8 Simple Steps Towards Data-Driven App Store Optimization (ASO)
How to conduct comprehensive background research before kicking off your ASO strategy
App store optimization (ASO), like any other area of modern marketing, can only be effective when driven by data. Whether you are developing a keyword strategy, an A/B testing plan, or a reporting and feedback loop, nothing makes sense unless your decisions are backed with data.
More importantly, while the usual data such as key performance indicators (KPIs) are vital, they are primarily meant for adjustments, corrections, and optimizations. They can’t answer strategic questions like which markets you should prioritize on, what trends in your industry may make or break your ASO efforts, and who will or will not install your app, among others. This is why proper research into external direct and indirect factors influencing ASO needs to be conducted before it starts.
To make your research process efficient, it should be split into multiple steps, each covering a specific topic. In most cases, it requires 8 steps:
- Understand the competitive landscape surrounding your app
- Analyze the app as a product and compare it with competitors
- Review current branding strategy and its differentiation with competitors
- Study the target and existing users of your app, especially those shared with competitors
- Examine industry trends relevant to your app
- Evaluate your app’s local market performance
- Explore local consumer cultures and behaviors
- Identify the patterns of what happens to other apps inside the app store
They can also be grouped into two phases:
- Phase 1 — Competitive analysis: This consists of the first four steps, which ultimately reveal where your app stands in the immediate competition, and how to gain advantages over competitors.
- Phase 2 — Context analysis: This is composed of the last four steps, which highlight the overall situation your app is in, the threats and opportunities ahead of it, and what direction your ASO strategy should follow.
What to research in each step
1. Competitors
An app store is a big place. Available and upcoming apps are counted by millions. Even with counter-competition strategies like targeting niched categories, genres, and even keywords, the number of apps competing for similar users with your app is usually thousands. To win users, it’s crucial to showcase in the app store what sets your app apart from the crowds.
The first step towards differentiation is identifying the right competitors. This answers what, or who, your app is different from. The tricky part is: It’s never straightforward how many or which competitors you should track. If it’s too many, it isn’t manageable. If it’s too few, you’re letting some slip through the radar. In general, there are two types of competitors to look out for:
- Direct competitors: They share the same business model, market segment, and user download intent with your app. For example, Google Meet and Zoom are direct competitors because they’re both online conferencing tools for mostly business or (virtual) office settings.
- Indirect competitors: They are in the same category, industry, or business vertical with your app, but can't always replace it. User interests and download intents are only partly shared. For instance, Facebook Messenger offers video calls as well, so Zoom’s users have every right to substitute Messenger with it, but they don't. They tend to use the former for friends and family, and the latter for colleagues and business partners.
After defining the right competitors, it's important to benchmark your app against them to show the ways in which it stands out. Tools like a competitive positioning or perceptual map, such as the example below, can help:
As seen from the map, being direct or indirect competitors can have complex meanings, depending on the specific conditions, focuses, traits, and "personalities" of different brands. Make sure you choose the best elements that easily make your app look unique and undisputed for marketing purposes.
2. Product
Having the market positioning of your app in mind is enough to orientate your strategy in the current competitive landscape already. However, it can only help you understand the situation as a marketer. The users, on the contrary, won’t be able to easily grasp such abstract ideas. You need to break it down into smaller, digestible, and user-friendly bits of information. Then, they can be communicated in the app store to users and convert them into installers.
In order to improve your app's conversion power, you need to find out what could make users want to use it as a product. Their key concern is whether it will fulfill their needs and solve their problems — and if it could do so better than competitors.
As a product, your app has four major components, namely the value propositions, the features, the contents, and the unique selling points (USPs).
- Value propositions: The promised benefits or values that users receive from your app. For example, Canva promises users the ease of creating designs on a mobile device.
- Features: The technical functions that the app allows or performs in order to deliver its value propositions. For example, the benefit of ease that Canva promises can be delivered by the variety of pre-made templates that the app allows users to access and modify.
- Contents: The images, copies, and other forms of consumable content that the app shows users. These can be names of authors in an ebook app or album covers in a music app, among others. For example, Canva offers Happy Birthday card templates as well as colorful postcards.
- USPs: They’re anything and everything that makes your app unique in the market. Canva, again, is uniquely designed to provide a balance between quick, simple templates and dynamic styles that help users create something quick but not boring.
Based on those product components of your app, you can benchmark with competitors to learn what your app does better and/or uniquely. Eventually, all that proves your app is superior or irreplaceable should appear in the app store to convince users.
3. Brand
The brand is what keeps all marketing activities consistent, with the values and the identity your company stands for. However, as marketing channels diversify, it's easier to forget about such consistency. The way your brand is represented in different channels, including the app store, may vary and contradict each other. This will confuse users and risk losing installs. Hence, doing research into the brand is a must before starting your ASO strategy.
