORITHM UPDATES

March 2015: Google begins manually reviewing apps submitted and occasionally rejecting apps with “repetitive,
excessive, or irrelevant keywords.”

November 2016: Google Research Blog post explains that keyword ranking algorithm uses machine learning to identify
relationships between keywords and provides most relevant app results for keyword searches. While no algorithm
updates are reported this month, this provides insight into how Google is constantly iterating on its keyword ranking
algorithm.

December 2016: Reports of keyword and top chart algorithm update as Google replaces current Installs (app is
currently installed) with active Installs (opened app within last 30 days) in Google Play console dashboard data.

February 2017: Google Android blog announces significant update to game app ranking algorithm, now considering
additional factors beyond download, such as user engagement and star rating. Reports of algorithm update affecting
keyword rankings for all apps.

2017: Several sources cite Google comments on its algorithm now considering stability of apps as a ranking signal,
punishing apps with excessive crashing, slow rendering, or poor battery management.

Increasing Visibility Through Getting Featured

“I’ve got a great app. What strategy can I implement to increase the chances of getting my app featured?”

This chapter is written by guest author Peter Fodor who is the founder
of AppAgent, a mobile marketing team jam-packed with experts
available for hire. Since 2011, Peter has worked on the launch of nearly
30 apps for all mobile platforms. Today, AppAgent focuses on mobile
strategy, data analytics, mobile creative services, and user acquisition.
Peter and his “agents” serve mobile gaming publisher Wooga,
Malwarebytes from Santa Clara, Polish based AAA gaming studio CI
Games, and one of the fastest growing startups in Europe, [Link].

Apart from increasing visibility via keyword searches and top chart placements, you can also naturally increase visibility
in the App Store by getting featured.

Having an app promoted by Apple or Google on 1.5 billion devices can generate millions of downloads in just a few
days. From an icon in a “Hot this week” section to getting an Editorial Choice promoted with a large banner, being
featured is the dream of many developers.

As touched on in the introduction, tapping into the massive amount of visibility reserved for featured apps is now both
more important and also more in the hands of the App Store feature managers than ever before since the release of

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iOS 11.

No matter whether you’re launching a new product or just releasing a major update, you should actively pursue
platform representatives to increase your chances. This chapter is a detailed guideline and will give you the tools you
need to boost your chances of securing an app feature.

Basic types of featuring

■ Editorial Choice

■ Big Banner

■ Small banner

■ Hot this week (section in the App Store) or Games we play (Google Play)

■ New apps/games we love or New and updated games (GP)

■ Collections (e.g. Fast-Reaction Games, Mind-bending puzzlers, Stay focused)

■ Social media posts on Twitter/Facebook

■ iOS 11 news: Behind the scenes, Meet the developer, The Daily List, World Premiere, How to, App/Game of the
day

This chapter covers the tactics and techniques on how I secured featuring for eight apps and games at my previous
studio and recently for AppAgent’s clients. Even though we’ve been promoted in the App Store, Play Store, Mac App
Store, Amazon App Store, and even Windows Phone Store, I will focus on the first two which rule mobile app space in
terms of downloads and revenue.

Octagon made it to the editorial collection two months after its release. We were confident to hustle Apple with amazing user reviews
as it had a 4.8 stars rating and high engagement metrics.

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The Massive Change on Featuring of iOS 11

Before delving into the details surrounding getting featured, let’s discuss more about how iOS 11 affected featuring.

Apple’s services business generated $26 billion in sales in 2016 and a Credit Suisse projection sees it growing to $52
billion by 2020. Phil Schiller, the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Apple Inc., is the man behind the App
Store and its $1 billion growth in 2016. He leads efforts to keep the revenue on a positive trajectory and to do so, Apple
wants to transform the App Store into a place everyone wants to visit daily.

The reason behind this is obvious: a comScore study in the US from June 2016 shows 49% of users haven’t installed any
app in the past 3 months. The same trend is visible across all Tier 1 countries where the interest in apps has reached its
peak. AppAnnie claims in a study from Q1 2017 that the average US mobile user opens about ten apps per day. This is
a clear proof people are happy with their existing selection of apps on the home screen.

AN APP DISCOVERY ISSUE

Besides ever-lasting search issues in the App Store, the hyper competition of nearly 2.2 million apps is causing “app-
sickness.” If you opened the App Store on your iPhone 6 before iOS 11, you instantly became overwhelmed with 14 apps
and dozens of others if you dared to explore the page more.

The golden rule is that the more choices you have, the less likely you are to pick one and this was something that led
Phil Schiller and his team to completely change, and so the biggest digital store in the world got a “facelift.” After all,
the store redesign is a low hanging fruit compared to the complexity of fixing the app search engine.

Since early 2009, Apple has had experience with editorial content. The human factor became a greater weight and the
iOS 11 revamp simply crowns Apple’s efforts for full control over the apps that users discover in the store.

Facebook, Twitter, App Store?

The ambition of creating a daily habit is rather exaggerated as we can’t imagine that the App Store will replace the
popular Facebook feed or procrastination on Twitter. Yet the new App Store landing page called “Today” is designed
as a news source combining new releases, interviews, guides, and other sources. All-in-one scrollable pages and
immersive content matches the design of the Apple Music store and fundamentally changes the look & feel of the store
compared to a hand-picked news stream.

Who will win?

For users, this whittling of choices to download will be quite beneficial. A more immersive presentation of the very best
apps, games, new types of content covering most popular products, and daily news is easier to digest.

For most developers, we dare to say the change is a disaster. The gap between top tier publishers and “the rest of the
world” will broaden even more. Four out of five tabs are mostly curated now (editorial content will now show even in
the search tab), with the last remaining tab being Updates. In a direct comparison, the iOS 10 landing page gives apps a
bigger chance of being featured, as there are 11 different editor-picked categories an app can be featured. After the iOS
11 update, only a few selected apps remain on the landing page making the battle for visibility even more fierce.

The trend of Apple gaining control over content distribution (think of Apple Music) is not surprising, but terrible if
developers don’t have good relationships with their reps. Those who do will benefit from the visibility even more
than before because the average downloads per featuring slot are for sure going up thanks to fewer spots and more
prominent placements.

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3 TIPS ON HOW TO GET FEATURED IN THE POST-IOS 10 ERA

Today, the only certain thing is change. Developers and marketers simply must learn to adapt. Here are my two cents
on how to increase your chances of getting into the spotlight, specifically in the new App Store:

1. STRONG POSITIONING
It’s already been 35 years since Al Ries and Jack Trout published a book called “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.”
In essence, you as a company and your product need to stick to a unique and very coherent statement about who
you are and what you offer to people. Look at ustwo or State of Play in the indie game dev scene, or Kabam and
Wooga in the big publisher scene. These names automatically trigger a specific “image” in people’s mind; triggers can
conjure things like “visual images, hand-made games, big IPs, and casual games for women” in peoples’ minds. The
same applies to products.

Having such clear positioning is critical when competing against the mass-market of apps, as editors in Cupertino will
focus on publishers and games which have stuck in their minds. Human beings have limited “mind slots” available, so
do whatever you must do to be recognizable and consistent both in your production and communication.

2. STORYTELLING
The Today tab in the new App Store becomes more a place for news than a store. My expectation is that being able to
tell a story in your pitch and even offer top notch content such as Behind the Scenes material in the form of a video or
a visually appealing How-to-Play guideline could increase your chances for being featured. Basically, we’re going back
to the old PR days where the main goal— in the pure form of a PR— is to offer a great story in an attractive package
to media which is creating leverage by reaching the desired audience.

I can imagine that new businesses will evolve around this opportunity and modern creators will bring ideas on how
to present the developer and the app through content. If we count on people’s laziness and ubiquitous time pressure,
having one go-to place where such content is published regularly will be a massive help for an editorial team.

3 . N U RT U R I N G R E L AT I O N S H I PS
Having a good relationship with a dev relations manager or a store manager is even more vital than before. The simple
advice here is to treat Apple representatives as your most valuable business partners: with respect and with their
welfare in mind. Offer testing of your product in advance, collect feedback (listen and don’t defend), suggest exclusive
content, ask for their recommendations on the best use of the new Apple technology...and last but not least, work hard
to convert the best suggestions into reality, and follow up to inform your reps that you took their suggestions to heart.

Most developers are by nature introverts, but take any opportunity to meet your App Store counterparts in person
and ask them what YOU can do for them as well as where they see new opportunities. But be prepared to be rejected
or ignored as maybe you don’t have something truly fantastic or they are just busy at the moment. And always deliver
the best you can; that’s how you build trust.

Why is Featuring a Big Deal Even for Rovio

Hitting the jackpot, winning in a lottery, making it to the big time … that’s how developers speak about getting featured
by Apple or Google. By no means is it an exaggeration because getting over one million downloads in a single week is
a big deal even for companies such as Rovio. With the Finnish giant as an example, the editorial “love” can save Rovio
around $675,000 in acquisition costs in the first week after a launch with an average CPI of $0.82 on iOS and $0.53 on

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Android (Source: Chartboost Index covering games, end of April). That’s a big pile of money even for Finns!

Featuring can save millions of dollars on the user-acquisition and help build the brand.

The App Store started back in July 2008, followed by the Android Market three months later. The beginnings were about
automatic promotions of new releases.

Industry “veterans” will probably still remember the New Games category where my first game “Power of Logic”
appeared, though it had some serious crash-causing bugs, so I should be considered quite a lucky guy. All of that was
back in 2011.

Sometime in 2015, the approach shifted to more editorial curation and nowadays handpicked content occupies almost
all of the promotional slots. The importance of an active approach to platform owners became a must. With 430 new
apps a day (stats by [Link]), 99.99% of developers wouldn’t have been as lucky as I was six years ago. That’s
why you have to make your own way when it comes to luck.

6 Factors You Need to Have a Chance of Getting Featured

Luckily, getting featured today isn’t like gambling in a Las Vegas casino. Consider these six factors which affect your
chances of getting featured:

01. Build a great product

02. Achieve strong metrics

03. Use the latest technologies

04. Establish a great App Store presence

05. Communicate with store managers

06. Find the right timing

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1) A GREAT PRODUCT.
Even if you date Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai, their affection won’t secure you featuring with a crappy product. 80% of
featuring is the app or game originality and a perfect execution. Everything else in the list above has only a marginal effect.
A great app should be comparable with top products in two areas:

01. Idea

02. Execution

I often see a misunderstanding of developers who consider themselves as “indies” in the world of gaming or “local
players” among apps. They believe Apple and Google should evaluate their apps differently, with a less strict criteria.
But the fact is no one cares, not even the store managers, nor the customers! People just want to use the greatest apps
and it’s up to the developer to find their own way when creating a top notch app or game when compared with the best.
Look at the top of the charts, spend your Thursdays regularly reviewing all of the new featured apps, and create
something amazing!

Here are some examples of what was unique about apps and games that I have helped to secure featuring:

■ Dead Effect 2: A mobile FPS with console quality graphics and a 22 hour long single player campaign, which
is comparable to AAA desktop games.

■ Tiny Miners: A top down “runner” combining casual core gameplay with mid-core metagame around looting,
crafting, and trading equipment.

■ Tradewise: Market news for stock investors with a unique algorithm personalizing the content based on your
stock portfolio and the watchlist.

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■ Galaxy Trucker (update release feature): An award-winning adaptation of the hit tabletop board game with a
rating of 4.8 stars. A massive update included 15 linear connected missions, daily online multiplayer missions,
and much more.

Dead Effect 2 on the third slot on Google Play. The game generated over 0.5M downloads in 10 days on Google Play with a big banner
in several Tier 1 countries.

2) STRONG METRICS
No matter if you’re launching a new product or pushing a major update, you should always provide platform owners
with proof of the quality of your app or game.

In the case of an update you can rely on historical data, accumulated ratings, and even reviews or mentions by
influencers. If you’re launching a new product, you should do a soft launch first to establish basic KPIs to help build a
case to be featured.

A soft launch is launching an app or game in selected territories in order to test and optimize the product and the
marketing strategy prior to the global launch. As a developer, you should increase your retention rate, paying user
conversion rates, average revenue per user and other KPIs. As a marketer, your task is to fine tune the product selling
proposition, store listing, and traffic channels to increase the install rate.

Knowing numbers is all about risk reduction both for you as well as Apple & Google. By providing them key
metrics, you show:

01. Performance of the product.

02. Your understanding of the mobile business.

03. Confidence in your creation.

With a limited number of promotional slots and only a handful of the big banners, store managers want to be sure

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they’re showcasing the very best apps and games. If you’re aiming high at the Editorial Choice, which is for new apps
and games only, having very strong soft launch numbers is an absolute must.

Pro Tip: Here’s the list of basic metrics I always share when reaching out to Apple and Google:

■ D1, D7, D14, and ideally D30 retention numbers

■ Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU)

■ Average rating and number of ratings (global or market-specific if you’re targeting a certain
region)

If you want to learn more about soft launching, check my App Promotion Summit slide deck at [Link]
APStalkSoftlaunch.

3) USING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES

Using the latest Apple and Google technologies significantly increases your chances for featuring. Why? Because both
platform owners want to showcase their newest stuff to customers and you, as a developer, are the middle-man.

When there’s a new major iOS or Android release or new hardware, many developers feel anxiety that they have
to update the code or consider, for example, new screen sizes when designing apps. The fact is, it’s always a huge
opportunity to become an early adopter supported by platform owners who love to present hot stuff in the store. Below
are some of the technological opportunities.

APPLE - WWDC 2017 ANNOUNCEMENTS:

■ SiriKit: Extension that communicates with Siri, even when your app isn’t running.

■ ARKit: Positional tracking and scene understanding so you can create immersive augmented reality apps.

■ Drag and Drop: Multi-Touch technology allowing a quick and easy way to move text, images, and files from one
app to another.

GOOGLE - GOOGLE I/O 2017 ANNOUNCEMENTS:

■ Vulkan: New 3D graphics engine in Android 7 Nougat suitable for high-end games.

■ Multi-window support: Allowing users to run two apps side-by-side or one-above-the-other in splitscreen
mode.

■ Enhanced notifications: Customization of messages, using direct reply.

■ Data Saver: Limiting foreground and background data usage if enabled by the user.

If you use the latest tech and provide information to store managers, they will think of suitable promotional sections
in the store which will highly increase your chances. Tradewise, an app in AppAgent’s portfolio, was initially featured
in the Finance category in the section “Stocks & Investments.” Three months later, the app appeared on the US home
page in the “Enhanced for 3D Touch” section where it remained for 12 weeks. This additional featuring generated
18,000 downloads worth tens of thousands of dollars, all thanks to one tech feature which we intentionally integrated
to increase our chances for a promotion.

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Tradewise among some pretty good companies in the collection “Enhanced for 3D Touch”

4) GREAT APP STORE PRESENCE

Two years ago I met Matt, the third employee of the App Store editorial team. He started in February 2009 and being
the youngest, most passionate person about the games, he quickly became responsible for this huge category.
Matt revealed that the editorial team filters out all of the apps with a poor icon or screenshots and those with a
misleading name or description with grammar mistakes. Only those which pass the filter mimicking a user’s behavior
are observed in more detail, installed and tested.

What does this mean for you? No matter how great a product you have, the “packaging” must be great too! Don’t try
to save money on hiring a professional designer for the icon, preparing top-notch screenshots, or spending a bunch
of time writing a description. If you’re running low on the budget, skip the app preview video which can waste lots of
resources if done right. Besides featuring, think of the importance of the store conversion which is highly affected by
the app presentation.

Part of this is A/B testing assets because once you get featured, the percent of converted users plays a big role
(see chapter on Conversion Rate Optimization). When Angry Birds 2 launched, the game got more than 20 million
downloads during the first week. A/B tests can be credited for at least 2.5 million downloads. For a game like that it is a
huge cost reduction (Source: Splitmetrics [[Link]
ab-testing/]).

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For Ocean Blast which was featured in the App Store, Play Store, and Amazon App Store, we ran 18 A/B tests of store listing elements
to improve the conversion by 18%.

5) COMMUNICATION WITH STORE MANAGERS

Being proactive in pursuing featuring is the key. Although dev relations managers actively search for new apps and
games both online and offline, for example, at conferences, it should be you who starts the communication. Later,
you will learn how to find your point of contact. Therefore, let’s assume at this stage you know ‘someone’ at Apple or
Google.

My tips for pitching are in the following chapter. Here I will just mention that building a relationship, treating managers
with respect, and thinking from their perspective is essential. Remember, featuring is about humans today, not
algorithms!

Mr. Muscle’s pitch was about a famous Czech wrestler who was born in 1879 and inspired the main character of the game. Featuring

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helped to secure over 650,000 downloads.

5) THE RIGHT TIMING

Timing has two layers. How far in advance you should approach store managers and when should you avoid it?

I recommend to start talking with your dev relations manager as soon as you have a polished vertical slice of your
product or service. Why? Because if they see potential, their technology evangelists can help you quickly solve your
issues (e.g. the frame rate drops in Unreal Engine on iOS when using Metal in games). Also, dev relations advise on user
interface and other aspects of the product. And what can be better than to get the Apple representative involved in
your app?

The minimum time to reach out to platforms is four weeks before the launch. Otherwise, both Apple and Google
aren’t able to process the submission quickly enough to help you on D-day.

When should you avoid approaching platform owners? In general, before and during the high season at Christmas.
Remember not to plan the launch date in November or December when the store is under fire from the biggest
publishers and acquisition investments— it’s a lost cause.

How Editorial Teams Operate

Store managers, dev relations, editors… You probably don’t understand who is who and what’s the difference. Yet each
of these groups has different objectives, roles, and rights. Let’s make this clear now.

It is very likely that your first point of contact will be a local dev relations manager. Each region such as the UK &
Ireland, Nordic, and CEE has a dedicated manager whose role is to help you with the product. They can give you advice
or suggestions as well as connect you to technology evangelists. BUT they aren’t responsible for featuring!

If the dev relations manager sees potential in your product, it might get recommended to their colleagues or store
managers (or biz dev managers, if we are to use Google’s terminology). Store managers are responsible for selecting
content for stores at the local level. This doesn’t necessarily mean that one manager oversees a single national App
Store, but usually it’s a region such as Germany and Austria or Finland, Sweden, and Norway.

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THE FEATURING PROCESS FOR THE APPLE APP STORE

If you get as far as the store manager, you will be asked by email to fill an Excel questionnaire and pray for the best. This
is usually the point where communication ends unless you aren’t in a situation where you can meet the Apple guys
in person in a short time, provide more information, etc. What’s next is only my own personal hypothesis as it tackles
the internal processes: the store manager either decides for featuring on a local level or pushes the application to the
U.S.- based Editorial team.

Then, in Cupertino, the app is reviewed again with the potential to be featured globally and in more prominent spots
such as big banners, collections, etc. In some cases, the developer gets an automated request for feature art via
iTunes Connect with a deadline for the upload. Such a request indicates increased chances but it definitely isn’t a
confirmation of featuring as it happened to us several times when we were asked for assets and didn’t have a prominent
spot using visuals.

The main thing here is the fact that you CAN’T talk to the editorial team directly about yourself, instead you can only
talk to store managers. You also have to remember that their communication is sometimes complicated due to their
heavy workload.

THE FEATURING PROCESS FOR THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE

Here comes one of the major differences between platforms. Once you pass the dev relations manager, you will
probably get a partnership registration form. It’s an evaluation process where those who pass get a dedicated business
development manager which could be seen as store manager for Apple App Store. If you get a rejection, your chances
for featuring decrease significantly as you won’t be able to communicate with the people responsible for featuring.
There are also ways to reach specialists at Indie Games, usually at events. Also, it is possible to sign up for Early Access
if you are working on a game in the soft launch phase. That being said, your chances are lower with the rejection.

If you pass the “screening process,” you’ll be put in touch with an assigned biz dev manager and very likely get another
form called “Featuring Nomination” which probably goes to the Mountain View editorial team for consideration.

From my personal experience, biz dev people at Google are very keen to help you improve the app and get everything
ready for featuring. They provide you with a list of comments and recommendations from the editorial team, keep
editorial in the cc in emails and explain what’s critical for featuring as well as what’s an optional request. Usually, the
list of requirements defines what you should do before a certain deadline to get your featuring slot secured.

This different approach is more human compared to Apple’s process. It allows for dialog and focuses on making your
app or game better. I have to admit that the vast majority of comments we received for our apps were good, to the point
it increased the value of the product.

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Early Access in the Google Play Store is an amazing way to collect user feedback prior the launch and increase your chances for
featuring.

Pitching Your App or Game

I bet you’ve asked yourself “And how do I find a dev relations manager?!” There are three options:

01. Ask other developers who have been featured in the past and maintain a good relationship with them (and
no, I’m not giving contacts to developers I don’t know).

02. Visit conferences where using a Pitch & Match system can help you find Apple and Google representatives and
arrange a personal meeting.

03. Use a LinkedIn hack and search for an “Apple developers relations manager” or a similar job role description
and filter the results by region. Once you find a relevant person, install the Chrome extension ‘Hunter’ [https://
[Link]/webstore/detail/hunter/hgmhmanijnjhaffoampdlllchpolkdnj?hl=en] to get the email
contact. Voila, here you go!

Once you have your contact, prepare a pitch. What’s important is the perspective! Forget the “me, me, me” approach
and think about your product platform from an owner’s perspective. To give you guidance, here are the questions I
always ask AppAgent’s clients:

■ Describe your product in a maximum of three sentences.

■ Who’s your ideal user? Be specific!

■ What’s the key benefit and why should people care?

■ How are you different from your main competitors and who are they?

■ What performance have you achieved so far? Give me numbers (retention, ARPU, DAUs/MAUs, ratings).

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■ Give me social proof such as real user reviews, quotations by media or influencers

■ What is the latest Apple or Google tech that has been integrated, what more can you do in this?

■ Tell me about the timing: when is the app ready for sharing with dev relations and when is the exact release
date or at the least, give me a very specific time frame we can discuss.

■ In which promotional collection does your product fit the best?

■ Ideally, provide a link to a Youtube video showing the app’s core functionality in less than 30 seconds.

You can create a perfect pitch from this outline. Be as short as possible, get to the point quickly and clearly state if
you’re looking for product consultation, technical help, or marketing support.

An example of a pitch to a store manager

The most important part of the pitch is the subject of the email and it’s opening part. If you’re meeting the manager in
person, it’s the same as you having a maximum of 30 seconds to get their attention and explain why they should care.
Be creative and think strategically! Here are three examples to inspire you:

Example 1: An award as a proof

When we were aiming for the featuring of Dead Effect 2, we went to PocketGamer Helsinki and joined the Very Big Indie
Pitch. Winning a second place award, having a partnership with nVidia, and armed with quotes from a private media
event in Moscow, the pitch was pretty strong. Dead Effect 2 got the big feature banner in almost all of the markets and
topped 1million downloads in the first two weeks.

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Dead Effect featured in the UK. It took 2nd place at the Very Big Indie Pitch in PGC Helsinki which helped us with credibility in the
opening email to Apple.

Example 2: The ridiculous hero

For a small fast reaction game called Mr. Muscle, the pitch was built around the main character inspired by a Czech
wrestler from the 19th century who won 10,000 fights in his career. At the peak of its fast reaction games popularity, Mr.
Muscle reached 600,000 Installs in the App Store in the first two weeks.

Example 3: From publisher to self-publishing

When we were aiming for the featuring of Ocean Blast, a match-3 game, the story was about a previous game that
was launched with a renowned publisher and the indie courage of self-publishing a new title with innovative game
mechanics. App Store featuring helped generate 50 000 downloads and the Play Store got 35 000 downloads in the first
week.

Pro Tip: Use BananaTag [[Link] to track your emails. Once the email is opened,
you get an email notification back, the same applies for link clicks. With this hack, you will understand
if your email got lost in the inbox and was never opened or if the recipient engaged with linked content
such as Youtube video or a link to the store.

The basics about featuring in both stores:

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APPLE APP STORE GOOGLE PLAY STORE

■ Look and originality are more than numbers ■ Decision making is primarily data oriented

■ Featuring is usually for one week for new releases ■ 10,000+ downloads, 4.2+ rating

■ Fixed slots, seasonal slots, long time collections ■ Featuring for one week, often later after the launch

■ The featuring of new apps and games is highly ■ More automated, less curated featuring sections
preferred
■ Very difficult to get featured with a paid app or game
■ Updates are usually featured in existing or new
collections

■ iOS 11 update: new editorial content in “Today” tab

such as developer preview, how-to guides, and deep
dive presentation.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF GETTING THROUGH

You can get additional bonus points when dealing featuring by meeting “soft criteria” which are often mentioned as a
side note. Looking at the long-term pattern in the questions from Apple and Google representatives means that there’s
definitely interest in these aspects:

Apple

■ An exclusive launch.

■ Heavy use of the A10 chip.

■ Using Metal in Games.

■ Optimization for iPhone 7, 7+ and iPad Pro.

■ Sub-150MB builds.

■ Localizations.

Google

■ Simultaneous launch on mobile platforms.

■ Play Services integration.

■ An Android shaped icon and video without Apple logos/badges/devices.

■ At least one non-manipulated screenshot per device.

■ AdMob and Google Analytics /Firebase integration.

■ Localizations.

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Pro Tip: Think of “timing” as another success factor. There may be great opportunities in seasonality,
holidays, or events. The pitch for our client Livesport, who provides real time sport results, was tightly
connected to the start of the Premier League in the UK which generates a big spike in the usage of the
app. Reach out to your manager at least one month in advance of the event to plan well ahead!

Featuring Prep

TIMING
Once you start communicating your launch date with platform owners, stick to it. They have a schedule of releases
and any last minute time change can ruin your chances.

If you have any technical or other issues, be very open and communicate them as they are. Keep in mind that
within Apple and Google are usually several people who are somehow linked to your app or game— in the role of dev
managers, relations managers, store managers, or otherwise. If you spoil it, their reputation will be hurt as well!

VISUAL ASSETS
In case you’re selected for a larger featuring (not just having an app icon somewhere in the store but a presentation in
the form of a banner), platform owners will provide you several days to prepare the key feature art. The assets are of
a massive resolution (mostly because of Apple and Android TVs). Therefore, you might need to completely redraw the
game visual to have sharp asset. Don’t think of just scaling and polishing up what you have; it will simply be rejected.

Pro Tip: Prepare high resolution art in advance (e.g. Apple requires 4320x1080px) in PSD. Bear in mind
that the editorial creative team might change the final look of your assets (and you can do nothing
about it).

Other assets might be social media assets (1300 x 740 px) or a video for social media (1080P HD, Length between 30-45
seconds). You will get very detailed specifications of the required output, usually a week ahead of the deadline.

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Tiny Miners big banner in Thailand

SERVER CAPACITY
Now for the serious stuff. Featuring can give you millions of downloads. It’s not always the case, you might only get
10,000 downloads for a niché app or 30,000 downloads for a casual game for less prominent featuring, but you have to
be prepared for more.

Getting featured means trust. Trust by someone who’s managing the largest digital shops on a global level. If something
goes wrong with your product, it hurts them too.

Therefore, if you have a backend heavy service or a multiplayer game, do load tests and be sure that your servers can
scale with the first spike of new users and have all your key staff on alert during the launch date.

Pro Tip: Many studios have a technical team at work non-stop from Thursday through the weekend, when
stores are refreshed and most apps are launched. The same applies for major updates. Considering dev
costs and the risk of issues, it’s definitely worth the effort.

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A typical featuring spike, this time for Tiltagon by Kiemura

MEASURING
In general, it’s technically not possible to track downloads coming directly from featuring. Yet you can use AppAnnie to
analyze where your app appears in the store, just click on the ‘Featured’ tab.

Pro Tip: As AppAnnie has a delay in data collection, use the country switcher in iTunes in the bottom
right corner to view different Apple App Stores. For Google Play, you can simply edit the URL by changing
the locales parameter (&hl=language_country, see Germany as an example): [Link]
store/search?q=ocean%20blast&c=apps&hl=de_de

In the App Store you can consider Impressions in the iTunes Connect App Analytics module as a good indication of the
strength of featuring and any change of visibility is immediately visible in this metric.

QUALITY
An important note at the end of this section relates to the quality of users. When it comes to featuring, the increased
visibility naturally drives more views of a larger audience. The results are:

01. A decrease in the conversion rate in the store (I’ve seen threefold to single digit numbers)

02. A decrease in the quality of users (lower retention and monetization)

The drop depends on the actual placement. For example, having Tradewise in a generic “Enhanced for 3D Touch”
collection on the US homepage, brings with it lower quality users compared to “Stocks & Investments” in the Finance
section. Therefore, it’s meaningless to provide you specific numbers but being aware of this can help you manage this
issue with product managers and other stakeholders.

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A Case Study in Featuring: Tradewise

In this case study I would like to show how you can put together small pieces of work which could help you get featured
on the U.S. App Store home page. Talking about money and impact, with our help we generated an uptake in users that
would have cost Tradewise around $50,000 in user-acquisition. All within one week… Here’s how we did it.

B U I L D O N A S O L I D FO U N DAT I O N S
Back in November 2015, AppAgent started working with a San Francisco-based startup previously called Trdr [:Trader:]
but later re-branded to Tradewise (App Store). It’s a Fin-tech company founded by Adisorn Ratanakovit, who served as
head of technology at Investools, before the company was acquired by TD Ameritrade.

Tradewise notifies investors about relevant market changes and helps them make better informed
investment decisions. The tech science behind the app is proprietary SignalRank technology which scans
thousands of market events and filters only the most relevant information affecting a user’s stock portfolio.
The main competitors for the app are news apps such as Bloomberg or Yahoo Finance. Because the app integrates
several brokerage accounts, it also competes with brokers as well.

The Tradewise app

DEFINITIONS FOR WHO AND WHAT

The main task was to clearly define the target group and product positioning. We laid down the basics for changes in
the UI and for upcoming acquisition campaigns. Altogether, we had ten meetings and completed tons of work while at
the same time adding dozens of new tasks to the list.

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THE PRODUCT IS KING

We at AppAgent always start on any project with a proper analytics setup and evaluation of the onboarding. With
several iterations, we get a 70% rate of the finished onboarding process.

To improve performance, we suggested tweaks on the main screen of the app to emphasize the daily performance of a
trader’s portfolio. An iPad version of the app was partially released in June 2016 with a complete redesign a few months later.

The main change which we suggested that our client make was to re-brand the product from ‘Trdr’ to ‘Tradewise’.
This makes the name easier to understand and helped us clarify the proposition.

GETTING EARLY ADOPTERS ON BOARD

We ran numerous low budget campaigns ($1-$2,000) where we tested different methods of targeting and 16 different
creative executions of Facebook ads altogether. Our work resulted in a 7x decrease of the initial CPI which our client
had before we jumped in.

Part of this was the optimization of the store listing where we tweaked screenshots and description and tested a tagline
which was rich with relevant keywords. The App Store conversion increased by 10% and definitely helped optimize
the CPI of paid campaigns; we also engaged a steady stream of users who came from organic searches.

SHOW TIME!
Once we reached 5,000 downloads and a rating of 4.5 stars, we knew the app was ready for “show time.” However,
we had to bring an additional “reason why” from Apple’s perspective to the table. That is usually demonstrated by
the implementation of their latest technology. As a result, the developer of Tradewise integrated 3D Touch for quick
access to the most important dashboards and a widget which gives access to the key figures even quicker. Later, we
also integrated the Peek and Pop functionality.

Armed with good numbers, clear positioning, a nice looking store listing, and new iOS features, it was time to pitch
the app in person to a regional dev relations manager. Soon after the meeting, we got a response from the App Store
Manager requesting more details with two good tips for additional features recommended by the U.S. editorial team.
This positive signal was confirmed a week later when Tradewise appeared in the “New Apps We Love” section on the
U.S. App Store homepage as well as on the “…and profit” homepage collection and a day later in the “Stocks & News”
section of the Finance category.

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Tradewise next to industry leaders in the US App Store

WHAT IS THE TOTAL COST? 9 MONTHS OF WORK...

Such a significant featuring (for what could still be classified as a niché app) resulted in a huge spike in downloads.
Moreover, a couple of months later, Tradewise appeared in the selection ‘Enhanced for 3D Touch’ where it remained
for the next 12 weeks. Together with all the previous work, featuring helped increase MAUs tenfold compared to the
period right before we started working with the client.

5 Key Takeaways on Getting Featured

Keep these 5 key takeaways in mind:

01. Build a great product: The key element of success is having a great product as everything else has a marginal
impact. This means bringing something unique to the market, having an outstanding execution and a specific
target group.

02. Create an outstanding presentation: Having an excellent and optimized store listing helps you get on the
radar and also get the most from being featured.

03. Think like Apple and Google: From the product’s presentation to the integration of the newest tech and
providing KPIs, you should always use the platform’s perspective.

04. Active communication: Meeting dev relations managers in person, writing a compelling pitch, and approaching
them well in advance are basic rules of an active approach.

05. Have good luck: No matter how much we try to guide you in the following pages, luck is an important factor,
too. An update to Galaxy Trucker, a paid game for $5, probably wouldn’t be featured if the store manager from
Google wouldn’t be a fan of the same board game by coincidence. The goal is to minimize the factor of luck to
hit the jackpot.

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POST-FEATURING ERA
Congratulations, your app or game is featured! You should feel excited about the massive interest and growing numbers
in the first three days. Then you start observing the first decline in download velocity. A week after the launch or
update release the promotion spot is usually gone and your downloads drop to a fraction of what you’ve seen just a
few days ago.

Featuring isn’t securing long term revenues and it doesn’t help you build a sustainable business. It’s a great boost and
an amazing way to start BUT it’s absolutely not enough to make a living from developing apps unless you’re lucky
enough to remain topped in the store for months (or even years in the case of few classics such as “Super Hexagon” or
“Canabalt”).

The fact is that featuring isn’t in your hands! Don’t bet your future on editorial team sympathy. It’s vital to have a solid
plan as well as a realistic marketing strategy in addition to expert people on board and enough resources to be fully
responsible for your own growth. Otherwise, you will become only a hero of a single week just as thousands of other
developers before. And that would be a pity if you want to make apps and games for living, right?

Subchapter authored by Peter Fodor.

Increasing Browse Visibility

“I’m not getting enough traffic from my top chart visibility. How can I change that?”

Next to increasing your visibility through keyword optimization, and landing a nice store feature, you can try to increase
your visibility through other browsing methods, too. In the following pages, we’ll discuss first how the top charts work,
then how you could potentially influence that with a burst campaign or switching from category and finally we’ll discuss
some other discovery methods such as the related/similar apps.

Top Chart Rankings

Both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store display app top charts, wherein the top performing apps are ranked
along several dimensions, including: category, country, and monetization. Yet, the way in which each store displays
rankings, which categories apps are grouped into, and even the way in which each store determines top chart rankings
differs significantly.

While ASO tools will report up to 1,500 ranked apps on the top free, paid, and grossing rankings for the App Store, only
200 ranked apps are visible in the mobile App Store app and 500 ranked apps in the mobile Play Store app. ASO tools
will also display both the primary and secondary category top chart rankings for an app, yet an app is only eligible
to show in the top chart of its primary category, or in countries where a primary category is not available, the app’s
secondary category.

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Screenshot: Priori Data top charts

Apple and Google calculate their top chart rankings based on the velocity of either downloads (top free/paid) or
dollars (top grossing, Google-only) of revenue that an app earns. That is, the velocity of downloads of free apps for the
top free chart and the number of downloads of paid apps for the top paid chart, as well as the velocity of dollars an app
earns for the top grossing chart. Velocity refers to the fact that downloads or dollars acquired in the most recent hour,
several hours, day or several days, respectively count more towards the app’s top chart ranking, in decreasing order
of importance. The higher an app’s download or dollar earning velocity compared to other apps in the same category
or country, the higher that app’s ranking relative its peers.

