What is App Store Optimization?
App store optimization, or ASO for short, is the science of improving the performance of an app store listing. It is all about applying the scientific method to mobile key performance indicators (KPIs) that are related to the app stores.
The three major aspects of ASO:
- Conversion rate optimization
- Keyword optimization / improving discoverability
- Measurement
These ASO KPIs usually relate to:
- Number and quality of installs
- Number and quality of app store impressions
- App store conversion rates
These three KPIs lie at the heart of ASO, and each has developed into its own specialty and practice.
Why is app store optimization important?
Understanding the importance of app store optimization is beneficial for creating a successful ASO campaign and understanding the ASO process. In order to learn app optimization, let’s first delve into three reasons why ASO is important.
1. Getting ASO right gives companies a compatative advantage
There are about 2 million apps In the Apple App Store and even more on Google Play, and new apps are being added daily. At the same time, the number of large mobile app development companies, both in games and in non-games, is getting smaller. The way this economy is evolving is similar to many other economies: a small core holds most of the value.
That said, paid UA for an app isn’t a magic bullet for success. Without understanding users and their motivations to install an app or a game (which is what ASO is truly about), these UA dollars will go down the drain as developers wouldn’t know what exactly made their app successful.
On the other hand, companies that get UA right for their app are the only ones that have a real competitive edge for app optimization in the app stores: many developers call this a distribution advantage.
2. The app stores are becoming the only place to obtain a distribution advantage
The app stores are packed with great games and apps that have never gotten more than a few thousand installs. The problem with competing in the app stores today is two-fold:
- It’s not about the app
With the production value of apps and games on a constant rise, it’s becoming harder to differentiate your product solely on the usability front—by improving the UX/UI. There will always be a competitor that does a good enough job in creating a viable alternative.
- It’s not about UA
If the product itself isn’t unique enough to succeed on its own merits, many companies turn to UA expertise for a differentiating factor. If they can’t create a superior product, they’ll focus on better reaching their audience through paid advertising. This has created a generation of UA experts building sophisticated models and audience segments in a race to acquire better quality users for a lower cost than their competitors. The problem is that Google and Facebook, the duopoly that controls the digital advertising market, is quickly democratizing user acquisition. They have developed the most sophisticated UA algorithms for optimizing campaigns that everyone can access, including your competition. UA, as a differentiating factor, is harder than it’s ever been.
If it’s not the product or paid UA, how do you create a distribution advantage?
A distribution advantage is a clear and defensible attribute (or a set of attributes) that allows one company to distribute their app to the market faster, broader, and in a more cost-effective way.
This means that when you put App X versus App Y, and the former has a distribution advantage and they compete for the same audience, App X will be able to get their app to more users faster than App Y. They’ll reach a significant user base more quickly and ultimately control their market. It’s a simple model that relies on being the first solution presented to interested users, and then adopted.
This is what companies tried to do by creating superior products and investing in a superior in-house UA team. But now, that is not enough: the playing field has leveled and so the only way to get that advantage is through successful ASO and app store marketing practices.
3. At the end of the day, it means understanding your audience more thoroughly than your competitors.
You need to understand what actually drives your users to install your app and leverage that knowledge to create better converting app store assets for superior conversion rates.
Benefits of improving your app conversion rate:
- A larger percentage of your audience will install your app after landing on your page, either from organic search or browsing the app stores.
- A larger return on ad spend (ROAS) when acquiring users through paid ads.
If your conversion rate is 20% and your competitor is 10%, you’ll be able to get twice the number of users for every dollar you spend on ads. You’ll also be able to afford to outbid your competitors.
This superior performance will result in faster growth which will in turn result in higher rankings on the top or category charts and better search rankings. This will amplify your advantage over the competition, leading you to quickly cater to a much larger user base, even if your resources are similar (same UA budget, similar quality products).
Takeaway? The most successful mobile developers today are those who best understand their audience.