Overall, marketers can utilize two types of brand elements to maintain the consistency of ASO activities:
- Intangible elements: These include your brand identity, message, tone-of-voice, personality, and story, among others. They determine the rules, protocols, and principles that all representatives of your brand must follow. Your app’s app store presence is no exception. If it matches what the brand promises, e.g. the way you reply to user reviews are as responsible as your brand claims to be, users can feel so much more comfortable with the app and that they can trust it. What follows is usually more installs.
- Tangible elements: They include visible materials like the logo, mascot, wordmark, color palette, and typeface, among others. If you have an established brand strategy where such materials are already sorted out, you can recycle them in the production of app store assets and make it more efficient. What’s more, depending on your app’s current level of brand awareness, bringing those materials to the app store could, directly and indirectly, impact both visibility and conversion rate (CVR).
ASO is a way to represent your brand inside the app store. It could help customers who are already aware of your brand easily recognize it, install it, or even advocate for it in the app store. It also sets your app apart from the competition with a distinctive brand story. Therefore, make sure you consider the brand book or branding guidelines before doing any major ASO activity.
4. Users
Winning the competition isn't only about your app and the competitors. It's also about the users or audience you are competing for. In fact, the entire purpose of gaining competitive advantages is to persuade more users to install your app instead of the others — and your persuasion won't work unless you match what they look for. Because of this, it's essential to study the users as the main audience of your app store communication, that is, ASO.
To understand what audience you are and should be communicating to, analyze the following:
- Core market segments: These are the general groups of users who would most likely download, use, and spend on your app. Analyzing them is the first step towards learning who exactly your app and business are relevant to. To make such analyses more efficient, group your users by their geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits.
- User archetypes or personas: They are the fictional characters that represent and summarize the characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors of your app's ideal-typical groups of users. While they aren't pragmatic, these symbolic representations of your users are a quick way to keep yourself reminded of who you're trying to "sell" the app to.
- Retention metrics: These are the quantitative data, or statistics, that reveal patterns in the ways users interact with your app. Some examples of such data include retention rate, churn rate, daily, and monthly active users, among others. In an ideal environment (e.g. no frauds or data errors), they provide you with a very reliable means to understand those users — numbers don't lie. If, for instance, your app gains a lot of installs from an audience who will uninstall it within 24 hours, and there's nothing wrong with the product, then it must be getting installed by the wrong kind of people. With retention (and engagement) metrics, such patterns are easily identifiable.
- UX research: Sometimes, metrics aren't enough. App users are humans, they're complex and unpredictable. Numbers may show you what happens and by whom, but why they do it and how it plays out are out of their reach. You need further insights into their usage flows or journeys inside your app, as well as their real-time interactions with its features and contents. When used together with quantitative data, these qualitative insights become extremely effective in helping you understand the contexts around user actions in great detail.
To sum up, you need to understand who your users are and what they're looking for before initializing your ASO projects because it will need to be tailored to those users specifically.
5. Industry
Whatever kind of app you are doing ASO for, it's only one of many operations and strategies in place to drive your entire company or business unit forward. This means it will be influenced by the same dynamics of the industry or vertical your business is situated in. Their trends and fluctuations will eventually present both opportunities and threats to your ASO activities.
One of the most obvious connections between an industry at large and ASO is seasonality. To exemplify, the e-commerce industry is very sensitive to seasonal events. The presence of Black Friday, winter sales, summer (fashion) trends, and weather changes, to name a few, could alter user behaviors inside the app store. More specifically, they could:
- Use keywords differently: Changes in the industry could encourage users to change their behaviors in-app store search. Certain keywords could suddenly become more or less popular (with higher or lower volume), or be used more or less frequently in search queries. The Corona crisis in 2020, for instance, made the search popularity of keywords like "face mask" soar rapidly due to concerns about spreading and receiving the virus. This indicates an increase in demand for such products, so shopping apps that rank for such keywords will gain significant advantages.
- Adjust download intents: Similar to keywords, seasonal and other time-sensitive changes in your industry could lead to changes in mobile users’ personal as well as professional lives. They will have different needs to fulfill and different problems to solve — sometimes with mobile apps. What they’re looking for hardly ever stays constant, and what motivates them to install your app at one time may fail at another. What this implies for ASO is you need to adjust your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
At the end of the day, it’s important to keep in mind that seasonality affects your industry, which will indirectly influence how users find and install your app. Looking out for relevant seasonal events is a good way to get prepare for a functional ASO strategy.
