Last November, Apple made some pretty big changes to the app store search engine (it used to be pretty straight-forward to maximize your rank in search results based on keywords and app description). According to a Tech Crunch article,
For developers searching against their own app name, what this change means is that they’ll now see a number of competing apps that didn’t show up before, and an overall expanded list of matches.
In other words, developers could expect some impact to their App Store Optimization (ASO) efforts.
So I dug around online to see if any developers were sharing the exact impact Apple’s change had on their own numbers… and found nothing. So I figured I’d share what we’re seeing with our app, Breathe.
Breathe is a little app that helps you be mindful of your breathing throughout the day.
We launched back in April and started getting great traffic from search results off the bat. People searching for “breathe” would find us at the top of the list — usually #1 or #2 in search results. Organic search was driving 10–30 new users a day.
Apple made the Search changes on November 3rd. We saw Breathe drop overnight from #2 on November 2nd to #14 on November 3rd.
As of November 24th, Breathe stabilized at #25… which makes it terribly hard for people to find us (assuming they’re looking for Breathe).
And that drop in ranking correlated directly with a drop in App Store views. Our view count had been rising steadily, but we saw an immediate drop starting November 3rd.
App Store views goes hand in hand with downloads so clearly this impacted new user numbers.
And then we woke up to Breathe being featured on the front page of Product Hunt. By the end of the day, we were in the top 5 (by upvotes and comments).
And this in turn resulted in a huge spike in both App Store views
… which resulted in a spike of new users
So what?
ASO is not a silver bullet sustainable growth driver but when Apple made its recent change, we took a hit. Product Hunt was a nice boost in the meantime but hopefully ASO in the post-Nov 3rd world won’t be a black box forever.
If you have any insights into the new App Store Search algorithm, or want to share your own experience with ASO post-Nov 3rd, I’d love to hear from you!
This post was originally published on Viabilify
