The story: Leveraging Health and Fitness apps growth

ASOWorld tech team are always keeping an eye on what's happening in the app markets to help app & game developers and marketers effectively increase their app's visibility in the app store, so as to quickly win their app success.

For health and fitness apps that have been so hot in the app market recently, with people's attention to personal and their family health, the user base of these apps is always on rising. What we are focusing on here is how to help health and fitness apps get the opportunity and quickly drive their organic growth in the situation of seasonal factors and the epidemic which is not unfamiliar to the world.

 

Below we'll start our discussion with the true story, about which how one of our users' health and fitness apps achieved over 500% organic growth in a matter of months.

 

Health and Fitness Application Case Study

Also, the application name remains anonymous here to protect the privacy of our customers. But to give you a better idea of ​​the health and fitness app's story we're sharing, we found one of their competitors' apps from the Google Play Store below.

The story

When we started our personalized app growth solution, we made a comprehensive analysis of the app's competition status and key competitors in the Google App Store, the habits of their target users, the current app store optimization condition of the application, the keyword coverage and ranking in the app market, and the traffic distribution.

 

A good beginning: this application of our users already has a certain promotion basis instead of a new application that has just been launched, that is, you can find a certain amount of downloads, reviews and ratings on the app product page. This app has done preliminary ASO optimization, and some fitness-related long-tail keywords have been distributed in the app name, subtitle, description and other positions on the product page.

 

The shortcomings are: the title characters is not fully utilized, the search volume of the distributed keyword is not high enough, and the performance of the Icons that visitors can see at a glance at the first screen position of the product page is not enough. As you can image, the organic downloads and traffic will also be very low.

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Health & fitness app industry data

Our recent research investigated how seasonality affects the App Store conversion from product page views to installs. An interesting finding was in the Health & Fitness category, where the average app downloaded from March after the winter ended was more likely to be downloaded compared to the average six months in this category. Our hypothesis is that as the weather warms, people are more likely to be outside, exercise and be active.

 

Data for the past six months shows that the average category benchmark for impressions/installs is 4.3% for AppRanking. This category is relatively competitive due to the steady increase in demand for healthier lifestyles over the past few decades. You'll find countless personal trainer apps, trackers, motivators, reminders, exercise variations, and more.

 

In this case study, we share how the App Growth Network helped this mobile app in the fitness category achieve impressive organic growth through a mix of paid media and ASO strategies. For the first mobile app growth plan, we'll cover Android growth (referred to as "Mobile app promotion plan 1"), and for the second, we'll cover iOS growth (referred to as "Mobile app promotion plan 2").

 

Target

The main goals of the app are:

• Rank higher for relevant high-traffic keywords.

• Increase organic downloads on Google Play Store and iOS in the US, Canada and more.

 

Strategies and Solutions

App Promotion Program 1 – Android

Phase 1 (February to mid-March): Pure Google Store Optimization, no paid ads

Our hybrid approach of combining paid media and app store optimization (a technical approach to optimization involving Google ad campaigns and keyword demand coverage to maximize traffic in the short term) produced very good results:

 

• First we started our app growth plan with keyword research. Our strategy for keyword shortlisting is to identify high-traffic, low-competition, long-tail keywords in order to gain as much visibility in search results as possible and drive more organic installs. The next KPIs are Traffic, Relevance, and Difficulty. These KPI values ​​come from multiple App Store optimization tools, such as appannie, google trends, and ASOWorld's database. We also did a competitive analysis to find keywords based on the above KPIs.

• App localization is a great way to increase app installs because Google Play favors localized apps for a better user experience. Although it's called a lingua franca, not everyone speaks English - having a localized app that's native to a non-English speaking country would be an advantage. As a result, we localized our app store listings in English-speaking countries, and optimized minor language localizations in other target regions to rank higher on the Google Play Store and increase organic downloads. We follow the same keyword strategy to filter localized search keywords in small language regions.

• Since an app's title and short description carry more weight for keyword rankings in Google Play, these two metadata fields are critical to gaining more visibility from Google Play search results. With this optimization factor in mind, we first optimized the app's Google Play Store title and short description (App Store meta-optimization) to rank higher for more relevant keywords.

• As a next step in optimization, we also keyword-optimized long descriptions in the US, Canada, and several target regions.

• Optimize the screenshots and video design according to the habits and preferences of the target users in each region, highlight the exclusive features of this app for our users, and take into account the cultural background of the population in each region to fit the user's aesthetics as much as possible. It be proved that good screenshots and video design will effectively increase the downloads conversion rates.

 

Phase 2 (starting March): Test correlation between Universal App Campaigns (UAC) and organic growth for small and large apps

• From our past experience, we know that UAC organic boost works best for smaller apps; so we assume that if we run UAC, we'll get more organic downloads.

 

The result

Phase 1: Google Play Optimization

• Through keyword optimization, we were able to improve rankings for the top 5 keywords (based on ranking progress) within 28 days, which resulted in over 200% organic growth.

 

Below are one of the main keyword ranking with high search volume.

 

Phase 2: Run Google Ads campaigns in the US and Canada to drive downloads

We also launched a Google Ads campaign in the US and Canada on March 9 to drive downloads.

 

So, compared to January, we saw a dramatic increase in organic traffic.

This was tested using smaller apps with 3-figure monthly ad spend, and the organic boost was noticeable.

 

We also ran the same test with a larger app with more downloads, and the correlation wasn't as high.

 

Conclusion

Without UAC, organic growth in February was over 200% compared to December; overall organic installs rose to around 280% in March with UAC running. This suggests that our hybrid approach, UAC combined with ASO, produces more organic growth.

 

App Promotion Program 2 – iOS

Based on our experience in applying best practices, we have done the following:

• Updated metadata to optimize keyword rankings, a/b tested icons and updated videos

• Creative Asset Testing

• Apple Search Ads (for iOS) to promote organic efforts

 

The result:

We looked at the app's ASA spend, total app downloads, and organic downloads throughout. We've seen the following trends: In the months we've been marketing, organic downloads have grown while spending has decreased.

 

For App Promotion 2, we also had a UAC campaign for Android, but we didn't see any correlation between paid media and organic growth.

 

Conclusion

As with case study, everyone will find something different that they might be interested in. Whether it's our research or growth approach.

 

For us, the conclusion is that for iOS, ASA is one of the most effective tools for keyword bidding, with the highest conversion rate, and organic growth eventually achieved a 500% increase. For Android, the correlation between paid and organic promotion is not as strong.