App Store Optimization – Increase Product Ranking
This analysis targets those computer scientists and entrepreneurs interested in not only joining the app development world but also thriving in it. It’s one thing to produce an innovative app, from the idea to its functionality, but it’s another thing to market the app and make profits. Anyone (potentially) can create an app, pay to become a registered Apple Developer, and anxiously post their product to the App Store. However, doing so does not guarantee in the slightest that the app will be recognized, downloaded, or increase in popularity.
When a consumer seeks to install an app on the App Store, they utilize the App Store’s search functionality, and consequentially apps are listed in a not-so-random fashion. If your product is brand new to the App Store, you want to optimize its rankings in the App Store similarly to how you might want your website to rise amongst the Page Ranking of thousands of other sites. To help market your app, it’s best to focus on App Store Optimization (ASO). Rather than leaving your brand new app to collect dust at the bottom of the rankings, you can pro-actively improve the standing of your app to help it rise toward the top.
Robi Ganguly researched ASO for Apple applications and provides useful insight towards successfully marketing mobile apps. In class we learned about Page Rank and the effects that a website linking to multiple pages has on the relative importance of an additional page that it links to. The more connections this source has to other pages, the more that additional pages rises in importance. In app store marketing, keywords are very important in the market standing of your product. It is shown that if the title of your app contains a strong keyword, your app will rank “on average 10.3% higher than those without a keyword in the title.” Additionally, the more keywords lying in your description of the app, the better. Just make sure the description maintains brevity along with quality information about its utility. Ganguly also found that higher ratings correlate to higher rankings, so right off the bat, if you can get friends and family to rate your app, your product will most likely rise in the rankings! The same goes for number of downloads. Ganguly did not have access to the actual number of downloads that apps have, but he proposed a correlation between the number of reviews an pap has and the number of downloads it may have. He then saw that higher ranking products had more reviews (or downloads). A reviewer of this article added additional insight about ASO in that the number of downloads does not always correspond to higher rankings. An app with more recent downloads whose download rate is increasing may rank higher than an app with more downloads from a long time ago. The same goes for web pages and page rank. A website that was super popular 10 years ago (MySpace for example) may have had a very high page rank, but now many other sites supersede it (Facebook, Twitter) due to novelty and rapid growth.
The general takeaway from this article is that keywords in app titles and descriptions increase the app’s rankings in the app store along with more downloads, high ratings, and good reviews. So, if you possess eager ingenuity and want to have an app on the App Store, make sure to optimize its marketing to increase its ranking and your success as an inventor!
Source:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/app-store-optimization/