6. Markets
Apart from seasonality, localization also plays a major role in the success of ASO. Overall, the more countries your app is released in, the more work you’ll have to deal with to localize its app store assets. They could range from merely translated screenshot captions to clean-slate localized keywords and even total makeovers of the entire app store presence. However, especially for bigger brands, you won’t have the time and resources to focus equally on all of your local markets. You need prioritization.
This is where market analysis comes in. It reveals the markets with more value and/or higher urgency, e.g. with larger market shares and higher revenues. These are your “home fields”. While expanding to more countries is nice to do, you can’t afford to lose your core markets to competitors. As soon as you identify which markets are critical, you can set priorities in an ASO strategy easily. To do so, simply compare the following between markets:
- KPIs: Practices such as funnel analyses can help you identify the countries where your app gathers the most installs, retains the most users, and generates the most revenues. Because this often goes beyond ASO, you’ll need analytics tools from other marketing areas such as customer relationship management (CRM) and monetization as well.
- Growth rate: The benefits of this is twofold. First, it shows you the top emerging markets to capitalize on with ASO. They usually stand for opportunities and ASO could boost their growth even further. Second, it suggests where threats may be coming from. Countries, where there has been no growth at all or mostly negative trends, are where your business declines. Sometimes, these are caused by an outdated app store presence — and ASO could fix that.
- Performance per app store: Apps may sometimes show different performance between the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as other platforms like the Huawei App Gallery. Thus, it’s possible to see your app perform better in one store in some markets but worse in other markets. If you break your ASO strategy down to the store level, this means some markets may need multiple different priority levels — for iOS and Android apps separately.
7. Culture
The app store isn’t the only place for people to seek solutions to their problems or satisfaction to their needs. They consume many forms of products and services, with different media, and from different sources. Together, all of these constructs their systemic attitude towards consumption— or consumer culture. Users with different cultures will deal with your app differently. This divergence becomes even wider as your app expands to more markets and face more local consumer cultures.
Take the German consumers, for example, who are widely known as careful and conscious buyers. They represent a group of consumers who “like to learn as much as possible about other similar products, features, provenance, etc.” before making a purchase. They are also said to have a thrift and cash stockpiling “tradition”. In a sense, this is a culture of saving. In the app store, if none of your app’s assets shows clearly that it can help them save, it may be rendered irrelevant. Installs, as a result, could suffer.
In order to understand the consumer culture of your target users, look for market insights providers like Statista, Santander Trade, and Nielsen. For more app or mobile-specific insights, consult Business of Apps, App Annie, or Sensor Tower. Finally, make sure you analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. Missing the latter could lead you to take numbers for granted and misinterpreting them while missing the former could make your analyses superficial and based on gut's feelings.
8. App store
The last, yet no less important area of background research, is a deep dive into recent trends inside the app store. They can show you not only what has happened to your app and other apps, especially competitors, but also patterns in Apple’s and Google’s behaviors. Specifically, look for:
- Patterns in featured apps: Apple, Google, and most other app store owners have recently been moving towards featuring apps and games under curated, editorial contents. Apart from the App and Game of the Day selections (iOS), as well as the sponsored lists of apps advertised through Google Ad Campaigns (Android), most apps are featured in a significant story and at a relevant time. By spying on apps that have been featured in the past, e.g. with tools like AppTweak, you can learn the occasions and, sometimes, the reasons they are featured for. If your app is similar to them, chances are you can send a pitch deck to get a similar opportunity as well.
- Top charts and category ranking: Ranking positions of apps in the overall top charts, as well as the category-specific charts, could offer great boosts in ASO performance. For visibility, ranking higher means getting seen earlier by users, so your app can reach more of them. For conversion, superior ranks indicate higher popularity, which gives users a social proof to trust and install your app. These reasons are enough to make it crucial to achieve a higher ranking than competitors. By tracking their current positions as well as recent ranking growth, then correlating them with their installs count and velocity, you can estimate the time and efforts it would take to bridge the distance on the charts. This means you can calculate when and how to improve or preserve your app's positions there.
After all, an app store is another marketplace for your app. It contains dynamics similar to those in any other form of market. By tracking and analyzing these dynamics, you’ll learn what kind of environment affects your app. It may show both opportunities and threats that you’ll have to deal with in an ASO strategy. You can only be ready to deal with them if the app store “market” insights are properly analyzed.
Data in ASO doesn't only mean metrics and KPIs. It doesn't only require mobile targeting, measurement, and reporting. There's a whole set of pre-ASO research topics that need to be processed decently. It sets the stage for an ASO strategy. It provides the context for most ASO activities. Most importantly, it creates a perspective on external factors that ASO depends on to function. It means preparation. You can do anything if you're prepared.