But wait, there’s a lot to uncover here. Let’s go back for a sec – where did ASO start?
History of app store optimization (ASO)
1. How ASO started
App Store Optimization all started when Apple released the IOS App Store with around 500 initial applications on 2008 July 10th to be exact. The number of apps grew exponentially and today there are just shy of 2 million available applications.
Google Play (then called Android Market) was introduced on October 22nd 2008, trailing Apple by only a few months. Today Google Play hosts more than 2.5 million apps.
Both Apple and Google app marketplaces offered a new business model and attracted millions of mobile app developers. Similar to the start of search engines, the competition was fierce. In order to get users to install your app, you first had to get them to find your app amongst the myriad of options, then hope they’ll actually choose to download your app.
Thus, the practice of ASO was born in efforts to increase app discoverability and app conversions.
2. The evolution of ASO strategies
Thomas Petit, mobile growth and Apple search ads expert, summarized the evolution of ASO in his keynote speech during the 2019 ASO conference in Berlin, breaking it down into two stages ASO 1.0 & ASO 2.0. Each stage is characterized by its own ASO strategy. It can be said that we are now entering into the ASO 3. 0 era with the launch of iOS 15 and the new ASO strategies that will ensue, although only time will tell.
ASO 1.0 – In 2009, shortly after the stores started to grow, a few early adopters started to spread the term ASO. This initial era of ASO was characterized mostly by focusing on keywords in the most simplistic way (taking inspiration from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at the time).
The entire app store optimization strategy then could be summarized in two steps:
- Add keywords to your app title
- Fill in your app keyword field
The competition in the app store was still slim and only a few app developers dabbled in any ASO practice, so even making the smallest change in efforts to optimize your app would positively impact your app store ranking.
Beyond optimizing an app bases on keywords, developers and publishers understood that featuring their app was also a key element in better performance and visibility. According to Petit, back in the early 2010s, a week-long featuring could have resulted in around 3 million installs. This led many app developers to flood Apple’s app store team with feature requests, giving the Apple App Store a mythical King-Maker aura of omnipotence that further attracted developers to appeal to the team directly.
In addition, given the still-underdeveloped app store algorithms, ‘black hat ASO’ was on the rise with many companies acquiring cheap incentivized traffic (for example, users that got paid to install a game) in order to have their app climb the ranks, increasing visibility, and therefore increasing organic uplift.
ASO 2.0 – The fast leap: just a few years into the future, ASO started to pick up as an established practice with every serious app developer worth their salt deciding to consciously and purposefully tackle it in one way or another. With the evolution came a more developed ASO strategy.
The major developments of ASO 2.0 have been:
Pay to play—with Google Play and the App Store offering paid placements, you can directly acquire users natively in the store.
A more holistic view of ASO, mostly correlated to the ways that users find and install apps:
- Search – no longer does an ASO strategy involve sitting in your office and coming up with keywords out of thin air or guesstimates based on various “app store intelligence” tools. Success in search today involves both an organic keyword strategy amplified by a paid search.
- Browse – improving browse performance involves a unique partnership between the paid user acquisition (UA) strategy and metadata improvements, as well as strategically achieving featuring in the right placements.
- Referral – analyzing and learning different user audience segments coming in through various UA channels and figuring out what is the most effective messaging and creative strategy to use with each in order to maximize quality users in the app.
The invisible thread that goes through all three pillars is app conversion rate optimization (CRO), the practice of improving conversion rates for an app across all the above acquisition channels. As the competitive landscape becomes more crowded and keywords become a much less effective way to garner a competitive edge, it is those companies and teams that can successfully optimize their app conversion rates that will climb the ranks, acquire users for less than the competition, and grow faster.
