Marketing an app is an intricate process. There are many factors to consider, fine-tune and optimize. Luckily, many times you will find that your successful competitors have already gone through the same process. App store optimization is no exception.
Taking a closer look at the strategy of your competitors can provide useful insights that you can use to improve your strategy. Both paid growth and app store optimization strategies can benefit from such an approach. This post will discuss some of the ways that you can use MobileAction tools to examine your competitor’s ASO strategy.
1- Locating Your Competitor
Before you can analyze the strategies of your competitors, you have to identify them. There are many ways to locate competitors through MobileAction. The Top Charts list is a great place to start your research. It is safe to assume that the apps on these lists are doing something right. Their strategies are more or less successful in increasing downloads.
Let us assume that we are trying to grow a card game app that we have just developed. The game will be multiplayer where players battle each other’s cards to defeat their opponents. It is a quite popular concept thus we aim to build a large user base.
We filter the top charts list according to the app category and start looking for similar apps.
The app “WWE SuperCard” captures our attention. We take a quick look at the App Profile to determine if the game is actually similar to our idea.
From the screenshots of the game, it is clear that the concept is similar to our hypothetical app. Card’s have attributes and player’s combat each other for victory.
WWE SuperCard will be our competitor in this scenario. Ideally, multiple competitors should be identified first before starting to build your ASO strategy. Let’s dive into their strategy and see whether we can gather some insights.
2- Visibility Analysis
We can check out the Visibility Report of WWE SuperCard to determine whether or not the update affected the visibility of the app.
When we take a look at the Historical Visibility Chart for WWE SuperCard, a very clear pattern is visible. After every update, the app has managed to maintain or increase its visibility score furthermore in the United Kingdom. It should be noted that it gets increasingly difficult to improve your Visibility Score. Over time it will be harder to increase it. This has been the case for this particular app.
We can see that the updates in November launched the apps visibility score from 70 to almost 75. Even though later updates did not cause such significant increases, they still managed to consistently raise the visibility score of the app.
Now that we established our competitor is doing something right with their ASO strategy, we can take a closer look at the changes they made in their updates.
We can start with the update which took place on the 18th of November. Currently, we are working on the Apple App Store. As there are differences in the keyword search algorithms, it is important to know the basic differences between the platforms. You can check out our ASO best practices post to read more about this topic.
In the App Store, app title and subtitle are our main points of focus as they are indexed for keywords.
We can see that the subtitle for the game has been changed from “Wrestling card battle game” to “Rule the ring”. This was an attempt to increase the ASO health of their app.
In addition to keyword optimization, conversion optimization is yet another important factor for driving downloads. As we can see, after the update the app started using an app icon with a more vibrant background color which is more successful for drawing attention.
The update on the 14th of December also captures our attention. We can see that both the App Name and the Subtitle were changed in this version.
As we keep stating, optimization is a necessary practice in the ASO world. The subtitle of the app has been changed once again in less than a month. “Card Collection & Battle Game” is the new subtitle for WWE SuperCard.
The phrase “Rule the ring” has been instead added to the app title. As the App Store Title can be up to 30 characters, it is a good practice to add related and popular keywords to your app title.
4- Monitoring the Changes in Ranking Factors
We demonstrated that the app did various changes to its keywords through several updates. It was also seen that WWE SuperCard managed to maintain and even increase its visibility score throughout the last months even though they already had decent visibility. What exactly is going on at the keyword level? ASO Report can help us to understand the keyword ranking differences.
The update on the 14th of December had a rather dramatic effect on the keyword rankings for WWE SuperCard. The app went from ranking on approximately 700 keywords to ranking on nearly 1520 keywords.
User Acquisition managers should keep in mind that increasing the total number of keywords that the app ranks for should not be the only focus. By targeting relevant keywords, you should also aim to increase your rankings for specific keywords.
In this case, we can see an estimated increase in downloads 10 days after the update. It is important to give ASO optimization efforts time to show their results.
Boost Your Organic Growth Today
App Store Optimization is an effective way to increase your downloads. Having the right tools to conduct app store optimization is crucial for an effective app marketing strategy.
MobileAction helps its user’s to increase their organic downloads by providing them with the best tools in the market. Schedule a demo with our consultants today and start growing your app!