For example, let’s say that there are only three apps competing for the paid utilities top chart: app A costs $.99 to
download, app B costs $1.99, and app C costs $2.99. If app A earns ten downloads in the last hour, app B earns five
downloads in the last hour and app C earns one download in the last hour, the apps would be ranked A, B, C in the top
paid utilities chart. This would still be the case even if app C earned 100 downloads in the last 30 days and app A earned
zero downloads in the last 30 days, because Apple ranks apps based on the velocity of downloads.

DOWNLOADS IN THE DOWNLOADS IN DOWNLOADS IN THE LAST

CURRENT RANK (TOP PAID)
LAST HOUR THE LAST DAY MONTH

A P P A 1 10 10 10

A P P B 2 5 5 5

A P P C 3 1 1 100

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However, in the top grossing utilities chart (Google-only), the order would go B, A, C, because app B earned $9.95, app
A earned $9.90 and app C earned $2.99.

CURRENT RANK GROSS REVENUE DOWNLOADS IN THE DOWNLOADS IN THE DOWNLOADS IN THE
PRICE
(TOP GROSSING) IN LAST HOUR LAST HOUR LAST DAY LAST MONTH

A P P B 1 1.99 9.95 5 5 5

A P P A 2 0.99 9.9 10 10 10

A P P C 3 2.99 2.99 1 1 100

Let’s say now that apps A, B and C are free utilities apps, and that they are combined with apps 1, 2, and 3 from the
business category, and that all six apps are competing for the U.S. top free chart. If app 1 earns 11 downloads in the last
hour, app 2 earns six downloads in the last hour, and app 3 earns two downloads in the last hour, then the order for the
U.S. top free chart would go 1, A, 2, B, 3, C.

CURRENT RANK (TOP CURRENT RANK (TOP DOWNLOADS IN THE DOWNLOADS IN THE DOWNLOADS IN THE
FREE) CATEGORY) LAST HOUR LAST DAY LAST MONTH

A P P 1 1 1 11 11 11

A P P A 2 1 10 10 10

A P P 2 3 2 6 6 6

A P P B 4 2 5 5 5

A P P 3 5 3 2 2 100

A P P C 6 3 1 1 100

Google’s Play Store top charts are calculated a bit differently than Apple App Store top charts. While the way that Google’s
top charts initially worked was based on similar logic to the Apple App Store (i.e. velocity of downloads or dollars
earned), reportedly throughout 2016, Google began incorporating additional factors into its ranking algorithm, and
in February 2017, the Google Android Developers Blog officially announced [[Link]
com/2017/02/[Link]] that its ranking algorithm would begin factoring in
user engagement and other signals for games, such as star ratings, in addition to download velocity.

While the exact workings and weightings are unknown, based on these changes, if app A has 1,000 downloads in the
last day, app B has 500 downloads in the last day and C has 100 downloads in the last day, app A has a 1-day retention
rate of 10%, app B has a 1-day retention rate of 50% and app A has a 1-day retention rate of 100%, app A has a star rating
of 2.5, app B has a star rating of 3.5, and app C has a star rating of 4.5, it’s now plausible that the order of ranking could
go app B, C, A, or even C, B, A, instead of assuredly app A, B, C.

While it is likely that Google’s main ranking signal is still download velocity, it is important to know that this king data
point that still retains chief status in the App Store no longer fills the same role in Google Play rankings.

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Additionally, Google Play Store includes a trending top chart, which incorporates apps from the other top charts, as
well as apps suited for the user’s geo location and those from the best new featured lists.

Periodically, Apple and Google also release new categories, such as the addition of stickers in the App Store with iOS
10 and eight new categories in the Google Play Store in mid-2016.

In both the App Store and Play Store, there are subcategories for several main categories, including:

■ Games (Apple and Google)

■ Kids/Family (Apple and Google)

■ Stickers (Apple-only)

■ Magazines & newspapers (Apple-only)

Additionally, apps in the Kids category are eligible to rank in the top charts of the app’s selected secondary category.

Screenshot: Mobile Action app rank history

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App Store Categories

SUBCATEGORIES

M A I N C A T E G O R I E S
M A G A Z I N E S &
G A M E S S T I C K E R S
N E W S P A P E R S

Books Arts & Photography Action Animals & Nature

Business Automotive Adventure Art

Catalogs Brides & Weddings Arcade Celebrations

Education Business & Investing Board Celebrities

Entertainment Children’s Magazines Card Comics & Cartoons

Finance Computers & Internet Casino Eating & Drinking

Food & Drink Cooking, Food & Drink Dice Emoji & Expressions

Games Crafts & Hobbies Educational Fashion

Health & Fitness Electronics & Audio Family Gaming

Kids Entertainment Music Kids & Family

Age bands: (< 5, 6 - 8, 9 - 11) Fashion & Style Puzzle Movies & TV

Lifestyle Health, Mind & Body Racing Music

Magazines & Newspapers History Role Playing People

Medical Home & Garden Simulation Places & Objects

Music Literary Magazines & Journals Sports Sports & Activities

Navigation Men’s Interest Strategy

News Movies & Music Trivia

Photo & Video News & Politics Word

Productivity Outdoors & Nature

Reference Parenting & Family

Shopping Pets

Social Networking Professional & Trade

Sports Regional News

Travel Science

Utilities Sports & Leisure

Weather Teens

Travel & Regional

Women’s Interest

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Play Store Categories

APPS GAMES

Art & Design Lifestyle Action

Auto & Vehicles Maps & Navigation Adventure

Beauty Medical Arcade

Books & Reference Music & Audio Board

Business News & Magazines Card

Comics Parenting Casino

Communications Personalization Casual

Dating Photography Educational

Education Productivity Music

Entertainment Shopping Puzzle

Events Social Racing

Finance Sports Role Playing

Food & Drink Tools Simulation

Health & Fitness Travel & Local Sports

House & Home Video Players & Editors Strategy

Libraries & Demo Weather Trivia

Word

Competitor Top Chart Rank Change

When analyzing your app’s performance, one great data point to use is to measure the change in your app’s top chart
ranking change vs. your competitors’. This data offers insight that can put your app’s own performance data into
perspective using your competitors as a benchmark. If your app is doing well, but your competitors are also doing
well, it may be an up-market; but if your competitors are stable or struggling while your app posts gains, then you can
be confident that your ASO efforts are producing good headway. Remember to ensure your calculations factor for a
lower rank number being better.

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Burst Campaigns
Burst campaigns are a type of user acquisition that is focused on using cheap downloads to quickly surge an app’s
top chart rank, with the purpose of earning quality organic downloads from the increased visibility from higher
top chart ranks (typically earning a position of 1-100 in a top chart is the target). The goal of a burst campaign is to
manipulate an app’s top chart ranking by preying on the fact that the top chart algorithms factor most for downloads
and download velocity in top chart rankings.

As such, burst campaigns are frowned upon by Apple and Google and thus this campaign type is regarded as gray
hat, or even black hat, as noted in the Black Hat chapter later on. Because burst campaigns are typically designed to
improve an app’s top chart ranking for a very short period of time (i.e. a burst), the quality of downloads is irrelevant
as the algorithms do not have days or weeks to factor for the retention of those downloads, and so burst campaigns
typically use incentivized downloads (users who earn credits for another app in exchange for downloading your app),
which cost very little per download and allow advertisers to afford the massive quantity of downloads necessary to
manipulate the top chart ranking algorithms.

On June 7, 2017 Google updated their policy to explicitly forbid incentivized installs:

“Developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any apps in Google Play.
This includes, but is not limited to, inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts
by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or incentivized installs, reviews and ratings.”

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Category Switching

This chapter is written by guest author Paul Malicki, CEO of Flapper,

Brazil’s first on-demand private aviation platform. Flapper helps
companies and individuals reduce their expenses with ‘táxi aéreo’.
With access to more than 100 certified private jet operators and an
easy-to-use mobile application, Flapper prides itself on offering the
most complete private aviation service in Brazil.

Paul published a book called The Chief Mobile Officer’s Guide to

Growth, and forms part of Forbes’ 30 under 30 in Technology.

Apple and Google each break their app catalogue into around 25 primary categories. In addition, they list 17 (for
Play Store) and 18 (App Store) dedicated categories for games, while Apple further breaks their apps into hundreds of
subcategories. For example, the generic Food & Drink category could be further narrowed down into Beverages, and
then --> Coffees, Juices, Recipes, and Tea.

The rationale behind introduction of such granular app indexation is threefold:

01. Easy discovery. Mobile stores want users to easily find their apps.

02. Ranking. Knowing what your app is about allow Apple and Google to rank it better.

03. Engagement. Extra featured lists, e.g. Explore Brazil, boost engagement on App Stores.

You probably knew about #1 and, if adept enough, you ran some tests to estimate which app category is more likely to
give you extra organic downloads. The typical reasoning behind switching app categories is that some spaces are more
visited by others.

What most people forget about is competition in different categories, and specifically the fact that the same number
of app downloads needed to maintain your top 3 in one category might not be enough to enter top 10 in another.
Then, there are visible differences in conversion rates per genre— the same travel app listed under Travel might receive
higher conversion rates than when placed in Lifestyle.

Pro Tip: When considering a category switch, the same number of app downloads needed to
maintain your top 3 in one category might not be enough to enter top 10 in another.

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The App Store Category Power Index

Lamentably, all of the above factors make it difficult for publishers to decide upon the most suitable app categories for
their apps. That’s why I created the below App Store Category Power Index. It puts together three simple KPIs to help
mobile app practitioners find the most “Powerful” App Store (only) category. The term “Powerful” denotes categories,
which are business-smart, i.e. those with a combination of high popularity + high conversion rates + low competition.

Image comparing App Store categories across three different dimensions, defined below.

■ In the above chart, competition reflects share of Top 3 apps in a given category in total downloads [PrioriData,
Feb 2016].

■ Conversion Rate denotes proportion of App Store views-to-downloads [MobileAction, Feb 2016].

■ Popularity is defined as share of apps from given category in total active apps globally.

For example, the number for top category signifies that 22.49% of all App Store apps actively used globally are games
[Statista, Dec 2015].

Methodology: I applied a weighted average score to each of the selected KPIs, giving considerably higher weight to
Popularity (aka market retention). Some values (e.g. competition for Games) had to be averaged, others replaced with
estimates.

The way you should read the above table is by looking first at the Index, then at its three components. For example,
Social Networking, with a value of 28 is simply not worth the code, unless you are prepared for the war. Consider the
following:

■ Top 3 social apps are responsible for as much as 22% of all category downloads

■ Yet only 2% of all active apps being used are social networks

■ The average conversion rate is 40%, not more

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This reflects extremely high concentration on the market, where new folks have little chance to succeed. Add to it the
laborious monetization model of social network apps and you will understand where am I coming from. Business apps,
in turn, are way more attractive— there tends to be little competition in the sector, which boasts of having the second
highest share of active apps. How cool!

Retention and Other Decisive Factors

Of course, you might find the approach just outlined ‘backward’ and incomplete. Yet, remember that the term
entrepreneur doesn’t apply to everyone with a flashy idea; building your startup on a proven concept is smart and
sustainable.

To reinforce it, the above Index then doesn’t reflect all decisive factors. For example, one developer might want to build
an app which complements its successful monthly subscription model. Assuming he is not afraid of competition, he
could look at 28-day Retention per category to make a decision. The reasoning here would run as follows: the higher
the retention, the more likely I am to guarantee that app subscriptions will be extended.

In fact, not every type of mobile app is equally engaging for the user. By analyzing more than 200 popular apps,
Apptentive found that there are stark differences in terms of 28-day return retention across sectors. Users of News
(82.78%), Finance (82.16%) and Shopping (78.66%) categories come back consistently, while Casual (35.18%), Tools
(42.51%), and Simulation (44.73%) are poor performers. Additionally, within the categories at the bottom, even the top
10% of best performing apps do not managed to invert the trend.

Top 6 Performers Bottom 6 Performers

90TH 90TH
CATEGORY SAMPLE AVERAGE CATEGORY SAMPLE AVERAGE
PERCENTILE PERCENTILE

N E W S 15 82.78% 96.70% C A S U A L 68 35.18% 49.51%

F I N A N C E 31 82.16% 96.46% T O O L S 11 42.51% 76.16%

S H O P P I N G 10 78.66% 92.24% S I M U L A T I O N 10 44.73% 62.38%

P H O T O &
M E D I C A L 14 77.45% 92.81% 18 51.73% 77.08%
V I D E O

M U S I C 28 75.89% 96.63% A D V E N T U R E 21 52.16% 76.72%

H E A LT H &
45 74.89% 95.78% F A M I L Y 35 55.66% 73.28%
F I T N E S S

Source: Apptentive, Feb 2016

Your analysis shouldn’t end here. Below I put together some of the secondary factors that have to be considered when
publishing your app. Most importantly, as for any startup, what matters the most is the magical combination of market
fit + team + capital.

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What else to consider when selecting your app category:

■ Seasonality. Apps for cultural events or educational apps display clear seasonality.

■ Lifetime value. Some categories, such as finance, are more likely to attract high spenders.

■ Featuring propensity. The more useful the app the more likely you will be noticed by editors.

■ Market trends. News apps are on the rise; navigation totally switched to social GPS model.

■ Localization. Check which genre is popular in your market + promoted by Apple/Google.

■ Wearables support. Are the category apps supporting the IoT technologies?

Fast and Furious - Benefiting From New App Categories

Another opportunity comes from entering the just-formed app categories or those which lack a clear leader.
Introduction of the new Shopping list by Apple in late 2015 has caused a real fuss on the App Store market. Many of
the new shopping apps, previously listed under Lifestyle, saw their ranks grow up by 5-10 positions. One of them, Wish,
climbed up by, on average, 25 ranks over the course of two weeks— no simple feat.

Image depicting the comparison of download ranks before/after a category switch

Inspiring enough? Now what if I told you that you could scoop a few extra ranks just by taking advantage of the “category
exit” by some of the bigger apps? It’s simple: if the downloads gap between the exiting leader and #2/#3 app of a given
genre is large enough, just jump in and start building your leadership position.

In point of fact, to execute such strategy, you will have to estimate the number of downloads needed to jump to the
top of the list, which as you will see, varies greatly per sector. On the following page I put a simple analysis of App Store
downloads per category. Both positions #1 and #2 are of interest to us, and not to appear biased, we will look into a
fairly large, Brazilian market.

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Number of Daily Downloads Needed to Burst to Category Ranks #1 and #2

Brazil, January 2016 & YoY

NUMBER 1 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 1 NUMBER 2

CATEGORY CATEGORY
[CHANGE YOY] [CHANGE YOY] [CHANGE YOY] [CHANGE YOY]

1’960 1’750 8’130 5’790

B O O K S M U S I C
(▲80%) (▲29%) (▲6%) (▼4%)

1’490 1’070 3’530 1’790

B U S I N E S S L I F E S T Y L E
(▼45%) (-0%) (▼25%) (▼54%)

770 550 4’390 3’070

M E D I C A L F I N A N C E
(▲38%) (▲8%) (▲5%) (▼5%)

810 680 15’031 6’046

W E A T H E R E N T E R T A I N M E N T
(▼14%) (▼20%) (▲113%) (▲122%)

7’240 2’640 3’236 2’470

U T I L I T I E S E D U C A T I O N
(▼30%) (▼57%) (▼26%) (▲12%)

470 470 680 510

S P O R T S C A T A L O G S
(▼31%) (▼27%) (▼47%) (-0%)

S O C I A L 21’290 14’610 3’280 1’790

F O O D & D R I N K
N E T W O R K I N G (▼64%) (▼61%) (▲1%) (▼32%)

4’680 3’880 3’530 2’510

P R O D U C T I V I T Y T R A V E L
(▲51%) (▲69%) (▲26%) (▼9%)

10’130 8’730 5’280 3’110

P H O T O & V I D E O S H O P P I N G
(▼51%) (▼56%) (▲265%) (▲170%)

1’830 894 H E A LT H & 2’090 1’660

N E W S
(▲105%) (▲5%) F I T N E S S (▼35%) (▼26%)

5’200 2’940 1’920 1’490

N A V I G A T I O N R E F E R E N C E
(▼65%) (▼62%) (▼71%) (▼17%)

*based on PrioriData statistics for January ‘15 and ‘16. Monthly downloads were averaged and multiplied by 1,1 (I assume the
platform might under report data by ca 10%) and then by the ratio of 1,2 to guarantee first position. Downloads are just one, but
still dominant, factor taken into consideration by both stores when ranking apps.

**Shopping category uses November data.

Number of Daily App Store Downloads Needed to Burst to Category Ranks #1 and #2, Brazil, January 2016 & YoY

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The abundance of both red and green triangles tells us that the market has undergone significant transformation in the
last year. Here is how publishers can take advantage of such insights:

■ Seek category exits: OLX, #1 Business app, migrated to ‘Shopping’ in November ‘15, leaving behind a large
‘hole.’ It now takes 45% less downloads to become a leader in ‘Business.’

■ Find a niche: Emoji, a simple social app, was ranked as #1 app in ‘Catalogs.’ It would take exactly 29x more
downloads to jump to #2 rank in ‘Social Networking.’ Smart.

■ Follow smartphone premieres: Likely thanks to launch of iPhone 6, utility apps were particularly popular
in 2015. A year later, it takes, 30% and 57% less downloads, respectively, to get to #1 and #2 rank in ‘Utilities’.

■ Follow the trends: Some apps, namely Whatsapp, Waze, Tinder, OLX, Netflix, Google Translate, Instagram,
and Chrome, have seen a massive adoption among Brazilian users, popularizing their respective categories.
Globo, the country’s leading TV network, took advantage of Netflix’s popularity, introducing Globo Play, now
the #2 movie streaming app in Brazil.

Now it’s time for your own A/B test. No research will ever replace app- and market-specific analyses. In many cases,
even positions 4-5 can give enough downloads. Yet, with exposure decreasing down the list, the focus should always
be on top 1-2 upper positions. Still full of doubts? You can always confirm your strategy with the developer relationship
teams of Apple and Google.

Subchapters authored by Paul Malicki.

Related / Similar Apps

When viewing an app in both the App Store and Play Store, users can also view a list of related (Apple) or similar
(Google) apps, listed in the app’s product page. So what determines which apps appear in these related/similar lists?

Screenshots from the App Store and the Google Play showing similar/suggested apps

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A few main factors influence these related app lists, which include:

01. Which other apps a user has downloaded.

02. CTR on related app suggestions.

03. The Category the app is in.

04. App keyword metadata.

While the first two factors are not as easy to influence as the third or fourth factors, it is possible to use ASO tactics to
indirectly attain success in the first factor. This is accomplished by expanding your app’s overlap of keywords that a
target app ranks for, such as the app’s brand name or other overlapping category terms. However, be aware that both
Apple and Google forbid advertisers from listing their competitors’ names in store metadata. While it is possible to slip
competitor names into the iOS keyword field, a Google Play description or even a title, it is not a guarantee of earning a
good rank on that term, and both Google and Apple have the ability to manually penalize an app’s ranking for abusing
this rule, and they do so periodically.

Pro Tip: It’s also possible to influence related app rankings by advertising to users who use/like/have
searched/or are connected in some other way to a target app using by Facebook Ads, AdWords, Apple
Search Ads, or another ad platform; while it can be expensive, by increasing your overlap with users of
the target app, you can increase your chances of being a related app for that target app.

Increasing Visibility in the App Stores Through Store Ads

“What is the crossover between Store Ads and ASO?”

Store Ads are useful for “cutting the line” and immediately increasing your app’s visibility on important keywords by
paying for them. That said, there are important nuances to be aware of for each Store Ad platform, and with regard to
the relationship between Store Ads and ASO.

Google Store Ads

Android Universal App Campaigns (UAC) enable marketers to show store ads directly in the Play Store, as well as across
other Google properties such as [Link]

UAC ads in the Play Store show up either in Google Play Store keyword results or in a suggested apps section of the
Play Store.

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Screenshot: Google Play keyword search with two store ad results.

While UAC v 1.0 offered little control or visibility to marketers, Google’s new UAC product allows a bit more optimization
control. Marketers have control over the following levers for UAC:

■ Cost per conversion goal (event optimization, install optimization).

■ Bid adjustments for country/device.

■ Budget.

■ Geographic location (Country/state/city/zip).

■ Up to four ad text ideas (25 characters).

■ Up to 20 images (various sizes).

■ Up to 20 videos.

■ Placement exclusions.

Tips for optimizing UAC campaigns include:

01. Tap into Google’s new ad asset reporting interface to optimize your ad text, image, and videos. Google assigns
a category of performance to each ad text unit (one best, two good, one low) to indicate how often the ad is
served, from high to low, respectively. Optimize for ads labeled good or best, and continually swap out the low
performing ad.

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02. Test optimizing for different conversions, such as downloads vs. in-app event. This requires the target
conversion to have the checkbox “include in conversions column” checked. For in-app events, use data points
that are middle-of-funnel, or between the install and lower funnel KPIs to offer enough data points for the UAC
algorithm to optimize for. For example, optimize for a sign-up, rather than a subscription. Google recommends
25-50 conversion events per day at a minimum.

03. Set bid adjustments for devices and countries according to performance, and test different bid levels. Be aware
that video ads cost more to serve though have the largest inventory, so lower bid levels will preclude your
campaigns from running video ads.

Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads (ASA) are similar to ASC, but only show in the App Store search results page.

ASA offer more control and visibility than Google UAC and similar capabilities as traditional PPC campaigns, with the
exclusion of ad and creative control.

There are two types of ASA ads: a smaller, text-based ad unit and a larger, screenshot-based ad unit; marketers aren’t
able to control which ad unit appears in search results.

Screenshot: Apple Search Ads ad preview

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Screenshot: Apple Search Ads ad preview

Tips for optimizing ASA campaigns include:

■ Push the majority of impressions to exact match types, where control and reporting visibility is highest.

■ Use a CPA goal to prevent competitive keywords from converting expensive conversions.

■ Raise bid to increase your impression volume.

■ Use search match to discover new keywords, and add those keywords as exact matches.

■ Add negative keywords to your broad/search match targets, to improve TTR/CPA.

■ Ensure that your priority keywords are in your app’s metadata, to maximize relevance for those keywords.

In late 2017, Apple also introduced a new ad product, called Search Ads Basic, which functions similarly to Google’s
UAC ad product. Search Ads Basic enables advertisers to pay a maximum price per install, but is limited to $5,000 per
month in spend and does not provide additional control beyond budget, or visibility into search terms.

The Relationship Between Store Ads and ASO

To be successful in ASO, it is not necessary to also run Store Ads; however, Store Ads do offer a unique benefit to ASO,
and it is important to understand the overlap between the two app marketing channels.

SEARCH AD KEYWORD RANK BOOST

One of the unique benefits of Apple Search Ads is that they not only acquire new users via PPC-based marketing, but
they can also boost your organic keyword ranking for search terms. The only other marketing effort known to have
this effect is keyword spike campaigns (covered later on in the black hat section). The number of conversions necessary
to move keyword ranks will depend on the competition for that particular keyword and the current keyword rank of
your app. Inherently, your organic will not improve if your app metadata does not make your app eligible to rank for

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that keyword.

In order to improve your organic keyword ranks from your Search Ads campaign Installs, you must earn Installs from
search terms that match the organic keyword you are targeting. In other words: bidding on a broad match keyword or
using search match will not earn you conversions from one specific search. Try bidding on exact match types to ensure
your search terms will match the keyword you want to increase your rank for.

Beware: The number of rank spots by which your organic keyword ranks improve when earning Search
Ads Installs will depend on the competition for that keyword and your app’s eligibility and relevance to
rank for that keyword, based on your app’s metadata and historic performance (see the next section on
KWO for more information on this topic). The higher your app’s relevance for a keyword, and the weaker
the competition, the fewer Search Ads Installs your app will require to climb through the keyword ranks,
and vice versa.

ASO INFLUENCE ON SEARCH ADS RELEVANCE

The mutually beneficial relationship between Search Ads and ASO also operates in reverse. Apple keeps a score of the
relevance of your app for each keyword you bid on, or search term that your ads are eligible to display an ad for via
broad/search match. This relevance score is determined in large part by the keywords found in your app metadata.
And, unlike organic rankings, when it relates to Search Ads, keywords in an app’s description do count towards the
relevance score. Moreover, your metadata is the major determinant of what ads are shown to users for certain search
terms.

There is a relevance relationship between an Android app listing and Google Store Ads, however the relevance
relationship is less strong for Google Store Ads than it is in Apple Search Ads.

STORE ADS TAX

This final point is also important to understand, as it indicates the paradigm shift that has occurred with the proliferation
of Store Ads. While Store Ads have become a significant tool to help an ASO achieve results, Store Ads also represent
a type of tax that apps must pay. This is because Store Ads are also search results that, when present, supersede the
first organic result. This results in some percentage of downloads to be captured by the Store Ads app, rather than the
organic app results. Furthermore, brands must also defend their brand term, lest competitors use Store Ads to siphon
vital brand downloads away. There is as of yet no data on how many downloads go to Store Ads vs. organic results,
however, it is important to realize that store searches are no longer guaranteed to go to an organic app result, whether
#1 or other.

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“I’m rocking it with impressions, but I’m not getting as many downloads I want. How can I address this issue?”

It’s easy to view boosting the visibility of your app in the store by adding keywords or earning a store feature as the
sexier of the two main ASO activities outlined in the ASO stack. Yet, there can be no doubt that increasing conversions
is required in order to succeed in ASO.

As commented on throughout the book so far, without a stable or improving conversion rate, top-line impression gains
earned through increasing visibility don’t necessary yield long-term chances for success, given that 1) impressions
do not equal Installs, and 2) the algorithms of Apple and Google consider whether or not your app is able to convert
visibility into actual users as a factor in determining keyword ranks. If your app fails to convert users at a better rate
than other apps competing in the same top chart or keyword ranking positions, then your app’s success potential will
be limited.

Increasing conversions involves spending time and effort on conversion rate optimization (CRO), or raising the rate at
which your app listing is able to convert store views into downloads.

We will begin this chapter on conversion rate by introducing the Conversion Rate Optimization Loop, followed by
providing a few useful industry benchmarks to familiarize you with industry CRO standards. Then, we will explore in-
detail how to optimize each of the store assets listed in the ASO stack framework. Next, we will proceed with details
related to running and reporting on A/B tests, and wrap up by offering tips to properly measure the impact of your CRO
efforts.

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Introduction to CRO
Before introducing the Conversion Rate Optimization Loop framework, let us pause and run through a side-by-side
overview of each store asset. This visual overview will help to set the stage for learning to optimize each asset, and
provide a direct comparison of Apple and Google assets, helpful for managers of both platforms.

APP ICON, TITLE, DEVELOPER NAME, AND SUBTITLE

( S U B T I T L E A P P L E - O N LY )

Apple icon/title/subtitle left, Google icon/title/developer name right; Apple subtitle cross-fades to developer name and back when a
subtitle is set

A P P S H O R T D E S C R I P T I O N ( G O O G L E - O N LY )

Google short description above the “read more” link to the long description

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APP DESCRIPTION

APP SCREENSHOTS

Apple screenshots left, Google screenshots right

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A P P F E AT U R E G R A P H I C ( G O O G L E - O N LY )

Google feature graphic

A P P C U S T O M B A C K G R O U N D ( A P P L E - O N LY )

Apple custom background

APP VIDEO

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Apple video top, Google video bottom

WHAT’S NEW

Google What’s New left, Apple What’s New right

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P R O M O T E D I N - A P P P U R C H A S E ( A P P L E - O N LY )

The Conversion Rate Optimization Loop

Now that we have the store assets fresh in mind, let’s explore a framework useful for managing the process of improving
your app’s conversion rate. While optimizing assets like screenshots, preview videos, or an icon may sound intimidating,
the process of CRO is more methodical than magical— two parts science to one part art. This process, encapsulated
below in the CRO loop, includes six steps.

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1. CONDUCT RESEARCH
Proper research involves spending time studying your competitors, learning about your target market, and analyzing
your app’s performance, all with the purpose of learning what information/value propositions are the most important
to communicate through your app listing.

2. HYPOTHESIZE ON WHAT WILL IMPROVE RESULTS ACCORDING

TO YOUR KPI
Many people start with CRO by “throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.” That can sometimes work, but the best
CRO is guided by a hypothesis, or logical thought providing the idea with context and a supporting structure as to why
the idea is likely to succeed.

■ Hypothesis example: IF we use screenshots of features that have higher in-app engagement rates, THEN
potential users seeing these screenshots will consider our app more valuable and be more likely to download
it.

3. CRAFT MESSAGE / SELECT IMAGERY

The next step in the CRO loop is to create messaging (and select imagery if applicable) based on your research and
targeted by your hypothesis that will be conveyed vis-a-vis your assets.

4. CREATE ASSETS (NEW VARIATIONS)

After you have crafted the messaging and aligned on the imagery to be used, it’s time to let your inner creative shine.
When creating variations, ensure they are each:

■ Obviously unique: Changes too subtle for the average person to notice will be useless to test.

■ Informed by your research and hypothesis: You spent the time honing an assumption about what will
increase your conversion rate in order to direct your creative process; don’t abandon it now!

While basic CRO focuses on improving one particular asset at a time, some of the most powerful CRO gains can come
from improving the way that your elements convey your messaging as a whole. For example, your branding should
resonate through all elements in a cohesive way, and your most important or key differentiators should be mentioned
in both your screenshots and your description.

5. TEST YOUR NEW ASSETS TO SEE HOW WELL THEY PERFORM

Set up an A/B test or pre-post test to see which variations of your assets produce the best conversion rate. For each
test you run, ensure that you have an expected performance level (i.e. either a control variant also running or at least a
historically-informed understanding of what the conversion rate should be) in order to analyze the results and declare
performance to be better or worse than the expectation.

6. REPORT ON THE PERFORMANCE FROM EACH VARIANT ACROSS

YOUR TEST(S), AND ANALYZE THE RESULTS
Use the data to determine whether the test was conclusive. As much as possible, make sure to consider the statistical
significance of your test, so as not to make a decision too early or based on too little data, wherein the results may be

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of low integrity.

Based on your analysis, decide whether to apply the update to your live listing or whether extend, or re-run your test.
If the test asset is applied, analyze the performance after applying in order to confirm that the results are still positive
after being applied.

After concluding the test, return to the research phase of the CRO loop and proceed with the loop again.

While the initial round of research will likely be the most comprehensive and time-consuming, subsequent iterations
of the CRO Loop should not automatically skip the research stage and move to the hypothesize/craft messaging/create
assets stage; this is due to a couple of key reasons, including a need for:

01. Continuous assessment of the App Store environment : Per comments at the end of the visibility chapter, the
ASO environment is constantly changing due to the confluence of a multitude of factors. Continual research is
crucial to stay on top of the latest insights/trends and ensure that your messaging and assets are always well-
positioned relative to the competition.

02. Preventing stale assumptions: While assumptions are important to form in order to make progress, assumptions
should never be taken as immutable truths. A lack of willingness to test current assumptions is what leads to
stagnation and decline, and repeating the CRO loop from the research phase helps to mitigate this risk.

KPIs & Benchmarks

Before diving further into the CRO Loop, let’s take a moment to familiarize yourself with conversion rates, so that you
can have an objective benchmark against which to compare your app’s conversion rates. One caveat to consider is that
what is considered a ‘good’ conversion rate will differ depending on factors like an app’s category, monetization
model, and country. While benchmark data is more difficult to come across for iOS apps, Google actually provides a
benchmark conversion rate data directly in its Google Play Console, filtered specifically for other apps which share your
app’s country, category, and monetization model.

Screenshot of Google Play’s Conversion Rate Benchmarks

With regard to iOS conversion rate benchmarks, we tapped Attribution and App Store Optimization tool TUNE to help
us understand what a decent benchmark per app category is. As TUNE has a lot of iTunes Connect data from tens of
thousands of apps, they were able to provide aggregate anonymized conversion rates from Impression:Product Page
View and Impression:App Unit, on a category level and here is the result:

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TUNE provided us with average App Store Conversion rates (snapshot: July 2017, all apps)

The data from the TUNE benchmark study illuminates a few interesting points:

■ While games own the top impression-to-download rate (tied with educational apps), games also have a lower
CTR to product page, indicating a higher percentage of direct impression-sourced downloads.

■ Touching further on the above observation, we can see that there are several categories of apps which have a
higher impression conversion rate than click-through-rate. For such apps where users tend to install directly
from a search impression, rather than diving deeper into the product page to learn more, this means that the
search results page preview (icon, title, subtitle, price, ratings, screenshots 1-3, 1st preview video) is even more
important than other categories for conveying the app’s use case than the full product page.

■ Conversely, several categories of apps have a much higher CTR than CVR, such as shopping, medical, sports,
and weather. These apps appear to have a higher degree of difficulty in convincing users to download, and
may need to exert extra effort into CRO to succeed.

For more data, consider the results of this study on conversion rate benchmarks from Splitmetrics, which shows the
median App Store Page Conversion rates from A/B tests:

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A/B test conversion rate data by top categories from a Splitmetrics study [[Link]
page-conversion-rate/]

When it comes to selecting which assets to optimize, the big three visual elements are generally the most common (icon,
screenshots, video/feature graphic); but research from Store Maven [[Link]
conversion-rate/] and TUNE provide additional insights into what elements are the most effective at lifting conversion.

For example, Store Maven [[Link] has found that only 2% of

iOS users and 5% of Android users will read an app’s full description. Yet, according to research from Tune [https://
[Link]/blog/mobile-users-make-app-install-decisions-google-play-app-store/], the most important elements
of an app page in converting visitors into users are more textual than visual.

Estimated lift in conversion rate by specific asset optimization, per Store Maven

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Factors that lead users to install an app, per another TUNE study [[Link]
decisions-google-play-app-store/]

The variance of studies and experiences underscores an important tenet in CRO, which is that no element should be
ignored. While prioritization is important, a proper CRO strategy should ultimately touch all aspects of an app listing.

CRO Loop Step #1: Conduct Research

When researching, try to assimilate information from every relevant source that you can, in order to be well-informed
and avoid biases that can arise from studying solely one source of data. Here are some ideas for information that may
be useful when planning your CRO efforts:

RESEARCH SOURCE: YOUR TARGET MARKET

■ What features do they care about? Focus on concisely communicating these key factors in the user’s decision
making process.

■ What features do they not care about? Increase the effectiveness of your listing by skipping these features,
or placing them below other, more important features.

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■ What needs/wants do they have? Clearly communicate how your app addresses these, whether these are
features, fears, desires, or other consideration points.

■ What education level do they have? What vocabulary do they use? Speak to them in terms they understand
best.

Also, be sure to take a moment and read (not skim) a good handful of top user reviews. Take notes on the above, as well
as other comments that multiple users mention and think about how to integrate these into your messaging.

Take note of what assumptions you had and determine whether users even seem to care about those at all (use
keywords, inferences, and other forms of logic to connect user feedback to your assumptions). Be mindful that anything
which users don’t care about should be considered negative weight; that is, not only are they not considered valuable
to users, but they can also actively detract from the important bits by convoluting the whole of your messaging.

Pro tip: For best results, focus on those reviews that are marked most useful, or the most recent reviews.

Screenshot showing Google Play reviews, sorted by helpfulness

RESEARCH SOURCE: COMPETITORS

Naturally, as ASO is all about competing well in a zero-sum environment, you should also soak up insights from studying
your competitors’ listings.

■ What are their differentiators or unique selling points? Determine how to overcome these in order to put
your app ahead in the user’s decision process.

■ What is their rating? Determine whether your rating is a liability to improve, or an asset to tout.

■ What complaints do users mention in their reviews? Take advantage of issues that your competitors face to
gain points in the user’s decision making process.

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Also take some time and compare your elements to the styles of other apps that appear near yours in keyword search
results. Focus on the fact that your app will need to capture user attention better than these apps in order to earn that
user’s initial tap and/or install.

Screenshot of Mobile Action’s Timeline update. Watching closely what your competitors change can also help with identifying your
next hypotheses and tests.