ASO 3.0 – Are we in a new era of ASO with the release of iOS 15? Apple just may have revolutionized ASO with the introduction of Custom Product Pages. Now companies have the ability to create separate product pages in the app store that are tailored to individual audiences. Only time will tell if this is a new era in ASO, but we have a feeling it might be. As we evolve into the 3.0 era, we’ll keep you updated on the newest strategies for ASO in 2022 and beyond.
Today, ASO is one of the most strategic elements in any mobile growth team.
3. ASO vs SEO
Why App Store Optimization is Nothing Like Search Engine Optimization
The initial phase in ASO closely mirrored SEO techniques, but the ASO practice has evolved since then.
The Similarities:
- Success in SEO for the Google search engine involves creating great content. Similarly, to be successful with ASO, you have to have a great app as your base.
The Differences:
- CRO (and the click-through-rate) in Google is reliant on text elements, whereas for the App Store and Google Play, these are only one part of the potential impactful elements, and they are significantly less impactful when compared to the visual ones (screenshots, videos, etc.).
- Google, and the web itself, is a much more open ecosystem than the app stores, as there are many external factors that affect success in SEO (backlinks, page load speed, the value provided on a page, etc.). The app stores themselves are a much more isolated system making it much harder to be successful, as there are fewer factors in your control and the competitive landscape is flatter.
For example, anyone can add the keywords ‘golf’ to their title and metadata. There could be literally 100,000 developers doing that. That’s why success in ASO will always involve eliciting better user engagement on your page and better conversion rates.
In summary, SEO is based primarily on text with various external factors that impact success. In ASO, success involves improving conversion rates and by better-conveying messages through creative assets, a skill set that not all SEO people possess.
You can read more about the ASO Vs SEO: Where Do We Stand in the Battle of Optimization?
How to do ASO
Now we are going to delve into how ASO works, by looking at the two traditional pillars: discoverability optimization and conversion rate optimization. So you know how to do ASO for your app, it is helpful to understand these two pillars.
1. App discoverability and keyword optimization
The practice of app discoverability optimization has several factors that account for all the ways of increasing organic impressions for your app store page: namely, search impressions and browse impressions.
On average, of all users who install apps, 65-70% are coming through app store search and 15-20% are coming through browsing the app store. Together, they make up the vast majority of installs in the stores so the practice of increasing your search and browse impressions is a crucial part of your growth. Remember that an app that isn’t ranked in any chart, will get no browse installs at all, and for other apps, who have a lot of paid traffic, paid installs can reach up to 50% of all installs. So it’s important to understand these numbers solely as a rule of thumb.
Search funnel optimization
Definition: The practice of researching, selecting, and implementing keywords in your app’s metadata for the purpose of improving the number and quality of keywords your app ranks for.
Search traffic is considered to be more targeted and of higher quality than browse, as it represents two distinct personas:
- Branded Search – users that are searching for your brand directly
- Intent Search – users that are searching for a solution to a problem (even if the problem is boredom and the solution is a game)
Learn more about How to Improve Your App’s Discoverability with our Keyword Optimization Guide
Search ads
In addition to optimizing organic search, developers can amplify their search traffic with paid ads targeted to specific keywords, ensuring they rank #1 for those keyword searches.
You can read more about Search Ads.
Browse optimization
Category ranking
This involves improving rankings within specific category charts. One of the top factors affecting all rankings is the daily first time install volume of an app, which could be increased by increasing UA budgets
Top charts rankings
Similar to the category charts, the top charts show the overall most popular apps or games in the store. As with category rankings, daily install volume is a large contributing factor.
Featuring
Other than the charts themselves, many browse users also find apps and games through various featuring placements in different parts of the store. Find out more about how to get your app featured here.
Not all featuring placements were created equal. Some of them will lead to significantly more app impressions and installs than others. It all boils down to context.
If you get your app featured on the ‘Today’ tab in the App Store, all users coming into the store (in that particular Geo) are exposed to your app listing. But, naturally, chances are slim that a random user who automatically opens the App Store ad and lands on the ‘Today’ tab would be interested in your app. Getting featured on the Games tab or the Apps tab leads to lower impressions but a higher chance these impressions will convert into app installs.
