💎 Growth Gems #45 - Gems from "New ASO Strategies for the NEW App Store"
Hi there,
Today's gems are mined ⛏️ from a talk at the App Promotion Summit USA 2021 with David Bell (CEO at Gummicube).
An interesting look at the recent announcements by both Apple and Google, and advices on how to approach them.
💎 #1
The App Store and Google Play Store are digital eCommerce platforms and in eCommerce search, the long tail is much more important. The introduction of search suggestions in the App Store is going to drive new behaviors, making long tail more important.
💎 #2
You may get different results when you’re doing a direct search vs. using a search suggestion, most likely based on what Apple’s algo thinks is the best result. Example: “jobs online” vs. “job” then tap the “online” suggestion. FYI in language learning it looks very much the same.
💎 #3
The Search Ads “Tab” placements are not going to always be valuable. A few times where you can consider it: when Apple is featuring similar themes in “discover” keywords, when your app is seasonally relevant (and only in this window) and if brand initiatives (e.g. offline marketing) drive your search terms into discover.
💎 #4
With In-App Events, new metadata is going to be included in the stores. An assumption is that the event names will qualify as keywords(i.e. indexable) and the descriptions will only be used to understand relevance to keywords and for the ASA relevance score (like the standard description).
💎 #5
The introduction of in-app events and the re-engagement analytics (re-downloads in App Analytics) are an indication that in the longer term Apple wants to provide more methods of re-engagement inside the stores and even more customized experiences for existing users.
💎 #6
App Analytics will now provide a pre-order dashboard, making pre-order marketing more measurable.
💎 #7
The Primary Store Listing Page can be A/B tested, but custom product pages do not appear to have A/B testing available. You might need to get learnings on your organic listing and then adapt your custom product pages.
💎 #8
A/B tests variants on your organic listing and observe the conversion rates separately per source (search, app referrer, web referrer), then use the winners for each source (or at least the learnings) in the campaign specific pages (custom product pages).
💎 #9
There is a relationship between singular and plural for a specific keyword. You will most likely rank for both if you only use one version (i.e. either singular or plural) but you’ll most likely rank lower for the other. If both singular and plural are really important to you, you should target both.
💎 #10
When you look at long tail keywords, you want to measure before and after: growth in impressions coming from search (subtracting ASA or Google Ads data) and conversion rate.
💎 #11
Long tail is not a game of targeting one keyword over another. It’s a game of having a cadence where you’re updating your app and shifting your metadata regularly to allow Apple/Google to experiment with your app on different terms. Over time, you will rank for more keywords if they’re relevant and if you have a good conversion rate.
Stay savvy!
⛏️ Sylvain