For your application to achieve greater visibility, both in Google Play and the App Store, it is essential not to make these common mistakes. Find out more to avoid them with the help of App Store Optimization.
There is a huge range of apps and app categories on the market today: educational, e-commerce, financial, social, medical, apps to play games, apps to buy cars, apps to improve your productivity… To be precise, the Apple App Store and Google Play currently host more than 5 million apps between them.
Competition is fierce when launching an application on the market. While it may seem obvious, securing visibility for your app is vital, both in the App Store and Google Play. ASO plays a major role in this mission.
A couple of questions are useful here. How many applications are currently downloaded on your smartphone? And how many are on your tablet? According to a study by Forrester Research, almost 65% of installed apps come from searches on the two largest app stores: Apple’s App Store, and Google Play
As for the question in the subheading: in a nutshell, ASO is for applications what SEO is for web positioning.
ASO is the process of optimizing an application so that it appears among the first results whenever a user conducts a search in the leading app stores.
Visibility for apps is paramount; the higher they appear in app store search results, the easier it will be for users to find them, which in turn increases the likelihood of them being downloaded.
When supporting an app’s development through ASO positioning, developers and marketers sometimes make mistakes that hamper their main objective: to make their applications more visible and obtain the highest number of downloads possible.
Reviewing these mistakes below allows us to learn from them, prevent them from happening again and, consequently, get closer to our goal.
First thing’s first: it pays to acknowledge ASO and its scope in order to avoid major mistakes. This technique can — and does! — impact the revenues which an app can generate.
Overlooking App Store Optimization is a common error, but these days it is practically unthinkable to consider an app’s success, maximize its visibility in app stores (both in the Top Charts and search results), improve its conversion rate and obtain organic downloads and installations without resorting to ASO.
To be clear: organic facilities are those which have no charge, and acquisition costs. This is a clear impact of ASO!
According to Apple’s own data, 65% of installations in the App Store originate from searches. Optimized keywords are necessary to make your recently-launched app visible, and increase its downloads.
Depending on the app you’ve developed, determining the right keywords to use should be fairly straightforward.
First of all, think about which keywords best define your app’s most basic functionalities, and which ones will redirect the most traffic to your listing. These simple first steps are key to the ASO process.
Once the core keywords have been defined, start looking for new combinations. For example, if you started with “walking”, “shoes”, “training”, etc., you should now combine them: “walking with shoes”, “training shoes”, “training shoes for walking”, etc. You can also try combining them with new keywords.
Another tip to avoid irrelevant keywords is to analyze the ones suggested by the App Store and Google Play auto-complete function.
Another common mistake is believing ASO amounts to “Traffic + Conversion”. Of course, the more traffic the better, but traffic is of little use if it doesn’t convert to downloads. Conversion Rate (Visits / Downloads) is all-important.
How can we improve this Conversion Rate? You know that your app is great and ultra-functional, but how do you convince other users to download it?
Visual resources – the app’s icon, screenshots, featured images and video – can be of the utmost importance and play a huge part in ASO positioning. Overlooking this visual element would be a significant mistake.
Remember the following formula at all times : Higher Conversion Rate = More Installs = Impact on ASO. Everything enters through the eyes first, and visual impact is common to all well-sighted human beings, so design work is key to getting the most out of your app’s graphic materials.
There is much more to marketing than data and measurement, although digital professionals sometimes forget this. For example, Google Play’s Developer Console has an “Experiments” functionality, which can be used to carry out A/B tests on most of the factors controlled by the developer from their console.
This functionality is extremely useful, and not using it would be a mistake. More tests mean extra data and the ability to improve your app’s performance.
Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in iTunes Connect. There are, however, two other options open to you:
- If your app is available on both the App Store and Google Play, use “Experiments” to test everything related to Google Play. If the results are satisfactory, you can adapt them to the App Store —but be careful, it’s not always a perfect match.
- Use other A/B testing tools such as SplitMetrics or StoreMaven.
As we can see in the Statista graph below, there are already more than 3 billion smartphones in the world. So why limit yourself to a single country, or a single language?
If your app is targeted at more than one country or language, you should consider locating the app file to the countries and languages of potential users.