RESEARCH SOURCE: YOUR APP’S PERFORMANCE

If your app is launched, tap into your own data to guide you to both the hotspots of user activity, as well as those sparse
areas of user activity. Both are important for informing you on how to position your app’s messaging. If your app is not
yet launched, study your website performance or signals from your other marketing or pre-launch activities. Consider
the following data points in your research:

■ Your conversion rate, and conversion rate vs. the benchmark (i.e., Google, or benchmark data from the
prior pages for Apple). This will serve as a barometer of how critical CRO is, and a yardstick for much potential
return you can expect from successful optimizations.

■ Your top-ranking, highest volume keywords. These keywords align with the intent that most users will have
in mind when they encounter your app listing. Keywords are like the question that users ask in order to find
relevant solutions in the form of apps.

■ App usage data: Review your app’s usage data to figure out which features or configurations are the most-
used or most-purchased, and use these insights to increase your app listing’s appeal to new users.

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Beware: Macro changes in your app’s seasonal patterns may affect your CRO efforts. If you have such
fluctuations in your app’s performance, try to account for them in your analysis.

Once you’ve got a good grip on your addressable market, the competitive landscape, and your app’s performance, you
can move on to the next phase of creating hypotheses.

CRO Loop Step #2: Hypothesize

Changing the background color of your screenshots to blue is an idea that could produce better or worse results. But
why? Without thinking through a hypothesis, you may not know why the results happened, only that they did, and you
will probably have to start from scratch when thinking about what else to try next.

But if you come up with a hypothesis and supporting evidence, then your job will be easier. Consider the following
example of a hypothesis and supporting evidence:

Hypothesis: “IF we add an image of happy people into the background color of our screenshots, THEN our conversion
rate will improve.”

Supporting evidence: This change will provide our app with a sense of realism, and help users to envision themselves
reaching the happy state of the people they see in your screenshots. By creating an emotional connection with our users
using images of people, our app will enjoy an advantage over other apps offering similar features, but no emotional
connection.

Not only does this exercise help us build confidence in our assumption, but it also sets us up for the next step, too. If
this test produces positive results, we can try to find other ways to increase the emotional connection or realism of our
app in user’s’ eyes, such as adding use cases to the description.

In order to come up with a hypothesis, observe different aspects of your app listing, your competitors’ app listings,
your marketing efforts, your customer service logs, or anything else that offers insight into your target market’s
interactions with apps and what they care about. Some of the following are some good examples of how research
can form hypotheses. Following the “if, then” format in writing hypotheses can help you keep the focus of ideation on
driving a desirable impact.

■ Scenario: Your icon or IAP icon.

Observation: Your icon is abstract, while other apps’ icons allude to their use cases. Hypothesis: If you add
imagery into your icons that hint at what your app does, then it will help users understand what your app does
or your IAP are offering more quickly.

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Left: A messenger (WeChat) with clear imagery for a messenger app. Right A messenger app (Wire), with less clear imagery.

■ Scenario: Your competitors’ screenshots or preview videos.

Observation: You and your competition all show a set of similar features, while users mention features in their
reviews that are not included in the general asset set. Hypothesis: If you show the same main features as your
competition, plus the most commonly mentioned additional feature by users, then this will assure users that
your app can do what other apps do, but offers even more value.
Observation: Your app doesn’t include the full in-app screenshot in your Play Store app listing screenshot,
while the top-ranking apps in your category generally display full-length screenshot. Hypothesis: If users can
see the full screenshot and are not left wondering what is hidden off-screen, then they will understand the
benefits better.

■ Scenario: Your screenshot captions.

Observation: Your font is very small, while some of your focus groups indicate that users don’t read your
captions and only comment on the look of your screenshots. Hypothesis: If you use larger, more legible fonts,
then users will be more willing and able to read them and grasp the value they convey.
Observation: A competitor uses two of your starred keywords in their screenshot captions. Hypothesis: If you
include keywords in your screenshot captions, then it will increase your app listing’s visual word recognition,
and thus conversion rate.

■ Scenario: Your short description or iOS promo text.

Observation: Top charting apps mention accolades, such as the total number of users and quotes from the
press. Hypothesis: If you mention social proof in your description opening, then users will be encouraged to
continue reading more and thus download.

■ Scenario: Your app’s rating.

Observation: Your app has a star rating of 3.5, while your competition all have ratings of 4 or higher.
Hypothesis: If you can earn a star rating of 4 or higher, then your app will no longer be disadvantaged relative
to competitors, and your conversion rate will improve.

CRO Loop Step #3: Craft Your Messaging / Select imagery

Crafting your messaging and selecting imagery involves distilling your research and hypothesis into a tangible form
that can be consumed by users. From the icon to the opening description hook to screenshots and captions to feature
graphic overlaid text and background imagery, the messaging/imagery is what answers the user’s question of “why
should I care?”

Here are five examples of messaging that apps oftentimes lean on:

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01. Social proof (e.g. total number of users)

Wish using social proof in its description

02. Branding (e.g. a journey of self-discovery)

Sarahah offering a branded description opening

03. Ease of use (e.g. one tap to do x)

Chase using an ease of use messaging in its description

04. Pricing (e.g. “cheapest” or “affordable”)

Groupon conveying pricing in its screenshot caption

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05. Engaging (e.g. the most fun game)

Tinder using an engaging first screenshot caption

While messaging can be added to any of the elements of an App Store listing, the best apps use messaging that spans
multiple elements to tell a more cohesive story.

When crafting your messaging, here are some general tips to keep in mind:

■ Offer users data points that describe your app in the smallest number of characters possible. Social proof (e.g.
total trips taken) is a quintessential example of using data points to sell an app.

■ Use vocabulary that users are looking for and understand, such as your best-ranking keywords.

■ Use questions, an engaging brand voice, problem statements, or other methods to entertain and engage
users. This can also include the use of emoji.

■ Test whether questions vs. statements have a higher conversion rate for your app.

■ Pick a hook that stands out when compared to other apps that share visibility for the same keywords or top
charts. Try using a description with more simple vocabulary, or saying the same thing with half as many words.

When selecting imagery, here are some general tips to keep in mind:

■ For lifestyle apps, using images of people or scenes to convey a sense of realism can score improvements.

■ Make sure not to obscure in-app screenshots with designs or other visuals. This can set off the user’s
suspicion that you have something to hide, and make them more cautious of downloading your app.

■ Identify imagery that can help convey information on what your app does or allude to a major use case.

■ Use custom design such as shadows, gradients, or hidden imagery. This can make visual designs appear more
impressive, and score points with users.

■ If your messaging is the strongest point, use abstract visuals as opposed to bold or real imagery, to help the
user focus on your messaging and not the imagery.

■ Test whether asset design that is subtle or contrasting does better for your app.

■ Test using words or letters in your visuals; word overlays can work incredibly well as many times, messaging

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overlaid in a visual element is noticed before messaging buried in text elements.

Talkatone overlaying “Call and text for free” in their feature graphic in the Google Play Store.

CRO Loop Step #4: Create Your Assets

After crafting your message and selecting imagery, consider what elements of your app listing are best suited to convey
your message, and whether you can connect messaging across multiple elements for better cohesion. Each element
is naturally very different, and as such presents an opportunity to speak to your message from different angles, which
can increase the power of your message as a whole.

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A Case Study in: Cohesive Messaging

Left: Whatsapp

WhatsApp conveys its connected message through

the short description and screenshots simply
by repeating the word “simple” and “real time;”
though WhatsApp could have used an image to
convey the message of personal, or else use the
phrase “real life” to describe other aspects of a
person’s life, such as photos of travels.

Right: Venmo

Venmo also touches on its message of simple, as

well as connecting finances between people, both
in the short description and second screenshot.

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Left: Airbnb

Here, Airbnb conveys a strong message of

experiences in unique locales, delivered by
the phrases “unforgettable trips” and “unique
homes” and the interesting loft and intriguing
open-water experience. Airbnb also departs from
the traditional, beautiful tropical/city imagery in
favor of a very unique home, which may or may
not strongly communicate the message of unique
enough, and as such represents a great A/B test to
try.

Right: Moji Maker

Mojimaker also takes a more direct approach

by repeating the accolades that it has acquired
in both the first screenshot and the description.
Additionally, the caption connects with the imagery
of the claw attaching parts of the emojis, underlining
the messaging of creation and customization.

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Left: Bleacher Report

Bleacher Report achieves coherence by repeating

similar messaging, informing users of the app’s
focus of putting their teams’ news, scores, and
information first.

In the following sections, we will dive deeper into optimizations for each of the store assets. Additionally, we will begin
each asset subchapter with a note of knowledge that applies to both Apple and Google assets (if applicable), and then
provide specific knowledge on the Apple App Store-specific asset, followed by the Google Play Store-specific asset.

Store Asset: App Title

While the title is 99% of the time used primarily for keyword ranking optimization, the test of a good ASO is whether a
keyword-optimized title can still effectively convey the main value proposition of the app, in order to boost conversion
rate. Unfortunately, you cannot A/B test the title in the App Store, nor in the Play Store, and must use a 3rd party A/B
testing tool; we provide several options for A/B testing tools in the tools chapter.

Pro tip: You can hack an A/B test together for your title by releasing a new title live into a localization
that shares the same language as your core market, but is a second or third-tier market. Measure the
change in performance via a pre-post comparison and use the results to directionally forecast how the
change would affect a title change in your core market.

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Robinhood is by now a strong brand in the U.S., but still a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing. Adding ‘Free Stock Trading’ not
only helps with searches but also with conversions.

Identify keywords that are most recognized and valued by users by referring to your user research, user reviews, or
performance marketing campaign data.

Pro tip: You can also run an advertisement test to inform your title testing. For example, if a Facebook
Ad running with “Robinhood - Free Stock Trading” as a headline outperforms “Robinhood - Trade stocks
for free” and the former also makes sense for keyword optimization, use the first as your app title.

In general, when optimizing your app’s title, ensure that the keywords that are most useful in describing your app are
located earlier in the title, and thus most safe from truncation (i.e. seek visual word recognition).

A Case Study in: Writing App Titles with

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal provides a good example of optimizing an app’s title for visual word recognition by placing top keywords
earlier in the title.

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Screenshot showing MyFitnessPal’s title

By placing the top keyword before the brand name (Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal), this app increases
the perception of its relevance for top keywords (calorie counter, diet, diet tracker). Additionally, when the app appears
as a result in auto-fill results for those top keywords, the app can capture user attention more quickly by more closely
matching the user’s search term, based on the fact that users read words from left-to-right.

Screenshot showing auto fill searches for calorie counter, with MyFitnessPal appearing second

Apple Asset: App Title

The Apple title has a larger font than the subtitle, and thus is more likely for a user to read first.

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Furthermore, the app title is not as prone to truncation in App Store Browse impressions as the subtitle.

Pro tip: The number of characters before an organic App Store Search title truncates in has been
observed to be between 18 and 20 characters.

Screenshot: App Store U.S. paid apps top chart depicting truncation of app titles and subtitles

Google Asset: App Title

An Android app’s title at 50 characters offers more space than the title of an iOS app (not including the subtitle). Yet
an Android app’s title is also more vital than in iOS for explaining to users what your app is all about from a keyword
search, given the absence of screenshots and a subtitle in a Google Play search impression:

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Screenshot of a Google keyword search. While the first three titles show a relation to scrum, the fourth title has no relevance.

Apple Asset: Subtitle (Apple-Only)

Offering an additional 30 characters and appearing anywhere the app title appears, the subtitle is useful for both
ranking in KWO, as well as CRO. Again, like the title, the most important factors for subtitle CRO involve finding the right
keywords and avoiding truncation. A difference between the title and subtitle is that subtitles tend to not truncate for
longer in App Store Search impressions than titles, yet truncate sooner than titles in App Store Browse impressions.

SoundCloud’s companion app for creators makes use of the subtitle to make it clear to App Store Browsers that it’s not its main

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listener app.

For the subtitle (and title), if possible try to optimize your letters for those that are thinnest, such as using “Is” vs. “Ms.” For example,
using this method enables app Visage to earn a fully untruncated 27 characters in an App Store Search impression with “Essential
beauty shot maker,” while app GasBuddy earns a fully untruncated 24 characters in an App Store feature impression with “For the
perfect pit stop,” while Footballguys Fantasy Football earns a paltry 18 characters in a top chart impression with “Dominate YOUR
Fant.”

Screenshot depicting Visage (left) earning a 27 character subtitle, GasBuddy (middle) earning 24, and Footballguys (right) earning 18
characters

Beware: The length of characters allowed before an App Store subtitle truncates is different depending
on whether the impression is a top chart, feature, or search impression.

Google Asset: Short Description (Google-Only)

This 80 character text field appears before the user expands the listing to view the long description and is vital for
encouraging users who learn by reading to download or continue on to the long description.

Hulu short description with a “READ MORE” link leading to the long description.

While short descriptions are important for both keyword ranking and increasing conversion, ASOs most often consider

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the main purpose of the short description as boosting conversion rate. That said, including a few very important
keywords in the short description can be a way to improve your app’s ranking and raise conversion rates by explaining
what your app is in terms that users are searching for.

Short descriptions are also well-equipped for conveying key messaging, given that they are centrally located above the
fold in an Android app page; by contrast, screenshots are not ideally-located, as users must scroll down in the Android
listing to see the screenshots, and the feature graphic is partially hidden under the status bar.

Screenshot depicting the short description sitting above the fold in the app page.

Other Metadata Store Assets: What’s New

Similar to the number and specifics of languages an app supports, an app with a steady history of updates can be a
major signal of quality (or vice versa), not just by the cadence of updates, but by the care put into wording each What’s
New-note. Additionally, in the App Store each What’s New is logged in the Version History, giving users a window into
what the app developer has spent time addressing in each version. A version history filled with “bug fixes” tells a story
of an app that is probably less valuable and problem-prone than an app that has a rich history of feature additions and
other significant improvements.

Try some of these tactics to get the most out of your What’s New text:

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■ Explain what new functionality was added and why people should
care.

■ If possible, explain what issues were fixed in “bug fixes.” If a bug that
many users were pained by was fixed, tell people that a major issue
was addressed.

■ Comfort new users and existing users alike by affirming your

commitment to updates (offer a cadence of updates if you have one).

■ Offer appreciation to people for using your app.

■ Offer witty or funny comments; such comments might even go viral!

For example, search on twitter for example for “Medium iOS update”
to see what the app Medium is doing with their What’s New texts and
how they are shared.

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■ Be clear and concise— use as few words as possible to focus attention

on what matters.

Apple Asset: What’s New

In Apple, the What’s New-section occupies a location that is likely to be read by inquisitive users and can indicate to
users the activity of the development team and thus how much the team cares about the app and how often they
make improvements (along with the version history, which is a catalog of prior entries of What’s New). In the App Store,
What’s New can also be updated without requiring an app update. The What’s New also shows in the updates section
of the App Store, and can easily be read by users who have downloaded your app.

In iOS 11, updates are shown with high prominence In iOS 10.3 and under, updates were located just
to users who have already installed your app below the description element.

Google Asset: What’s New

The What’s New-section in Google does not rank for keywords and only appears in listings for users who have already
downloaded the app, pegging this element as one of the least important elements for CRO.

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Screenshot: What’s New in Google Play appearing just between the Short description & “Read More” button if the app is installed.

Other Metadata Store Assets: Full/Long App Description

Most app descriptions include some combination of the following sections. Try creating each of these sections and
testing different variations and locations of each section in your long description:

■ Description opening hook:

■ General description of the app:

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■ What’s to love about the app:

■ Features of the app:

■ App user reviews/PR quotes (Oksana Iarosevych points out that this is against policy in Google Play):

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■ App usage data accolades:

■ How the app works:

■ App use cases:

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■ App user FAQs:

■ Company administrative information (privacy, subscriptions, etc.):

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Also, consider some of the following A/B test-ready ideas for using your app’s description to improve your conversion
rate:

■ Test differences in font formatting/section headings/white spacing/content density.

■ Add, remove, or change the order of major sections.

■ Include social media/support links.

■ Use an active voice when describing features and try using use cases that resonate with your target market’s
intent. For example, instead of the sentence “grocery list items,” use the sentence “add items to your grocery
list, like milk, eggs, and bread.”

Apple Asset: Full Description

The first several lines of your description will show under your promo text (if set), and before the “more” button.

Optimizing your first five lines continues to be the most important section of the Apple description, but the full
description is also important to a key subset of potential users; these are the people who are engaged enough to want
to learn more about your app beyond the screenshots/first five lines, and some that will read it in its entirety. Crucially,
these people:

01. Are high-quality users: If they are actually investing this much time to decide what app to download, their
overall value as a user is probably higher than the non-brand keyword searcher who hits download within three
seconds.

02. Are not quite ready to download your app: They want to know what else your app does beyond what was
provided in the screenshots. Your full description, therefore, may be vital in convincing these users to
download.

The main goal of description optimization in Apple, where keywords do not rank, is to strike the right balance of
conveying your messaging, while doing so in the most concise manner possible. This difference represents an advantage
that an App Store description possesses over a Google Play description, as the App Store description can be written
freely, without the pressure of inserting keywords for ranking.

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Google Asset: Long Description

While the Google Play app description is the same number of characters as the App Store’s (4,000), the Google Play
description is far more important to increasing visibility than the App Store description because the Google Play
description ranks for keywords.

Yet a significant advantage in CRO that Google Play descriptions possess over App Store descriptions centers around
text formatting.

Developers can use rich formatting (HTML) and emojis to make the Google Play app description stand out of the crowd
in searches and in your page view. For example, Boomerang [[Link]
app-store-optimization/] saw a 16% conversion uplift when they formatted their Google Play Store description. While
we haven’t seen this high conversion uplift on the description before, we did see conversion increases by making clever
use of emojis or rich formatting.

You can also use rich formatting to bring out the structure in your Play Store description by accentuating chapter
headings, for instance.

Additionally, you can also use rich text and emojis to stand out in the crowd; even in your Google Play Title (see
Wattpad Free Books) and developer name you can use emojis to increase conversion, although you won’t be able to
run A/B tests on these two assets.

Beware: Having emoji in your developer name or title, will disqualify you from running Google AdWords
campaigns.

Examples of emojis in long descriptions

ASSET EMOJI EXAMPLE

Title

Short description

Developer name

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Examples of emojis in long descriptions

ASSET EMOJI EXAMPLE

Description

What’s new

When it comes to formatting, a lot more is possible, but only with the long description.

Screenshot showing a developer failing to use formatting in their live short description.

Further Reading: To learn more about how HTML formating in the Google Play long description works,
check out this Phiture blog post [[Link]
with-rich-formatting-and-emojis-5f50ff354e5f].

Other Store Assets: Promotional Text (Apple-Only)

When present, the 170 character promo text element will show on top of the first several lines of the Apple description,
and can be edited between new versions. While screenshots usually earn the most focus in CRO, don’t forget that all
users who visit your app’s product page will see your promo text.

Use promo text to offer information that gets users even more excited about your app, such as upcoming features,

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special pricing, or other time-sensitive messaging points.

Example of App Store promo text; image source: 9to5mac [[Link]

gallery-screenshots/]

Other Store Assets: Developer Name

For companies with existing brand awareness, the developer name can be a way to increase conversion rates by
leveraging that brand equity. Additionally, a well-chosen developer name can also entice people to tap and view the
rest of the developer’s apps. While the developer name is very difficult to change, once set in the App Store, it is very
easy to change in the Google Play Store.

Beware: For smaller developers who use a personal account to distribute an Apple app, this personal
account may likely be less trusted than a good brand.

A couple other tips for leveraging your developer name for CRO include:

■ Considering the pros and cons of adding a legal business entity type to the developer name. For example, a
GmbH is internationally less familiar than an LLC/Inc.

■ Exploring using alternative methods for CRO, such as using emojis in your developer name in Google Play.

Other Apple Assets: Developer Page

Developer pages in Apple do not offer much control in terms of optimization; but the most recently updated app
appears at the top of the total apps list, and developer pages that include an arrangement of the developer’s app icons
can show for branded searches above the first organic result, but below Search Ads results.

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Screenshot depicting a developer page result Screenshot depicting Rovio’s developer page
showing for a keyword search with custom background for app types and
showcasing of Rovio’s latest release.

Other Google Assets: Developer Name

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Screenshot showing the Google Play Store Screenshot showing the Google Play developer
page for Expedia page for Expedia

with developer widget

Developers can upload the following elements to their developer page:

■ A developer page feature graphic.

■ A developer page short description.

■ A developer page icon.

■ An app to feature in the developer page.

Optimizing the developer page is very much to the Android app developer’s best interest, leading to free cross-
promotional downloads as well as an increased credibility with users that can help acquire a user’s initial download.

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Other Apple Assets: Custom Product Page Background (Apple-

Only)
For select top developers, Apple has given a bit more creative freedom in designing the App Store page. If you’re one
of the lucky ones, you’ll be asked by Apple to provide ‘Product Page art assets’ and with those you’ll be able to add a
feature graphic but also a background color.

PRODUCT PAGE ART ASSET NEEDED

Apple will request that developers: “Please provide evergreen artwork with generic elements for your app’s product
page. Include a title treatment/logo within the file that is scalable both up and down as a Photoshop ‘Smart Object.’
Please note that the primary background color in your featuring art template will match the product page color.”

While Apple got rid of the background color, you can still define a custom background very much like the Google Play
feature graphic, shown at the top of the app product page.

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Facebook Messenger takes a branded Uber follows in the same vein as Facebook
approach with its custom background, using Messenger, using a safe branded approach of
the brand logo and a gradient background an abstract design, a gradient background,
with smaller icons used in the product. This and the Uber logo.
is one of the safer approaches for a large
brand to using a custom background, as
experimenting with more appealing designs
carries the risk of alienating a subset or
multiple subsets of users, and thus backfiring
for larger brands.

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Amazon approaches realism from a more Lyft, by contrast to Uber, uses a more
practical sense, rather than a people-based engaging real-world visual to pursue realism
emotional angle, thus limiting its exposure and an emotional connection with users.
to risk of alienation. This is a good middle- As a second-place competitor looking to
ground option for larger brands still looking usurp Uber, this strategy (higher risk of user
to make a stronger first impression on users. alienation, higher reward) makes sense for
Lyft.

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Pinterest also opts for the realism approach, in addition to introducing users to the UX of Pinterest pins. Yet, Pinterest’s
image could be optimized better by focusing the images in each board into the space provided by Apple, as the images
on the edges are impossible to decipher. And, while Pinterest does not use an image of a person or people, its use of
food (and a more exploratory dish at that) also runs the risk of alienating people with non-compatible tastes.

Visual Word Recognition

Taking a step back from assets, let’s return to the concept of visual word recognition, which is a very important concept
for CRO.

What makes up your app’s visibility is many individual impressions across the App Store as a whole, from featured
spots, to top chart spots, to results for keyword searches, and product page views. Yet, for most apps the majority of
organic visibility and downloads come from a handful of high-volume, highly ranked keywords.

Optimizing your app’s conversion rate for your top opportunity keywords is low hanging fruit and often an easy way to
unlock more downloads with minimal effort.

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Screenshot of a Google Play keyword search for “diet.” Each app applies some form of connection with the keyword “diet,” either in the
icon imagery, developer name, or the app title.

The first step in optimizing your app for top keywords is to figure out what your top keywords are. This involves tracking
all keywords relevant to your app using an ASO tool, and then 1) returning to your keyword search term backlog to pick
the most important terms and 2) filter those keywords down to those with a rank of 10 or better (or even top five). This
shows you which of your top keywords are ranked well enough to actually capture downloads from users, and more
specifically those that have the highest contribution margin to your overall downloads. In other words: find and focus
on using the keywords that the largest number of potential users are likely to find your app using.

Keep two caveats in mind when performing this research:

01. Keyword ranks do fluctuate, so it can be useful to use a seven-day average when running this analysis.

02. Keyword search volume also fluctuates, so do a live search and check the search popularity history on a
keyword to ensure that each top keyword is a consistently high-volume keyword.

Optimizing for top keywords doesn’t have to be a standalone strategy that replaces your branding or other messaging.
The goal is to use keywords that people are searching, and thus are looking to see that your app provides an answer/
solution for, in the same way that dynamic ads in AdWords work to improve CTR. Your job as the ASO is to present
the user with a silver platter reply that your app is the best solution to the need that they have, and using the same

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language as the user has is a great way to do that.

Screenshot: Mobile Action keyword ranks

Pro tip: The takeaways from the ASO Stack blog post [[Link]
play-update-reveals-keyword-installs-to-developers-f5cf2e384eb3] announcing Google Play’s organic
search term data visibility applies to optimizing for visual word recognition, too. Now app marketers
can use these insights to determine which search terms drive most users to their store listing, and
optimize for recognition of these key words and phrases in the store listing.

A Case Study in: Visual Word Recognition with

Keepsafe

Photo locker app Keepsafe offers a visual asset-based case study in optimization for visual word recognition.

Here we can see that the top keywords for Keepsafe include “photo lock,” “photo locker,” “private photos,” and
“album vault,” and that these keywords are included across the screenshot captions as well as the text description, in
prominent position. By taking this simple action, Keepsafe increases the chances of both capturing searcher attention,
and immediately assuring them that Keepsafe is a relevant app for their needs.

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Compare this approach with that of “burying the lead,” or forcing users to sift through other, less relevant descriptor
keywords, which don’t relate as directly to the user’s keyword search (i.e. negative weight content, from the Research
CRO Loop step).

Revenue Model
Also beyond the frame of store assets, yet having a significant influence on your conversion rate is the revenue model
that your app uses.

Screenshots depicting how different pricing models certainly have different levels of friction to converting users.

In addition to considering the pros and cons of each main revenue model from a business model standpoint, also
consider the pros and cons from a conversion rate and conversion eligibility standpoint.

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Conversion Rate and Conversion Eligibility Standpoint PROs and CONs

REVENUE MODEL PROS CONS

■ Low friction to user ■ Requires commerce-based

acquisition conversion business model

■ Does not make apps eligible

for top paid/grossing charts
E-commerce ■ Does not allow apps to
promote up to 20 IAPs in
Apple, which can provide
more real estate for improving
conversion rates

■ Low friction to user ■ Users tend to dislike ads

acquisition conversion ■ Does not make apps eligible
for top paid/grossing charts
Free download, with ads
■ Does not allow apps to
promote up to 20 IAPs in
Apple

■ Low friction to user ■ Users may write negative

acquisition conversion reviews about keeping too
many features paid
Free download, with In-App ■ Allows apps to be listed in the
Purchases top grossing chart

■ Allows apps to promote up to

20 IAPs in Apple

■ Low friction to user ■ Users tend to dislike ads

acquisition conversion ■ Users may write negative
Free download, with In-App ■ Allows apps to be listed in the reviews about developers
Purchases and ads top grossing chart both charging for IAP and
showing ads
■ Allows apps to promote up to
20 IAPs in Apple

■ Allows apps to be listed in the ■ Introduces the highest level

top paid and grossing chart of friction to user acquisition
conversion
Paid download
■ Unlocks ability to bundle apps
■ Does not allow apps to
promote up to 20 IAPs in
Apple

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Conversion Rate and Conversion Eligibility Standpoint PROs and CONs

REVENUE MODEL PROS CONS

■ Allows apps to be listed in the ■ Introduces the highest level

top paid and grossing chart of friction to user acquisition
conversion
Paid download with In-App
■ Unlocks ability to bundle apps
Purchases
■ Users may write negative
■ Allows apps to promote up to
reviews about developers
20 IAPs in Apple
both charging for download
and features

Pro tip: Apps that are paid downloads can test lowering the price as part of a limited time discount;
this is an easy and temporary way to increase downloads and increase your app’s ranking while leaving
your app’s expected price point unaffected.

Apple Assets: In-App Purchases (Apple-Only)

Let’s return to the discussion of assets with In-App Purchases.

In-App Purchases have significant importance in both KWO and CRO terms, given that up to 20 IAPs can be promoted
into an app’s product page and search results, along with an icon, name, and description.

■ The IAP name can be as long as 30 characters.

■ The IAP description as long as 45 characters.

■ The IAP icon is allowed as a 1024x1024 PNG or JPEG file.

Preliminary best practices for optimizing your IAP for CRO involve:

■ Creating an icon which is appealing, understandable as a visually-oriented descriptor, and can convince a user
to continue reading about the IAP or the app itself, just like the regular app icon.

■ Using the right name that is descriptive and appealing enough to convince a user to buy or read more, just
like the app title.

■ A description, which must explain the value proposition and use case of the In-App Purchase, just like the
description, but with 99% fewer words.

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Pro tip: Try using the most popular keywords that relate to that IAP in the description to increase
visual word recognition. Also, try using bite-sized data points that help users to understand why their
experience using your app will be better after unlocking your IAP. For example, try social proof (e.g.
numbers on how many people buy that IAP), a comparison of what the IAP provides compared to normal
app use (e.g. 100x more gems than are earned in a typical day), or indicate that the IAP was featured
by Apple.

Screenshot depicting 8fit’s In-App Purchase result in the search results.

Pro Tip: Your app’s icon will always inhabit the bottom-left corner of your IAP icon, so ensure that any
imagery in the bottom-left corner of your IAP icon is okay to be obscured

A Case Study in: Naming In-App Purchases

Here we can see a text-based example of a more descriptive and less descriptive set of IAPs for two competing apps:

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Tinder and Bumble. While Bumble offers no differentiation in their IAP names, Tinder allows users to understand more
about what each purchase is, just by looking at the name. That said, only some of Tinder’s IAP names are clear and
descriptive, and also require users to know what a super like or boost is.

Bumble’s IAP are all named the same. Some of Tinder’s IAP have more descriptive names.

In-App Purchases do not show in the Google Play Store page, and thus have little impact on CRO.

A Case Study in: In-App Purchase Icon Design

Apple’s new promoted IAPs do not have their own videos or screenshots and have descriptions limited to 45 characters.
This means that the promoted IAP icon must play a big role in conveying meaning about what users can expect from
your IAP. This is made even more important by the fact that promoted IAPs drive revenue while free downloads do not.
Here are a few examples of unique IAP icon design to help your own creative process.

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APP IN THE AIR

App in the Air’s promoted IAP icon offers a bit of visual-intent recognition vis-a-vis the globe image in the background.
It also uses a circular or cyclical visual representation, depicting the idea of a subscription, which is a nice subtle touch.
Using a number may appeal to users (anecdotally, Incipia has seen numbers help improve conversion rate; numbers
are also a great way to convey a powerful takeaway in a small package). However, the number one could be confused
for a one time purchase, a one month’s subscription or something else. The icon also misses the mark as it doesn’t
relate to the description of the IAP, either.

MY LITTLE PONY
My Little Pony’s icon combines the strength of character recognition with the visually-supported idea that users will
get all the characters with this IAP. Using glitter/sparkles in the design and other tricks (two characters have different
expressions) make this icon fun and engaging too, and the icon maintains the brand by placing the brand logo into
the bottom-right, given that the logo is too small to notice in the regular app icon. However, what’s happening in the
bottom-right of the IAP icon is unintelligible at this size with the logo atop it, and also adds unnecessary visual noise to
the icon. Overall though, for games especially, icons (whether app icons or IAP icons) should be fun and grab attention
just like a toy in the store aisle (and make you look/read more), and this one does well.

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WATTPAD

Like App in the Air’s icon, Wattpad’s IAP chooses to associate with the purchase timing of the IAP (one month), rather
than the content of the IAP. The star is used as an extra bit of flair to liven up the icon, or perhaps relate to the free
extra 7 days.

From the IAP icon design of Wattpad and App in the Air emerges an illustration of one of the emerging two main
approaches to promoted IAP icon design: basic time period-based vs complex use case-based. This is similar to the
basic branded logo/tagline + gradient background vs complex use case design patterns of Android feature graphic
design. The time period-based design is easier and less risky to execute on, and will likely become the more popular

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of the two designs. The case-based design will require a more experienced designer and an app that has more than
one benefit, but may yield better performance if done right.

JOURNI

Journi’s icon opts for the use-case route, attempting to illustrate in visual form each of the purchase goodies. By
using a simple gradient background, two colors and concentrating the design in the center of the icon to leave plenty
of padding, Journi fends off the complexity danger of this use case-based design pattern.

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CANDY CRUSH SAGA

Candy Crush’s IAP icon is a great example of visually explaining what is contained in a bundled IAP. While promoting
an In-App Purchase that bundles multiple benefits into a “premium” or “pack” purchase makes it harder to explain, the
icon can be a great way to convey meaning not offered in the promoted IAP name or description. Candy Crush also goes
one step further by using numbers to describe the different amounts of the multiple individual benefits included in the
IAP - a great touch and one that lines up well with the description!

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Store Assets: App Icon

One of the most important aspects of CRO in general is to include competitor apps in your research, rather than solely
creating an icon in isolation. Yet, this is even more important with regard to icons due to the fact that many times icons
are the only visual element in an app preview (e.g. top charts in either store and the Android keyword searches).

Analyzing how your icon is positioned against the other app icons is the best tactic to help you determine how to
make your icon more appealing and win over visitors with more success than your competition.

There are many different styles of icon design, yet consider these five distilled commonalities for optimizing your app
icon design:

01. Color: Try a background fill, contrasting font versus background, common colors among competition.

02. Visual associations: Explore using one dominant visual that associates with the app’s main use case.

03. Quality Design: Tap into a designer’s touch, such as shadows, gradients, decoration, and more subtle
associations.

04. Use words or letters: Some apps use words or letters in their icon; most are branded (e.g., Facebook or Twitter),
but not all.

05. Generally, gravitate towards a singular design focus. Most apps will benefit more from a single, simple visual
focus; however some apps such as photos and video may also benefit from a more complex design, so long as

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it is polished and of a high-quality.

App Icon
While important for apps earning a large volume of App Store Browse impressions, the 1024x1024 App Store icon is
otherwise less important than the Google Play Store icon for search impressions.

Your app’s icon will also appear in each of your promoted In-App Purchases, increasing the visibility and importance
of having a clear, understandable app icon.

Google Assets: App Icon

The app icon (at 512x512 pixels) is the most visible (and the only visual) element in a Google Play keyword search,
making an Android app’s icon much more important for CRO than an iOS app’s icon. For this reason and due to operating
system stylistic differences, app icons in the Google Play Store are often more visually complex than App Store icons,
in order to help show off relevant imagery that describes the app’s main purpose to searchers and help differentiate
an app from its competition.

A Case Study on: Icon Design

For the Play Store sports scores apps here, we see much more letter branding vs. distinct associations; yet three apps
do make heavy use of the common sports representations of a trophy, whistle (if you look closely you can see a well-
placed football as well), and cheering fan silhouette. Additionally, we can see several icons using actual words, beyond
the name of the developer. Color leans toward red or blue and most apps use colored background fills as well to
contrast against white font. These apps are fairly distinct, yet they miss out on the opportunity to make an association
with the main use case here (scores/numbers).

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While these App Store travel app icons are mostly dominated by large app brands, there still are still two common
themes: locomotion (a rabbit and planes) and the well-known location pin; the Google Trips briefcase is also
a recognizable travel association, while the Travelocity snowflakes or stars seem to be more a branding play than
immediately recognizable as travel or flights. There are plenty of travel associations that could be tested for a non-
brand app in this category, such as a globe, car, passport, sign, and even palm tree. What is also clear here though, is
that nearly all of these travel app icons are colorful, to elicit positive, excited visions of gallivanting around the world.

Google Assets: Feature Graphic (Google-Only)

The feature graphic (a 1024x500 banner) is located in the top-center of your app’s listing after a visitor taps to view
more of your App Store listing. Feature graphics are a favorite for Android CRO, given their prominent location and
the fact that they are an open canvas with which app developers or marketers can do what they like. While many apps
use a simple brand logo as the focus of their feature graphic, consider using your feature graphic as the place to let
your creative juices flow.

Beware: Per a 2018 Google Play redesign, the feature graphic will reportedly disappear from the Play
Store page, making this asset no longer a consideration for conversion rate optimization for users with
updated versions of the Play Store app, and making screenshots and the video more valuable.