Getting featured on the app store usually results in a decrease in conversion rates. This is because conversion rates are calculated as installs divided by impressions. So, if impressions increase but installs remain the same, you’ll see a decrease in your conversion rate.
2. App store conversion rate optimization (App Store CRO)
Increasing app impressions (eyes on the page) is only half the job. In the app stores, users make decisions extremely fast: users spend only 3-6 seconds looking at your app page before deciding whether to install or to move on. And moving on, in most cases, means moving on to your competitor’s app.
This makes the practice of CRO in the app stores one of the most strategic growth practices for any mobile developer.
Why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is more impactful than keyword optimization
Simply put, there’s nothing that can stop all developers in the world from padding their metadata with the words they wish to rank for. For example, there will be tens to hundreds of thousands of apps trying to rank for the word “taxi.” Simply including that word in the app metadata won’t actually help you rank for that keyword with such stiff competition.
That said (and more on this to follow), one of the most impactful factors that affect ranking is user behavior. The higher the number of users who search for a specific query, tap on an app store listing, and then install that app, the bigger the likelihood of ranking higher for that particular query. First-time installers are key to this.
Apple has publicly stated that there are more than 42 factors affecting search rankings and results, but user behavior is notably the single most important.
Changing the rules of the game: iOS 15 and ASO
It might or might not have come with Apple’s insight, but the most recent update, iOS 15, is changing the ASO game. Prior to iOS 15, there was one App Store product page per company. With the release of iOS 15, it will now be possible to create specific, targeted product pages for different target audiences. That means companies that do not put the effort into creating personalized product pages for their paid traffic will be left behind their competitors.
For a complete guide to navigating Apple’s new changes, visit our iOS 15 Preparation Hub.
App Store vs. Google Play: Similarities and differences
1. The importance of downstream metrics for Play Store ASO
In the past few years, Google Play has been playing catch up (albeit successfully) to Apple when it comes to the app stores, from auto-playing videos, emphasizing the screenshot gallery, to a cleaner design of the app store page. (However, with the new iOS 15 changes, we can expect Google to be making some changes to the Play Store.)
Google (with a clearly superior search engine expertise) also has a much more developed search function within their store. In order to improve your app’s performance in Google Play, you need to consider not only the metadata and user behavior (conversion rate on your page) but your downstream metrics.
App quality, measured by crashes and app not responding (ANR) events, significantly impacts the discoverability of your app through search and on the charts. Retention also plays an important role.
2. The importance of app personalization for ASO
Google Play also has a more sophisticated personalization engine than Apple. This means that you as a developer have less control over your browse impressions. Also, the factors that determine whether you’ll be promoted through personalization are varied and unknown. From Google’s comments on the topic, we know that by creating a good product (with good downstream metrics), maintaining great reviews and ratings, along with a stellar app store performance (conversion rates), you’ll also improve your exposure through personalization.
The Apple App Store is also attempting to add personalization into the way users discover apps, but it is several steps behind Google on that front for now. Currently, the App Store does feature several sections that are personalized (such as the ‘apps you might like’ section), but they’re much less prominent. We can imagine that the new iOS 15 release is fulfilling this attempt to personalize the user experience. With the option to create 35 different custom product pages for paid traffic, users will now be able to discover more tailored apps for their personalities.
3. Android users are different than iOS users
It’s no secret, Android users are inherently different from iOS users. You can see this reflected in the fact that the IOS App Store accounts for the majority of mobile app revenue, while the vast majority of app installs happen on Google Play. Therefore, app store optimization for Android is significantly different than that for Apple Store ASO.
You can read more extensively about the distinction and our analysis of the differences between the App Store and Google Play in regards to ASO here.
