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Sep 18 2021
According to statistics, 65% of app installs on the App Store come from search results. Looking at these figures, is it necessary to say more how important organic traffic for app promotion?
To understand how the App Store recommendation algorithm works, let’s first look at the general working principle of App Store search.
You can search for apps in the "Search" tab (the rightmost of the five buttons below). Technically speaking, this section can be divided into three subsections:
“Discover” is born from “Trending Searches” section, which exists from iOS 8 up to iOS 13.
Users might think “Discover” is just another “Trending Searches” with different name. However, these two sections do not apply the same ranking algorithm. In this article, we are going to learn the similarities and differences below.
“Trending” (Popular) includes search queries gaining popularity. In this case, most of time these queries are just brand names of popular apps, leading to only app on the Apple Store.
The ranking is updated regularly, like all the other results on the App Store. It does not have a dramatic change, only partially and gradually. The App Store algorithm for creating the Trending list is quite simple based on our experience: it includes those search queries which search number has increased recently. The “Trending” list is easily manipulated by driving a large amount of traffic to certain words.
“Discover”, existing separately from “Trending”, is another list of popular keywords.
We can notice the obvious difference between them, that “Discover” no longer includes specific brand name, such as Tinder, Facebook,etc. It’s a list of non-branded keywords: dating, talk, social, etc.
It sounds like a opportunity for smaller companies when major traffic won’t drive to tech giant names directly, that smaller companies also have a chance to display their apps at search results from Discover queries.
Discover have no personalization, while queries only differ by country. It updates 3-6 times a day and show the same result for iPhone and iPad located at same region. The queries show first four results for iPhone and first 6 results for iPad.
As we mentioned above, the “Discover” algorithm performs differently with “Trending”. It is time for us to analyze how keywords in the Discover section affect traffic. And most importantly, our ASO World tech team studied the possibilities to manipulate this section to gain organic traffic growth.
First, let’s see how to analyze the difference between Trending and Discovery section.
Consider these questions below:
Work Plan:
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We collected all of iPhone Discover queries updates from June to July in US.
Let’s look at the data itself, what makes up the Discovery queries and how you can learn from it.
40% of keywords are game related, leaving the rest, including photo and video edit, entertainment, utilities, etc. The queries are usually the first one on App Store search list when you type the first word in the bar.
The initial analysis of the sample shows that the queries are usually repetitive though the queries list update 3-6 times a day. The update does not follow a typical cyclic pattern: The same keywords can be repeated on the list for several days, then exit for a week.
We only have 156 keywords in total in the sample since the “Discovery” contains only 4 keywords and they remain most of time. There are only 152 unique queries in June and 149 in July.
These keywords does not include brand name, only general ones. It indicates that App Store has an algorithm to acquire general keywords related to app itself. That makes an app can be related to several keywords.
The analysis above implies that Apple encourages users to explore new apps, rather than searching specific brand name.
It’s definitely not a coincidence that we have most popular keywords in the queries.
To test it out, we make a list of most popular searches in US on July. The list repeat most of Discovery queries, however they do not assemble each other.
Discover may root on the same logic as Trending, with brand-related name excluded. That is a ranking of growing popular keywords without brand-related information. Apple Store allows more chances for user to explore and for app to expose.
Since we cleared out the logic behind Discover collection, now we will figure out how to use the logic to gain organic traffic.
It is important to understand that these keywords show up in Discover queries is a consequence of their popularity, not a cause. The keywords are already very popular, that’s why they end up in this collection, bringing them more visibility.
Study the Discover collections to see if your app is related to any of those, which help you gain traffic from Discover search results.
Learn from your competitors and big brand, what keywords do they use. You might get inspired by their way of promotion.
Focus on most strategic keywords of balance relevance, ranking difficulty and search popularity. We need to determine a keyword bringing you the most traffic with limited budget.
Rank better at popular keywords search results will bring you steady organic traffic since Discover is a collection of popular keywords. Many factors contributes to your search results ranking. We will break down into 2 parts, on-metadata optimization and off-metadata optimization.
On-metadata is the basic metadata which mainly includes app Name/title, app subtitle, app description.
Now you have the keywords you want to make use of, implement the keywords into your metadata. Keep it in mind that they do not affect your app ranking directly but surely relates to your app install conversion rate.
We have several metrics included in off-meta optimization, which are downloads, first installation, rating and reviews.
These directly affect your ranking when app store algorithm rank your app by overall performance.
Optimize your product page to increase your app conversion rate and search results ranking to a higher position. We have steady organic traffic growth performing them at the same time.
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