According to Business of Apps, the Apple App Store has about 3.6 million iOS apps, while the Google Play Store has more than 2.39 million Android apps. If your app isn't visible, people won't click to download it. Therefore, increasing your app's visibility in the App Store is critical to differentiate your brand from the competition and increase app download rates.
2021 is another year of opportunities and challenges for mobile marketing. Many brands have analyzed new consumer behaviors and adjusted their marketing strategies accordingly, focusing on the important role of mobile apps in the new normal. 2022 is just around the corner and it seems like it will bring more digital transformation. What should app marketers keep in mind as they develop their strategies for next year?
Organic user acquisition becomes the priority
As the mobile landscape becomes more competitive, it is becoming more important for app marketers to plan ahead for user acquisition. Unlike earlier years, when building your own mobile app was enough, only 0.01% of apps are now managing to build an effective user acquisition strategy. That's why user acquisition strategies play a more important role even before the app is developed.
There are about 2 million apps in the Apple App Store and even more on Google Play, and new apps are being added every day. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer large mobile app development companies in the gaming and non-gaming space. This economy is growing in a similar way to many others: a small core owns most of the value.
That said, a UA that pays for apps is not a panacea for success. Without understanding users and their motivations for installing an app or game (which is what ASO is really all about), those UA dollars go down the drain because developers don't know exactly what makes their apps successful.
Ultimately, this means knowing your audience better than your competitors. You need to understand what really drives your users to install your app, and use that knowledge to create better converting app store assets for higher conversion rates.
To learn more about user persona, you can check "
How to Drive Your App Promotion With User Persona And Market Research?" of our previous articles.
Once an app is launched, it is important to provide a seamless experience for users to retain them after acquisition. In addition, since the ultimate goal of any app developer is to make a profit, providing value to users is critical and essential.
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Pay attention to keyword relevancy, not just traffic
On average, 65-70% of all app installations come from app store searches and 15-20% from browsing the app store. Together, they make up the vast majority of installs in the store, so the practice of increasing search and browsing impressions is a key part of your growth.
High traffic keywords can be vague and hard to rank for
Even if your goal is to get a lot of people to your app and convince them to download and install it, you can't assume that you can achieve that goal if you just populate your list with high-traffic keywords.
First of all, those keywords with the highest traffic are very competitive and hard to rank for. But it's also the case that many keywords that seem popular and superficially appealing will be interpreted differently by those using them in search.
For example, since the Zutobi app offers driving lessons for teens trying to get a driver's license, it seems sensible to consider "driver's license" as a viable keyword because it ranks high in the average monthly search.
However, if you type "driver's license" into the Google Web search bar, your results will include information about renewing your license, getting a license plate, and even entries that have nothing to do with driving at all.
In addition, high-volume keywords are often vague and easy to interpret, not to mention competitive.
Use descriptive long-tail keywords to increase your conversion
If you have created your user personas, you will have a better understanding of what your target customers need and what problems they need to solve. When you enter a keyword or keyword phrase into the search bar, your knowledge of the representative customer should prompt you to understand what he or she is looking for.
Therefore, using more descriptive long-tail keywords may be more relevant to the searcher's intent.
These keywords rank lower in terms of monthly search counts, but the traffic you see will generate greater interest in your application and is more likely to convert to users.
Monitor the keyword trends and traffic
Optimizing your app store is a process. It's not something you can just do once and never look back. You should regularly monitor the performance of your app to see how well your keywords are achieving your key performance indicator (KPI) goals.
The reason you need to iterate over different keywords on a consistent basis (some experts believe you should look at results weekly or even daily) is that there are many factors that can explain changes in rankings.
Long-term factors such as changing consumer preferences, competitor behavior, or product seasonality may affect the effectiveness of keywords.
In the short term, an application's ranking position may change depending on the day of the week, time of day, or for other unknowable reasons.
If you monitor your results regularly, you will be able to see trends for specific keywords that take out insignificant influences.
ASO experts offer best practices on how to target keywords in app listings, which vary based on the rules set by each of the two app stores. The rules are constantly changing, so be sure to check their respective policies for what does and does not rank, character limits on app titles and descriptions, and disallowed practices.
The following are the latest guidelines for the Google Play and Apple iOS stores.
Google Play
- Title: 30 characters maximum
- Short description: up to 80 characters
- Description: up to 4,000 characters
Google Play indexes almost all of the text contained in product details.
Apple (iOS) App Store
- Title: up to 30 characters
- Subtitle: up to 30 characters
- Keyword field: up to 100 characters
The iOS App Store does not index all text fields (unlike Google), so please try to get keywords in these additional fields.
- Developer name
- In-App Purchase (IAP)
Conversion is more important than ever: native A/B test
A better way to find out which app store elements work best to achieve your goals is to test different versions of the same variables (e.g. icons, screens, videos) on a representative sample of users. A/B testing is a safe way to optimize the store image before rolling it out to all users.
Google Play Store Experiments
The Google Play console has A/B testing built into its platform, which includes a feature called Google Experiments. Here are their recommended best practices for running tests.
- Understand what you are trying to achieve by running tests. What specific goals do you want to be able to evaluate the results against?
- Stick to testing one variable at a time. If you try to test multiple variables, you will not have a clear understanding of how to attribute any changes in the results.
- Test your icon, as it will have a large impact on the consumer's decision to click on your application.
- Other important elements to test are your short description, your featured image, and your screenshots (and even the order of the screenshots).
- Give your experiment at least a week so that you can explain weekday and weekend behavior.
- Google recommends testing with 50% of your audience so that there are enough members in your sample group to get reliable results.
App Store product page optimization
Apple's custom product page and product page optimization have all gone live with the release of iOS 15, and developers can now A/B test in the App Store as well.
Prior to iOS 15, each company had an App Store product page. With the release of iOS 15, it is now possible to create specific, targeted product pages for different target audiences. This means that companies that don't make an effort to create personalized product pages for their paid traffic will fall behind their competitors.
Apple will allow up to 35 unique custom product pages, each providing insight into various features through different screenshots, app previews and promotional text. Developers can then drive traffic to the appropriate product page using a unique URL that will be placed in a relevant ad or third-party recommendation.
Performance data for custom product pages will also be available in App Analytics. Targeted page views will provide actionable data on display counts, app downloads, app install conversion rates and retention rates.
Using product page optimization, developers can test variations of app icons, screenshots and preview videos. apple will allow three different treatments to be applied at once, with a maximum duration of 90 days for each test.
To learn more about iOS15 A/B test, you can check "
iOS15: A/B Testing Your Product Page" of our previous articles.
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