4. The importance of each element changes according to layouts
Even though the stores have gotten more similar in recent years, there are enough differences in the layout to dictate different user journeys and behaviors on each platform.
This means that users landing on a Google Play page and users landing on an App Store page will be exposed to different elements (in different configurations) before they make any decision.
User journeys are different – In order to optimize for conversion, you need to optimize the effectiveness of your messages and creatives for the order that users are exposed to them in their journey.
Best Practices: Conversion rate optimization in the App Stores
This section will now look at some ASO best practices for CRO in both app stores, so you can increase your app store optimization for both Apple and Google Play. Our 11 tips will help with advanced app store optimization.
- Understand app creative assets in the app stores
- Optimize text elements
- Utilize app reviews and ratings
- Choose a relevant app category
- Use app store locations and culturalization
- Competitive landscape
- Update your app creatives frequently
- Aim for smaller app sizes
- Account for seasonality
- Leverage audience testing
- Understand your app’s user behavior
Now we’ll review these 11 app store optimization best practices one-by-one.
1. Understand app creative assets in the app stores
On the web, businesses can control how they package their messaging on their own websites. They can build and craft webpages in order to create the most opportune and effective setting to convert potential clients. Compared to the freedom of hosting your own webpage, the app stores pose many restrictions. They provide extremely limited flexibility to developers and marketers so an understanding of the intricacies and nuances of the app stores’ layouts and options are vital to app optimization.
Which creative elements appear on an Apple App Store page?
There are four main journeys that users can take to find an app in the store. In each flow, creative assets play an important role. All creative assets in the search results page, the top charts page, and in the featuring page stem from the creatives you upload to your app store page.
List of App Store page elements that are in the developers’ control:
- Icon
- Title
- Subtitle
- App preview video
- Screenshots
- Description
- In-app purchases
Which creative elements appear on a Google Play page?
Just like in the App Store, the Google Play store also has four main journeys users follow to find and install new apps.
List of Google Play page elements in the developers’ control:
- Icon
- Title
- Promo video
- Screenshots
- Short description
- Long description
- In-app purchases
What is the first impression and why is it the most important section of your App Store and Google Play page?
Hundreds of millions of users sampled on the app stores showed us this important data: less than 30% of users ever go past the first impression frame of your app store page. The first impression frame is the area ‘above the fold’: in other words, what users see when they land on an app store page before they scroll either vertically or horizontally.
As this area impacts 100% of users (and for ~65% of them, it’s the only thing they’ll be exposed to), focusing on the elements that appear here will always be the first priority of any creative ASO strategy.
a. How important is an app icon for ASO?
According to data that we collected and analyzed from millions of users sampled on StoreMaven’s app store a/b tests, we learned that the icon is one of the most important elements in the store (although not with the highest potential for conversion rate improvements).
An icon can improve conversion rates by 12%-18%.
An icon is the most prominent creative asset for your app
The icon is the one asset that appears in all app store users’ journeys: in the app store page itself, the search results page, top charts, and featuring placements.
Although the icon isn’t the most prominent asset (from a visual hierarchy standpoint) on an app store page (where it competes with the screenshot gallery and potentially a video) in the other flows (search and browse) it has much bigger importance.
Don’t forget the impact on re-engagement
Interestingly, the icon is also the only creative asset in the app store that lives outside of the app store. As the icon appears on user’s devices’ home screens, changing it can and often will impact re-engagements. Simply put, users see a new icon on their home screen which gets their attention and leads them to open the app, offering a unique opportunity to re-engage inactive users.
What is the optimal app icon strategy for ASO?
After analyzing the impact of thousands of icon tests, StoreMaven has created a framework to thoroughly develop a strategy for testing app icons for the purpose of improving conversion rates.
Among the most important things that need to be considered when developing a strategy for your icon is the core messaging you want to convey.
b. How important is the screenshot gallery for ASO?
What impact can screenshots have on conversion rates in the app stores?