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A Case Study on: Feature Graphic Designs

THE WEATHER CHANNEL

The Weather Channel’s feature graphic offers a visual that is immediately recognizable by users familiar with weather
apps, which is the weather radar map. Not only is this a recognizable allude to an important feature of a weather
category app, but it is also vivid and attracts the user’s attention (though at this stage, the eye-catching appeal is less
important given the user has already chosen to learn more about TWC’s app after clicking in from an earlier impression).
Including the icon in the middle of the feature graphic is, in our opinion, a wasted opportunity to either keep the design
clean by using the radar map alone, or offer something new to the user (given the same icon is located just below the
feature graphic).

The Weather Channel could also consider the following additional tests to improve CRO:

■ Add an overlaid one-three word caption (key to this would be ensuring it was fully legible on the variable
background); this will determine whether adding messaging is useful in converting users.

■ Test different weather features (e.g., forecast, applicable custom content, etc.); this will determine which

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feature best converts users.

■ Add social proof and reinforce how many downloads TWC has earned, or other accolades; this will make the
app seem appealing enough to download.

8FIT

8fit’s feature graphic choice is an excellent one for an app that ties heavily into a lifestyle use case, which is the split/
screen shot. Here 8fit hammers home two associations in the visitor’s mind of 8fit’s main purpose: helping people plan
meals and workouts. 8fit’s screenshots also follow the split/screen design, showing the ever-popular in the fitness
world before and after shot. 8fit also includes subtle branding by watermarking their logo into the top-left corner of the
graphic, which is a nice touch.

8fit could also consider the following additional tests to improve CRO:

■ Try a split/screen of a before and after transformation, just in case users don’t scroll to the screenshot; this
will determine whether the before/after transformation association is key for converting users.

■ Use different models for the left, workout-side and the right, meal-side; this will figure out which model best
converts users.

■ Overlay messaging onto the top of the graphic, such as “lose weight the healthy way,” “plans tailored to you,”
or “workout & meal coaching;” this could make the app seem appealing enough to download.

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TRIVIA CRACK

When it comes to feature graphics for games, the sky is really the limit in terms of creativity and what goes into this app
banner slot, so critiquing game feature graphics is a difficult task. Trivia Crack here chose a fun and playful, branded
approach.

Trivia Crack could also consider the following additional tests to improve CRO:

■ Test holiday-theming in the graphic, like the icon; this can indicate to users that the app is updated/maintained
enough for the developer to consider the current seasonality, thus indicating the app is maintained and not
left to grow outdated.

■ Add a level or stopwatch time number above each character’s head, (functionality pertaining to the game);
this will determine whether the challenging aspect of the game helps convert users better.

■ Test adding more characters such as the popcorn box and knight characters, or including fewer characters;
this could potentially increase the appeal of the design by making it more engaging, or less busy respectively.

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TED

TED applies a variation on the real-world photo feature graphic by making a mosaic of photos surrounding the TED
logo and slogan (yet it’s worth noting that this mosaic style is the branded pre-roll for each TED Talk). This approach
is interesting, yet it is also a bit busy for a small screen and thus represents a departure from traditional feature
graphic designs and may possibly cause confusion or dissatisfaction in users looking for a simple, straightforward
understanding of an app.

TED could also consider the following additional tests to improve CRO:

■ Use a more cohesive set of photos, which all follow a similar theme (e.g., main colors present in the photo,
location of the TED speaker [such as on stage], or only shots of the audience); this can increase the polish and
professional appeal of the app, indicating that the team that makes the app is capable of making a top-notch
product.

■ Test the white background TED logo with black slogan text; color changes sometimes have a very dramatic
impact on conversion rates, as website form designers know well!

■ Add a light bulb icon next to the TED logo; this can increase the association with user intent (i.e., discovery,
education, learning).

Store Assets: Screenshots

When creating screenshots, it’s a best practice to not assume that users will scroll through each individual screenshot.
Be sure to order your first few screenshots by those that explain the most important features and value that your app
has to offer, so that if users don’t scroll any further, you have still cast your app in the best light possible.

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Pro tip: Don’t forget that the content inside of your screenshots (i.e. the in-app screenshots) should also
be a part of the CRO loop. Test different screenshots or content within the screenshot (e.g. photos) to
see which produces the best results.

Some tips for getting the most out of your screenshot CRO include running tests along the following dimensions:

■ Background styles: Try a solid color, real world imagery, a gradient, or an abstract background.

■ Custom design styles: Explore connected-style, superimposed icons, call-out graphics, or multiple devices in
one screenshot image.

■ Display styles: Test a screenshot-only without captions, a screenshot with overlaid captions, a screenshot in a
partial or fully in-view phone, or a screenshot embedded in real-world imagery such as a person’s hand.

■ Caption styles: Investigate how performance changes when captions are overlaid directly on the top/bottom
of the screenshot itself, captions are laid on the background (traditional style), caption font size or style is
tweak, or captions resemble call-outs located in different areas of the screenshot.

■ Change the order of your screenshots.

■ Change the in-app content of your screenshots, such as focusing on features or experiences that are most
popular with users.

Apple Assets: Screenshots

Until the advent of the auto play preview video, screenshots were often considered the most important all-around App
Store asset, due to the fact that they appear in search results.

Screenshots (up to five) now show in three tiles in an App Store Search result (the first two screenshots will show if
a preview video is present in the search results, and screenshots will show after each preview video in the product
page), and are second in terms of impact on conversion rate in terms of impact on CRO only to the preview video. If you
provide landscape mode screens or app previews, only one tile will show in the search results.

Tips for optimizing your screenshots include:

■ Connecting the first three screenshots using design, such as imagery that grows or connects each screenshot,
like a sun rising in three phases.

■ Using very short captions and large, legible font styling, to ensure your captions are readable.

■ Using visuals that are easy to discern in a smaller screenshot size (i.e. less complex).

■ Saving space by using only the screenshot images themselves, rather than wrapping them in a phone profile.

■ Using design to enlarge certain aspects of your app’s UI if they are too hard to discern from the search results
view.

■ Using larger captions in screenshots 4-5 if you do not have a preview video, and screenshots 3-5 if so. This
is because these screenshots will show in the larger product page view, and can support more text while
remaining legible.

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A Case Study on: Screenshot Design

VISUAL POP-OFF

This visual style (also known as a call-out) had a measure of popularity in iOS 10 ASO, likely due to its custom feel and
ability to attract attention. The pop-off style may prove more useful for zooming in to 2x or 3x on parts of an app’s UI
that may be harder to distinguish at a normal size. Or, the pop-off could draw user attention to parts of the screen that
they may otherwise miss; an issue exacerbated by the addition of the third screenshot and smaller overall real estate.

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CONNECTED-STYLE

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Three screenshots allows for a stronger and broader canvas to convey progression than disjointed screenshtos offer.

Youtube TV provides a good example of a three screenshot-long progression. Shazam and Postsnap combine the
connected screenshot style with more text that tells a bit more of a story than a caption alone can muster. With smaller
screens, the connected style can be a way to boost text size and retain the use of text as a major component of the
messaging strategy.

CONNECTED MIDDLE VISUAL

Similar to the connected-style, this more rare style allows the app to control more of the messaging by using more text
and visuals, as opposed to having to use an actual screenshot. If the app lacks differentiation and is more functional
than experiential, this may be a good choice. This style allows users to still have two full screenshots while also better
controlling messaging.

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SINGLE-WORD CAPTION

How do you make the most of a small screen while still conveying your message via text? Use a single word for your
captions. Single or two-word captions have become more popular in iOS 11 ASO.

Google Assets: Screenshots

The fact that screenshots (up to eight) are the last visual element seen of an Android app’s profile (behind the icon
and feature graphic/preview video) makes screenshots in Google Play lower on the CRO totem pole than in the App
Store. Yet, screenshots are still the most direct method by which an app user can preview what using an app is like
(other than the preview video), meaning that they are still of vital importance to CRO.

When creating Google Play screenshots, it’s important to consider two important facts about the Google Play screenshot
asset:

01. Google Play screenshots, unlike their App Store counterparts, occupy a low level on the visibility totem pole.
Before a user sees a Google Play app’s screenshots, the user must first tap the app preview, where the icon is
the first visual element. Then, the user must scroll down below the (past the feature graphic/video and the
short description), to reach the screenshots.

02. Google Play screenshots, therefore, do not need to capture a user’s attention; instead, the main focus should
be on educating the user on what the app does, and why they should care. In this regard, custom design is less
important for Google Play screenshots, and may even backfire.

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Screenshots depicting the Google Play screenshots located below the fold in the app page

One caveat is that, for larger branded apps, screenshots will show in search results.

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Google Play Store search for Snapchat

A Case Study in: Android Screenshot Designs

CUSTOM BACKGROUND GOOGLE PLAY SCREENSHOTS

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Custom background screenshot styles are one of the more safe styles of design, allowing the app to be creative, while
also introducing minimal risk into obscuring the screenshots themselves. The third screenshot here of Checkout 51 is
the exception, opting for a much busier background along with call out and pop off elements, the confluence of which
creates a high risk of overwhelming users who are simply looking to know what the app looks like.

ALTERNATING DESIGN GOOGLE PLAY SCREENSHOTS

As an attention-capturing device, alternating the design or style of each screenshot does a good job, yet it also makes
screenshots appear busier and less cohesive, which can strike the wrong cord with an apps’ branding feel. Additionally,
given that the purpose of Google Play screenshots is less necessary to capture attention, this style of design can

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introduce more risk to converting users than benefit.

CONNECTED-STYLE GOOGLE PLAY SCREENSHOTS

Connecting screenshots together is a common approach in ASO for the ability to control the messaging with a larger
surface area for text, and also allowing for more design creativity. The downside is the flip-side of this coin, meaning
that it may put users on alert about being “advertised to” more-so than more “standard” designs, by reducing the
number of screenshots available for users to see, and ultimately reducing their confidence in objectively deciding
whether the app solves their needs.

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STORY-STYLE GOOGLE PLAY SCREENSHOTS

Zillow takes an innovative approach by using landscape screenshots to tap into a larger surface area per screenshot;
thus Zillow is able to execute a story-style screenshot design, with longer captions that don’t also require a sacrifice in
legibility. Zillow also uses a different icon to accentuate the main message in each screenshot, and a gradient to add
a polished touch.

OVER-DESIGNED STYLE GOOGLE PLAY SCREENSHOTS

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As the name implies, this screenshot style is hardly a set of screenshots. In each set, there is only one clear screenshot in
a device profile, with the other screenshots going overboard with design. While certainly eye-catching, this screenshot
style is also extremely busy and thus more likely to turn users off than explaining the app in a clear and concise manner.

Beware: ASO expert, Ilia Kukharev, points out that:

“If you have landscape screenshots for Google Play, 2208x1242 or 1920x1080 (widescreen ratio), your
screenshots will be cut off on the right on Android 5 and 6 and the screenshots will look good only on
Android 7 and 8.

The solution is to make your screenshots more “square” (choose 2000x1300) which will work fine on all
versions of Android”

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A Case Study in: Landscape Screenshot Designs

CAPTION OVERLAY
While most landscape orientation games use videos, some games do opt for the simplicity of screenshots. The most
popular style in this case is to overlay captions onto the screenshot, as these two games do.

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CAPTIONED
Captioned pages are a tactic used by both portrait and landscape apps in order to control more of the message
conveyed to users. In this endeavor (control over the message), there are both pros and cons to landscape orientation
screenshots. The pro is that the message is more focused into one screen, with less overall wording and potential
dilution of the message; on the other side of the coin, portrait orientation screenshots have the chance to spread
messaging over 3 screenshots, and thus tell more of a cohesive story/benefit.

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POSTER/CONNECTED-STYLE
The main benefit of using a landscape-style orientation for screenshots is to take advantage of the expanded canvas
for design and messaging. With a larger space comes the ability to move from a tiny caption to a full sentence or two
and even a tagline or callout, in addition to iconography, a logo, and a screenshot of the app’s UI. These three apps
illustrate different takes on this style, each exhibiting a rich, branded background design with much more text than a
portrait orientation could support, while still managing to be legible

Using a landscape design style lends itself well to portrait orientation apps, which:

■ Have fewer screens or are more simple.

■ Have more straightforward use cases that are immediately understood (e.g. booking flights).

■ Focus more on design/content than features.

■ Have a strong branding/design team.

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SPLASH SCREEN
Similar to the poster/connected style is the expanded splash screen. Again, the benefit is that a landscape orientation
offers more, contiguous pixels to design across without being interrupted by the screenshot breaks between portrait
screenshots.

The danger with using a landscape splash screen that isn’t a danger with a portrait splash screen is that users don’t get
to see an actual screenshot of the app UI, which can be risky as it requires users to interrupt their scroll and have to tap
into the product page to see an actual screenshot of your app. Many people may not be willing to take this extra step
and choose to continue scrolling to other app results for their keyword search.

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The following apps apply the poster or connected-style design seen earlier across three individual portrait orientation
screenshots. Yet with two screenshot breaks, this design style lends itself much better to landscape orientation than
portrait. Especially when individual screenshots are smaller, every pixel that can be better utilized is beneficial to the
overall design.

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MIXED ORIENTATION
Additionally, both landscape and portrait screenshots can be used at once, such as CBS News below, which uses a
landscape screenshot first, and then switches to portrait for screenshot #2. While it’s not a great experience in the
product page view, it shows that it’s possible to mix the two orientations.

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Store Assets: Video

This chapter is written by guest author Sylvain Gauchet.

Sylvain is passionate about app marketing and mobile growth and co-
founded Apptamin in 2012.

Apptamin is a creative agency producing mobile video ads and App

Store videos. Working with brands, agencies, startups, and game studios,
Apptamin helps its clients in creating the right videos based on the
targeted channels and objectives. The company has team members in
Montpellier (France), New York, and Hong Kong and covers the whole
process from discovery to video delivery. Sylvain, the Apptamin team,
and guest experts share insights on ASO, app promotion and video
creatives on the Apptamin blog [[Link]

General
Video has always been a great way to show products in their best light. And it’s not different for mobile apps and games.

Although not a slam dunk, leveraging video in the App Stores can help you increase conversion, if you do it right.

Storemaven estimates that the uplift one can get by having a video on your App Store page can be up to +20-35%, and

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that visitors who watch the video are 3x more likely to install (based on analyzing 120M sessions of their tool).

Pre-iOS 11, Splitmetrics estimated that the average increase in conversion with video for iOS was around 16%.

Video statistics data source: [Link]

Although not everyone gets these types of results, it is worth considering video in your onboarding process. Users that
have seen your video have a better understanding of your app, and are more likely to be engaged and stick around. But
the only way to know for sure is through experimentation.

There should be no “one creative fits all” approach. This is true for mobile advertising, and it is true as well as for App
Store videos, with many important differences in guidelines and formats between the Apple App Stores (iOS/tvOS) and
the Google Play Store.

Let’s first take a look at these differences. We’ll then dive into more details and then provide you with recommendations
for using videos in the App Store and Play Store.

Even some of our most savvy mobile marketing customers seem to have misconceptions about the formats of App
Store videos, and we often end up needing to carefully explain the differences.

Let’s make clear how we call the two types of videos in this chapter:

■ App Previews are the videos displayed on the iOS and tvOS App Stores. They were introduced in 2014, and the
way they are displayed has changed in iOS 11.

■ Promo videos (the term Google uses) or Play Store videos are the videos displayed on the Google Play Store.

THE TOP 5 APP STORE VIDEO MISTAKES

We’ve produced over 1,000 videos over the years, and we pay particular attention to what could help or hurt the
positive impact of using video on the stores.

If you follow the best practices we recommend in this subchapter and keep a critical eye on your video production, you
should be more than well-equipped to build a store video.

Here are some of the main pitfalls to avoid in store videos:

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Top 5 App Store Video Mistakes

APP PREVIEWS (IOS APP STORE) PROMO VIDEOS (GOOGLE PLAY STORE)

Showing your logo or app icon at the beginning of the video: instead, jump right to what’s key
Mistake #1
about your app. Start strong, those first few seconds are critical!

Not experimenting or at the very least Using iOS screen captures in your Play Store
observing new video styles. iOS 11 video: you want viewers to identify with the app
brings changes to the App Store that you’re showing (Android users are usually not fans
Mistake #2 give a new place to video and interesting of Apple)
possibilities. That said, be aware of the
guidelines and always have a backup plan
in case the video is not approved.

Overlooking the poster frame of your Creating a vertical/portrait video for your Play
video: the poster frame was a crucial Store: YouTube videos are landscape so you’re
element of your App Store page pre-iOS 11 missing out on precious screen real estate that
and it is still important. You should think could allow you to showcase your app better (and
Mistake #3 about your poster frame almost as much it looks sloppy)
as you think about your screenshots.
Since it has to be a frame of your video,
you need to plan this ahead of time (when
scripting the video).

Not optimizing for sound off. Because Showing the app from too far away, or using text
App Previews autoplay in mute, users will that is too small: most people watch your video on
very rarely hear the sound of your video. mobile, so you need to make sure it’s optimized
Mistake #4
Make sure you use copy (overlayed or via for them.
text interstitials) and try to show the most
compelling screens from your app.

Staying on the same screen for too long Just for fun: Having an ad displayed before your
at the beginning of the video, missing out video! If you have ads on your YouTube channel,
Mistake #5 on people understanding that it’s actually figure out a way to not have it for your promo
a video. video on the Play Store (users don’t want to see
a 15s ad instead of the video showing your app!)

Keep these key points in mind when optimizing your app video:

■ There are significant differences between promo videos (Play Store videos) and App Previews (App Store
videos). They are not interchangeable. You want to optimize your video(s) for each store.

■ That said, some rules do apply to both types of videos, such as keeping it simple, leading with the value
proposition, making it clear without sound and showing your best content.

■ Be sure to test the impact of your videos, and tweak things if needed.

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Apple Assets: App Preview Video

The first thing to note is that App Previews are device specific, and you upload them on iTunes Connect.

This means that you are supposed to have one video for each device. In reality, some devices have the same ratio and
one video with a 9:16 ratio will be enough for all of them : iPhone 5/6/7/8/6 Plus/7 Plus/8 Plus. You simply upload the
highest resolution (1080x1920) on iTunes connect and are then able to generate automatically the lower resolutions.
Same with the iPad Pro and iPad.

Because the iPhone X and the iPads have a different screen ratios from the other iPhones, you are supposed to create
separate versions for these devices.

The screen ratios of the 3 devices are different. App Previews being device specific, this means you need 3 different videos.

The iPhone X App Preview is optional for now, but we’ve seen Apple ask developers for one to feature them. Here’s what
iPhone X users see so far if you do not have an iPhone X App Preview.

If you do not upload iPhone X screenshots, then iPhone X users will see the “other iPhones” App Preview (the 9:16 video
for portrait) in both the search results and the app listing, i.e the “normal” behavior. The only difference is that if they
tap from the app listing to view the App Preview full screen, they’ll see black bars on top and bottom of the video for a
portrait app (the black bars are on the sides for a landscape app/video of course). This is because a 886×1920 resolution
(the iPhone X App Preview resolution) is “taller” than a 1080×1920 resolution (the resolution of the iPhone 6/7/8 Plus).

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This is how an iPhone 6/7/8 App Preview would show to iPhone X User

If you upload iPhone X screenshots but not an iPhone X App Preview, then iPhone X users will see the “other iPhones”
App Preview in the search results but not on the app listing.

Apple TV apps are on a different store, the tvOS App Store, so if you have a tvOS app and want an App Preview in that
store, you need to produce another video. We won’t expand on this in this book.

Apple most likely put the device-specific app previews in place because the goal of these App Previews is to give an
accurate view of the user experience, and apps are often different based on whether you use them on a phone, a tablet
or a TV.

Here are all of the App Preview resolutions:

Source: [Link]

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With iOS 11, it is possible to have up to 3 App Preview videos in one app page listing. But more on that later.

If you want to add a video to your App Store page then you are supposed to follow Apple’s guidelines.

Historically, the guidelines ([Link] have been pretty strict and

enforced by Apple. It seems Apple is getting a little more flexible. Some publishers are definitely operating beyond the
guidelines and getting away with it. It is of course safer to play by the rules, and if you explore the grey area (it’s always
more fun!) make sure you have a backup plan.

Also, you can only update the App Previews when updating your app, so plan accordingly.

FIRST APP PREVIEW AUTOPLAYS IN SEARCH RESULTS

The App Preview now auto plays on mute, alongside the first 2 screenshots. Even when there are 3 App Previews, only
the first one is displayed in the search results.

Screenshot in iOS 11 showing Jelly Splash: the first App Preview autoplays in the search results, along with the first two screenshots.

Once again, this puts a bigger emphasis on the video rather than the poster frame (and the other two screenshots when
in portrait mode) as the eye gets attracted by the moving images. It becomes quite obvious when seeing search results
for apps in landscape mode:

The landscape Lego Jurassic World App Preview video takes almost the full width, and the moving images make that app listing very
visible and compelling.

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One of the interesting things that happens in the search results is that when the App Preview of the app in focus
completes its showing, the App Preview of the next app starts auto playing.

SHOULD YOU USE ALL THREE APP PREVIEWS?

As mentioned, you can have up to three App Previews...but should you take advantage of that?

The answer is that it’s too soon to tell, and it might depend on your app as well. For simpler apps, our gut reaction
would be that one App Preview is enough to consider at first. But again, the only way to really know is to test it!

We can see the additional App Previews being useful though.

■ The first App Previews displays in both the search results and is displayed first in the store listing. We believe
it should allow users to get a good overview of the app or the game, starting with the most important (see the
“best practices” section above). The video pace should also be catchy and dynamic.

■ The 2 additional App Previews complement the first one. They can be shorter and illustrate one or several
specific features, such as “gratifying moments” or “pro tips”. Keep in mind that there a minimum length of 15s.

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For Jelly Splash the App Preview #2 we created is an “infinite scroll” of the map, differentiating it from App Preview #1.

For Tandem, we only created 1 App Preview. But a good App Preview #2 could be showing just a text a change or a video call between
users (that show later in App Preview #1).

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The app experience itself should give you ideas and help you decide whether it’s worth testing or not. If you do add 2
more App Previews, we would recommend using copy as well for maximum impact (see “best practices” section below).

Screenshot diagram showing the video poster frame

POSTER FRAME
“Feature frames” refer to the thumbnails that show before playing the video. In the App Store this is called the “Poster
frame”.

“Poster frame” (pre-iOS 11) and autoplay (post iOS 11) for the App Previews.

Apple calls the visual over which the play button sits the “poster frame”. In the App Store the “poster frame”
previously (pre-iOS 11) acted as the first screenshot. This had made the poster frame a critical asset, because it
showed up in both the search results and as the first visual (besides the icon) in the App Store page.

With the fact that App Previews autoplay, this is of lesser importance, so long as your video starts strong. But don’t
neglect it, as the poster frame can still be seen in the following circumstances:

■ In the search results (while the 1st App Preview of the app above or below is playing)

■ Before your app preview video is “in focus” for the 2nd and 3rd App Previews in the App Store listing

■ By people with slower internet connections before the video begins playing.

■ By people browsing the App Store in India or China, where autoplay is currently not in place.

■ By people that have turned off autoplay in their App Store settings

So you still want to think it through and decide on a good poster frame.

You should plan in advance (i.e when scripting your video) what your poster frame will be. It needs to convey what your

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app does, and fit in nicely with your app’s screenshots.

Make your poster frame fit nicely with your screenshots

To put it briefly: if it were to make a good screenshot, it would make a good poster frame.

Something that some developers have tried that is perhaps towards a grey area (but which has seemed OK with Apple

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in several occurrences) is to actually use the screenshot that you would otherwise use as the first screenshot, as the
poster frame for a split second at the beginning of your preview video.

Screenshots showing interesting examples of video poster frames

Screenshots depicting videos in the App Store vs in the Google Play Store

When there are multiple App Previews, each is displayed before the screenshots, and autoplay as soon as they become
“in focus.”

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Screenshot depicting multiple preview videos showing, with the first autoplaying, and the second queued to play, with the poster
frame and a play button showing.

BEST PRACTICES WHEN CREATING APP PREVIEWS FOR THE APP

STORE
App Previews need to be based mostly on captured footage from within the app, but you also have the ability to add
some overlays or interstitial text as well. Here are some tips:

■ Look at the competition: What are apps in your category or niche doing? How could you improve on it?

■ Put the most important benefit first (as long as it looks good): don’t wait until the end to show what’s
unique about your app, lead with it! Your icon is already in your app page, so there is no need to waste time
by showing it again at the start of the video. Make sure that the imagery moves in the very first few seconds,
so people don’t confuse the video with a screenshot and keep scrolling. Captivate them! You want to show
something very visual very quickly from your app/game, as some users will only watch the first few seconds
of your video.

■ Use copy, and quickly: because App Previews autoplay muted in both the search results and the App Store
listing, having some copy (very short and easily readable - even in the smaller sized search results) can help
viewers understand your app’s benefits faster (or your game’s awesomeness/story). You can also leverage text
screens to give character to your video, by (reasonably) adding animations or live action video backgrounds.

■ Don’t try to show everything: you only have between up to 30s, so you need to select what’s really important
to make the most out of the time you have. That means no login screen or settings! Splitmetrics even estimates
that 80% of users don’t watch past the first 12s (pre-iOS 11).

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■ Show relevant app content and gameplay: This is even more important than in the Play Store, because App
Previews must stay within the app. Create content or show gameplay that put your app in its best light.

■ Add a nub/touch circle when tapping/interacting with the screen: You can’t show hands, so add a touch
indicator so viewers understand what’s happening and what’s being tapped.

■ Keep it simple: You can’t really show the context in which the app is being used, so make sure that you show
things in a way that doesn’t confuse viewers.

■ Be care not to be too salesy: Apple doesn’t want this video to be an ad, but rather something that accurately
showcases your app. But you also need to convince people, so try to find the right balance.

■ End with a call to action: The user is already considering downloading your app, so now that you have the
viewer excited, make sure you explicitly remind them to actually download your app!

■ Don’t forget the poster frame: Again, the poster frame will show for a split second (or longer depending on
the internet connection).

Because of where they appear and how they are displayed, App Previews are evolving and becoming more like ads.
One sign of this is the fact that Apple says you should use copy to add context, because the video is on mute by default.
Several developers also create videos that are more dynamic than before and explore the grey area, often successfully
(i.e the video is approved). A few examples of this “dark grey” area is:

■ Using a landscape video even for a portrait app, which means they show things (text, background) around the
UI and sometimes a device

■ Using less UI and more animations

■ Using live action shots (the riskier in my opinion if those shots are not shown within the actual app)

Now be careful when you experiment: you should still keep in mind Apple’s guidelines. So you can have a backup plan
in case the video is not approved.

HOW TO MEASURE YOUR APP PREVIEW’S IMPACT

This is a bit more tricky and less accurate than on the Play Store.

There are two main options:

■ The pre-post report: Analyze your conversion rate in your iTunes analytics. Keep marketing/acquisition
efforts at the same level and compare the results between the week before you add the App Preview, and the
week after.

■ Testing tools: Tools like Storemaven or Splitmetrics “clone” your app page and allow you to run an A/B test on
the cloned page. You define what you want to test and then send the cloned App Store page some paid traffic.
The results give you an indication of what works best, and the fact that you can use attribution links can help
you identify the quality of users from each variation post-install, too.

It certainly will be really interesting to measure the impact of App Previews, now that they are going to have a much
larger importance. We’ve already had clients (both gaming and apps) for which adding a video since iOS 11 has been
increasing conversion, ranging from 3-5% to 30-35%.

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LOCALIZATION
So far if you were to add an App Preview in English to an App Store app listing, then all users everywhere in the world
would see that App Preview in English. This changes with having three App Previews per localization. You can therefore
decide which locale displays App Previews (or not) as well as have localized App Previews.

Apple offers the following advice about localization: “If you’re targeting multiple countries with your marketing
message, you may want to localize your app preview’s narration for different languages. You can also adjust the order
of your app previews to emphasize videos without narration.”

Google Assets: Store Videos

Videos in the Play Store (“Promo videos”) are YouTube videos. You upload them to YouTube, and then indicate the
link in your store listing in the Google Play Store developer console (Graphic Assets section) if you want the video to
appear on your app’s Play Store page.

Screenshot depicting the metadata for adding video in Google Play

Because it’s a YouTube video, the only constraint when creating your Play Store video is that it needs to be 16:9
(1080x1920 is the most common resolution).

This main difference between App Previews and Play Store videos has led to seeing what we call at Apptamin the “big
black bars” syndrome: publishers using their portrait App Preview as a YouTube video for the Google Play Store. And
it makes us cringe a little each time.

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If this App Preview video was used on the Play Store, it would show the wrong UI, and there is also tons of space lost
on each side. Don’t think that because you upload a portrait video for the Play Store it will be displayed in portrait: no
matter what, users will have to turn their phone to watch the video.

The YouTube video format provides you with a lot of freedom creatively, and also comes in handy when you want to
show multiple devices, interactions between users or use live action video (not allowed on the Apple App Store).

The only real constraints we’ve seen is when Google wants to feature apps: they only want the Play Store badge and
Android devices. So you might as well anticipate that.

Conveniently, you can update the video in your app details page whenever you want: just change the YouTube link!

Regarding the style of your video, it should depend on the type of app/game, your audience, and your goal. A good way
to go about it is to first look at what types of videos top apps in your category or niche use. You can get a start there,
and then try later to think outside the box and do A/B tests to improve.

Added bonus: you can add the video (or shorter versions of it!) to your pool of creatives for Universal App Campaigns
(UAC).

OVERALL USE OF PROMO VIDEOS ON THE PLAY STORE

Let’s take a quick look at the overall use of promo video in each category.

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Screenshot showing % of apps per categories that use promo videos; Mobile Action study

We can see some significant differences between categories, and that an overall average of 24% of apps have a promo
video.

If you’re in a competitive category, using a video might help give you an edge. Here is what we see when we look at the
estimated downloads for the Productivity category.

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Screenshot showing daily downloads by apps with videos vs. without. Source: Mobile Action study

While the favoring here is clearly for apps with videos, of course, there could be other factors than the video affecting
the number of downloads. You should dive in deeper to see whether video is worth considering for you.

Here is a graph of the use of promo videos on the Play Store in the Top 50 games:

Screenshot showing video usage by the top 50 games, broken out by category. Source: Mobile Action study

The majority of the Arcade category apps have a video, and even though here too it is not the sole factor, games with
videos seem to be performing well.

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Screenshot showing daily downloads arcade games with video vs. without. Source: Mobile Action study

Something else you’ll notice when looking at usage of video is that paid apps tend to use it more, as well as the Top 50
Grossing (70% use video on the US Google Play Store as of June 1st, 2017).

FEATURE GRAPHIC AS A THUMBNAIL

“Feature frames” refer to the thumbnails that show before playing the video. In Google Play this is the “Feature graphic,”
which shows as a thumbnail which is overlaid with a play button that leads to the Play Store Video.

Video is displayed differently in Google Play than in the App Store. Besides a few layout tests by Google or specific
brand keywords search, the feature graphic is not displayed in the search results (so there is no way to play the video
there).

Screenshot depicting the Google Play Store video thumbnail/feature graphic

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When seeing an app’s Play Store page on mobile, the play video button is layered on top of the “feature graphic” at the
top of the page. On desktop, the thumbnail of the YouTube video is displayed in lieu of the first screenshot.

BEST PRACTICES WHEN CREATING PROMO VIDEOS FOR THE

PLAY STORE

General Tips
Here are a few tips when it comes to producing promo videos for your Play Store page:

■ Look at the competition: What are apps in your category or niche doing? How could you improve on it? Check
their YouTube stats (views, average view duration) and compare them.

■ Put the most important benefit first: It is not a TV ad; users can stop watching it anytime. So get straight to the point
and show the most important benefit first. Unless your brand is well-known or your app/game uses a famous IP, there is
no need to show a logo or icon at the beginning: it is already in your app details page. If you do show it, keep it extra short.
Storemaven estimates that an average of 10% of viewers drop every five seconds (you can see that in your
YouTube Analytics and compare).

■ Don’t try to show everything: You need to keep things short (30-40 seconds is good), which means you can’t
show everything from your app. Focus on the main value proposition and max three features or benefits.

■ Make it understandable with no sound: Your potential users might be checking your app somewhere public
and/or with their device on mute or low volume. So make sure that the message is clear without sound. Short
and easy to read captions can go a long way here.

■ Show relevant app content and gameplay: Don’t show an empty app! Make sure great content is populated
when displaying footage from inside your app; viewers need to get excited (but not lost) about what they can
get. Make sure that the actions shown within the app are smooth (scrolls, swipes, etc.).

■ Don’t go too fast: People don’t know your app yet, so be careful about the “expert syndrome.” Get feedback
from people who don’t know your app about your video’s pace.

■ Optimize for mobile: The creative freedom you have doesn’t mean you should forget where people watch this
video: on their mobile devices (views of the Play Store videos on desktop are very often below 1%). So make
sure everything shows well on a small screen!

■ End with a call to action: People are just one tap away from downloading your app, so make sure you push
them over the edge by including a clear call to action (“Download today,” “Play now,” etc.).

COMING UP WITH THE SCRIPT AND MAKING THE VIDEO COME TO

LIFE: THE PROCESS
So how do we actually go about scripting and making a video? It would be too long to describe each little step, but
below are the most important ones, along with some visuals from one of the projects that Apptamin worked on with
Vivino.

This promo video increased conversion on the Google Play Store by 15% (here [[Link]
vivino-case-study/] is the case study, which also goes into how the video was cut into separate video ads—one for each
use case).

Discovery/Brief: When making a video, we first try the app, take a look at the different marketing assets (website, Play

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Store page, general communication, etc.), and discuss with the client to get a better understanding of what’s important
to highlight. Of course, if you produce the video internally, those are discussions you can have within your team only;
the idea is to plan for a video that is in line with your branding and tone.

Insights: we noticed that Vivino used this type of graphics styles, which played into our video planning

Synopsis: We then put together a synopsis, or a high-level script/scenario for the video. In the case that a voice-over
adds value, we put a first script down for this as well. It’s very important to take the time to define this high-level view;
you can make sure that the message is right, and it helps you get a better sense of the timing of the video. Plus, at this
stage, modifications are just text edits and therefore not costly...So share it with the relevant persons on your team!
Of course, we also add a few sentences about our approach and why we make certain choices, usually referring back to
the general tips given in the section above.

Your app might be used in a specific context/use case. This and its benefits are a good starting point.

Define beforehand what you plan on showing and saying

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There is a small introduction (#1 in the synopsis), but we made sure the app would be shown within the first five seconds.

Visual style: Because that “vintage” design style was used in some of their online marketing (see #1), we thought it
would be interesting to explore. After confirming, we sent them visuals for each of the main scenes. Because in this
specific case we “recreated” the UI (vs. screen recording) in order to keep the style consistent, we also sent a few
examples of how this would look.

You might see a few changes in the final video, but it is overall pretty similar to those designs

01. Detailed script: Not the most exciting part, but a very important one: at this step we define things like the

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music, the voice-over talent, and also exactly what will be shown from the app (which screens, what data—like
which wine to scan, which order, etc.).

02. Animation: With the designs part, this is when things really come to life and the initial planning really pays off!

Each project is different, but we recommend following these tips and general process. In short, it’s about carefully
planning (and making edits early on) and making sure you stay on brand and on message.

OPTIMIZE THE FEATURE GRAPHIC

As we’ve seen, the play button for the video is located on top of the feature graphic when seeing the app page on
mobile.

The feature graphic is the first asset in the store listing on mobile and therefore an important graphic asset. You should
test/optimize it to see what performs best.

Make sure the play button integrates nicely, and make the feature graphic consistent with both your screenshots and
your promo video (same featured characters for a game, etc.).

HOW TO MEASURE YOUR PLAY STORE VIDEO’S IMPACT

Creating and adding a promo video to your App Store listing is useless (except for the reason of getting featured) if you
don’t test and measure the results. Google lets you run split tests on different elements of your store listing with their
store experiments.

This means you can see if you get better conversion with a video or without, and also see which video performs better.
You can test up to 4 versions (including “no video”) at the same time, but you should start by testing only video vs. “no
video”.