Both Google Play and the App Store leave this task to the developers. Locating your app will almost certainly improve its conversion rate, in addition to improving searches in the markets you are targeting.
One common ASO error to avoid is literally translating the text of your app from one language to another. Ideally, the text should be adapted and optimized for the best possible ASO.
Literal translation is not enough due to the complexity of launching an app in other markets. The latter involves several issues: analyzing the new markets, exploring the most relevant keywords, making a good benchmark, studying the Top Charts in detail, and more. Translating the file of your app literally will actively hinder its ASO.
When positioning the apps in their stores, Google and Apple take three issues into account:
- the number of times an app is downloaded;
- the speed at which facilities are generated, and;
- the opinion of the app’s users (reviews)
It is possible to generate new users through paid channels like Instagram Ads, Influencer marketing and Facebook Ads, while making the most of your own channels.
Don’t underestimate your app when generating more downloads. Going viral and word of mouth are both useful for climbing the search rankings and Top Charts.
Here’s an example. In 2017, Google announced that the games with the highest engagement would earn greater visibility on Google Play’s Top Charts, confirming the suspicions of many: if the product measures up, then it will be treated better than others in the major app stores.
With that in mind, it pays to consider things like inbound marketing, push notifications, and your app’s added value and communication strategy. All of which will help you to conquer the highest rankings in the App Store and Google Play.
Assuming that your app impacts ASO, it follows that negative reviews can negatively impact its download conversion rate. Don Quixote’s famous phrase – “They bark, Sánchez, a sign that we are riding” – does not apply here; you should avoid making them bark!
In ASO positioning, keyword research, tab optimization and monitoring go hand in hand.
To identify the most suitable keywords for your app’s optimization look for the ones that best define the essence of what your business is offering, and which your potential users are likely to be searching for.
The next step is to conduct monitoring using a dedicated ASO tool (TheTool, App Annie, or Sensor Tower). In this way you can visualize estimated traffic and gauge the level of difficulty involved in getting a good ranking.
It sounds obvious, but you shouldn’t focus on keywords which you do not consider to be important. What are the odds of someone searching for a “fitness training” app and installing a “scientific calculator” instead?
You can pay over the odds to focus on high volume (head-tail) keywords if you have just launched your app. But focusing on the long and mid-tails, which end up being more useful and lead to more downloads, is a better long-term strategy. The trick is to optimize keywords in the tab, gradually and patiently.
Google Play and Apple each have their own particularities when it comes to ASO. Fully understanding the operation of both is essential when introducing ASO modifications in the store file. It is particularly useful to study the ways in which Google and Apple interpret Search and Conversion in their Stores:
- Search: Google carries out an indexing of the complete content of your app’s file, while Apple does not. Google considers all keywords included in Title, Description, Short Description, User comments, the URL and the name of the developer. This is why you should aim to use relevant keywords in your Title, Description and Short Description fields. Apple, on the other hand, only considers the “App Name” field, Keywords, developer name and full name of in-app purchases, if it chooses to monetize in this way.
- Conversion: many consider Conversion to be part of ASO. In fact, it is a prop to be optimized so that potential users are convinced to install your app. And as we have seen, the more downloads your app has, the better it will rank in the Top Charts. We have also discussed the importance of visual resources to increase your app’s attractiveness for potential users.
- Finally, Google allows developers to use emojis and HTML to make the format richer – be it in the description, short description or title — while Apple does not.
There is no end to the mistakes we can potentially make in ASO. But learning from these mistakes, and avoiding them going forwards, is key to giving your app greater visibility and securing more downloads.
This review of 8 common mistakes you shouldn’t be making in ASO positioning can act as a guide for making your applications more visible on Google Play and the App Store.
Some mistakes are more general, and others more specific. Acknowledging the importance of ASO is the first step towards your app achieving the greatest possible visibility in the two major app stores.
There is more to it than that, of course. Retracing your positioning steps, fine-tuning details, working on design issues and contemplating what we discussed in this article are all important steps.
The goal should always be to position your app as prominently as possible, so that your potential users notice it, are attracted to it, and ultimately install it.
In short, increasing organic downloads while minimizing the cost of acquiring app users is the name of the game.
