Covid-19 has had a brutal impact on consumer behaviour around the world, with serious consequences on the app marketplace. While there are businesses who have seen their demands vanish, some apps and games have seen their download numbers flourish richly. This happens due to the changes occurring in App Store Optimization (ASO).
ASO is often about making small changes to your app page that have a significant impact on your app’s search ranking and visibility in the stores. ASO has changed a lot over the last few years, bringing rise to new marketing channels and best practices. Generating impressions and installs in during and post Covid-19 market will take more than simply updating your keywords or hiring a social influencer to talk your app up to their audience.
The goal for your app should be to remain competitive in 2020 and get foresight into trends that will keep on even after the pandemic has ended. While there are quite a few app store optimization services available in the market, here are some things you can keep in mind:
Continued Keyword Optimization
Keywords form the foundation of search discovery on anything on the internet, including apps on app stores. Like any other marketing channel, consistency is key to maintaining relevance. Even if your keywords have been optimized one too many times, not iterating frequently can stagnateprevious improvements. With more developers optimizing, including the already popular apps, the shorter and more generic keywords have now become overcrowded hard to compete for.
As the stores’ algorithms get smarter with time, long-tail keyword searches will start to increase in popularity and offer more optimization opportunities. Keywords are still just as important in 2020 as they have always been. Be sure to continue researching the market and updating your keywords as your app grows with time.
App Localization
App localization allows you to push up your app’s downloads by 30% to 100% when you localize properly on a locale. With the world living indoors in 2020, it’s great to boost your downloads and rank in other countries which shows that you deliver a good, reliable product, and care about global expansion. This affects your app store position as well. You can localize your text to suit multiple dialects, like French for France and Canada. You can also do the same for your app’s screenshots, descriptions, subtitles, etc.
App Preview Videos
As users are browsing the stores to find new ways to say connected with friends and family and also for entertainment, this is the perfect time for you to think of creating an app preview video to help get your app more exposure. These preview videos play automatically on store search results, making it easy for a user to spot your app amidst many. If your app has recently been visible with the help of keywords, a preview video can be a great way to quickly explain to visitors what your app is about and encourage them to install.
Paid Marketing
With the ever-growing number of apps available on the Apple and Google stores, differentiation has become more about the brands and less about their products. More and more brands are now working on finding ways they can underline their brand statements on their app page even if that meant less room to show their product. This increasing importance calls for more story-telling and therefore, a marketing-oriented ASO strategy.
Paid marketing on platforms like Apple Search Ads and Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram can be great for helping apps grow. Paid marketing helps accelerate how fast your app ranks for keywords. Search Ads engines actually help in increasing your rank, as it places your ad in search results tied to specific keywords used by you.
It is important to note that any marketing campaigns you plan for your app will need to align with the App Store Optimization campaign, helping you earn higher quality users at a lower cost. There are many mobile app marketing services you can get in touch with to help you through this process.
Sturdy Apps
App crashes affect your chances of getting recommended negatively, Google confirmed recently. The more your app crashes, the fewer recommendations you will receive. Building an app that doesn’t crash every so often will get you higher recommendations from app stores.
Whether you manage your app’s ASO strategy on your own or utilize a third-party service, it’s important for you to constantly run A/B tests. Also known as Split testing, A/B testing is a process through which you can see two variants of the same page to different segments of website visitors at the same time and compare which variant drives more conversions or installs.
Ensure that you keep these tests iterative as well as continuous. Testing app elements one at a time helps you understand what works and what doesn’t. This keeps you on top of any technological development that might take place, affecting your app.
In Conclusion
2020/21 is expected to be busy for optimizers. With technology developing every other day, things are going to get more challenging. But, iterating and experimenting offers great results and having the right ASO tools will make finding new opportunities and monitoring performance much easier.