Later, you can do new experiments to try out alternative versions (different value proposition first, different concept,
different lengths, etc.). To get ideas on ways to tweak the video, look at the Analytics of your video on YouTube (especially
the Audience retention part, to see if there are any sudden drops).

Trying a completely different approach for the video and A/B testing it is of course also an option!

Looking at the demographics, if you see some countries watch video more than others, it might be worth it to localize
the video for those countries.

You can (and should) localize your Play Store video if your user base is strong in different languages. There are two
options here:

01. If you created a different video for a language, just put the YouTube link of that localized video in the Google
Play Developer Console for that language.

02. If you’re using YouTube’s captions for translations, then just put the same link and Google/YouTube should
display the captions in other languages when necessary.

To get more relevant results, try to maintain the same level of marketing/acquisition efforts. Or even better (if you can),
stop them while the experiment is ongoing. If people are already sold on your app when they get to your page (through
an ad somewhere else for example), then they are less likely to look at your store listing assets (including the video).

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Pro tip: You can set your YouTube video as unlisted, so that all the views come from the Play Store.
By looking at the YouTube Analytics, you can then get valuable insights on number of views and
engagement of only people visiting your App Store page. Once your store listing experiment is done, you
can put the video to public mode, so that anyone can find it through YouTube (or even a Google search),
and you can maximize the number of views your video receives. The views you got when the video was
unlisted will still count to total views.

Subchapters authored by Sylvain Gauchet.

Other Metadata Elements: App Size

For many users, phone storage sizes and data streaming costs make downloading apps a challenge, and smaller apps
have a leg up in this regard. This is especially true when we start talking about regions with low-end Android devices
and marginal connectivity.

The relationship between an app’s size and its conversion rate is difficult data to find; however one study by Segment
on the conversion rate of an app that was released multiple times—each time with different file sizes—found that
increasing the size of the app reduced conversion rate by up to 66%.

Beware: Apps over 100MB require the user to access the App Store via WiFi before downloading, which
introduces friction to acquiring new users for larger apps.

Study showing the negative correlation between app size and conversion rate. Source: Segment study [[Link]
mobile-app-size-effect-on-downloads/]

Not only does your app’s App Size have an influencing factor on conversion to install, the Google Play Store also
suggests which apps to uninstall if you don’t have enough space on your device.

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Screenshot showing suggested apps to uninstall, based on size. Source: AndroidPolice [ [Link]
play-stores-uninstall-manager-intelligently-suggests-apps-uninstalled-clear-space/ ]

If you want to reduce your file size for Android, read up on Keval Patel’s Medium post: ”How you can decrease application
size by 60% (In only 5 minutes)? [[Link]
60-in-only-5-minutes-47eff3e7874e]”

CRO Loop Step #5: Testing, Running A/B Tests & Experiments
After creating elements loaded up with the proper messaging and imagery, it’s time to set up a test to see how your
hypothesis and assets perform against your expectations. Be careful in this step, as without a proper test setup, the
results can be contaminated, offer low confidence in the results, yield inconclusive or false positive results, and
generally mislead you in terms of identifying the proper decision to make.

Running an A/B test involves three steps:

01. Organize your assets into test variations.

02. Drive people to your test and split it randomly between the variants.

03. Determine when your test has produced statistically significant results, or are otherwise confidence in the
results.

After step three per above, you can move onto the final step in the CRO loop: Analyzing the results.

We will cover a few different ways to run your test, but first consider these tips for running an A/B test:

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■ When creating a test, be sure to use a homogeneous context/cohort, to ensure that differences in performance
are produced as a result of the test variations, rather than differences in the users viewing the test variants. For
example, run experiments in only one OS or country, as users of each OS or from each country will likely have
unique reactions.

■ Try not to test too many changes at once—this can lead to the conundrum of not understanding what change
caused what outcome in performance (e.g., was it the color, visual, text, symbols, etc. that produced the
outcome?).

■ Be careful not to end tests early or without enough data. Often, test results may begin favoring one variant,
only to shift to another variant and ultimately declare the latter the winner. If you cannot afford to drive enough
traffic to run a statistically significant test, then be cautious when applying the results.

TESTING BOLD THINGS VS. INCREMENTAL CHANGES

One of the best ways to make significant conversion rate gains via A/B testing is to test big, bold changes (e.g. trying
a completely different app icon) with each variation vs. incremental changes (e.g. changing the size of the app icon);
however, making a habit of testing bold changes is not without concerns.

■ Pros of Bold A/B Testing:

■ Easier to uncover big gains by trying novel approaches that may work better than the current iteration.

■ Keeps your app listing fresh by trying the latest trends (e.g. animated device designs) in order to fend off
the stagnation that can arise from keeping an app listing the same for months or years.

■ Facilitates brainstorming, research, and discovery that can benefit other areas of development/design/
marketing beyond the app listing.

■ Changes are less likely to lead to performance variation smaller than the margin for error, meaning that
learnings of what works and does not work are uncovered quicker.

■ Cons of Bold A/B Testing:

■ For Google Play experiments, bold A/B testing can negatively impact regular performance if the test
variants perform worse. Test with a lower percentage of traffic when trying bold changes to mitigate
potential negative test results.

■ Bold testing often requires significant extra resources to execute (e.g. design), with an unknown payoff.

■ If the changes are very bold and very different (i.e. many material changes), it can be difficult to diagnose
what aspect of the change caused the variance in performance.

■ Requires more effort in queuing up future new variations for future A/B testing.

TESTING COMBINATIONS OF CHANGES

In some cases you may want to try a group of changes at once, such as a complete revamp of an entire store listing.

While testing one thing at a time is a best practice, testing a confluence of changes has benefits, such as having a higher
likelihood of producing a statistically significant test outcome, or creating an improvement where the sum of the parts
is greater than the parts individually, as in the case studies on cohesive messaging.

In this case, it is important to track exactly what is changing and ensure that you have a hypothesis or reason as to why

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each change should improve performance, for analysis and posterity. This exercise will also help you ensure that each
change is well-founded and makes sense when taken as a whole, rather than combining several individual good ideas
which may not combine well.

If possible you will also want to return to testing afterwards, to see whether you can uncover the effects of individual
change and increase your confidence in the whole. Try reverting each of the changes to see whether the results are
similar or lead to worse results, and uncover insights for running further tests.

If the test is a success, then celebrate it! So long as your testing is founded in research and set up to help you continue
to iterate on your optimizations, then you are making good progress.

RUNNING TESTS VIA GOOGLE PLAY LISTING EXPERIMENTS

Using the Google Play Experiments engine is one of the best and most common A/B testing tools available to ASOs.
Not only do Play Store experiments use actual store traffic and provide insight into uninstalls/retention rate, but they
are also free to use, calculate a statistically significant winner, and make applying variants extremely easy to do.

The two major disadvantages are that Google Play A/B test results do not necessarily reflect what results may be
like in the App Store (in addition to the differences in users of each platform, the search UX and app listings are also
materially different), and Thomas Petit points out that Google’s 90% confidence interval is not the highest bar of
significance, and may thus lead to cases where positive test results do not yield similar results one applied live.

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Screenshot of a concluded Google Play experiment (variant names removed).

Pro Tip: Don’t attempt to speed through testing—make sure to let your A/B tests run for at least a week,
especially if you’re running more than one variant. In the case of Google Play experiments, for example,
performance can often start off one way and flip over time, as uninstall/active user data collects. Also, if
you’re running more variants, the traffic that the variant receives comes from different sources of your
total traffic (e.g. keywords), which change over time, meaning that performance can swing day over
day by virtue of this fact, rather than the variant’s true impact on performance.

Further Reading: Check out Thomas Petit’s Slideshare presentation [[Link]

ThomasBCN/aso-ab-testing-your-store-listing] for more ideas and tips for A/B testing.

RUNNING TESTS VIA 3RD PARTY A/B TESTING TOOLS

3rd party A/B testing tools offer more control over the A/B test parameters, provide more data on user behavior, and
can be used for App Store listings and even search results pages.

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Yet, 3rd party tools can be expensive and require traffic from a 3rd party sources, which skew results of tests by virtue
of harboring different install intents than live App Store traffic. 3rd party A/B testing tools will be covered in the tools
section later, but the main A/B testing tools include:

■ Splitmetrics: Good breadth of product, e.g. provides Search Ads A/B tests.

■ Store Maven: Premium product suited for larger apps with larger creative departments.

■ RaiseMetrics: Affordable A/B testing.

OTHER WAYS TO RUN A/B TESTS

In addition to running an actual A/B test, there are a few other methods by which experimenting with a store listing
can be done:

■ Running ads, such as Facebook Ads. While the results will not be nearly as reliable as a true A/B test, using
ads can allow you to test different messaging, text, and visual creative and is useful in providing research and
direction for future A/B test variations.

■ Experimentation can also be done by simply pushing a change live with a new app version and measuring
the pre-post impact on performance. While this is a more risky approach and takes more time to potentially
reverse in the App Store than the Play Store (by way of the approval process), live testing is the most surefire
method by which to ensure test results yield a positive outcome. This is especially true in the App Store, which
does not provide a first party A/B testing solution. When measuring performance change pre- and post-update,
it’s important to take several precautions to ensure the most accurate analysis:

■ Use the same period of time to compare performance (e.g., the same number of days of the week prior
to and after the change, such as the Monday-Sunday before and the most immediate Monday-Sunday
following the change), to ensure that performance differences are not due to trends in seasonality or the
day of the week.

■ Do not make any other changes to your app listing or your keyword mix, which could cause noise in
analyzing the impact of your experiment.

■ Running a country-by-country experiment, i.e. by pushing new screenshots live in Australia but not in the U.S.
and comparing the conversion rates after.

Pro tip: Using Apple Search Ads creative sets can be used to run AB tests as well, by testing the difference
in tap-through-rate and conversion rate for different creative sets. Running AB tests using creative sets
requires adding screenshots and videos to your live store listing, and then selecting subsets of your
app’s live assets to test as a creative set.

Report on the data from each creative set vs the default creative set, over the same time period to
measure the change in performance. and see whether a new variation outperforms the default
arrangement. Creative sets can also be used to test the performance of certain assets with individual
keywords, by creating an ad set with a single keyword in it, which is not possible with other AB testing
methods, including Google Play experiments.

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CRO Loop Step #6: Report & Analyze

After your test is complete comes possibly the most important, yet oftentimes tedious parts of managing a CRO strategy:
reporting and analysis. Reporting produces data, which is the raw input, and analysis spins that data into insights.
These days, data is the best way to make decisions, vs. the hunch-driven decision making of the older, Mad Men-esque
era in marketing. This is because data is objective, and less prone to biases or other factors that can skew the analysis
and thus the resulting decision.

For example, while a hunch is that changing the background color to blue will succeed, and may lead to a full store
listing update without running a test, a data-driven decision is to run an A/B test with 25% of your total store traffic to
confirm whether this is the case, before making a decision that affects 100% of your store traffic.

Reporting may produce the data that in this particular A/B test, the blue background has a 22% conversion rate, vs.
your control white background’s 20% conversion rate.

Analysis takes the data one step further and focuses on the actionable outcome of data produced by the report. Below
are a few entirely different, yet entirely logical conclusions that could be drawn based on the analysis of the prior
report. However, be aware that while reporting (data) is inherently objective, analysis (insights) is subjective, because
it depends on conclusions drawn by the person interpreting the analysis.

Conclusion #1: The test improved conversion rate by 10%. Recommendation: apply the test.

Conclusion #2: The test did not produce a statistically significant difference in conversion rate due to being based on
not enough traffic. Recommendation: continue testing.

Conclusion #3: 10% is not a significant enough improvement. Recommendation: try another test.

While implementing the results of this test may not cause harm (given the information on hand, it will likely result in no
change to performance), it does represent an opportunity cost of trying something else.

Though, implementing the results of a test with a poor analysis may indeed be harmful, such as applying a screenshot
change that starts off very positive due to a high install rate, but ends up very negative due to both a poor retention rate
and an initial sampling of a set of high converting users.

Beware: Changes to your marketing efforts can introduce noise into analyzing the efficacy of your CRO
activities. Try to minimize other activities that can impact your CRO. If this is not possible, mark the time
periods where noise is to be expected, and draw performance data from other time periods to reduce
the impact of the noise in your analysis.

Thankfully, A/B testing tools take most of the heavy lifting out of measuring the results of the test. When running a test in
a 3rd party, look for a variant’s chance to outperform the control, or the result in Google Play Store listing experiments.
Keep in mind that, while other metrics such as scroll depth, time to tap install, or total time on page may be interesting,
the ultimate KPI for an A/B test should be earning more Installs as a percentage of total eligible visits.

After applying the results of an A/B test to your live listing, be sure to measure the results of the report. Tips for
measuring results include:

■ Report on the conversion rate before and after making the change to your listing, and determine whether
the test results held true once applied. However, be aware that data in performance reports may lag by several
days, and that changes may also take some time to be fully realized.

■ Report on the change in your app’s performance against the conversion rate benchmark to make sure your

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test has outperformed the benchmark conversion rate, rather than just improving results in an “up-market.”

■ Report not only on the change in your app’s Installs, but your chosen downstream KPI as well. While KWO is
more likely than CRO to change your KPI performance, it is possible that by acquiring more or fewer downloads
from a particular subset of your listing, visitors can cause your KPI levels to change, too. Keeping your KPI top
of mind when analyzing any marketing optimizations, no matter the optimization is a good mindset to acquire.

If you report on your A/B test and see worse performance, or no change, you may consider one of a few options:

■ For results that are neutral—wait for more data to see whether positive or negative performance is revealed
before making a decision.

■ For results that begin significantly negative, but gradually improve—wait to see whether the performance
continues improving to a positive point before disrupting the change you implemented. If performance
worsens, take defensive action.

■ For results that show sustained, worse performance, take evasive action by either:

■ Revert to the prior control. While appealing and the most safe option, reverting to the control is not
always guaranteed to immediately revert performance back to where it had been before, due to the fact
that your app’s visibility is based on historic data, so the most recent worse performance will have an
affect on the performance of the control variant.

■ Run another test based on the latest insights and push significant budget to your test to quickly garner
enough data to make a confident decision. The risk here is that the new test is not guaranteed to produce
better results and will take some time to determine, during which performance remains low. Choose this
option if you have learned something significant in the latest attempt.

■ Apply the next-best variant. The risk is that the likelihood that this variant will outperform is lower than
the current underperforming variable, so only take this route if the next-best variant also tested well.

Pro tip: Consider the fact that negative test results can actually be a good sign. Because when
performance is significantly negative, you’ve found something that has a significant impact on
performance overall, and thus by process of elimination you can work your way to a change that
produces a positive impact! Lower significance intervals can cause lower confidence in test results, so
seek high significance intervals and large changes in performance for best results.

After applying the results of an A/B test, be sure to measure the performance to ensure that the performance yield has
actually improved. Running a B/A test can help increase confidence in the outcome (testing the prior winner/control
against the newly applied winner).

A Case Study in: CRO with Keepsafe

With photo lock app Keepsafe, we based our research on the messaging that could position Keepsafe into a stronger
stance relative the competition.

We began with research into what positioned Keepsafe best against the competition (e.g., feature set, total users, total

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user events...) and crafted messaging for each of those competitive advantages (Keepsafe has 15+ features, Keepsafe
has been downloaded by 50 million people, Keepsafe has been used by millions to store over 1 billion photos…).

We then pushed the messaging through several elements in Google (screenshots, feature graphic, short description,
long description), and even expanded the test to localized versions to six non-U.S. countries. We ended up discovering
a winning messaging (millions of people using Keepsafe to save over a billion photos) still in use today, several months
later in the feature graphic and long description.

Screenshot showing Keepsafe’s feature graphic tested variant

A Case Study in: CRO with 5miles

For local marketplace app, 5miles our research involved several different threads of insights:

01. First, we realized that in 5miles’ Android listing, the traditional caption style of one or two sentences on top of
the screenshots underperformed screenshots without any captions at all; but we also saw that one competitor
had made use of a caption style that blended captions into the screenshots themselves.

02. We also saw strong trends in products that were listed very frequently in the 5miles marketplace, and
hypothesized that the products shown in the screenshots would have a strong impact on performance if linked
to such frequently posted from the 5miles marketplace.

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03. We also drew the conclusion based on competitive research that people in buy/sell mode wanted captions
focused on features that helped them to buy or sell faster/easier, rather than more generic branding or social
proof.

With this information, we set up a series of progressive A/B tests in the Google Play Experiments engine to test several
new caption-styles, new caption text, and focused photos on several different popular products being sold on 5miles.
The result was a brand-new screenshot style that was not only successful on Android, but also iOS!

Screenshot showing one of 5miles’ new screenshot test variants

Reporting on Conversion Rate Optimization

When considering how to measure the impact of your CRO efforts, the best numbers to consider are naturally ratios and
relative data points, as CRO is about improving your app’s efficiency.

Metric: Impressions to Product Page View Click-Through Rate (Apple-Only)

For Apple apps, this top-of-funnel metric is mainly useful to understand the ability of your app preview to encourage
a deeper look. This is useful to determine how well your app preview does at drawing users deeper into your product
page, but because a product page view does not always generate an install, it should be considered just a metric and
secondary to an install-related KPI.

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Beware: Changing both keywords and your app’s store listing at the same time can make it difficult to
determine whether a change in product page view CTR or install conversion rate happened because of
your new keyword mix or because of your new CRO changes. Try to make changes to either your visibility
or conversion at the same time, and only one CRO element at a time for best measurement confidence.

KPI: Impressions to App Units conversion rate (Apple) OR Store Listing Visitors to Installs (Google)

This main ratio KPI for measuring CRO performance revolves around the (unique) visitor to install conversion rate in the
App or Play Store. Making improvements to your listing are ultimately done with the goal of increasing the chance that
each visitor (which is most accurately measured by impressions or Store Listing Visitors) will decide to install your app.

For Apple, be sure to measure the conversion rate from the App Store Browse source (affected by your smaller app
preview) or App Store Search source (affected by your larger app preview). For Android, be sure to measure the Google
Play organic conversion rate (at a country level).

Keep two important factors in mind about your impression conversion rate:

■ Shifts in impressions can also cause changes to your conversion rate, independently of your CRO efforts. For
example, changing keyword ranks due to competitive changes, algorithm updates, or seasonality can all affect
your impression conversion rate independent of any change in your store listing.

■ Because users can download apps from an impression, this is the lowest common denominator for measuring
install conversion rate; however, per the TUNE study, sometimes users may not download until they have
viewed your app’s product page, causing this conversion rate to appear very low.

KPI: Product Page Views to App Units conversion rate (Apple)

While the impression conversion rate is the best metric for measuring the performance of your CRO efforts overall,
in order to measure Apple changes that only affect your product page, it’s necessary to measure the product page to
install conversion rate. Elements that only affect your product page view conversion rate include your promotional text,
description, screenshots 4-5 (or screenshots 3-5 if you use a preview video), what’s new, and your promoted In-App
Purchases, though these can also affect your impression conversion rate).

Pro Tip: When measuring the PPV to App Units conversion rate, be aware that advertising efforts which
direct users to your product page will skew this conversion rate ratio more-so than the impression to
app unit conversion rate.

Beware: Your app may have a higher number of downloads than Product Page Views due to the fact
that users can direct-install your app from a search impression.

KPI: Installs

The classic metric for measuring the impact of visibility improvements is also an important KPI for measuring the
success of CRO. While install conversion rate helps measure efficiency, the ultimate goal of ASO revolves around

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increasing install volume. Over time, not only will improvements in CRO raise your conversion rate, but also the number
of Installs your app receives. In this light, keyword ranks are also a metric that can be used to point to the success of
CRO, as your app climbs up the ranks by converting more visitors into users, and thus earning more favorable organic
rank placement from the keyword algorithm.

KPI: Google Play Conversion Rate Benchmark (Google)

Google Play’s benchmark is a great quality signal for determining how your performance stacks up to the competition,
which can often be more useful than comparing against your app’s own performance, as ASO is very much involved in
positioning your app for better performance against the competition. Additionally, as a comparative data point, the
conversion rate benchmark can also help you determine whether your visibility optimization efforts are likely to bear
sustainable fruit or not, as a low conversion rate will cause your visibility to decline over time.

Google Play conversion rate benchmark data (app name and category data removed)

The simplest method of reporting on CRO (or visibility improvements) performance is to create a weekly/monthly log
of store performance data, and use this historic data as your benchmark.

By using benchmarks for what normal data looks like, you can also create a system that saves time analyzing by
indicating on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis whether performance is normal, or whether something is off
and requires a deeper review. Abnormalities in performance uncovered by reporting can also be used to raise a red flag
for issues related to factors outside of your direct control, such as identifying potential issues in ratings/reviews or
shifts in competitors or the store algorithm.

In the metrics view in the iTunes Connect App Analytics dashboard, Apple also uses a gray line to indicate when app or
iOS updates occur, helping you to zero in more quickly on the right dates.

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Conversion rate shown in the App Analytics dashboard

TEMPLATES FOR REPORTING ON CRO

You can also use data from your reporting to correlate with keyword metadata and conversion rate optimization
changes, affirm or debunk your hypotheses, and inform future hypotheses. An easy way to do so is to create a log
tracking changes to your app listing along with pre-post analysis. Pre-post analysis looks at the change in the same
period of time before and after a change occurred, thus allowing you to isolate the probable outcome on performance
of that change. Again, many ASO changes take time to be fully realized, so looking at longer periods of time is most
often the best method of truly running a pre-post analysis.

And, by adding conditional formatting you can more easily visualize the results and quickly eyeball the changes that
produced the most success or failure.

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Pro tip: Add a ‘caveats’ or ‘comments’ column to your changelog in order to identify noise or other
events that could have influenced the impact of the change and thus contaminated the analysis. In the
case below, what looked like the most successful change was actually found to have been influenced
by a PR campaign, not by merit of the screenshot change. Be aware that, even if you can calculate the
change in Installs that the external event garnered, algorithms work on trends and velocity, meaning
that earning more Installs could in and of itself have produced better visibility and even more Installs.

A NOTE ON SEASONAL OR OTHERWISE TIME-SENSITIVE CRO

There are many instances where there arises a time-sensitive opportunity for improving conversion rates by taking
advantage of a current event or trend. Changing seasonality or holidays each year are chief amongst these, but others
include political events (e.g. a presidential election), large sports events (e.g. the World Cup) and shifts in popular
culture (e.g., the Occupy Wallstreet or #blacklivesmatter movements of the United States).

01. While some such time-sensitive opportunities may actually last for several weeks or months, optimizing for
them should be viewed as a luxury, rather than a necessity. Taking advantage of a time-sensitive represents a
risk due to: The fact that these opportunities may not be as pervasive throughout the general market for app
users as, say the intent of a keyword search or category of apps.

02. There is less data available on how to cater to trends than the regular rhythm of business.

03. Such trends are also often ephemeral, meaning that learnings gained become obsolete afterwards.

As a luxury activity, you should only attempt to optimize for these opportunities if your overall performance is sound,
if the trend matters to your target market, and if you have the ability to test your optimization before applying the
results to your live app listing.

The only exception to this rule is if taking a risk on a trend with unknown results does not stand to jeopardize your

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performance, such as when your downloads or store views are near a nadir and latching onto a trend is one remedy at
your disposal. In such cases, successfully “catching the wave,” so to speak, may prove capable of catapulting your app’s
performance out of the depths.

Image of Gardenscape’s icon during the holidays; Source: Toad App Development [[Link]
for-the-holiday-season/]

PORTFOLIO APPROACH: OPTIMIZING AGAINST YOUR OTHER APPS

Developers with multiple apps in the App or Play Store possess a unique opportunity to optimize against their portfolio,
generating learnings applicable that can benefit all apps and thus producing self-virtuous growth of knowledge.

Even if the apps exist in different categories and cater to different target users, there are still many mutually beneficial
tests and learnings that can be discovered using the portfolio optimization approach, such as:

■ Testing the impact of different general screenshot or preview video designs (e.g., screenshot in a real phone
profile, screenshot in an animated phone profile, screenshot-only).

■ Probing nuances of how the keyword and top chart ranking algorithms operate, via standardized tests.

■ Testing the structure and layout of your description.

■ Testing different messaging styles for IAPs (e.g. use case vs. straightforward description vs. data points).

There is also an important caveat to be aware of when optimizing against apps targeted towards different types of
users: the learning outcomes will always carry the risk of being influenced primarily by the intent of the users, rather
than the test you have run. In order to overcome this, you should test your learning against the app you want to apply
it to before doing so, to ensure that the hypothesis holds true.

Along these lines, you can also test for learnings of one app across Apple and Google; but again, be sure to test the
learnings in the other platform before assuming they will hold true.

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 07 Ratings and Reviews | ON THE IMPORTANCE OF RATINGS & REVIEWS

07
Ratings and Reviews
“How important are ratings and reviews for ASO?”

On the Importance of Ratings & Reviews

One of the most influential ASO activities involves maximizing the number of positive star ratings (4 and 5 star) and
positive user reviews that your app receives. Having a high star rating and positive reviews are important for convincing
users that your app is actually worth downloading, via the wisdom of the crowd.

Both ratings and reviews are important and serve the same functions for users by different methods: Ratings convey the
quick, quantitative information for measuring an app’s quality, and reviews carry the more substantive, qualitative
information for measuring an app’s quality.

An app’s star rating can be thought of as the most important single data point affecting an app’s conversion rates.

This is because the star rating is presented early-on (in store search results, in the app listing, and even in ads) and is
easily consumable by users, given that it is a single, aggregated data point. Generally, a star rating of between 3 and
3.99 serves as the threshold for average apps, while a star rating under 3 serves as a warning flag to users to stay away,
and a star rating of 4 or higher indicates that an app is of good-to-excellent value.

STAR RATING TYPICAL USER QUALIFICATION

<3 “Bad app”

3-3.99 “Average app”

4-4.75 “Good app”

4.75+ “Excellent app”

Additionally, because some developers pay for 5-star ratings (see the upcoming chapter on black hat ASO), or have

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otherwise gamed their star ratings and even their reviews, this means that a perfect 5-star rating may be a suspicious
signal. Apps which have a larger number of total ratings and reviews containing more substantive information are seen
as more credible and less likely to have gamed rating/reviews.

To really benchmark your app against what should be achievable, it’s also important to realize that different types of apps/games
have different average ratings. Ido Schoonen provided this graph of average rating per games category on Google Play (data from
late 2016).

Google Play has also began providing additional insights into ratings and reviews for users, including the top keywords
found in reviews. Google also asks users to rate specific aspects relevant to the app, such as stability, gameplay, or
design.

Screenshot showing advanced reviews from a Google Play app

The Impact of Ratings & Reviews on Search

In addition to affecting your app’s conversion rate, having a high star rating and earning a steady stream of ratings is
also important for your top chart and keyword ranks. While the ASO industry has long held this as a ranking tenet, a

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study in 2015 by Moz, App Annie, and Apptentive provided further proof of this, finding a correlation between apps with
higher ratings volume and higher rankings, to the tune of +29% for the App Store and +40% in the Play Store.

2015 Study by Moz, App Annie, and Apptentive

A Google Play blog post [[Link]

[Link]] in February 2017 also formally confirmed the importance of star ratings with the following comment:

“Recently, we’ve begun tuning our algorithms to optimize for user engagement, not just downloads. This is
one of our ways to reward quality, which for games means promoting titles with stickiness (strong engagement
and retention metrics) as well as a more traditional measure like a high star rating.”

Generally, increasing the number of ratings and maintaining a high star rating will improve your app’s rank, unless
other factors such as a worsening conversion rate, or comparatively higher ratings metrics from competitors push your
app’s overall rank score down.

Setting Up a Review Strategy

While it’s easy to add a “rate our app” link into your app’s setting screen, a passive prompt like this will result in fewer
ratings than an active pop-up prompt or dynamic banner.

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Screenshot showing Slack asking for ratings in a menu, a tactic Screenshot showing Hyper asking the user with an in-app
which only will get very few eyeballs. dialog, a more effective tactic.

Creating an effective review strategy encompasses three steps:

01. Rating prompt Trigger

02. Dialog and flow of the rating prompt (Google-only)

03. Replying to user reviews

You can either manage these activities directly by adding the requisite code to your app or managing reviews through
iTunes Connect or the Google Play Console. Alternatively, you can use an ASO tool, such as Appbot, to help manage
ratings and reviews.

iOS: With the release of iOS 10.3, Apple created an ability for developers to request users to rate their
app from within the app, rather than sending the user to the App Store to leave a rating/review, which
created friction in acquiring ratings and led to the potential for drop-offs along the way. Moreover, this
official 10.3 rating prompt is now required by Apple for requesting reviews, replacing custom rating
prompts. Keep in mind that Apple’s in-app rating prompt can only be presented three times per user
per year before it is disabled. To ensure the most efficient use of your rating prompt, use the right
trigger logic to identify the most optimized time to prompt users.

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Screenshot showing the new rating flow in iOS (source: Macstories)

Beware: While it is up to developers whether or not to follow Apple’s guidelines, proceed with caution
when using custom prompts since iOS 11, Apple has disallowed such custom prompts, requiring
developers to solely use iOS 10.3 rating prompt.

Using the Right Trigger

The rating trigger is the biggest factor influencing a user’s intent to leave a review. Asking users at the wrong moment
will waste a precious prompt, whereas waiting to ask users at the right time will drastically increase the likelihood of
earning a rating.

TYPE OF TRIGGER EXAMPLE

Usage trigger After the third session

Key action trigger After successfully booking a flight

Negative trigger Do not prompt if the app has crashed within 30 days

Other triggers After an update to the newest version

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USAGE TRIGGERS
Usage triggers are the simplest to set up and therefore the most common, but they are also the least effective at
converting new ratings, given time is not as correlated with user satisfaction as key actions. Here are a couple of
examples of usage triggers:

■ Prompt users when they have achieved the average number of launches (this ensures users have come back
and are regular users before prompting).

■ Prompt users when they achieve the average number of consecutive days of use spent in-app (this selects only
users whose usage patterns indicate a strong attachment to the app).

KEY ACTION TRIGGERS

While key action triggers require more effort to set up, they are the most effective method for requesting a rating from
a user. Here are a few examples of key action-based triggers:

■ Wait until a user has performed one or more key actions (this ensures users have derived some value before
asking).

■ Trigger the prompt once a user has completed some “happy path” chain of several key actions (this instills
more confidence than a single key action that users have received good value). Thomas Petit points out that
this trigger can be made even more effective by prompting users who have gone through one or more “failures”
and have then achieved “success,” such as failing a game level three times and completing it on the fourth try.

■ Wait until after a user has made a purchase (it doesn’t hurt to ask and a purchase is a significant indicator that
they like your product).

NEGATIVE TRIGGERS
Add negative triggers to your rating prompt logic in order to avoid asking users at a time which you know will lead to a
poor likelihood of earning a good rating from the user. Try testing one of these negative triggers in your rating prompt:

■ If you can track crash-related data, do not prompt after a user has experienced a crash in the last seven days.

■ Do not prompt users who have already tapped “yes, I would like to leave review” in your custom prompt
in the last 30-90 days (but reset this after a big update).

■ Do not prompt users who have said they do not want to leave a review in the last 180 days

OTHER TRIGGERS
■ Prompt for a rating when a user updates your app (combine this with a “what’s new” bullet list in the messaging).

■ While not as effective as a managed prompt, adding a “rate us” button in the settings of your app is an easy
way to maximize your potential ratings volume.

Pro Tip: Store logic for the rating prompt trigger on a server vs. client-side, so that you can easily update
the logic without requiring a new app version.

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Using the Right Dialog and Flow

While Apple has disallowed custom rating prompt systems, Google has provided no such guidance, meaning that a
custom dialog and flow is still a good optimization step for Android apps.

The visual design, messaging, and implementation aspects of the rating prompt UI that users interact with will also
have a big influence on your rating prompt’s success. Many apps set up custom triggers, yet neglect to optimize the way
their prompt shows, leading to an optimization gap.

Screenshot showing the review flow from Hyper

DESIGN
Design refers to the text and visual UI of each pop-up in your rating prompt. Here are a few tips for improving your rating
prompt design:

■ Visually appealing UIs grab more attention. Improve engagement with your review prompt by having a UI
designer add an on-brand touch to your prompt window with custom colors, fonts, and icons.

■ Add a fun animation for displaying the review prompt to entertain your users.

■ Explain why you’re asking users for a review, but don’t write a novel to increase the chances that your text will
be fully read.

VOICE
Voice refers to the messaging and the feel of the prompt that users take away from reading the text in your pop-ups.
Here are a few tips for improving your rating prompt’s voice:

■ Ask users nicely (“Pardon the interruption—would you mind leaving us a review?”) rather than demanding
(“Rate us 5 stars!”).

■ Refer to your users with a level of respect and connection by greeting them as a “power user,” “super user,”

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“valued customer,” or some personable nickname for users that is unique to your app (e.g. Hey Power Redditor!).

■ Ask users to leave a review telling others about their favorite feature or use case.

IMPLEMENTATION
Implementation refers to the actual mechanics of how the rating prompt flow operates once the trigger initiates the
prompt. Here are a couple tips for improving your rating prompt implementation:

■ Implement the popular dissatisfied ‘response to feedback form’ logic. That is, when you ask whether users
are enjoying your app and they reply “no,” link them to an email to send feedback directly or open a support
ticket, rather than writing a negative review.

■ Track which key actions/workflows triggered the prompt and mention that key action/workflow in the review
prompt to call out the value the user received.

Pro Tip: In addition to active pop-up prompts, try placing a constant reminder of your prompt in high
visibility locations as a passive banner. These passive prompts can increase the top-of-mind status for
users, and also don’t interrupt users while they are in the middle of a task.

Screenshot showing how Circa depicts a passive banner prompt in-line with content in a popular blog post [[Link]
circa/the-right-way-to-ask-users-to-review-your-app-9a32fd604fca]

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Replying to Reviews
Replying to user reviews is a must for three reasons:

The 1-to-7 ratio: Did you know that in order to maintain a 4.5 average star rating after receiving one 1-star
rating you need seven 5-star ratings [[Link]
applauseio-62526535]?

Social influence: Many users read reviews to determine whether they want to download your app or not, and your
reply to a negative comment can help influence these users’ decisions.

Re-engaging the individual: With your reply, you may be able to get the user to enjoy your app again. While not
extremely impactful for apps with millions of users, for some apps regaining the individual might be attractive if the
user:

a. is a high ARPU user (i.e. whale)

B. may turn from a detractor into a promoter (this can influence other users’ conversion decisions).

Viewing, analyzing, and managing app ratings, reviews, and replies in Google Play is easy to do, thanks to Google’s
focus on empowering developers since 2013, per below.

Screenshot of the Google Play Console’s ratings and reviews analysis

With the release of iOS 10.3, Apple also began allowing developers to reply to reviews in the App Store.

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Screenshot of the ITunes Connect ratings and reviews view

Here are some tips on how to effectively reply to user reviews:

■ Address your users by name and apologize for their inconvenience—be personable!

■ Address their concern directly—help them troubleshoot their issue in your review reply if possible, and
tell them whether it will be fixed in an upcoming update or that you are actively looking into it.

■ Provide a support email for the user to provide extra information.

■ Prioritize replying to the most useful reviews first—these are promoted by Google at the top of the list.

■ Don’t reply to every single review—this can lead to a templated-reply approach, which will lead to less
genuine replies, something that users can and do pick up on.

Using Your App Listing to Ask for Ratings and Reviews

In addition to prompting users from within your app, you can also leverage your app listing to ask for app ratings.

You can prime new users to leave a rating after downloading your app by asking them to do so, towards the bottom
of your description. You can even let users know what your ratings triggers are in the description, which can reduce the
user’s surprise or annoyance of being prompted, and thus increase their receptiveness to the prompt.

You can also leave a note in the What’s New-section of your new version to encourage existing users to leave a rating
when downloading updates of your app (especially given that the What’s New-section appears higher in the iOS
product page for apps a user has already downloaded). This can be a very low effort activity to generate new reviews,
especially when the latest release adds significant new functionality that users are likely to value.

