Recently, App Annie published “The State of Mobile 2019” report with a lot of interesting insights within the mobile industry: impressive numbers indicate that the time spent using Apps grew by 50% from 2016 to 2018 globally and mobile-focused companies made up 95% of USD Valuations in 2018’s major liquidity events. Competitiveness also grew and mobile-companies were pushed to come up with innovative strategies for their business. Currently, there are some techniques that are becoming popular among mobile marketers (and developers) and one of them is, App Store Optimization (ASO).
Lab Cave CMO, Enric Pedró, shared some insights on ASO and how to take advance of this strategy for a successful mobile marketing campaign. “ASO is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Apps. Those that know how to combine SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies can easily position a website, ASO and User Acquisition (UA) campaigns work in a similar way. SEO has become fundamental to website positioning, so has ASO for Apps, however very few companies invest time in it.”
Organic vs. Paid Growth: finding the balance
In the mobile industry, ASO and UA are complementary strategies: when you combine both, you can achieve a higher relevance for your App, lower cost per thousand impressions (CPM’s) and have overall more competitive campaigns. Thanks to the ASO’s Conversion Optimization Rate (CRO) work, your App will improve its Conversion Rate (CR) helping your app to reach higher positions in the waterfalls of traffic source algorithms like AdNetworks, Facebook, SDK and so forth.
UA campaigns do bring instant results, however once you stop them, users will not keep downloading the App or even visit your App Page, causing your overall downloads to suddenly drop. This strategy is not sustainable, unless you have an unlimited budget to spend on UA.
ASO helps you maintain a steady stream of high quality users who are more likely to keep using your App, which translates to higher Retention Rates (RR). Since keyword research is one of the main pillars of ASO, you will really reach the audience that is looking for what you offer. In fact according to Apple 65% of downloads come from searches. Summarizing, Enric Pedró points out that “90% of your marketing efforts should be focused on organic strategies and only 10% on paid campaigns.”
What you need to know about ASO
“One of the most common misunderstandings of ASO is the belief that this is something that you do once and never look at it again” says Enric. Keywords seasonality can change, a competitor can get more relevance, a new App can be released, A/B tests can reveal a need to update your creatives, Google Play and App Store algorithms change, etc. All these aspects that are involved with ASO are in constant change and because of that, ASO is an ongoing effort. Localization does affect your App as well: maybe you are using the same screenshots in all countries and not paying attention to how much you could optimize your App by just changing it for something that will align better with a specific geo and language. To share another example, countries with the same language could have different relevant keywords for the same categories.
To understand better how ASO can contribute with an App’s growth strategy, a recent case study made by Lab Cave shows the initial results of ASO efforts in the App Store for the game Castle Clash (IGG). After 5 months, a 25% growth was achieved in daily downloads in Tier1 countries and a 56% growth in daily downloads in other countries:
Enric adds: “I don’t blame marketers for ignoring ASO and just focusing on paying to acquire new users. I’ve been working in mobile marketing for the last nine years and it wasn’t long ago that I learned about the power of ASO”. From what we can see from last years’ industry reports, many opportunities are available and the market is growing fast – plenty of reasons to recalculate investments, work on growth, and get ahead of the competition.
About Lab Cave
Lab Cave is a Mobile Growth Company that provides ASO and Ad Mediation services for mobile Apps and games. Part of Fibonad Group (the largest Spanish digital advertising group offering Branding, Performance and Publishing services), Lab Cave has achieved more than 200 million organic downloads without running any paid acquisitions campaign. Learn more about us at our website https://labcavegames.com/