Because there’s no direct way to measure or quantify your app store optimization efforts, it can be easy to rely on keyword rankings as a measure of progress. Here’s why that can be problematic.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🧐Our app saw significant improvements in keyword rankings – but not organics.

🤖This was likely because we were a game, and not an intent driven category.

🏅It’s important to look at organic uplift over baselines – not just keyword rankings.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Today I’m going to talk about what not to track while measuring ASO Now we’ve talked about what is the best way to measure the impact of keyword optimization — check out our other podcast episode about this. In this context it’s worth touching on one of the most common mistakes that people make attempting to measure the impact of ASO. 

Let me tell you a short story. Many months ago, we worked with an ASO agency on an app’s organic presence. We saw some significant improvement in keyword ranking for what we thought were important keywords. We got week after week of reports showing improved keyword rankings. The problem was, we saw no meaningful improvement in total organics as we looked at our organic baseline before the ASO activity and afterwards. This led me to believe that since we were a game, the keywords were ranking for were not in any sort of mainstream category that typically has a lot of intent attached to it. 

For instance, if you look at meditation or fitness or weight loss – users actively search for these things. We weren’t in those categories, we were a game. Consequently there were hardly any keyword searches that were relevant to our game. I mean, nobody is going to search for Match 3 games. 

So even though these keywords are very relevant to us and even though we ranked highly for these keywords, it turns out, we weren’t just getting traffic and consequently the key word optimization activity wasn’t quite working for us. Now, it would have been easy to miss this had we been fully focused on improved keyword rankings rather than improved organics.  This is why we always recommend to pay attention not to your keyword rankings but always to your organics – to your organic baseline and have your organics improve as a result of this activity.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!