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Screenshot of onX Hunt asking for a review in their updates

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08
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“I feel like I’ve tapped out on growth in my home country; how can I continue to grow my user base?”

Addressing a Global Audience Through Localization

In 2014 when SoundCloud began localizing, they saw a large uptick in downloads in countries where they had localized,
even though they had only localized their keywords. The numbers were presented a few months after the change in the
App Promotion Summit and they weren’t lying: for example SoundCloud saw 376% MoM download growth in Russia
and 264% growth in South Korea.

This was not just a strategy that worked for SoundCloud, either; in Peggy Anne-Salz’s 2016 ASO Report for Venturebeat,
she quoted Steve P. Young from App Masters on his findings that localization had brought in a 10x increase in downloads.

It’s not difficult to see how localization of your assets can be a high impact ASO activity, from both a visibility as well
as a conversion standpoint.

While English is often perceived as a global language given that 1.5 billion peopel speak English, it’s easy to forget
that the other 6 billion people don’t consider it as such. Not only does a large portion of the global population search
the App Stores with local keywords (even in Australia people search for “pokies” instead of “slot machines”), having a
localized App Store presence increases conversion as well as the chances of being featured. In fact, some local editorial
teams even make localization a requirement.

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Table showing the most spoken languages worldwide (speakers and native speaker in millions). Source: Statista [[Link]
[Link]/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/]

In this chapter we’ll take you through several important topics in localization that can inform your visibility and
conversion strategy, including how the stores work, figuring out which languages to optimize for, minimal viable
translation, and other localization tips and tricks.

How the Stores Work: Available Languages

Let’s start with the available localizations that you can localize your store presence in.

The App Store has up to 28 localizations available, whereas Google Play supports up to 77 localizations. This is not
to be confused with the number of localizations that you can localize your app into.

In both stores, you can set one primary language. By doing so, you specify the fallback language for the event that a
user is browsing the store in a language that you didn’t localize in.

LOCALIZATIONS AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE PLAY (77 TOTAL)

■ Afrikaans – af ■ Armenian – hy-AM ■ Basque – eu-ES

■ Amharic – am ■ Azerbaijani – az-AZ ■ Belarusian – be

■ Arabic – ar ■ Bangla – bn-BD ■ Bulgarian – bg

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■ Burmese – my-MM ■ German - de-DE ■ Polish – pl-PL

■ Catalan – ca ■ Greek – el-GR ■ Portuguese (Brazil) – pt-BR

■ Chinese (Hong Kong) – zh-HK ■ Hebrew – iw-IL ■ Portuguese (Portugal) – pt-PT

■ Chinese (Simplified) – zh-CN ■ Hindi – hi-IN ■ Romanian – ro

■ Chinese (Traditional) – zh-TW ■ Hungarian – hu-HU ■ Romansh – rm

■ Croatian – hr ■ Icelandic – is-IS ■ Russian – ru-RU

■ Czech – cs-CZ ■ Indonesian – id ■ Serbian – sr

■ Danish – da-DK ■ Italian – it-IT ■ Sinhala – si-LK

■ Dutch – nl-NL ■ Japanese – ja-JP ■ Slovak – sk

■ English – en-AU ■ Kannada – kn-IN ■ Slovenian – sl

■ English – en-IN ■ Khmer – km-KH ■ Spanish (Latin America) – es-

419
■ English – en-SG ■ Korean (South Korea) – ko-KR
■ Spanish (Spain) – es-ES
■ English – en-ZA ■ Kyrgyz – ky-KG
■ Spanish (United States) – es-
■ English (Canada) – en-CA ■ Lao – lo-LA US

■ English (United Kingdom) – ■ Latvian – lv ■ Swahili – sw

en-GB
■ Lithuanian – lt ■ Swedish – sv-SE
■ English (United States) – en-
US ■ Macedonian – mk-MK ■ Tamil – ta-IN

■ Estonian – et ■ Malay – ms ■ Telugu – te-IN

■ Filipino – fil ■ Malayalam – ml-IN ■ Thai – th

■ Finnish – fi-FI ■ Marathi – mr-IN ■ Turkish – tr-TR

■ French – fr-FR ■ Mongolian – mn-MN ■ Ukrainian – uk

■ French (Canada) – fr-CA ■ Nepali – ne-NP ■ Vietnamese – vi

■ Galician – gl-ES ■ Norwegian – no-NO ■ Zulu – zu

■ Georgian – ka-G ■ Persian – fa

LOCALIZATIONS AVAILABLE VIA THE APP STORE (28 TOTAL)

■ Chinese (Simplified) ■ Dutch ■ English (U.K.)

■ Chinese (Traditional) ■ English (Australia) ■ English (U.S.)

■ Danish ■ English (Canada) ■ Finnish

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■ French ■ Korean ■ Spanish (Spain)

■ French (Canada) ■ Malay ■ Swedish

■ German ■ Norwegian ■ Thai

■ Greek ■ Portuguese (Brazil) ■ Turkish

■ Indonesian ■ Portuguese (Portugal) ■ Vietnamese

■ Italian ■ Russian

■ Japanese ■ Spanish (Mexico)

Google Play Store Localization

Even if you don’t provide any translations yourself, the Google Play Store Listing long description will still be translated
via Google Translate and shown to the user in their own language upon the user’s request.

Screenshots showing Google’s Play Store listing translation UX

Beware: It’s noteworthy that the short description is automatically translated without any user
interference. While Google Translate has become better and better, it’s not perfect and the automated
translations of the short description can lead to weird, undesirable outcomes. Especially for brands: if
you decide to stay English-only in your App Store presence, it might be worth verifying that these auto-
translations aren’t poorly translated in your core languages, and fixing those that are.

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Pro Tip: Google’s auto-translate also auto-translates parts of your keyword corpus. If you rank for
“shop healthy” in English, then it’s likely that you might also rank for “gezond shoppen” (Dutch) without
having a Dutch app or having ever translated and published a Dutch store presence.

App Store Localization

The App Store is a bit more rudimentary in that it doesn’t provide auto-translations, except for translations of some
keywords that you specify in English (U.S.) into Spanish. This isn’t visible to users, but your app can indeed be displayed
in the US to people searching for Spanish keywords.

Even more interesting for ASO is that each App Store Territory indexes for at least two or more localizations. You can
use this to your own benefit by leveraging keywords in the lower priority localization for the higher priority localization.

As Apple offers some, but not all, data on which localizations are indexed where, we ran a couple of tests with fake
keywords such as ‘enuk1201’ in the English (GB) localization and then tracked these keywords across the different App
Store territories. Here’s what we found:

Keyword Auto-Translation Availability

A P P S T O R E T E R R I T O R Y

L A N G U A G E
UNITED UNITED
GERMANY SPAIN CHINA CANADA
STATES KINGDOM

ENGLISH (UNITED STATES) Unless English (UK) is not set

ENGLISH (UNITED KINGDOM)

ENGLISH (AUSTRALIA)

SPANISH (MEXICO)

SPANISH (SPAIN)

GERMAN

CHINESE TRADITIONAL

CHINESE SIMPLIFIED

FRENCH (CANADA)

ENGLISH (CANADA)

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We drew a couple of conclusions from this test:

■ In the United States, apps rank for Spanish (MX) and English (U.S.) localized keywords.

■ Globally except for Canada and the U.S., apps rank for at least keywords found in English (UK), except if the
app doesn’t have English (UK) specified, in which case the app ranks for English (US) or whatever is set to the
app’s Primary Language

What’s noteworthy is that you will also rank globally (except in Canada and the US), for English (AU). Why
Australian English would rank worldwide is a mystery and needs to be treated with caution as Apple might revert this
phenomenon.

Keywords are not combined across localizations, meaning that if you have “learn” only in the English (U.S.) keywords
field and “spanish” only in the Spanish (MX) keywords field, you will rank for “learn” and “spanish” in the U.S., but won’t
rank for “learn spanish.”

The above rules apply to the app title, subtitle, and keywords field.

SETTING UP YOUR STRATEGY AROUND MULTIPLE INDEXED

LOCALIZATIONS IN THE APP STORE
Say that you have a recipe app with all kinds of recipes from vegetarian recipes, to christmas recipes, and pasta
recipes. The app is in English and the core market is the United States.

With so many recipes, the 30 character title, the 30 character subtitle, and the 100 character keywords field are not
enough to store every keyword you want to rank for.

The first step is to sort the keywords according to the methods mentioned in the chapter on keyword optimization. In
that research you will want to pull data from your own app usage too: what types of recipes do you offer and how are
they represented? Next, continue by entering the most powerful keywords in the English (U.S.) metadata:

ENGLISH (UNITED STATES)

Title MyApp - Best Healthy Recipes 28 char length

Subtitle Pasta, Pizza, Veggie and more 29 char length

meat,chicken,bbq,grill,stews,seafood,noodles,poultry, lunch,
keywords field ocktails,appetizers,chili,side,dishes 97 char length

Then with the other keywords, you will want to make sure to target as many as possible in the Mexican Spanish
keywords field. You can also place English keywords into the Mexican Spanish title/subtitle and target more English
keywords.

While frowned upon by Apple, so far no rejections have been made public about reviewers not accepting English in
non-English localizations. In general, it would be a best practice to at least localize the title/subtitle to target your main
localized language, so as to increase conversion. Even if your product is not available in Mexico, keep in mind that even
in the U.S. there is a Spanish speaking population that might be more likely to find and download your app if you use
Mexican Spanish keywords.

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SPANISH (MEXICO)

Title MyApp - Recetas saludables 26 char length

Subtitle Italiana, Mexicana y más 24 char length

recipes,salad,holiday,christmas,vegan,vegetable,
keywords field 99 char length
pancakes,pork,salmon,meatloaf,asian,french,american

Highlighted above you see the newly targeted Spanish keywords in the title/subtitle. You can also see new types of
recipes your U.S. users might be looking for in the keywords field. You can also see the keyword “recipe;” while this
word is in your English (U.S.) metadata, too, recall that keywords can’t be combined across localizations, so in order to
target “salmon recipes,” you will need to repeat ‘recipes’ in the Spanish (MX) keywords field.

LIST OF APP STORE TERRITORIES WITH CROSS-

LOCALIZATION BENEFITS:

APP STORE TERRITORY LANGUAGES THAT AN APP CAN BE INDEXED FOR

Spanish
United States English (U.S.)
(Mexico)

English
United Kingdom English (U.K.)
(Australia)

English English
Australia, New Zealand
(Australia) (U.K.)

English
Belgium English (U.K.) French Dutch
(Australia)

Portuguese English English

Brazil
(Brazil) (U.K.) (Australia)

English French
Canada
(Canada) (Canada)

Chinese English English

China, Singapore
(Simplified) (U.K.) (Australia)

English
Cyprus English (U.K.) Greek Turkish
(Australia)

English
Denmark English (U.K.) Danish
(Australia)

English
Finland English (U.K.) Finnish
(Australia)

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APP STORE TERRITORY LANGUAGES THAT AN APP CAN BE INDEXED FOR

English English
France French
(U.K.) (Australia)

English English
Germany, Austria German
(U.K.) (Australia)

English English
Greece Greek
(Australia) (U.K.)

Chinese English English

Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan
(Traditional) (Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Indonesia Indonesian
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Italy Italian
(Australia) (U.K.)

English
Japan Japanese
(U.S.)

English English
Korea Korean
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Luxembourg French German
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Malaysia Malay
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Netherlands Dutch
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Norway Norwegian
(Australia) (U.K.)

Portuguese English English

Portugal
(Portugal) (Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Russia, Ukraine Russian
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Spain Spanish (Spain)
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Suriname Dutch
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Sweden Swedish
(Australia) (U.K.)

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APP STORE TERRITORY LANGUAGES THAT AN APP CAN BE INDEXED FOR

English English
Switzerland German French Italian
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Thailand Thai
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Turkey Turkish
(Australia) (U.K.)

English English
Vietnam Vietnamese
(Australia) (U.K.)

Spanish-speaking LATAM
Argentina, Bolivia, Belize, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican English English
Spanish (MX)
Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, (U.K.) (Australia)
Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru,
Uruguay, Venezuela

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APP STORE TERRITORY LANGUAGES THAT AN APP CAN BE INDEXED FOR

Rest of World:
Albania, Algeria, Angola, Anguilla,
Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain,
Barbados, Belarus, Benin, Bermuda,
Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam,
Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cape
Verde, Cayman Islands, Chad, Congo,
Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominica,
Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana,
Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana,
Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel,
Jamaica, Jordan, Kazkhstan, Kenya,
Jamaica, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos,
Latvia, Lebanon, Liberia, Lithuania,
Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi,
English
Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, English (U.K.)
(Australia)
Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia,
Montserrat, Mozambique, Namibia,
Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan,
Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines,
Poland, Papua New Guinea, Qatar,
Romania, Saint Lucia, São Tomé
and Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal,
Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South
Africa, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St.
Vincent and The Grenadines, Swaziland,
Tajikistan, Tanzania, Trinidad and
Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Turks
and Caicos, Uganda, United Arab
Emirates, Uzbekistan, Virgin Islands,
British, Yemen, Zimbabwe

Picking Your Languages

As we’ve seen there are a lot of languages to choose from, so where should you start? Of course, this will depend on
your broader internationalization strategy, which should incorporate many different factors such as total addressable
market size, monetization capabilities, your genre, and available internal resources. However, if you just want to test,
you can start by looking at in which languages your app is already popular in. Look at your app analytics data to see
how many new or active app users your app has per language and country. Alternatively, in the Google Play Console
you can look at Installs by user by Language (Statistics > Configure Report).

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For iTunes Connect a language breakdown is not available, and you would need to base your localization choices on
statistics broken down by Territory.

Minimum Viable Translations

A minimum viable translation is the minimum you can do in App Store localization to get initial traction in terms of
visibility and conversion, which will give you the signal to divest or invest in further localizing for that market.

APP STORE
Frowned upon by Apple as well as your users are automated translations. Still, these automated translations are useful
for helping increase visibility in local markets for the App Store. That’s what makes them the definition of minimum
viable translations, at least when it comes to the keywords field, which is hidden from users and the public. Adding a
localized keywords field does not impact your conversion, and you also still rank for your primary language.

If you have a movie recorder/editor and want to gauge if there’s any appetite in the German market, you start by going
to Google translate and entering the main keyword you’ve identified in English.

Screenshot showing Google Translate; for your top-terms you will want to do some minor research.

This specific example is nice as it explains also why you should be on guard about using Google translations in user-
facing messaging; while the concepts have been translated correctly, the app-specific meaning got lost in the translation.
For example, for the keyword movie editor, it was translated as the person who edits movies (Filmredakteur). You
probably wouldn’t know this if you don’t speak German! As an ASO, you should also go one step further to research how
each of these translated keywords looks in the App Store using a live search or ASO tool.

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Screenshot showing how Apptweak displays that there are no results for Filmredakteur in Germany

If the keyword is one of your focus keywords, then the research you will want to do is mainly focused on the root
keyword: “Film.” Entering this in a tool like [Link] yields the following:

Screenshot from [Link] showing search results

Search one of these high-volume search results to get a good idea on what other apps are ranking for this keyword, and
whether or not you’re in good company on this term.

Once you’ve assembled your list of German keywords, you can add them into iTunes Connect, leaving all the user-

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facing assets the same (Title, Screenshots, etc):

Track your main localized keywords in your favorite ASO tool and also track the number of App Store search Impressions,
as well as App Units from App Store search. If the translation seems to earn some initial traction, try doing another
round of optimizations or move on to Localization.

Pro Tip: You can switch to another App Store territory by following the next steps:

1. In the Today tab, click on your profile image

2. Click on your profile image again
3. Click “Country/Region”
4. Click “Change Country or Region”
5. Select a new country or region and click “Next”
6. When asked to accept the ToS, you can safely click “Cancel”
You’re now in another App Store territory, and you’ll be able to browse it, but not download any apps.

PLAY STORE
With Google Play, on the other hand, you won’t want to mess around with automated translations. You are indexed for
many keywords in local searches already without translating your metadata, and adding auto-translated metadata as
if it were professional translations can decrease your conversion rate. We therefore advise you to order a translation of
at least your Title and Short description, as these are most visible and influential on your conversion rate. You can use
a service like Gengo for this.

True localization
Localizing languages is not just about translation, which is where many ASOs stop. In order to achieve the best CRO
results, consider these tips:

■ Use language that resonates with the local culture (e.g., slang or other colloquialisms), rather than even

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logical, 1:1 translations.

■ Use locally correct references in your graphics and text, such as listing local units of measurement or
punctuation in your description (e.g., commas vs. periods for prices, like $2,99 in Europe), or including local
cities in screenshots.

Groupon screenshot depicting localized captions, but with an English UI (Instead of German), showing San Francisco (instead of
Berlin) and showing $ (instead of a euro sign)

■ Use locally understood cultural references and trends. For example, try using the color red in China (the color
of luck), or adding overlaid text into your app icon in Japan, which is a common trend for apps.

■ Optimize for local holidays and seasonality, such as local independence days, or summertime in the southern
hemisphere at the same time as wintertime in the northern hemisphere.

■ Especially for regionally relevant apps (such as weather apps), it might make sense to address the local
relevancy in the app icon (only available in the Google Play Store).

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Screenshots showing Waze adding local relevancy in Germany by adding a flag, but in France going even one step further with a
baguette!

■ Optimize your listing for the features that resonate most with local users; don’t assume that users in each
country will all prefer the same features of your app to equal degrees.

■ If your app offers customer support in a country’s local language(s), call it out! By doing so, you can assure
users that they will be taken care of if they download your app.

■ Earn local ratings; while ratings in the Play Store are aggregated globally, App Store ratings are visible only
from the local country, and additionally, users will want to read reviews in their own language.

■ If your app is newly launched, tell people that you are new to the country. By acknowledging that you are new
to the country and just getting started, you can build a feeling of genuineness and even excitement with local
users.

Further Reading: For more detail on localization, check out the following resources:

Localizing your App Store presence can add quite a lot of overhead. Teams working with a lot of localizations will want
to ensure you have automated some of that overhead. To reduce this workload, you can use tools such as Fastlane or
AppRadar Publisher.

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For more information on screenshots specifically, check out Philip Engberg’s post: How I nailed App Store screenshot
automation [[Link] which
expands on how he automated the generation of localized screenshots with the help of snapshot (a Fastlane tool).

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 09
3rd Party android distribution
09 3rd Party android distribution |

09
3rd Party android distribution
“Google Play isn’t the only Android App Store, right? Where else can I submit my Android app?”

While for iOS and Windows Phone you only have one store to distribute to, for Android there is a broad palette of stores
available.

Image depicting the number of 3rd party App Stores

If you’re looking to increase your global reach outside of China, we suggest considering the Amazon App Store,
Blackberry World, and Samsung apps. Be warned, though, that the opportunity compared to the Play Store is much
smaller for these stores, as only a small percentage of Android users are on these alternate App Stores. That said,

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you can expect less competition and easier access to the editorial teams of those stores, which might make it worth
the effort.

Screenshot showing the number of apps available in leading App Stores as of June 2016. Source: Statista [ [Link]
statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/ ]

If you want to tap into the ever-growing number of smartphone users in China, you will have to work with alternate
Android Stores; in fact, the Google Play Store is not available in China as Google was actually blocked as of mid-2014.

For distribution in China on Android, consider Baidu App Store, Tencent App Gem, Xiaomi App Store, Qihoo 360 Mobile
Assistant, and the Huawei App Store. These stores combined have the vast majority of Android market share in China.

Screenshot showing the leading mobile app distribution stores in China in 2015, by market share. Source: Statista [ [Link]
[Link]/statistics/646357/china-leading-mobile-app-stores-by-market-share/ ]

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Pro Tip: As it can be quite daunting to upload your apps into 300+ different Android Stores, and all the
stores have different metadata requirements, tools like CodeNgo or AppScatter can be of help. Codengo
aims to provide a self-publishing platform for many 3rd party Android stores.

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10
Black Hat aSO
 10 Black Hat aSO |

10
Black Hat aSO
“How can I make sure that I stay on the good side of Apple and Google and not run the risk of having my app taken
down?”

The goal of ASO is to boost visibility and conversion, while still abiding to the rules of the App Stores. In contrast, the
Black Hat sect of ASO disregards these rules completely and uses unfair optimization tactics to gain a competitive
advantage. To prevent such unfair competition, Apple and Google lay out strict penalties (such as removal from their
App Stores and developer programs) for apps that break the rules or use forbidden tactics.

This chapter aims to give an outline of which practices of Black Hat ASO are out there and how to be effective with ASO
while at the same time steering clear of dangerous or shady black hat tactics.

Black Hat Tactics per Activity

ASO ACTIVITY BLACK HAT ASO TACTICS KNOWN

Keyword optimization Yes

Ranking visibility Yes

Conversion rate optimization Yes

Choosing platforms & distribution channels No

Getting featured Unknown, but possible (bribery/nepotism)

Black Hat tactics exist for almost all ASO activities

Both Apple and Google have a set of strict guidelines and rules ( Apple App Store Guidelines [[Link]
com/app-store/review/guidelines/] and Google Play Store Guidelines [[Link]

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content-policy/]) but also at other times keep it necessarily vague on what exactly is considered overstepping the line.
According to Apple’s review guidelines [[Link] developers will
know the line when they cross it.

The App Stores rely on developers to optimize for discovery to deliver a great user experience. Apple encourages
developers to optimize their apps’ metadata, from text elements like the app description to visual elements like
screenshots, so that users can enjoy the optimal store experience. Apple even actively seems to embrace ASO and give
tips on how to optimize for search [[Link] Google Play goes one step further
and provides tools like Store Listing Experiments to optimize assets, next to other useful features for conversion rate
optimization (CRO).

Black Hat ASO is used to artificially increase both visibility and conversion

In CRO terms, Black Hat ASO is used by spammers to gain an unfair advantage against legitimate apps by manipulating
the areas of CRO that deliver the most impact.

Burst campaigns, one of the main tools in the Black Hat ASO’s toolkit, are mostly used for growing an app’s visibility.
Yet for Android apps (where the total downloads are visible to users), burst campaigns can also increase an app’s
conversion rate by making apps appear more popular than they actually are through this social proof-based data
point. This can also occur in the App Store, where top chart ranks show in an app’s product page.

Campaigns that raise an app’s star rating and generate fake reviews are also a big Black Hat CRO tool. By raising an
app’s total star ratings, boosting its star rating, and/or filling an app’s store listing with flattering reviews, Black Hat
ASOs can fool unwitting, legitimate users that an app’s value is higher than it actually is, and earn a boost in organic
downloads.

While it is effective in the short term, over the longer term Black Hat ASO tactics cannot improve an inherently poor
quality app. As such, it offers a view into the fact that having a good conversion rate is required in order to maintain or
grow visibility, as explained throughout this book.

To illustrate this fact, we conducted a case study [[Link]

spam/] investigating a weather app spammer that used a set of apps to infiltrate the top keyword ranks for “weather”
searches in the Google Play Store. While the spammer used fake reviews and a keyword burst campaign to initially gain
a top rank for weather searches, the app subsequently lost ranking as legitimate users stopped downloading it or wrote
bad reviews.

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White Hat / Grey Hat / Black Hat Techniques

WHITE HAT GREY HAT BLACK HAT

Incentivized Installs

Bot Installs

“Retained” Bot Installs

Non-Incentivized Search Installs

Incentivized Search Installs

VISIBILITY

Bot trending searches

Top Grossing Refund”-trick

Keyword “dropping”

Keyword “stuffing”

Lifting of brand names

Lifting of trending keywords

Leverage localization tricks

Asking for reviews

Asking for reviews after segmenting

Asking for reviews

Paid Negative Reviews

REVIEWS

Paid Human / Bot Reviews

Incentivized Reviews

Writing your own reviews

Review Contests

Paid FB likes or Google +1s

Not abiding the guidelines

OTHER

Fake apps & rip-offs

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Black Hat Strategy: Keyword Metadata Manipulation

The following are the a few of the most common Black Hat tactics around keywords in the app metadata.

KEYWORD STUFFING
In the Play Store, where the descriptions rank for keywords, one simple tactic is to shove as many keywords as many
times into the app description, in hopes of earning higher rank for those keywords. The app below offers a view into
keyword stuffing for the keyword: “free music”

Screenshot example of an app keyword stuffing in their app description

KEYWORD DROPPING
Keyword dropping is a more elegant tactic than keyword stuffing. It has its roots in SEO tactics of optimizing for popular
phrases people actually search for (think ‘cheap flights to New York’, ‘cheap flights to Paris’, ‘cheap flights to Dubai’ type
SEO texts found often on websites). The same principle applies in the app stores, within limits. For instance, a music
app could include a long list with names of popular artists in its description, which would not strictly be descriptive
about the app but still related and relevant to the app’s content.

LEECHING OFF OF BRAND NAMES

Using well-known brand names and sometimes even their logos to deceive users into downloading the black hat app
instead of the original. Taking into account that, according to Google, more than half of the users are searching for a
specific title [[Link] this is naturally
a widespread Black Hat tactic. Sometimes, an app that’s legitimate by itself may resort to using the better-known brand
name to mislead users and boost its presence.

In other cases, the app is entirely fake and designed to scam or spam users ([Link]
thomasbrewster/2017/11/06/google-whatsapp-fake-problem-is-big/#3a96316f597d). Fake apps are using blank
spaces and Unicode characters to make the developer name and titles look like the real ones.

While Apple reset star reviews after each update in iOS 10 or earlier, these fake apps could simply submit a new version
after getting too many negative reviews. While iOS ratings do not auto-reset, developers have the option to manually

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reset their ratings and reviews.

Example of fake apps next to the original

TRENDING SEARCH MANIPULATION

A position in the trending searches can result in a significant amount of downloads [[Link]
blog/the-ultimate-power-of-trending-searches] from users casually browsing the App Store. The Trending Searches
are displayed whenever a user is tapping the search icon in the Apple App Store. This presents an opportunity for
fraudulent searches [[Link]
of-gaming/] which can be used to increase exposure and get short-term growth.

A slightly less aggressive, yet borderline Black Hat technique is incorporating trending search keywords that aren’t
relevant to the app itself. It is also prohibited in the guidelines of both stores and can result in getting banned. But of
course it is legitimate to adapt an app so it becomes relevant to a trending keyword, such as “Halloween,” by changing
the app temporarily to a Halloween edition.

Black Hat Strategy: Ranking Manipulation

App Store rankings are one of the major drivers for traffic and app discovery, whether it’s ranking in the Top 100
downloaded charts, ranking within a category, or keyword ranks.

Because simple download data or download velocity data are highly important factors in the ranking algorithms, the
algorithms are left vulnerable to a number of Black Hat tactics.

TOP CHART MANIPULATION USING FAKE INSTALLS

Black Hat methods acquire massive numbers of cheap installations, which can come from many sources, such as
people who are paid to download apps, bots, or incentivized ads. Some bot Installs can even go as far as pretending
to be “retained” Installs (fake users opening the app after X amount of time), manipulating rankings beyond the initial
burst. The main target of burst campaigns is acquiring organic downloads from the visibility attained by achieving high
top-chart rankings, but keywords can also be affected, per the following page.

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Example for manipulated download charts, pointed out by developer Herman Jakobi [[Link]
status/805172558949662720]

CHART MANIPULATION USING INCENTIVIZED INSTALLS

In the case of incentivized installs, the users are real but their intent for downloading an app isn’t genuine. In 2011,
Apple prominently cracked down on incentivized app Installs [[Link]
rejecting-apps-with-pay-per-install-campaigns] campaigns by rejecting apps that had implemented offer walls for
incentivized downloads. One issue with incentivized Installs is that they usually lead to a low quality user base, which
can hurt an app’s engagement metrics. This can be mitigated by using incentivized video ads where a view is rewarded
with in-game currency but the actual download is optional.

While incentivized Installs are mostly regarded as a Gray Hat tactic and can be used by legitimate apps, incentivized
Installs are still designed to manipulate rankings by acquiring a large number of Installs from users who have little-to-
no interest in the app itself other than simply earning an incentive (such as unlocking content in another app).

Taken in the context of purely building brand awareness, this is not a problem; however, when considering that app
rankings are a zero-sum game where downloads of all kinds affect rankings, this means that apps which gain rank via
incentivized downloads push out apps that have worked hard to acquire downloads from more legitimate sources,
often over a longer period of time; this fact marks the transition of incentivized Installs from being acceptable to
becoming harmful to the legitimacy of the App Store.

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SEARCH & INSTALL CAMPAIGNS

Example flow for a search & install campaign where users are sent to the App Store via a certain query and download an app in
exchange for virtual currency

Here, users are incentivized to download an app coming from a specific search query instead of directly downloading
from the App Store page. This results in both a higher click-through-rate as well as a higher amount of users that
convert from this particular keyword. Also, it can affect the trending searches section if done at scale.

In addition to affecting the total downloads, recall that the App Stores consider conversion rate as a major signal
for keyword rank. This has implications for search & install campaigns, because if an app is able to acquire artificial
keyword searches that convert at 100%, they can game the system by raising their conversion rate for that keyword
overall. While store ads can be used in some ways for the same purpose, this can be a far more expensive approach.

While search & install campaigns are seen by many as Black Hat ASO, others consider it legitimate, and providers that
are manipulating the search scores are openly promoting these type of campaigns.

MANIPULATING THE TOP GROSSING CHART

This tactic, highlighted by Gabriel Machuret [[Link] includes increasing the price of an
app to astronomic heights and then asking friends to buy it.

The trick is to let them demand a refund right away after the transaction has been processed. This will lead to climbing
on top of the Top Grossing charts within a category to then just change the pricing back to normal and profiting off the
increased visibility due to the top grossing ranking spot.

With the removal of Top Grossing charts, this option became obsolete for the App Store.

Black Hat Strategy: Manipulating Ratings & Reviews

User reviews are one of the most important factors for App Store ranking and conversion rate optimization. A common
way is to ask the users to rate their experience within the app first, and then send only the happy users to the App Store
to leave a rating (this is called segmenting), but recently Apple seems to be taking an issue with this approach [https://
[Link]/pietbrauer/status/791883047373246464], and now requires developers to abandon custom prompts, and
instead use only Apple’s 10.3 in-app rating system.

There are a number of Grey-to-Black Hat tactics to boost user reviews, all of which are illegal but nevertheless commonly
found.

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INCENTIVIZED REVIEWS

Screenshot depicting an incentivized review process

This tactic includes everything where the user is offered something in return for leaving a review. Apple prohibits
offering for example in-app currency, content, or upgrades in the app to get reviews and ratings in return. In their
guidelines, Apple is stating “Developers who attempt to manipulate or cheat the user reviews or chart ranking in the
App Store with fake or paid reviews, or any other inappropriate methods will be removed from the iOS Developer
Program.” [[Link]

PAID REVIEWS
Buying reviews is a prohibited, but very common Black Hat tactic. Normally these reviews are quite easy to recognize
when taking a look at the wording. If there are a lot of reviews with almost identical wordings, it’s safe to assume that

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these reviews are bought. It also happens that identical reviews from competitors are used.

Example of paid reviews offer on fiverr

REVIEW CONTESTS

Screenshot depicting a review contest

Because the Google Play Store indexes the keywords in user reviews, there are multiple ways for Android apps to
manupulate keyword rankings. Two of the most popular are to give users entries into a contest to win something in
return for leaving a keyword-laden review.

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REVIEWING YOUR OWN APP

Another tactic generally regarded as Gray Hat, many developers will write reviews for their own app, or ask friends to
do the same. This is especially common with indie developers, or apps with low rating volume after having ratings reset
after an update.

With the App Store move to non-resetting of reviews, this practice has likely diminished in usage.

RATING COMPETITORS’ APPS NEGATIVELY

There are many cases were publishers have chosen the unfair route to attack their competition. Rating the competition
negatively [[Link] is one of them. Needless to say, this tactic
is prohibited by Apple and Google.

SUMMARY
As mentioned before, it’s not always 100% clear which tactics are considered Black Hat and which are legitimate. Even
the standard practice of putting an important keyword in the app name itself is clearly unpopular with Apple who
reduced the space to 30 characters and added a subtitle field in for indexable descriptions.

This table summarizes all of the above-mentioned tactics in the spectrum of White-to-Black Hat. Keep in mind that
successful ASO practitioners steer away from Black Hat completely but instead focus on mastering the balance between
‘White Hat’ and ‘Grey Hat’ tactics.

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11
Tools
11 Tools |

11
Tools
“What tools are useful for managing ASO?”

Trying to manage an ASO strategy without using tools is not recommended.

One reason among many is that neither Apple nor Google provide data for keyword or top chart ranking. ASO tools
have been developed to make repetitive or difficult tasks easy to manage, thereby helping you to gain more insight and
improve your ASO results with less effort.

Here is a table mapping the tools listed in the ASO Stack to a number of popular ASO Tools available.
REPLYING TO REVIEWS

APP STORE ANALYTICS

KEYWORD RESEARCH

PRIORITIZATION AND

A/B TESTING TOOLS

USER EXPERIENCE
KEYWORD RANK

IN-APP RATING
INTELLIGENCE

MANAGEMENT

SCREENSHOT
COMPETITIVE
SENTIMENT

WEIGHTING
RATINGS &

FEEDBACK

METADATA
TRACKING

TRACKING

BUILDERS
KEYWORD

PROMPTS

TOOL

App Annie

AppBot

AppFigures

AppFollow

[Link]

[Link]

AppLaunchpad

AppRadar

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REPLYING TO REVIEWS

APP STORE ANALYTICS

KEYWORD RESEARCH

PRIORITIZATION AND

A/B TESTING TOOLS

USER EXPERIENCE
KEYWORD RANK

IN-APP RATING
INTELLIGENCE

MANAGEMENT

SCREENSHOT
COMPETITIVE
SENTIMENT

WEIGHTING
RATINGS &

FEEDBACK

METADATA
TRACKING

TRACKING

BUILDERS
KEYWORD

PROMPTS
TOOL

AppScatter

Apptentive

Apptimize

Apptopia

AppTweak

ASODesk

CodeNGo

Fastlane

MobileAction

PrioriData

RaiseMetrics

SensorTower

SplitMetrics

StoreMaven

TheTool

TUNE

Google Trends

Google Keyword
Planner

Platform Tools
Notwithstanding the above comment, Apple and Google do provide plenty of data via their first party reporting
platforms, with more data being released by both Apple and Google on a regular basis.

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Google Play Console

DASHBOARD VIEW
The dashboard is the main screen in the Google Play Console that you will arrive at after selecting an application.
The Play Console dashboard is meant to offer an overview of the health of your app and includes the following data
points:

■ Installs by user

■ UnInstalls by user

■ Installs by user by country

■ Installs on active devices (only available per the last 30 days)

■ Ratings volume

■ Average rating

■ Crashes

Screenshot of the Google Play Console dashboard

Use this data to check in on the overall health/growth of your app. But be aware that this data is not filtered by source,
meaning that you cannot distinguish between, say organic traffic and paid traffic; an increase in either will show up as
an increase in Installs. Use the User Acquisition view to compare performance by sources.

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STATISTICS VIEW
The Statistics view offers a deeper look into your app’s data along several data points and even comparison dates.
Downloading the data will export a collection of reports in comma-separated format from the time period you have
selected (7 days, 30 days, 1 year, lifetime).

By configuring your report, you can view up to two data points across one of the following:

■ Android version

■ Device type

■ Tablet size (10 inch and above vs. 7 inch to 10 inch, not inclusive of 10 inch)

■ Country

■ Language

■ App version

■ Carrier

Screenshot of the Google Play Console Statistics view

Use this data to see how your app is trending based on the prior period, information that the User Acquisition view does
not provide. But similarly to the Dashboard view, be aware that you cannot filter by acquisition source in this report.

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This report is more handy than the Dashboard view for drilling down into your app’s performance along dimensions
such as country, but the statistics report is generally less useful for ASO than the User Acquisition view.

