Fortunately, there are many enterprise-level tools available that
can help you better understand your app visibility and rankings.
The tools in order of what I use are App Annie, SearchMan,
Sensor Tower, and AppCodes.
The value of these tools is that they enable global visibility,
insight into keywords, competition trends, the ability to do KPI,
key performance indicator analysis, and they integrate with the iTunes store data.
Each platform is unique.
Some are better at being very comprehensive in their data, or
strong visual reporting, or better aggregation of reviews and their analyses.
I recommend you try all four of these, they're all free to use for
front-end data and they'll each give you a slightly different understanding of your
app's overall performance.
The best way to make use of app optimization tools is defining,
first, what your objective is.
Are you trying to improve keyword ranking, overall visibility,
learning how you compete against competitors, or maybe all the above?
Once you have your objective clear, you can then start to define the gap between
where your app is today and how you get to where you want to be in the future.
This requires to know the data and
indicators that equate to successful ASO campaign.
From there you can identify unique keyword opportunities, how you might improve
the images or descriptions, and especially the ratings and reviews feedback.
That is such a tremendous vehicle in improving your ranking opportunities,
it's through improved app quality that the ratings and reviews feedback increases.
I'll now share a few examples of some of the data you can get from these tools.
For example, in this one you can get specific keyword rankings and
the competitive results for the iPad and iPhone stores.
If keyword ranking is of most interest to you, and how many other competitors
exist for that particular keyword as well, this would be a good report to understand.
SearchMan includes this visibility score report.
As you know, the discovery tactic for keywords includes higher volume,
higher opportunity, and more relevance.
And specifically, making updates in iOS to the keyword field or
to the title field in both Apple and Google environments.
The visibility score is a summary metric that indicates an app's overall
discoverability inside the app store search.
It's the grand total of estimated search volume of each keyword multiplied
by an accessibility factor corresponding to that keyword search rank.
In this case, you can see that the visibility score went up at the time of
an app optimization update, due to a better focus on keywords and
improving the title's optimization.
In this graph from App Annie,
you get a real sense for the globalization of app optimization.
The app was updated, including ASO, and you saw a direct spike from those events.
And it eventually fell over the next week or two.
But the download increases occurred throughout the globe, and
ultimately led to a 75% increase in daily downloads,
sustained a month after the time of launch.
It's not enough just to have access to the data,
it's important to understand how to interpret it.
So in this first graph we can see that the app had a strong increase in hype and
activity at launch, and then that dropped down impacting the amount of installs.
The second was due to a regular popular app that increases,
going consistently upward.
The third is a popular app that had a strong lift initially and dropped down,
but needs a new boost of either better optimization, or
an additional feature, or some way to justify having a new launch.
And the last graph is a trending app trend where we see a significant spike in
that app's visibility, maybe due to very positive reviews, high ratings,
and a lot of momentum when it comes to the app's visibility in the App Store.
The App Annie platform has this specific report for ratings and reviews,
that can be very insightful.
This does a couple things for us.
One, it allows us to look at the country, rating number 1 through 5,
and app version, and filter by those criteria.
We then can look at the verbatim review comments,
exactly what was written about that app during a particular period of time.
So you could pinpoint a specific date, a country, a rating number,
an app version, to as narrow or as wide a view as you'd like to see,
and gain some tremendous insight about that app's performance.
It's also, I think,
important to understand that app data alone is not always conclusive.
Here we might interpret that December was a seasonal increase.
But at the time of this first star, which represents a launch, maybe the ratings and
reviews weren't initially great causing this app to fall at the end of January.
But then the second launch saw a little bit of a lift, and
then the third, in February, caused a flatline.
In and of itself, this data doesn't show much about the app's performance, except
that it went up and down relative to different parts of this app's lifecycle.
So it is important to take the data we have here in context with other
things happening and other knowledge we might have about that app.
This data from SearchMan shows something similar,
where it's not conclusive what exactly caused these drops or spikes.
Perhaps with the first app launch it was due to low ratings, but the others are so
cyclical in nature that it's difficult to really understand the cause and
effect based on this data alone for improvements in rankings.
Companies with a more sophisticated approach to app marketing might be
interested in a dashboard like this.
What I'm conveying here is something that executives and those with
an interest in app marketing, even app engagement, would find of interest.
On the left we can see some of the KPIs related to findability,
the top keywords, the competition, how our ratings and reviews are doing.
But as you come down the marketing funnel for apps, down to downloading,
installing, and engaging with the app, there are different measures of success in
KPIs which can't only be found from some of the tools I've shared.
This is where a comprehensive marketing strategy, and
alignment with data stakeholders who have access to these, and
ultimately a vision for telling this story well, is critical.
Data is the engine that keeps marketers both honest and relevant.
And being able to interpret data and ultimately tell a story to your clients or
employers is what separates those who merely have data
from those who really use it for a competitive benefit.