Screenshots are usually where users’ eyes go to try to understand your app or game. Users expect the screenshot gallery to quickly give them all the information they need about the app or game to decide whether to install your app or not.
In both app stores, almost 100% of users view the screenshot gallery, but that’s limited to the part of it that is visible in the first impression frame. Usually (depending on device screen size, whether there is a video presence or not, and on screenshot orientation) users see 1-2 screenshots in the App Store and 1-3 in the Google Play store.
As you can see from the graph above, the percentage of users who scroll through the screenshot gallery is relatively small. This means that within the screenshot gallery, not all screenshots were created equal. The first two screenshots should convey your strongest value proposition.
Are Google Play and the App Store very different?
The App Store has put a lot of emphasis on the screenshot gallery, which takes (in most devices) more than 60% of the screen.
In the Google Play layout, after a mid-2019 update, the screenshots take only 25% of the screen size, rendering them extremely small and hard to understand—all small UI elements and captions become almost impossible to read and understand.
This difference dictates a different design strategy for each store: simply applying screenshots from iOS to Google Play, or vice versa, will result in illegible images that fail to convey your main points and drive users to install.
How to use screenshots to tell your app story?
c. How important is the app preview video for ASO?
Let’s bust the ol’ myth
There’s a tale among app developers and marketers when discussing app store videos. About half of all marketers claim they’re a must in order to increase conversion rates, while the other half swear they hurt conversion rates.
The truth is—and this is based on cold, hard data—that it depends…
When thinking about creating a video for your app, you mustn’t ignore these three pivotal factors:
- Geography – there are certain geographies where people are much more reluctant to watch videos in general, with auto-playing videos being a harsh enemy for most people on an expensive data bundle. Many users in countries with slow internet connections also developed a habit of ignoring videos because it takes them a long time to render and play.
- Audience – there are audiences that are simply less receptive of video as a medium: it depends on your app category, how users in this category make decisions, and how much time they’re willing to invest to make that decision. If users’ patience is low, many of them will very quickly stop watching.
- Video Quality – last but not least, you should consider the video quality itself. Many marketers try videos and then conclude that they don’t work and hurt conversion rates. That could simply be the result of trying out an unoptimized video in the store.
How do users engage with app store videos?
To understand how to capitalize on the opportunity of auto-playing videos in the store, you need to first understand how users interact with videos in the app stores.
Auto played videos are watched by more than 85% of users (it’s not 100% because it takes a few moments to start playing which allows some users to ‘escape’ the auto-playing video by scrolling through the gallery or the page). Also, a low percentage of users turn off auto-playing videos in their settings.
The average watch rate of a video on iOS is 6-8 seconds, and on Google Play it’s 4-5 seconds.
Only 20% of users watch videos in full.
From those users who do at least start to watch the video, about 30% end up installing the app, showing the conversion rate potential of a video.
Planning and testing a great app store video
Given the usage characteristics of videos in the app stores, it’s important to understand that similar to the screenshot gallery, you want to have your strongest messaging at the beginning of the video. It’s not a film: it’s a short clip that should be treated more like a few moving screens than a feature film.
2. Optimize text elements
We wrote a comprehensive article on how to optimize your text elements. Check out our Complete Guide for Writing the Perfect App Title, Subtitle, and Description.
a. How does the app title affect ASO?
The app title is another creative asset that appears in all user journeys in the app stores. The title itself, although a text element that is less effective than a visual one, has a 5-7% conversion rate lift potential. In the App Store you are allowed 30 characters and in Google Play you have 50 characters to use as a title.
Other than using the title to add keywords you would like to rank for, you have to think about the title as a converting asset: a strong app title will convey to users not only the name of the app or the game but what is it about (unless it’s extremely well-known and the brand name is the message). For example, if you have a game with a mysterious title such as “Bunny-Palooza,” other than knowing that there is a good chance bunnies are involved, users won’t actually know much more. Adding “RPG” or “Adventure” to the title will quickly signal to users what type of game this is.
b. How does the iOS app subtitle affect ASO?