ANDROID VITALS
Data points here include insight for developers to analyze app performance in terms of stability, battery, and rendering
times.

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Developers can use this view to manage Firebase Cloud Messenger, as well as services and APIs.

RELEASE MANAGEMENT
Developers and marketers can tap into Google’s abilities to manage new app releases, Android Instant Apps, device
catalogues, and app signing here.

STORE PRESENCE
This view is a big one for app developers/marketers, as it houses the levers that determines how your app’s store listing
appears in the store, including the following two major areas:

■ Store listing

The store listing is where you enter your app’s metadata (both text and visuals), category, contact/privacy information,
as well as add translations for localized listings

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Screenshots of the Google Play Console Store Listing view

■ Store listing experiments

One of the biggest differentiators between the Google Play Console and iTunes Connect is the ability to run experiments
(A/B tests) through the Google Play Store. Experiments can test all elements of an app listing (except the app title), and
experiments can be run on up to 75% of an app’s live store traffic.

Screenshot of the Google Play Console Store Listing Experiments view

While highly useful and the best way to obtain a true test of a live App Store listing, there are several limitations to note
with Google’s A/B testing engine:

■ The confidence interval is locked at 90%, which may not be a high enough level of confidence for marketers

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who want a more precise reading.

■ Testing is done with all visitors to an app’s listing, which cannot be manipulated (e.g. search vs. top chart
browsing).

■ Experiments provide data on retained users, however, they do not allow for reporting on other post-install
metrics, such as revenue.

■ Per the above point, experiments provide no insight into which types of users were sent to each variant.

■ Running multiple experiments only provides data on performance for a variant all-up, which while useful for a
cohesive report, makes it difficult to distinguish the effect of each variable.

■ Experiments do not provide insight into other metrics, such as engagement or view-rate of each element.

Screenshot of a Google Play Experiment

Other options available in the Store Presence view include:

■ Pricing & distribution

■ Content rating

■ In-app products

■ Paid app sales

■ Translation services

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USER ACQUISITION
The user acquisition tab is another important area for app developers/marketers focusing on ASO. Here, Google
provides data on both acquisition as well as retention, broken out along several dimensions.

Screenshot of the Google Play Console User Acquisition report

Google’s acquisition data is quite useful and extensive, especially for ASOs who don’t have a Mobile Measurement
Partner (MMP). Use this data for some of the following analyses:

■ Measuring the real change in performance after an optimization (e.g. how a screenshot change effected
conversion rate).

■ Measuring the performance of each acquisition source, such as how SEO Installs converted purchases (and
which keywords drove Installs), or how each AdWords campaign performed.

■ Analyzing your app’s AARR (acquisition, activation [i.e. 1 day retention], retention [i.e. 7-30 day retention], and
revenue [i.e. purchases]).

■ Identifying subscription rates, as well as maturation rates (i.e. users who reached the end of the initial
subscription period), and drop-off rates from subscription payment #1 to subscription payment #2.

■ Measuring funnel performance for each country.

Google’s “Installs without a store listing visit” refers to downloads that occurred without a visit to your app’s page, such

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as direct downloads from [Link], or Installs pre-loaded onto new phones.

In addition to general acquisition and retention rate data, ASOs can also dive into Google’s conversion rate benchmark
data to compare their performance vs. the marketplace of peer apps (i.e. apps that share a category and monetization-
type).

Screenshot of the Google Play Console User Acquisition report showing an app’s conversion rate vs. the benchmark conversion rate

Other information provided via the acquisition reports view includes:

■ AdWords campaigns: Reports on AdWords campaign budget, spend, target CPI vs. actual CPI, status, and
conversions.

■ Promotions: Allows you to create promotion codes for paid apps or In-App Purchases, which can be distributed
to users for marketing/retention purposes. Apps can provide up to 500 promo codes per quarter.

■ Optimization suggestions: Programmatic suggestions from Google, such as adding a localized store listing
version for a country with a poor conversion rate.

As mentioned earlier in the book, Google Play will now allow marketers and developers to see the same breakdown of
app store search vs browse that Apple does, and even takes this visibility one step farther by showing the top actual
search terms that users entered, along with data on store listing visitors, installs, retained installs, and buyers. This
allows marketers to optimize for not only keywords that produce installs, but keywords that have higher ARPU statistics,
thus producing a higher return on investment.

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Screenshot of the search vs browse installs view in the Google Play Console User Acquisition report

Screenshot of the search vs browse installs view in the Google Play Console User Acquisition report

FINANCIAL REPORTS
The financial views of the Google Play Console provide financial data in several unique sub-views:

■ Overview: Provides revenue, buyer, and average revenue per transaction/user data, broken out by several
summary time periods (last day, last 7 days, last 30 days, overall) and by country

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■ Revenue: Breaks down revenue per individual product (with subscription products also broken out separately),
as well as by day over select time periods, and by country

■ Buyers: Explains total/unique/returning buyer data broken out per country and by day over select time
periods.

■ Conversions: Offers conversion and (cumulative) spending per buyer data broken out by weekly/monthly
cohorts over select time periods.

■ Subscriptions: Provides a window into your active subscriptions vs. cancellations vs. new subscription
volume, and revenue over time.

Screenshot of the Google Play Console Financial reports showing a subscription report

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USER FEEDBACK
This last view contains inputs from users, including both ratings/reviews and beta feedback. User feedback data is
provided in one of four sub-views:

R AT I N G S
Google provides great summary data on reviews via daily/weekly/monthly and cumulative time grains. Google also
provides several dimensions for drilling-down into ratings health, including:

■ Country

■ Language

■ App version

■ Android version

■ Device & tablet type

Screenshots of the Google Play Console Ratings reporting view

Use Google’s ratings report information to:

■ Analyze the impact of your rating prompt.

■ Allocate customer service resources, based on the rating per country data.

■ Prioritize QA resources, depending on the rating per device or Android version data.

■ Decide to take action if your app’s rating is consistently trending lower.

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R E V I E W A N A LY S I S
Google also provides a similarly deep level of insight for review analysis, with the following data points:

■ The impact on ratings of reviews that were and were not replied to by you (the developer).

■ The most common phrases found in reviews (review highlights).

■ Insights into each rating functional area (i.e., common topics, such as app design or updates) and a comparison
for each functional area of your app’s performance vs. your app’s category peers.

Screenshots of the Google Play Console Reviews analysis

Specific, dynamic topics mentioned in reviews by users are also provided, for several languages.

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Screenshots of the Google Play Console Reviews analysis

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Use Google’s Reviews reports to:

■ Prioritize developer time based on feature/bug feedback.

■ Identify features and functional areas to highlight in your CRO efforts.

■ Identify common root words useful for visibility optimization.

■ Come up with messaging and ideas for your marketing and advertising efforts outside of the store.

REVIEWS
Google also allows developers/marketers to view/analyze/manage replies to individual reviews, and filter the reviews
displayed by several dimensions, including:

■ Rating

■ Android version

■ App version

■ Specific review phrase (highlight) mentioned

■ Language

■ Specific functional area (common topic)

■ Developer reply state

■ Specific topic mentioned

■ Device

■ Search review text for custom input

BETA FEEDBACK
Provides data similar to the reviews subview, but limited to beta feedback and the following dimensions:

■ Language

■ App version

■ Android version

■ Developer reply state

■ Search review text for custom input

Android app developers/marketers can also create a developer page, which can help increase downloads for all apps
in a developer account.

Developer pages can include the following information:

■ Promotional text (140 characters)

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■ Website URL

■ Graphic assets (developer icon 512x512 and header image 4096x2304)

■ Featured app

Screenshot of Trulia’s developer page via Google Play web app

Screenshot of Trulia’s developer page via Google Play mobile app

Other information found in the Google Play Console includes:

■ Developer account details

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■ API access details

■ Pricing templates: help templatize the management for pricing across multiple apps

■ Managing testers

■ Pre-launch report: identifies crashes, display issues, and security vulnerabilities.

■ Preferences for notifications

■ Game services

iTunes Connect
While Google has out-innovated Apple when it comes to app developer tools, Apple has nonetheless built a solid
platform and committed to a regular series of updates to its iTunes Connect platform. Apple’s iTunes Connect platform
is separated into four main navigation views, as well as several sub-tab views within each.

MY APPS
Similar to Google’s Store Listing view, the App Store subview is where developers and marketers adjust the metadata
that shows in the App Store. The major subviews here include:

App Information: This includes the app title, category, and localization selection.

Pricing and Availability : This provides visibility into pricing-related distribution details.

App (with version #): This is where the major metadata (besides the title and category) are submitted, including:

■ Screenshots

■ Icon

■ Description

■ What’s New

■ Localization

Developers can add a localized app listing for a specific country or countries in the App information subview by clicking
the default language name dropdown and selecting a country to localize for. Localizations require a new build/version
to be queued for submission.

F E AT U R E S
The Features subview provides control and visibility over In-App Purchases, subscriptions, the Game Center, encryption,
and promo codes.

TESTFLIGHT
The TestFlight sub-view provides control and visibility over beta testers (internal and external), as well as requisite
testing information. This sub-view includes useful information on tester invites sent, tester installation status, and app
crashes, for both each version, as well as for individual testers.

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ACTIVITY
The activity subview provides details on build submissions, App Store versions, and ratings and reviews, which also
enables the ability to reply to user reviews.

Screenshot of the iTunes Connect Ratings and Reviews view

Screenshot of iTunes Connect reply to user review option

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Pro Tip: In ratings and reviews, you can also see metadata on the country of the user who left the
review, and how many viewers marked a review as helpful. Apple makes it easier to access this data by
providing a filter option for most recent/helpful/favorable/critical, as well as for app version and user
territory. This enables you to zero in on the reviews that best represent the sentiments of your userbase.

APP ANALYTICS
As with Google’s User Acquisition view, App Analytics is the location that ASOs will spend the most time investigating
in ITC, as it provides the data points necessary to judge the success of an ASO strategy. App analytics can be viewed in
summary across all of a developer account’s apps/bundles, as well as individually.

In the initial overview subview, marketers and developers will see a high-level look into the selected app’s performance,
along with retention and geographic data.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect App Analytics Overview dashboard

Similar to Google’s Dashboard view, but more detailed, the Overview subview is great for gaining a quick look at the
health and performance of your app, to see whether things are trending in the right direction or whether a problem is
developing.

Keep in mind that the latest day or two days’ data may be delayed in reporting, and may not show (especially for app
units and revenue data).

The metrics subview provides an ability to drill-down into dimensions such as App Store Browse and filter by
dimensions like territory. Data from the metrics subview can be compared to one another in dual axis or calculated
ratio, as well as downloaded to CSV. New app version updates or Apple software updates are indicated by gray, vertical
bars (annotations). You can also save views, such as TTR (ratio of Product Page Views/Impressions).

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect App Analytics Metrics view

The Metrics subview is excellent for configuring data for download into your own reports, as well as drilling into a trend
noticed in the overview subview, such as worsening downloads. Use this data for some of the following analyses:

■ Comparing the conversion rate by country.

■ Determining the uplift in App Store search impressions from a recent metadata update.

■ Determining whether the uplift from a recent visibility optimization led to a worse ARPU.

■ Viewing macro trends in metrics like impression volume or KPIs like app units, spanning months, to understand
the long-term success of your ASO efforts.

The sources subview contains some information found in Google’s User Acquisition view, but with additional clarity
into sources within the App Store via the App Store Search and App Store Browse segments.

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Screenshots of iTunes Connect App Analytics Sources view

Some of the ways that you can use Apple’s source data include:

■ Disambiguating the impact of search vs. top charts/features in terms of driving performance for your app.

■ With this data, it is also now possible to more accurately determine the return of earning your way to an
above-the-fold top chart position.

■ Identifying top referrer apps, in order to strengthen those relationships and/or marketing connections.

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■ More easily correlating the impact of keyword ranking changes, via analyzing only data from the App Store
Search segment.

Some caveats of the new iTunes Source data include:

■ From Thomas Petit:

■ The data is only available since 4/15/17.

■ There is a massive post-install misattribution.

■ Organic/Paid Search Ads breakdown undisclosed.

■ From Gabor Papp:

■ This data is based only on opt-in data (for us, that’s only 26-30% of all user data).

The retention subview offers insight into your app’s retention performance, broken out across the following dashboards:

■ Retention per day for users acquired 30 days ago

■ Day 1 retention for the past 30 days

■ Daily retention for each of the past 28 days

Screenshot of iTunes Connect App Analytics Retention view

Use this data for some of the following analyses:

■ Analyzing your app’s retention data if you do not have an MMP.

■ Analyzing the impact of your engagement campaigns on raising retention.

■ Analyzing the quality/retention of users sourced from changes in ASO/marketing strategy.

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Pro Tip: You can schedule a weekly email summary that provides app analytics data on your top 20
apps via the Users and Roles view.

Screenshot example of an App Analytics summary email report (identifiable app details removed)

SALES AND TRENDS

Sales and Trends provides a more in-depth analysis than App Analytics does, into downloads and products purchased
by users.

Subscription products (filterable by app or subscription product), active subscriptions, and daily subscriptions.

There are a variety of ways in which you can use these reports. For example, you can:

■ Analyze your push campaign effectiveness for increasing the number of new subscription signups (pre-post).

■ Cross-reference your new user acquisition reports with new subscriptions to determine whether you’re
acquiring quality users and what the lag time in subscribing is.

■ Diagnose the overall health of your subscription volume and, with a daily/weekly/monthly revenue goal,
determine when you need to turn up your marketing activities to increase subscription cash flows.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect Sales and Trends subscriptions general view

■ Subscription activity, listing a count of the individual subscription events per day, includes:

■ New subscribers

■ Renewals

■ Reactivations (users who cancelled and returned)

■ Refunds

■ Cancellations

■ The number of active free trials.

■ A breakdown, per month of conversion rates per subscriptions and trials, along with average rates over the
past 12 months.

You can use these reports to determine how well your optimization activities are doing in terms of improving the
conversion rate of both free and paid subscriptions. Track the dates on which your activities (such as promoting free
trials, running remarketing campaigns, or implementing a push or in-app notifications system) are occurring and then
compare the conversion rate pre-and-post the start date of your optimization activities.

Screenshot of iTunes Connect Sales and Trends subscription retention view

■ Subscription cohort analysis, showing active subscriptions by starting week, stretching back from the current
week.
This report is useful for determining the lifetime length of subscriptions, which helps when calculating the lifetime value
of your customer (LTV is a must-know number in order to scale effectively, especially when running paid marketing
campaigns). You can also use this report to determine how your subscription optimization efforts are doing, similar to
the prior conversion rate report, yet this time in terms of total length of each subscription.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect Sales and Trends Active Subscriptions per week view

■ Subscription revenue (by dollar and percentage of the total) of users over time, segmented into those who
have been subscribed for over or under 1 year, when Apple’s cut of revenues swaps from 30% to 15%.
This report is useful for determining how much of your subscription revenue is being earned by higher margin > 1 year
users

Screenshot of iTunes Connect Sales and Trends Active Subscriptions view

It includes a list of the top subscriptions for a developer account, by app and subscription name with a count of active
subscription and active free trials.

Use this report to determine which subscription products are performing better than others in terms of total conversions
and free trials. Two other useful data points that can be calculated from this report include:

■ Determining the importance of a trial in producing a full subscription for each individual subscription by
dividing the number of trials by active subscriptions (as applicable).

■ Determining whether free trials lead to more subscriptions in general by segmenting subscriptions into
“offers free” and “does not offer free trial,” and summing the total subscriptions for each segment.

Apple also offers a couple of additional reports for developers and marketers, including:

01. Subscriptions: Higher-level audience or market data such as active subscriptions by country or subscription ID.

02. Subscription Events: A more detailed view within individual subscriptions, such as days before cancellation,
cancellation reason, and days cancelled.

SALES
Sales offers reports on all products sold (including free downloads and paid purchases). Sales reports can also filter
returned items by the following options:

■ Content (the name or ID of the unit sold, such as an IAP item)

■ Territory

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■ Device

■ Category (each item’s category, such as iOS Apps > Business)

■ Content type (drill-down into different distribution categories of items, including apps, bundles, In-App
Purchases broken out by iOS apps, tvOS apps and Mac apps)

■ Transaction type (free/paid/re-downloaded/refund/update)

■ CMB (short for Complete My Bundle, shows action taken by customers to purchase the remaining apps in a
bundle beyond those already purchased)

■ App version

■ Store currency (e.g. USD, EUR, INR)

■ Client (App Store/iMessage App Store/News)

Screenshot of iTunes Connect Sales and Trends General view

Reports provide a way to easily download data.

Payments and Financial Reports provides a breakdown of payments and units sold per date range across regions,
including original currencies, currency conversions, and taxes/adjustments.

User Roles allows developers to control access to all or partial access of an iTunes Connect account, as well as access
to TestFlight for beta testing purposes. There are 7 different roles that a user can gain access to. Users can also be
limited to access only a certain app(s), except for the admin or finance roles, or if the reports add-on is added to a role.

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Screenshot of iTunes Connect User Permissions view

Agreements, Tax, and Banking includes all the legal requirements to distribute and sell apps.

Resources and Help provides developers with videos, documentation, news, and links to help resources across the
different products distributed through iTunes, such as apps or podcasts.

3rd party ASO Tools provide broad functionality to report on, analyze, optimize, and position the metadata elements
of your ASO strategy. In the following pages, we list the major ASO tools, broken out by functionality that includes
keyword research, keyword optimization, keyword ranking, top chart ranking, app performance data, ratings/reviews,
and competitive research.

General ASO Tools

General ASO tools focus on helping you analyze all the general elements of your ASO strategy, from ranking on
keywords/top charts, to keyword research, to light competitive review and more.

AppFollow
AppFollow is a Russian ASO tool started in 2015 and publicly launched in 2016 as a monitor for apps in the App Stores.
Based on the data the service was aggregating, the AppFollow team started to develop internal ASO tools to support
doing ASO for customers. AppFollow offers general ASO services, with unique features including app reviews, ranks,
keywords, downloads, and reports delivered to Slack and email in real-time.

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Screenshots: AppFollow

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AppRadar
AppRadar is an Austrian ASO tool that first went live in March 2016. Thomas Kriebernegg, the CEO of App Radar, had
been working as an App Marketing Consultant since 2011. AppRadar specializes in keyword research, and some
of AppRadar’s unique features include submitting metadata directly to iTunes Connect and Google Play Console
accounts.

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Screenshots: AppRadar

AppTweak
AppTweak is a Belgium-based ASO tool, founded in 2013 by Olivier Verdin and Sebastien Dellis. AppTweak provides
general ASO services, with unique features that include a percentage stack that shows keyword download contribution
margins over time and monitoring top keywords by rank gain/loss.

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Screenshots: AppTweak

ASODesk
ASODesk is a Russian ASO tool, founded by Sergey Sharov. ASODesk provides general ASO services, along with unique
features focused on providing accurate attribution of organic downloads to keywords.

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Screenshots: ASODesk

Mobile Action
Mobile Action was started in 2013 by CEO Aykut Karaalioglu as an ASO and app marketing agency. The Mobile Action
team built the tool to support clients and eventually launched the tool externally as a SaaS platform. Mobile Action
provides general ASO services, with unique features that include an estimate of daily/monthly active users for apps
and custom alerts for app changes.

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Screenshots: Mobile Action

SensorTower
SensorTower is an ASO tool founded in 2013 by AngelPad 6 alumni Alex Malafeev and Oliver Yeh. SensorTower offers
general ASO services, with unique features that include custom alerts delivered via email and Slack for new/soft
launches, download/revenue spikes, and app updates.

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Screenshots: SensorTower

Priori Data
Priori Data is a German app marketplace intelligence and research tool founded by Patrick Kane in 2013 in Berlin. Priori
Data offers competitive intelligence and keyword rank tracking, and recently added ASO features for researching
and tracking keywords, along with unique features that include providing daily app download and revenue for apps.

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Screenshots: Priori Data

TUNE
TUNE App Store Analytics, formerly MobileDevHQ, was founded by Ian Sefferman in 2012 as the first ASO-focused
product for mobile marketers. TUNE acquired MobileDevHQ in 2014, where it now sits within the TUNE Marketing
Console product suite. TUNE provides a combination of multiple ASO services, with unique features that include
attribution, engagement, and A/B testing support, as well as automated featured placement annotations and
organic uplift measurement, which measures the impact of marketing activity on organic Installs.

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Screenshots: TUNE

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TheTool
TheTool is a newer ASO tool out of Spain, created by ASO and SEO experts at app marketing and mobile growth agency,
PickASO. It was first built as an internal tool and then publicly released in 2017. TheTool provides general ASO services,
as well as unique features such as a mobile app interface and a focus on analyzing the organic multiplier of paid
downloads.

Screenshots: TheTool

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Keyword Discovery Tools

Keyword discovery tools focus on helping you research keywords in either the genesis or iteration stages of your ASO
strategy, but do not provide ranking or reporting for specific apps.

Google Keyword Planner Tool

The Google Keyword planner tool is accessed through the AdWords interface, requiring users to sign up for an AdWords
account.

While it only provides keyword research based on [Link] web search traffic, the Keyword Planner Tool is one of
the most prolific keyword research tools available, and can nonetheless serve as a great starting point for keyword
research. One handy feature is the ability to require certain words to be present in search queries (keywords to include),
which can help zero in on searches for “apps,” “iPhone,” and “Android” and obtain more accurate suggestions. Another
useful parameter is narrowing results for particular countries, date ranges (e.g. for seasonality), and languages.

This tool also provides insight into monthly search volume for keywords, which can directionally be used to prioritize
keywords.

However, take web search trend data with a grain of salt and be aware that web search trends often do not align with
App Store search trends. That said, for app indexing optimization, the Keyword Planner is an excellent resource for
researching the right keywords to use to increase web-sourced organic Installs.

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Screenshots: Google Keyword Planner Tool

Google Trends
Google Trends is another tool that can be useful for comparing the web-based, relative popularity of particular topics,
for up to five topics. One unique feature of Google Trends is that it rolls many individual keywords into a “topic.” This
helps provide a more accurate macro-view when analyzing trends that may span a wide set of keywords that are alike.
Again, a word of caution for using Google trends for anything other than directional analysis, as web-based search
trends may not mirror App Store search trends.

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Screenshots: Google Trends

[Link]
[Link] is free a tool made by Sebastian Knopp that provides auto-fill results for Google Play for the U.S.,
UK, Italy, Germany, France, Brazil, and Spain, and had offered App Store trending searches for worldwide, the U.S., CA,
Italy, Germany, France, China, and Spain (plus a count of the number of hours trending).

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Screenshots: [Link]

[Link]
Created by ASO Tool AppTweak, [Link] provides auto-fill results for the App Store and Google Play Store.

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Screenshot: [Link]

A/B testing tools

A/B testing tools focus on empowering ASOs in conversion rate optimization and provide iOS ASOs with the
functionality of Google Play Experiments, but with additional features; ASOs can also use A/B testing tools to run
experiments for Android apps.

RaiseMetrics
RaiseMetrics is an A/B testing tool publicly launched in 2016. It was initially built for a small group of people to help
with an app optimization by mobile optimization experts Diana Sedunova and Adelina Voskresenskaya with technical
help from Alexey Savitsky. Unique features include the ability to pay per single experiment and the ability to run a
2-step search page test that provides insights into competitor listings, as well as your app’s listing.

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Screenshots: RaiseMetrics

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SplitMetrics
SplitMetrics is an A/B testing tool founded in 2014 by Max Kamenkov, an ASO guru and a former chief architect at
Pandadoc, and Eugene Nevgen, a founder at MSQRD. Unique features include an instant audit of an app’s ASO strategy,
as well as ASO consulting services and performance benchmark data for clients running tests.

Screenshot: SplitMetrics

StoreMaven
StoreMaven is an A/B testing tool founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs with experience in gaming, mobile marketing,
and big-data analytics. A unique feature of StoreMaven is its machine learning algorithm, which saves media costs by
concluding tests faster and with fewer samples.

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Screenshots: StoreMaven

Competitive Intelligence Tools

While some competitive intelligence tools provide features that overlap with general ASO tools such as app reporting
and keyword/top chart ranks, competitive/marketplace intelligence tools focus on providing ASOs with data more
difficult to obtain, such as retention rates and usage overlap for competitor apps and categories, country-level and
demographic data, and advertising trends.

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AppAnnie
AppAnnie is the largest ASO tool, founded in 2010. AppAnnie provides a broad suite of products, primarily focusing on
competitive/market intelligence. Some of AppAnnie’s unique features include competitive advertising intelligence,
usage intelligence, and hourly top chart rankings.

AppFigures
AppFigures is an app tracking and intelligence tool founded in 2009. AppFigures focuses on providing unique value
via integrations, robust API reporting, and real-time reports.

Screenshot: AppFigures

AppTopia
AppTopia is an app data and market intelligence tool founded in 2011. AppTopia focuses on providing unique value
through retention rate, app SDK usage figures, and breakout app alerts.

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Screenshot: AppTopia

In-App Rating Prompts

Apptentive
Apptentive is a U.S.-based ratings, reviews, and sentiment optimization tool founded in 2011 to provide tools to
developers to measure sentiment and gather feedback from their user base.

Screenshot: Apptentive

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Screenshot Builders
Screenshot builders make life less tedious, but offer features such as templates for custom screenshot design, as well
as automation of localization buildout.

AppLaunchpad
AppLaunchpad is a tool to create app screenshots for App Store & Google Play pages, and has taken the place of
[Link], which Google bought and shut down.

Screenshot: AppLaunchpad

Fastlane
Fastlane is an open source way to automate generating iOS and Android screenshots, in addition to other build/
release features. Fastlane is owned by Fabric, which is owned by Google.

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Screenshot: Fastlane

Other ASO tools

Listed here are a couple of other tools that provide ancillary features useful for ASOs.

AppScatter
AppScatter helps you publish to and monitor hundreds of stores worldwide.

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Screenshot: AppScatter

CodeNGo
CodeNGo is a platform that helps developers self-publish their app to over 30 stores, as well as translate listings and
report on data from 3rd party stores.

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Screenshot: CodeNGo

AppBot
AppBot is a tool for monitoring and managing app ratings and reviews across major App Stores. Unique features
include integrations with communication, CRM, and project management platforms, as well as topic/sentiment/trending
analysis.

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Screenshot: AppBot

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General ASO Tools Survey

The following is a (very long, forewarning!) comprehensive table providing insights into the specifics of the different
features offered by some of the ASO tools covered in this chapter. Tools covered include both ASO General Tools, as
well as A/B Testing Tools. As with the ASO Tools mapping in the beginning of this chapter, the blue squares indicate
that a tool does indeed have a particular feature. If applicable additional details offered by the tools we surveyed are
contained with the cells pertaining to a tool (columns) and a feature (rows). All data in these surveys was provided via
survey by each tool.

General ASO Tools Survey: AppFollow-AppTweak

General ASO Tools Survey

AppFollow-AppTweak

FEATURE ITEM APPFOLLOW APPRADAR ASO DECK APPTWEAK

G E N E R A L I N F O R M A T I O N

Total number of keywords tracked in

5,000,000 300,000 8,000,000 1,000,000
aggregate

A P P A N A L Y T I C S

App Store Top Chart Rankings

App update timeline showing the

what's new texts and updates

App update timeline showing the

difference of app titles, keywords,
screenshots, and other metadata after
an update

Apple Search Ads integration for

advertiser

App/Play Store Data integration

Aggregated User reviews

Translations of user reviews

Review analysis showing mode words

or phrases

Download estimates from top charts

K E Y W O R D A N A L Y S I S ( D E T A I L S )

Download estimates from store feature

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General ASO Tools Survey

AppFollow-AppTweak

FEATURE ITEM APPFOLLOW APPRADAR ASO DECK APPTWEAK

US/AU/UK/NZ/MX/CH/CA App Store

Apple Search Apple Search Apple Search
search volume is based on: search
Popularity Popularity Popularity
popularity or other?

Mobile data:
US/AU/UK/NZ/MX/CH/CA What is Play Apple Search See AppTweak
keyword
Store search volume based on? Popularity Note 1
suggestions

Mobile data:
We don't provide keyword
What are non-US App Store Search See AppTweak
made up values, suggestions, search
volumes based on? Note 1
only hard numbers ads, number of
reviews

See AppTweak
How is difficulty score calculated?
Note 2

K E Y W O R D A N A L Y S I S

Difficulty/Top 10 Chance score

Organic download estimates for a

keyword

App & Play store territories supported

155 74 70
for keyword research

Keyword suggestions

Shows keyword autofills

Competitor spy for keywords

competitor is using

Competitor ranking for keywords

Keyword distribution graph showing

how many keywords an app ranks for

Filters for keyword suggestions

Suggests popular category Keywords

M A R K E T I N T E L L I G E N C E

App download reports

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General ASO Tools Survey

AppFollow-AppTweak

FEATURE ITEM APPFOLLOW APPRADAR ASO DECK APPTWEAK

App revenue reports

App cross-app usage reports

App retention rate reports

App install conversion rate reports

App demographics reports

Number and type of App features (in

app/play store)

App visibility score

P R I C I N G ( D E T A I L S )

Free plan: 2 apps,

2 countries and 20
keywords. Premium
plan: starting from Starting at $30/ Starting at €49 per
Pricing Free basic plan
$9/month. For big month month.
companies and
publishers we have
Enterprise plan.

P R I C I N G

$30 include
Price is decreasing
150 keywords.
with higher plan,
We also offer
Pricing per 100 keywords $15/100 keywords $49 down to €20 for
keyword flatrates
100 keywords in
for enterprise
Enterprise Plan
customers.

S U P P O R T ( D E T A I L S )

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General ASO Tools Survey

AppFollow-AppTweak

FEATURE ITEM APPFOLLOW APPRADAR ASO DECK APPTWEAK

Live chat support

& emails for
everyone; Skype
Web-chat, email, calls for customers
Tiers of customer support Email Email, online chat
Slack community or free trial users;
dedicated account
manager for large
accounts

S U P P O R T

API access

Slack, HipChat,
Zendesk, Facebook
Workplace,
Microsoft Teams,
Trello, Webhook, Slack, iTunes

Non App-Store 3rd party integrations Twitter, iTunes Connect, Google

Slack
included? (i.e.. Slack etc.) Connect, Google Play Developer
Play Console, Console
Analytics: Google
Analytics, Search
Ads, AppsFlyer,
Appmetrica

AppTweak Note 1:

Our unique Volume formula using multiple elements such as: keyword’s frequency in the store (app titles, description,
reviews, etc.), keyword’s frequency in the hints (auto-suggestions), keyword’s frequency in the spoken language,
keyword’s length, and keyword’s volume on the mobile web. A score is given for each keyword on each of these elements,
which we will bring into a 1-100 scale indicator, where higher the number means higher the volume. Available in 12
languages (using native dictionaries) for now.

AppTweak Note 2:

We take into account both the Volume (Search Popularity) and the Competition indicators (both numbers between
1-100). We consider that a good keyword is a keyword with a high volume and a low competition. The KEI reflects the
keyword’s performance so the higher the KEI means the better the ratio between the Volume and the Competition.

AdvAnced App sTore opTimizATion 359

11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

General ASO Tools Survey: Mobile Action-TUNE

General ASO Tools Survey

Mobile Action-TUNE

FEATURE ITEM MOBILE ACTION PRIORI DATA SENSOR TOWER THETOOL TUNE

G N E R A L I N F O R M A T I O N

Total number of keywords

Millions 1,500,000 Millions 1,000,000 4,000,000
tracked in aggregate

A P P A N A L Y T I C S

App update timeline showing

the what's new texts and
updates

App update timeline showing

the difference of app titles,
keywords, screenshots, and
other metadata after an update

App update timeline showing

the difference of app titles,
keywords, screenshots, and
other metadata after an update

Apple Search Ads integration

for advertiser

App/Play Store Data

integration

Aggregated User reviews

Translations of user reviews

Review analysis showing mode

words or phrases

Download estimates from top

charts

Download estimates from store

feature

K E Y W O R D A N A L Y S I S ( D E T A I L S )

AdvAnced App sTore opTimizATion 360

11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

General ASO Tools Survey

Mobile Action-TUNE

FEATURE ITEM MOBILE ACTION PRIORI DATA SENSOR TOWER THETOOL TUNE

In Store Data
US/AU/UK/NZ/MX/CH/CA App
Using apple Apple Search own Algorithm Apple Search
Store search volume is based
data Popularity + Apple Search Popularity
on: search popularity or other?
Ads data

Based on a
combination of
Apple Popularity
(app store
search data,
even across

US/AU/UK/NZ/MX/CH/CA What platforms, is

Mobile search In Store Data
is Play Store search volume still the best
volume own Algorithm
based on? data available),
autocomplete
data, review
keyword
frequency data,
and mobile web
search

Based on a
combination of
autocomplete

What are non-US App Store In Store Data data, review

Search volumes based on? own Algorithm keyword
frequency data,
and mobile web
search

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11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

General ASO Tools Survey

Mobile Action-TUNE

FEATURE ITEM MOBILE ACTION PRIORI DATA SENSOR TOWER THETOOL TUNE

Based on a
combination of
Size of the top
result count (i.e.,
10 apps ranked Machine
how many apps
for the keyword learning:
rank for a given
and weekly Competitors,
keyword) and
How is difficulty score avg number Title Matches,
ranking volatility
calculated? of newcomers Installs &
(i.e., how often
in the top 10 Ratings, Age of
do apps that
(constantly new the apps and
rank in the
apps => easier more...
top positions
to rank for)
for a keyword
change)

K E Y W O R D A N A L Y S I S

Difficulty/Top 10 Chance score

Organic download estimates

for a keyword

App & Play store territories

supported for keyword 61 20 100 91 30
research

Keyword suggestions

Shows keyword autofills Custom

Competitor spy for keywords

competitor is using

Competitor ranking for

keywords

Keyword distribution graph

showing how many keywords
an app ranks for

Filters for keyword suggestions

Suggests popular category

Keywords

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11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

General ASO Tools Survey

Mobile Action-TUNE

FEATURE ITEM MOBILE ACTION PRIORI DATA SENSOR TOWER THETOOL TUNE

M A R K E T I N T E L L I G E N C E

For the user's

app(s)? Yes;
App download reports
for competitor
apps? No

App revenue reports

App cross-app usage reports Custom

App retention rate reports

App install conversion rate

reports

App demographics reports

Number and type of App

features (in app/play store)

App visibility score

P R I C I N G ( D E T A I L S )

Starting at $99/
month for 500 Free forever
keywords, all plan for
Starting at $69/ Enterprise Starting at 29€/
Pricing countries + startups; paid
month Subscription month ($30)
keywords & plans start at
DL/rev for 3 $69/month
competitors

P R I C I N G

Contact for
details on extra
$99 for 500 $15/100 Unlimited at any
Pricing per 100 keywords keywords (new
keywords keywords plan
plans coming
soon)

S U P P O R T ( D E T A I L S )

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11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

General ASO Tools Survey

Mobile Action-TUNE

FEATURE ITEM MOBILE ACTION PRIORI DATA SENSOR TOWER THETOOL TUNE

Level 1: Email,
Chat (free plans
and above),
Level 2: Previous
+ Skype call
access (for all
Email, chat,
paid plans), Email, Chat, Email, chat, Email, chat,
Tiers of customer support phone, in-
Level 3: Previous Phone phone Skype, Zendesk
person
+ dedicated
Customer
Success
Manager
(Enterprise
plans)

S U P P O R T

API access

Non App-Store 3rd party TUNE

integrations included? (i.e.. Attribution
Slack etc.) Analytics

A/B Testing Tools Survey

A/B Testing Tools Survey

FEATURE ITEM STOREMAVEN RAISE METRICS SPLITMETRICS

P R I C I N G

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11 Tools | GENERAL ASO TOOLS SURVEY

A/B Testing Tools Survey

FEATURE ITEM STOREMAVEN RAISE METRICS SPLITMETRICS

Depends on the
level of services
provided and the
number of tests From $499 per
clients run annually. month with
Pricing Besides providing free-$250 per month available discounts
the technological when purchasing an
platform, annual subscription.
StoreMaven also
offers a "managed
service."

