How to do ASO for Amazon Appstore

Amazon Appstore is a high-potential app store outside of the Big Two: Google Play and Apple App Store. Vladimir Romanov from Heapp Games jumped into this platform head-first and managed to get his game in the Top 20. In this article, Vladimir shares his findings for promoting apps on this store.
The experiments he describes below were done on a Kindle Fire.
I first learned about Amazon Appstore in June 2018 when I was an ASO newbie. I was tasked with increasing traffic to a mobile casino in various app stores, including this one. At first, I didn’t really get it. How do you do app store optimization without any tools? There are tons of articles online about ASO for Google Play and App Store, but almost nothing about Amazon App market. Their official help section doesn’t offer up any specifics, either. It only suggests recommendations on describing the product in as interesting a way as possible to attract users. So, I dug in and started trying things manually.
For 10 months my app was consistently in the Top 20 in the Games category. It reached #600 overall for free apps and games in the United States.

Why Publish an App on Amazon Mobile Appstore
Amazon Appstore stands out from other Android app stores because it’s the only way to promote apps for Kindle Fire devices. For comparison, the app store for South Korean giant Samsung Galaxy only offers apps for its own devices and competes with Google’s Play Market. It’s not hard to guess who gets all the glory. On top of that, Kindle Fire tablets have the potential to grow a new audience. They run on Android OS, and adapting an app for this line of devices is easier than it seems. Having the app store for its own product line puts the company on par with Apple. And as we worked on ASO, we noticed that the two have a lot in common.
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Getting started on ASO for Amazon Apps
The first problem I faced was a pretty basic one: there was nowhere to see keyword positions. I couldn’t find any detailed help guides, so I threw together a Google Docs spreadsheet and started measuring keyword positions myself:

I assumed that Amazon uses more or less the same search algorithms that it has for its main search engine for goods. After all, the web version of the Appstore is listed as one of the categories on Amazon.com, in the same position as categories like “Books & Comics” and “Shopping”. This theory didn’t pan out. As I manually selected keywords, it became clear that physical goods can be searched for with short descriptions taken out of context, but that’s not the case for apps. That was a pretty interesting find.
So, in the end, it turned out that indexed app searches are based on three main fields:
- Title (200 characters)
- Keywords (30 words divided by commas without a character limit)
- Developer Name (about 50 characters)
In addition to these, there are also non-indexed text fields:
- Short Description (1200 characters)
- Product (Long) Description (4000 characters)
- Product Features bullets (maximum 10 lines)
- “Latest Updates” is similar to “What’s New”, and it’s filled out separately for each localization (maximum of 4000 characters).