The subtitle, which exists only on Apple’s App Store, is a less prominent text element which makes it less effective for improving conversion rates. That said, the subtitle also appears in the search results page and the top charts and can act as an addendum to the title.
So, like the previous example, if you would like to convey to users that this is a PvP (Player vs Player) shooter game, you could do that by highlighting that fact in the subtitle.
c. How does the description affect ASO?
First, always keep this in the back of your mind —users don’t like to read. There is a negligible percentage of users that ever read the description, usually 1%-2%. Always focus on making the short preview (the part that is always visible) clear and detailed, but do not spend too much time or resources on perfecting it. Instead, use the asset for its other purpose: to be read by the algorithm and used for keyword optimization (in the Google Play store). Optimizing the text for users to read is by far the least effective way to spend time and money when thinking of increasing conversion rates.
3. Utilize app reviews and ratings
Reviews and ratings are the social proof elements of the stores. Although mobile marketing usually discusses them together, they’re actually different. They have a different impact on conversion rates based on where and how users see them.
a. How do reviews affect ASO?
Reviews affect conversion rate optimization in two ways:
- The number of reviews—as the number of reviews appears in the first impression, it can act as a piece of social proof showing how many people have actually used and reviewed the app. Especially in iOS, where the number of installs is not specified, it’s the only hint for users as to whether this app is popular or not.
- For that 20-25% of users who explore the page by scrolling vertically, the reviews are one of the first elements they see. In the Google Play store, reviews get much more respect by sitting in their own widget, with the top review as well as the most critical review highlighted for users to read. In iOS, the reviews are featured in a review gallery on the bottom, based on Apple’s algorithms. Users can click to view all reviews on a separate screen if they wish.
Reviews (both positive and negative) have a strong impact on users who are exposed to them. Although there is not much you can do about reviews once they go live in the stores (other than replying to them), there is a certain best practice you should follow day-to-day.
Check out this guide about how reviews and ratings affect your app install conversion rate.
b. How do star ratings affect ASO?
Ratings are interesting. In both stores, they go from 1-5 and signal to users the quality of an app. Getting these ratings relies heavily on collecting reviews and ratings through the app itself (many use the native option).
Storemaven recently completed a series of tests in which all the creatives were kept the same and the only thing that’s changed is the rating score. This is what we learned:
- A rating of 5.0—the perfect score—leads to lower conversion rates. Interesting right? We are suspicious creatures by nature, and a perfect score seems, well, fake, and signals to users it could be a case of “too good to be true.”
- A rating between 4.0-4.9 is the sweet spot you want your ratings to be. An important thing worth mentioning is that there’s no real difference between 4.1 and 4.9.
But, once ratings fall to 3.99 and below, conversion rates start to drop. Dramatically. Ratings under 4.0, from our observations, are inherently associated with low quality, and the lower you get, the lower your conversion rates will drop—exponentially.
Getting positive ratings always depends upon having a great product, but there are still best practice mechanisms to ensure you’re maximizing the positive ratings you collect and minimizing the negative ones.
4. Choose a relevant app category
What is the impact of choosing an app store category on ASO?
Similar to adding a category name to the title or subtitle, choosing a category means a category name will appear in the first impression. So, if you have an RPG puzzle game, and you choose to appear in the RPG category, you may communicate to RPG-oriented users that this is a game for them, but more casual puzzle game players may be alienated.
Although this is a textual element with minimal impact on conversion rates, when fine-tuning an ASO strategy, it’s worth analyzing the potential categories you could belong to and assessing their impact on conversion rates.
We wrote an article about the implications and strategy behind choosing a category here.
5. Use app store localizations & culturalization
We wrote an extensive guide about how to master localization and culturalization in order to boost your CVR. Check it out here.