S U P P O R T

24/7 Customer Email, chat on site,

Tiers of customer support Support for phone for priority
everyone clients

T E S T V A R I A B L E S

Icon testing

Screenshot testing

Description testing

Title/name testing

Price/IAP testing

Preview video testing

Feature graphic testing

Ratings & reviews testing

T E S T T Y P E

Search results page testing

App store page testing

Store featured testing

E X T R A F E A T U R E S

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A/B Testing Tools Survey

FEATURE ITEM STOREMAVEN RAISE METRICS SPLITMETRICS

Support for apple watch testing?

Records video results of testers?

Can create designs for clients?

AdvAnced App sTore opTimizATion 366

 12
Outside Of the stOre
 12 Outside Of the stOre | PRODUCT

12
Outside Of the stOre
“What outside of the App Stores can affect my app’s success in ASO?”

Product
The app itself is not just the purpose for the existence of ASO, but also a major factor in the success potential for ASO.
With advancements in store ranking algorithm criteria that factor more signals in new and deeper ways into the rank-
scoring system, the app itself cannot be considered a separate set of levers that are ignored when considering ASO.

Retention Rate
As highlighted throughout the book, store algorithms are increasingly factoring for retention rate, which is naturally
a heavily product-influenced outcome. While acquisition source is a major factor in user quality and retention, the
product is the largest factor and can fail to retain users, regardless of the acquisition source.

While the exact weighting of retention rate in the algorithm scoring system is unknown, the general ASO industry
consensus is that retention is one of the major factors after download velocity and conversion rate, and alongside
ratings/reviews.

If an app cannot retain users, or even worse causes users to uninstall at a rapid rate, then the app’s ASO success will
falter as the store algorithms reduce the app’s visibility in response to the app’s low retention rate or high uninstall rate.

Pro tip: While the inner workings of the algorithms are unknown, it’s a likely bet that an app’s retention
rate is compared to peer apps, either those in the same category or those ranking for the same keywords.
This means that, even if your app’s retention rate may be decent across the entire app industry, if your
app’s retention rate is low compared with your App Store peers, then your app will still score negative
points in the retention ranking component.

Here are some reasons for which apps may have a low retention rate, or in other words cause higher churn:

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■ Poor onboarding process: If the process is confusing, not educational enough, or non-engaging, it could
cause users to open the app and churn. Moreover, if an app lacks an onboarding process at all and requires
users to sign up immediately after opening the app, this can cause users to churn.

■ Not enough features: If users expect or look forward to certain features in the app and fail to find them, this
can cause churn. If the app listing is misleading in favor of increasing downloads, this can backfire in the
retention ranking component, which can cause the app to lose ranking and lose future downloads.

■ Lack of a clear, fundamental value: If the app does not solve a problem or provide significant value to the
user, it can fail to retain users.

■ Lack of engagement: While too many push notifications, emails, and in-app messages can be a bad thing, the
right mix can bring users back into the app who would have otherwise churned, and even make active users
more active.

■ Lack of updates: Apps that are released and never updated can lose users, especially if competitors continue
to innovate and release new versions and features.

Ratings/Reviews
Because they are most often sourced from within the app, ratings and reviews are also a factor that are influenced by
the product, and not ASO. Yet, ratings and reviews are one of the major factors affecting an app’s ASO visibility and
conversion potential.

Additionally, recall that ratings are one of the most visible and objective social proof data points, and as such highly
affect conversion rates, which is also a major ranking signal.

To unlock an app’s true ASO success, the app must do a good job of encouraging users to leave positive ratings and
reviews (both in terms of being a good product, and leveraging in-app rating prompts).

Above and beyond prompting users for ratings and reviews, here are a few methods to use your product to raise star
ratings:

■ Add features users ask for.

■ Add features that competitors do not provide.

■ Create an emotional connection with users by using in-app content, enabling people to use/benefit from the
app with other people, or producing an impact on people in their real lives.

■ Create an addicting experience; users who use an app on a daily basis are more prone to write reviews or rate
the app.

Crashes/Stability
While crashes are not yet considered as a factor in the App Store’s algorithm weighting, they can affect retention rate,
as well as ratings and reviews, and thus indirectly drag an app’s ASO success potential down.

However, in August 2017 Google announced that it would rank apps which drained user battery life or crashed
often lower than other apps. More and more, ASOs must count the product team as a core partner in succeeding in ASO.

Furthermore, while some apps that are not 100% stable may end up being featured, having good stability marks is
generally a requirement.

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UX/UI Design
An app’s ASO can be directly affected by its UX/UI design in many different ways, such as determining:

■ Components of the app’s experience that can be described in the assets.

■ Keywords that describe the app and its UX.

■ An app’s positioning against competitors, for better or worse.

Furthermore, an app’s store listing is also built using visuals from the app itself, and therefore highly influenced by the
branding/look and feel, and limited to what the product looks like in terms of screenshots and preview video content.
For apps with great design, this can be a great boon for ASO, and vice versa.

As with stability, excellent app design is also a factor in being featured, as well as affecting an app’s ability to retain
users, and earn ratings and reviews.

App Features
As a similar factor to UX/UI, features also shape the limits of how an app can be marketed in visibility terms, as well as
terms of competitive positioning and conversion.

Features determine what In-App Purchases users can buy, and thus which IAPs the app can index or be featured for.

Features also determine what can be shown in the app’s listing, as the content that fills in the app’s UX/UI.

Also like UX/UI and stability, features naturally affect an app’s ability to be featured, earn ratings/reviews, and retain
users.

Monetization
Monetization is one of the most direct and fundamental product factors influencing ASO. Unfortunately, it often serves
only as a bottleneck to success.

While an app with a good monetization model does not benefit in direct ASO terms from earning revenue from its users
(except in the case of the top paid/grossing charts, per below), an app with a poorly executed monetization model
stands only to lose success potential, as the app is at higher risk for a poor conversion rate, negative ratings/reviews,
poor user retention, and a lower chance of being featured.

For example, consider three examples of apps which are each free to download:

01. App A offers all its features for free and monetizes through ads. While app A may not have the highest ARPU,
app A will likely earn the highest visibility because more users will likely download the app, and users will likely
use the app for longer.

02. App B offers a subset of features for free, and charges for the rest as an In-App Purchase. App B will likely earn
a higher ARPU and earn more visibility than app C, but app B will likely earn less visibility than app A, because
app B has a more limited experience for users who do not pay. However, app B will benefit from being able to
promote its In-App Purchases, which is an ability that neither app A nor app C can leverage.

03. App C charges a paid download for its app. App C will most likely have highest ARPU and is eligible for bundles,
but will also have the lowest visibility and conversion rate.

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In this case, app B could improve its ASO performance by combining ads with In-App Purchases, to offer users who
do not pay a chance to continue using the app, and thus improving its retention rate.

While it’s unknown whether revenue plays a factor in an app’s rankings, it isn’t out of the question, and monetization
certainly does play a factor in the Google top grossing chart, as well as the top paid charts, as the pricing model/level
of an app will affect its download conversion rate.

Alternative User Acquisition Sources

As highlighted throughout the book, because of the algorithmic reliance on download velocity as a major signal,
acquiring downloads from other sources beyond ASO is of critical importance to earning and keeping significant
growth.

There are many sources that can provide downloads from outside of the store, and each can have a direct impact (albeit sometimes
incremental) impact on an app’s ASO success potential.

For upper-range keyword ranks, apps can even use alternatively-sourced downloads to overcome the ranks on a
keyword of other apps that don’t drive downloads outside of the store. Then, once in decent keyword rank position,
the usurping app can climb the remaining keyword ranks organically by converting users better than other apps.

Additionally, we have also explored the fact that some apps use black hat methods to drive downloads from particular
keyword searches, causing those apps to earn a doubly high score when ranking for those keywords.

Again, not only do downloads outside the store affect the visibility of an app, but they also affect the conversion rate of
an app. In the Google Play Store, users can see a range of the app’s total actual downloads, as well as an app’s best
top chart ranking.

Exploring downloads outside the store could fill the pages of a whole additional book (or two!), so to summarize:

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while there are still apps that almost only grow because of their organic visibility in the stores, it’s gotten a lot tougher
nowadays with competition from millions of apps. ASO alone these days is not a sufficient strategy, and one should
consider other mobile growth strategies in the Acquisition layer of Mobile Growth Stack to help get the most out of
your App Store optimization.

The Mobile Growth Stack (see [Link])

Content Indexing

This chapter includes comments by guest author Emily Grossman, the

Director of App Strategy at MobileMoxie. She specializes in app search
marketing, with a focus on strategic deep linking, app indexing, app
launch strategy, and App Store optimization.

Emily has spoken about mobile application marketing at national and

international conferences and has collaborated with major U.S. brands
on their mobile marketing and mobile app strategies. Before her work
at MobileMoxie, Emily was one of the original employees at Double
Encore, Inc, one of the first native application development agencies
(acquired by WPP’s POSSIBLE in 2014).

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App indexing is the ability of a mobile app to be displayed in a web search results page. Each app that is live in the App
or Play Store is automatically displayed in web searches with a link to that app’s store permanent URL. While this is the
basic definition of app indexing, most references to app indexing are with regard to indexing and deep linking to the
content within an app, just like links to pages within a website are indexing in search results page.

Indexing the content from within an app does not occur by default for all live apps. This is because in order to index
the content within apps, developers must implement technology to enable an app to support deep linking. The reason
for this has to do with the way an app is built; in short, while a web page has a permanent URL for each of its web
pages, apps have dynamic screens that are loaded only based on user interactions, and cannot be assumed to live in a
permanent location within the app.

In order to set up deep linking, a developer must either implement Apple’s Core Spotlight API [[Link]
com/library/content/documentation/General/Conceptual/AppSearch/[Link]], or Google’s Android deep
linking technology [[Link] You can also use tools
to assist in app indexing setup, from MMPs (i.e., Adjust, AppsFlyer, Kochava, Tune) to free services like Branch Metrics.

Both Google and Apple have a concept of a public vs. private index of content, where public content is information
that can be accessed by anyone and can be indexed for any user to see in search results (e.g. public profiles of stores
in Yelp), while private content is information that should only be accessible to a particular user (e.g. direct messages in
Twitter), and will only be visible in searches made by that particular user.

The most important thing to understand about Google App Indexing in 2017 is that only Android deep links can
be indexed.

For iOS, Google is not actually indexing any separate URLs— Google is merely indexing web URLs and counting on
Apple’s Universal Links directive to route users into iOS apps. With this in mind, when we talk about Google’s public vs.
private index, we are talking exclusively about Android apps.

The public index is available to any and all Android devices, and hosted centrally with Google. The private index
is device-specific and hosted on an individual’s Android phone. The private index depends on app downloads and
individual user engagement, so each Android user will have a different private index. An individual device’s private
index can be accessed via the Google Search bar on Android devices by clicking on “in apps.”

Developers can currently get valid deep links indexed in Google’s public index through a few methods:

■ Using http-scheme deep links and allowing Googlebot for Android to crawl.

■ Calling Google’s App Indexing API (part of Firebase) on http-scheme deep links.

■ Referencing http or custom-scheme deep links in rel=alternate link tags in the <head> of a corresponding web
page or in sitemaps.

Developers can currently get valid deep links indexed in Google’s private index by calling Google’s Firebase App
Indexing API on app activities.

Apple’s Spotlight Search engine also leverages a private and public index that can contain deep links to app
content. Like Google’s private and public indexes, the private index is centrally hosted and can deliver results to any
device. The private index is device-specific and depends on individual user engagement.

Unlike Google, the private index isn’t independently accessibly via an “In Apps” feature; Apple mixes results from
the user’s private index and general public cloud index when it presents search results to users within the Spotlight
interface.

Additionally, Google has begun indexing content within apps, allowing users to see content from apps that they

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have already downloaded appear in a Google search.

Deep links will not show for apps that users have not installed, and after that, traditional SEO factors (e.g., CTR, keyword
relevance, etc.) influence where in the SRP a deep link shows up. Additionally, Google claims that using the Firebase
App Indexing API gives deep links a rankings boost.

As it relates to deep links vs. web links, in Google Search, deep links to apps are returned when the app is installed on a
user’s device, the app supports Google App Indexing, and the deep links are relevant to the user’s query. Results that
link to the Google Play Store or iOS App Store (App Packs or Install Buttons) will be returned on mobile devices when the
user’s query has strong app download intent (i.e., “kids games” or “to-do list” or “travel apps”). That said, according
to Google [[Link] for
content that is found in both an accelerated mobile page (AMP) and mobile app, the AMP result will override the deep
link result for the foreseeable future.

Using the Firebase App Indexing API will initiate indexing on Android apps, but there are ways to get public deep
links indexed without the API. Similarly, using other parts of Firebase will not automatically guarantee indexing.

When it comes to what control a developer has over how a deep link result shows, on Android, the app icon associated
with the app will appear in search results next to the deep link.

Publicly indexed deep links will pull the title and description set for corresponding web content through meta tags in
the <head> of the html specified in the deep linking code. Via the Firebase App Indexing API, developers can specify a
separate or distinct Title (“mText”) that will appear for deep links when they are triggered in on-device search.

Screenshots of deep app linking via [Link] Image credit: Andevcon [[Link]
deep-link-an-android-app]

For Apple spotlight search, developers input a title, description, and thumbnail.

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Screenshot of a Spotlight search result. Image credit: Apple [[Link]

Conceptual/AppSearch/[Link]]

Further Reading: For deeper detail on app indexing, check out these resources:

If you own an app, you can set up the Google Search Console in Google Webmaster Tools to report on your overall
status of app indexing. On top of this, you can check individual URLs for indexing status with Google’s tool, regardless
of whether or not you own them: [Link] (“Test public content
indexing”)

App indexing case studies:

■ [Link]

■ [Link]

■ [Link]

Content indexing subchapter written, including comments, by Emily Grossman.

Google App Packs

In addition to regular results, [Link] searches also return app packs, which are groups of apps that are relevant
for a particular web search from a mobile device (iOS devices will be shown only app packs for iOS apps, while Android
devices will be shown only app packs for Android apps). App packs point to an app’s store page and are not deep
linked to content to within an app. All apps that are live in the App Store or Play Store are eligible to rank within an
app pack.

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For iOS apps, app packs return 30 apps with three showing by default. The app title, description, in app purchases, and
user reviews can influence which keywords an iOS app ranks for.

Android apps return in app packs of up to 100 apps with six showing by default. While the title and user reviews are the
best ways to directly influence which keywords an Android app ranks for, Google also ranks apps with other keyword
associations identified by Google’s keyword ranking algorithm as relevant.

Screenshot depicting app packs on [Link]

This chapter is written by guest author Daniel Peris, co-founder of

PickASO agency and TheTool— the first performance-based ASO tool
developed in Spain by specialists with more than 10 years of experience
in digital marketing and startups. Daniel has been doing SEO since 2007
and ASO since 2013 and has optimized over 200 apps from different
niches: banking, retail, entertainment, gaming, etc.

How to Use Google Search Console for Apps

Google Search Console for Apps is the only way to monitor visibility (impressions, clicks, keywords, countries, etc.)
of your Android app in the Google mobile web search. This free tool gives multiple possibilities to track your app’s

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performance in web search.

If you’ve already set up App Indexing, Google Search Console for Apps will report your app’s content visibility and
possible issues with its implementation.

HOW TO ADD YOUR APP TO THE GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

(GOOGLE-ONLY)
01. Go to Google Search Console [[Link] click on “Add
property,” select “Android App,” and insert your app or game’s package URL name:

02. Once you have submitted the app, you have to verify that you are the owner of this app, which can take up to
48 hours.

There are two ways of doing this:

■ Automatic verification: Only available if you are the owner and have management rights on the app in
Google Play Console and are logged in with the same account in Google Search Console:

■ Enter the URL of your app using this format: android-app://{package_name}/

■ Example: android-app://[Link]/

■ Ask the owner of the app already verified for Google Search Console to give you user/owner rights for this app.

For this, the owner needs to click on Settings icon on his Search Console, select Users & Property Owners and select
“Manage property owners” or “Add a new user.”

Additional Resources:

[Link]

[Link]

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How to Track App SEO performance

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS SEARCH CONSOLE

To access the analytics and reports on SEO of your app, select “Search Analytics” in your App property on Google
Search Console:

Screenshot showing Google Webmaster Tool Search console view

Similarly to Search Console for websites, in the App Search Analytics you can track the impressions, clicks, CTR, and
position for ranked keywords, indexed content of the app (in case of App Indexing), and the breakdown per country or
per device.

All this information is available for a maximum of 90 days.

Other sections include:

■ Messages: Notifications and announcements from Google, error notices, advice, and tips.

■ Crawl Status: An indicator of visibility of the app (how many pages Googlebot has indexed). This only applies
if you’ve set up App Indexing.

■ Fetch as Google: In case you use deep links in your mobile app, submit any of them in order to check whether
Google can access it.

GOOGLE PLAY CONSOLE

In Google Play Console, go to “User acquisition > Reports > Google Search (Organic)” to see which keywords bring
Installs with Google web SEO / App Packs:

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Screenshot depicting the Google SEO row in acquisition reports

Here you can see which keywords are bringing Installs from Google Web Search:

Screenshot depicting the keyword sources in acquisition reports

Pro tip: Match keywords from Google Search Console and Google Play Console… Magic! Now you have
impressions > clicks > Installs (> buyers) keywords data from SEO / App Packs!

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On Backlinks and ASO

In our experience, backlinks don’t have a direct impact on ASO. Maybe some of them, the ones that generate Installs,
have a little impact, but there’s no direct relation with ASO Search or Top Charts. ASO is not SEO and vice versa and
backlinks are the main SEO factor.

But, because mobile web search is growing in popularity, the role of the backlinks in SEO for apps is growing stronger,
too. Google does take into account backlinks (and anchor texts) to rank apps in mobile web search.

While unlikely in ASO, in Google SEO for mobile apps, backlinks do play an important role. If more powerful domains
point to your app, then the more visibility your app result will get in web search, the more clicks and the more
downloads, as you can see in the following example.

App: Fidget Spinner from Ketchapp ([Link]

Screenshot showing the evolution of referring domains

Screenshot showing the number of organic kewords bringing traffic to Fidget Spinner

The effect of high quality backlinks has been proved, in our opinion, for Google Web Search that now includes the App

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Packs and crawls app content (in case of App Indexing) and backlinks to put more weight on the apps/games that have
stronger URL ratings.

There are some tools that allow to monitor SEO backlinks, such as Open Site Explorer by Moz [[Link]
researchtools/ose/] and ahrefs.

USING AHREFS FOR APP SEO

ahrefs provides comprehensive statistics about domain rating ([Link] and [Link]) and URL rating, backlinks,
referring domains, organic keywords per country, estimates organic traffic, and paid keywords, and shows top referring
content and anchor texts:

Image source: ahrefs

AdvAnced App stOre OptimizAtiOn 381

12 Outside Of the stOre | GOOGLE APP PACKS

Image source: ahrefs

Image source: ahrefs

AdvAnced App stOre OptimizAtiOn 382

12 Outside Of the stOre | GOOGLE APP PACKS

To track and improve the rankings of a mobile app in Google Mobile Web Search, there are certain best practices that
developers and marketers can use:

■ Track your app’s visibility on Google web search with Google Search Console tool (only for Google Play apps).

■ Track your app’s backlinks profile with Backlinks SEO tools like ahrefs or Open Site Explorer by MOZ.

■ Optimize your app’s on-metadata for ASO + SEO: title/app name, short description (Google Play), long
description, developer name, etc.

■ Contact media to get some mentions and direct links to your app.

■ Get more positive ratings/reviews from users.

Users can organically find your app in App Stores, but they also can do it in Google mobile web search. This is why it’s
important to track your app’s visibility in every channel.

Subchapter authored by Daniel Peris.

AdvAnced App stOre OptimizAtiOn 383

13
Final Words
13 Final Words |

13
Final Words
And there you have it! The unabridged guide to advanced App Store Optimization.

We hope that you have gained a more in-depth understanding of how ASO works, from increasing your visibility, to
raising your conversion rate, to learning about the tools available to help you in your work, to understanding how
forces outside of the store influence your app’s ASO success potential, and everything in-between.

If you enjoyed this book, please tell your friends and spread the word! And if you have feedback, we would love to hear
from you! Send a note to info@[Link] and hello@[Link].

Visit the ASOStack Blog by [Link] and the blog at [Link] to learn more about our companies and stay up-to-
date on the latest and greatest content on ASO.

THANK YOUS
We would first like to give major thank-you to our editor, Regina Leuwer [[Link]
without whom we would have suffered greatly in staying on task writing and completing this book, and without whom
we certainly would not have finished on time for the launch of iOS 11.

We’d also like to give a thank-you to our book branding designer, Javier Prieto, without whom the book would not have
been nowhere near as professional, visually engaging, and all-around stylish.

Regina Leuwer (Editor) and Javier Prieto (Designer)

advanced app store optimization 385

13 Final Words |

Additionally, the cover of the ASO book has been made by Stuart Miller [[Link]
a27b7115a/], and the second copy of the book was proofread by Robin Runyan [[Link]
robinrunyan].

We also have a list of other folks that we would like to thank and acknowledge for helping us to create the book:

Guest Authors (alphabetical order)

■ Daniel Peris— Backlinks and setting up the Google Search Console

■ Emily Grossman—App Indexing

■ Pablo Penny—The Keyword Optimization Cycle

■ Paul Malicki—Switching Categories

■ Peter Fodor—Getting Featured

■ Sylvain Gauchet—App Store Videos

Proofreaders and Other Contributors (alphabetical order)

■ Adeline Lee

■ Andy Carvell

■ Ido Schoonen

■ Ilia Kukharev

■ Luca Giacomel

■ Oksana Iarosevych

■ Sebastian Knopp

■ Thomas Petit

Tool Providers (alphabetical order)

■ AppFollow [[Link] Anatoly Sharifulin, Evgeny Kruglov

■ AppRadar [[Link] Thomas Kriebernegg

■ AppTweak [[Link] Laurie Galazzo

■ ASODesk [[Link] Sergey Sharov

■ Mobile Action [[Link] Aykut Karaalioglu, Hugh Kimura

■ Priori Data [[Link] Patrick Kane, Patrik Winkler

advanced app store optimization 386

13 Final Words |

■ RaiseMetrics [[Link] Alexey Savitsky

■ SensorTower [[Link] Randy Nelson

■ SplitMetrics [[Link] Alexandra Lamechenka, Ian Artimovich

■ StoreMaven [[Link] Adam Rakib

■ TheTool [[Link] Katerina Zolotareva, Daniel Peris

■ TUNE [[Link] Ian Sefferman, Patrick Haig, Tam Phan

We would also like to thank the engaged and wonderful ASO Stack Slack community that has blossomed from just a
few folks, to now hundreds of ASOs from all across the world.

Lastly, we would like to thank you, our reader, for whom this whole book was created. Thank you for reading! We hope
that you will accomplish great things in the world of app marketing, and we look forward to hearing from you.

-Moritz and Gabe

advanced app store optimization 387

 Table of ConTenTs

GLOSSARY
symbols AppFollow 57, 83, 298, 325, 326, 351 Captions 24, 76, 79, 152, 182, 199, 203,
208, 210, 234, 237, 246, 279
[Link] 44, 298, 339, 340
3rd party stores 8, 348
Category 3, 8, 17, 18, 22, 30, 33, 34, 35,
[Link] 44, 277, 298, 338, 339
44, 46, 65, 71, 79, 80, 101, 104,
a AppLaunchpad 298, 346 105, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126,
127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134,
A/B testing 3, 13, 105, 158, 237, 240, 241, AppRadar 57, 280, 298, 327, 328, 351 145, 152, 194, 195, 227, 230, 231,
242, 243, 244, 303, 333, 340, 342 232, 234, 249, 251, 255, 291, 293,
AppScatter 285, 299, 347, 348
AdWords 14, 39, 45, 46, 56, 90, 132, 172, 302, 306, 310, 314, 324, 352, 353,
AppsFlyer 354, 368 357, 363
181, 305, 306, 336
Apptamin 216, 229, 234 China 224, 270, 272, 279, 283, 284, 338
ahrefs 376, 377, 378
Apptentive 128, 256, 299, 345 Churn 363, 364
Algorithm 31, 58, 93, 95, 96, 97, 356
Apptimize 299 CodeNGo 299, 348, 349
AMP 369
Apptopia 24, 299 Collections 98, 108, 112
Analytics 86, 88, 112, 115, 234, 237, 238,
249, 298, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, AppTweak 34, 36, 43, 57, 58, 64, 83, 299, Competitors 44, 65, 80, 92, 109, 116,
321, 333, 351, 354, 355, 359, 373 328, 329, 339, 351, 352, 354 124, 132, 136, 144, 149, 150, 151,
API 53, 54, 314, 344, 354, 359, 368, 369 ARPU 39, 52, 104, 109, 262, 306, 318, 365 152, 249, 256, 295, 357, 358, 364,
365
App ASA 134, 135
CPA 52, 135
bundles 93 ASODesk 62, 299, 329, 330
CPI 52, 100, 117, 306
description 172, 288, 290 Attribution 53, 78, 145, 228, 329, 333,
359 CRO 8, 10, 67, 79, 138, 139, 143, 144,
icon 87, 113, 139, 185, 188, 192, 193, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 155,
218, 240, 279, 369 Autocomplete 59, 356 162, 166, 172, 173, 174, 180, 183,
launch 367 185, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196,
197, 198, 199, 203, 239, 243, 244,
ratings/reviews 20, 249, 309, 325, 363,
b
245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251,
365, 378 Backlinks 33, 375, 376, 378 278, 288, 312
subtitle 15, 18, 20, 32, 33, 42, 67, 68, Benchmarks 88, 93, 124, 145, 146, 150, CTR 77, 78, 132, 146, 181, 247, 369, 373
69, 70, 71, 79, 95, 96, 139, 146, 244, 248, 249, 255, 306, 342
160, 161, 162, 163, 271, 272, 296
Black Hat ASO 3, 80, 287, 288, 293 d
video 141, 218
Browse 29, 119, 161, 162, 193, 248, 317, Dashboard 86, 88, 90, 97, 249, 300, 301,
App Annie 96, 256, 298 318 302, 317
AppAnnie 99, 115, 344 Burst campaign 119, 125, 288 Description 13, 14, 20, 32, 33, 42, 45, 58,
AppBot 49, 298, 349, 350 66, 67, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 94, 95,
105, 109, 117, 132, 136, 139, 140,
AppFigures 298, 344 C 144, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156,

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 14 Table of ConTenTs

157, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171, 172, Incentivized installs 125, 289, 292 Onboarding 117, 217, 364
173, 176, 182, 185, 186, 188, 191,
Indexed 33, 39, 55, 71, 72, 80, 270, 272, Organic 7, 27, 29, 30, 41, 74, 78, 82, 88,
203, 245, 248, 252, 263, 269, 278,
278, 368, 369, 373 117, 125, 126, 135, 136, 161, 174,
279, 288, 290, 354, 355, 360, 369,
180, 248, 288, 291, 300, 320, 329,
371, 378 iOS 11 3, 4, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21,
333, 335, 336, 352, 357, 367, 373,
22, 24, 26, 67, 74, 75, 93, 98, 99,
Developer console 87, 229, 237, 354 375, 376
112, 166, 203, 217, 218, 221, 224,
227, 228, 258
e p
ITunes Connect 43, 70, 86, 88, 108, 115,
Eligibility 32, 93, 94, 136, 183, 184 145, 219, 249, 257, 276, 277, 303, Package name 75, 76
314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322,
Emoji 123, 131, 154, 172 323, 324, 325, 327, 354 Plural 35, 36, 71
Engaged 88, 111, 117, 171, 217 Positioning 100, 116, 117, 248, 365
Experiments 3, 80, 237, 239, 240, 241, K PPC 3, 132, 134, 135
242, 244, 246, 288, 303, 304, 340
Keyword optimization 3, 7, 10, 29, 30, Preview videos 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 24, 39,
31, 39, 40, 41, 60, 63, 68, 79, 88, 143, 152, 221, 227
f 93, 119, 159, 271, 287, 325
Pricing 153, 174, 183, 293, 304, 314, 353,
Fastlane 280, 281, 299, 346, 347 Keyword stuffing 81, 96, 290 358, 359, 360, 366
Feature graphic 141, 147, 152, 155, 164, KPI 78, 84, 88, 90, 144, 244, 247, 248 PrioriData 65, 127, 130, 299
176, 177, 189, 194, 195, 196, 198, KWO 10, 39, 41, 52, 60, 66, 82, 89, 93, Prioritization 45, 59, 148, 298
203, 233, 234, 237, 245, 246, 360 136, 162, 185, 244
Promotional text 173, 248, 312
Featuring 24, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104,
105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, l Publishers 38, 75, 97, 99, 100, 107, 111,
112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 127, 131, 221, 229, 280, 296, 353
129, 177 Languages 58, 71, 164, 229, 237, 267,
269, 272, 275, 278, 310, 336, 354
Formatting 171, 172, 173, 250 r
Latent semantic indexing 49
Framework 3, 7, 39, 40, 138, 139, 143 RaiseMetrics 243, 299, 340, 341
Localization 8, 39, 70, 129, 158, 229, 266,
Funnel 13, 88, 134, 247, 305 Rankings 3, 13, 22, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34,
267, 269, 270, 272, 276, 278, 280,
289, 314, 346, 347 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 60, 62, 63, 64,
65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80, 83,
G Localized 27, 39, 229, 237, 245, 266, 271, 84, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96,
Google Keyword Planner 41, 42, 45, 46, 276, 278, 279, 281, 302, 306, 314 97, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 130,
53, 299, 336, 337 132, 135, 136, 138, 150, 152, 154,
LTV 52, 322
158, 162, 163, 164, 171, 185, 252,
Google Trends 46, 299, 337, 338 255, 256, 277, 288, 291, 292, 293,
Guidelines 67, 68, 217, 218, 221, 228, m 294, 295, 298, 320, 325, 336, 344,
258, 287, 288, 289, 291, 294 352, 357, 363, 364, 366, 369, 371,
Manipulating 288, 291, 293 378
Measuring 26, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 115, Rating prompt 257, 258, 259, 260, 261,
H 243, 244, 247, 248, 254, 305 309
Hack 109, 111, 158 Metadata 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, Ratings 3, 8, 10, 14, 20, 38, 89, 93, 94, 96,
Holidays 113, 251, 279 42, 43, 51, 60, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 97, 98, 103, 104, 109, 112, 117,
75, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 93, 94, 95, 121, 125, 146, 149, 152, 249, 254,
Hypothesize 144, 145, 151 132, 135, 136, 164, 167, 229, 238, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261,
250, 271, 272, 278, 285, 288, 290, 262, 263, 280, 288, 290, 291, 293,
i 302, 314, 316, 318, 325, 327, 351, 294, 296, 298, 300, 304, 309, 310,
352, 355, 378 312, 315, 316, 325, 345, 349, 357,
IAP 13, 24, 73, 75, 94, 95, 151, 184, 185, 360, 363, 364, 365, 376, 378
Metric 65, 85, 87, 88, 115, 247, 248
186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 323, 360
MMP 52, 53, 305, 320 Relevance 32, 33, 34, 39, 62, 63, 64, 89,
Impressions 14, 24, 38, 52, 77, 78, 84, 85, 93, 96, 135, 136, 160, 162, 369
86, 87, 115, 133, 135, 138, 161, MobileAction 127, 299
162, 180, 193, 247, 248, 278, 317, Report 8, 9, 84, 89, 90, 119, 130, 144,
318, 371, 373, 374 Monetization 115, 119, 128, 145, 275, 158, 228, 243, 244, 266, 275, 301,
306, 365, 366 302, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309,
In-App Purchases 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 33, 314, 321, 322, 323, 325, 348, 307
39, 74, 75, 89, 94, 184, 185, 186, Monitoring 83, 85, 328, 349
187, 193, 248, 306, 314, 324, 365, Reporting 26, 63, 82, 89, 132, 134, 135,
366 o 138, 243, 244, 247, 249, 250, 299,

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 Table of ConTenTs

304, 309, 317, 336, 343, 344 243, 246, 251, 252, 270, 303, 342,
360
Reports 49, 53, 86, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97,
244, 301, 306, 308, 312, 318, 321, Thesaurus 42, 47
322, 323, 324, 325, 344, 345, 352,
TheTool 56, 58, 75, 299, 335, 355, 356,
353, 354, 358, 373, 374
371
Requirements 108, 266, 285, 325, 364
Timing 101, 107, 110, 113, 189, 235
Retention 8, 27, 31, 36, 38, 77, 88, 89, 90,
Top chart 8, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27,
103, 104, 109, 115, 121, 125, 127,
38, 39, 65, 78, 85, 93, 95, 96, 97,
128, 237, 241, 244, 256, 305, 306,
119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 138,
316, 320, 322, 343, 344, 345, 353,
154, 161, 163, 180, 192, 252, 255,
358, 363, 364, 365, 366
288, 291, 298, 304, 319, 325, 343,
344, 351, 355, 366, 375
s
Translation 270, 276, 304, 351, 355
Search
Trending 59, 89, 122, 289, 291, 293, 301,
popularity 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 78, 309, 317, 338, 349
79, 89, 93, 181, 352, 354, 356
Truncation 159, 161, 162
Seasonality 113, 129, 197, 243, 248, 251,
TUNE 61, 145, 146, 147, 148, 248, 299,
279, 336
333, 334, 355, 359
Segment 238
tvOS 87, 217, 220, 324
Segmenting 289, 293, 323
SensorTower 49, 59, 299, 331, 332 U
SEO 33, 39, 75, 290, 305, 335, 369, 371, UAC 14, 89, 132, 133, 134, 135, 230
373, 374, 375, 376, 378
Uninstalls 38, 88, 238, 239, 241, 242, 363
Short description 32, 33, 42, 66, 71, 139,
Updates 3, 8, 12, 13, 14, 22, 38, 83, 84,
152, 156, 163, 164, 167, 172, 173,
85, 87, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103,
176, 203, 245, 269, 278, 378
104, 112, 114, 118, 119, 145, 150,
Spike 113, 114, 115, 118, 135 164, 165, 166, 221, 230, 243, 248,
249, 258, 259, 263, 264, 290, 296,
SplitMetrics 299, 342
310, 314, 317, 318, 324, 331, 351,
SRP 12, 369 355, 364

Stability 38, 97, 255, 302, 364, 365 Uplift 88, 172, 216, 318, 333

Statistics 130, 217, 267, 275, 276, 301,

302, 306, 376 v
StoreMaven 299, 342, 343, 359, 360 Velocity 38, 69, 87, 119, 120, 121, 125,
250, 291, 363, 366
Stuffing 81, 96, 289, 290
Visibility 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 24,
Subscriptions 78, 128, 170, 308, 314,
29, 30, 32, 36, 64, 67, 68, 69, 75,
321, 322, 323, 358
79, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93,
Survey 46, 47, 351, 355, 359 97, 99, 115, 119, 125, 132, 133,
134, 135, 138, 145, 154, 172, 180,
193, 203, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250,
T 261, 266, 267, 276, 287, 288, 289,
Targeting 26, 41, 43, 56, 64, 65, 67, 70, 291, 293, 306, 312, 314, 318, 353,
80, 104, 117, 136, 229 358, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 371,
372, 373, 375, 378
Testing 3, 8, 13, 24, 36, 96, 100, 105, 133,
158, 159, 167, 224, 228, 237, 239, Visual Word Recognition 3, 63, 64, 67,
240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 251, 76, 78, 152, 159, 180, 182, 186
252, 259, 304, 314, 324, 333, 340, Vocabulary 92, 149, 154
342, 351, 352, 359, 360, 361
Volatility 65, 357
TestNest 3, 343
Tests 47, 80, 105, 106, 114, 126, 138, 146, W
150, 172, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199,
230, 233, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, Weighting 298, 363, 364

advanCed app sTore opTimizaTion 390