With 2021 coming to an end, it’s time to prepare a strong app marketing strategy that will fuel your app’s growth in 2022! Here at AppTweak, awarded ASO Tool of the Year, we spent 2021 investing a lot of resources into delivering high-impact ASO features that will help boost your App Store Optimization in the New Year.
In this blog, we’ll take you through some of the most valuable features on our ASO tool that will help boost your app’s growth in 2022! Each feature that we discuss in this article was developed on AppTweak in 2021 alone.
Visualize new store metadata with the App Page Preview
Our App Page Preview (called the Store Listing Preview for Play Store lovers) has been a clear client favorite since its release in March 2021! This handy feature allows you to preview your metadata changes on the App Store and Google Play exactly how a user would see it on his or her respective device. You can easily edit the different metadata fields, test different sets of screenshots, and make any adjustments before pushing your app to the store for review, saving time and avoiding trivial mistakes. You can learn more about the App Page Preview here.
How the App Page Preview can help boost app growth
If you’re about to submit an update for your app, this feature will allow you to double-check how the changes will actually look on your product page. Be sure to ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your new app name take up more than one line? If so, after which keyword does the line jump?
- Is your subtitle or short description truncated? When does the line get cut off?
- If you add promo text to your metadata (iOS), how does this impact the visibility of your description?
- How many screenshots are visible on the screen? Where does the screen cut the images? If special visual effects run across your screenshots, make sure these actually look good!
- How does the app page look in dark mode?
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Measure the impact of ASO work on app performance
In 2021, we introduced a very unique feature that allows our clients to easily measure the impact of ASO efforts on their app performance. Our ASO Impact feature automatically indicates when your app was featured or when an important app update went live, for example. You are then able to plot these events against the metric(s) of your choice and better understand the impact on your app’s (or your competitors’) performance.
How measuring ASO impact can help boost app growth
This feature helps you understand how ASO efforts impact your app. For instance, you’re able to deduce how being featured affects your app’s impressions, installs, and conversion rate, and plot these metrics against each other on the same graph. Or, you can better visualize the impact a keyword update has on your app’s installs and category ranking. Being able to visualize and measure the impact of your ASO work on your downloads and category ranking is fundamental to ensure you invest your time and effort into the most effective app growth strategies!
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Discover actionable insights about app featurings
At AppTweak, we do our best to provide the most actionable insights across our entire platform. That’s why this year, we invested a lot of resources into providing more actionable, aggregated data allowing you to immediately measure the visibility your app receives from being featured on the App Store and Google Play, and compare this with your competitors.
How actionable featurings data can help boost app growth
Regularly monitoring the featurings in which your app appears on the stores is important to fully understand your app’s performance metrics. This new Featurings page will help you understand any unusual peaks or falls in performance, and will estimate the impact a featuring has on your app’s impressions, page views, and downloads (App Store only).
This section will also help you discover new opportunities. AppTweak highlights the editorial stories in which your app appeared alone, those in which your app appeared alongside your competitors, and those in which your competitors appeared and you didn’t. This helps to highlight any missed opportunities and give you ideas on how best to showcase your app to Apple in the future.
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Understand user opinions through reviews & ratings
This year, we totally redesigned our Reviews and Ratings section with the goal of providing you with even more actionable insights! These features now allow you to:
- Compare your app’s ratings and reviews with your competitors.
- Discover daily fluctuations in your new ratings, total ratings, and change in average ratings.
- Use advanced filters to browse through reviews, including the featured reviews shown on your real app page on the App Store and Google Play.
- Receive a full review sentiment analysis—most positive/negative/trending keywords in reviews—for your app and your competitors.
- Reply to reviews directly from AppTweak.
How monitoring reviews and ratings can boost app growth
Reviews and ratings are a crucial part of ASO, as they have a direct impact on your app’s conversion and are a goldmine in terms of user feedback. With 79% of consumers checking reviews/ratings before downloading an app, managing your app’s reviews and ratings should definitely be part of your ASO routine! Our Ratings section now displays the evolution of your ratings over time so you can analyze trends and identify changes in your app’s popularity; our Reviews section will then allow you to contextualize your findings, considering how users describe your app and your competitors.
Keeping an eye on the Review Sentiment Analysis makes it extremely easy to learn what users (dis)like about your app and your competitors. This can help you differentiate between the features that should be kept and those that could be removed/improved to maintain a good user experience. By implementing valuable features that your competitors don’t yet provide, you can also boost your competitive advantage and app growth.
You can now reply directly to your app reviews on AppTweak! Replying to reviews is important to maintain a strong relationship with your users—giving your consumers extra time and attention will not go to waste. The perfect reply has the potential to convince unhappy users to change their rating and indirectly impact your average rating score. You can read this blog to learn tips and best practices when replying to reviews.
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Spy on competitors’ A/B tests and custom store listings
In 2021, we also made some major improvements to the way we fetch data on Google Play. It is now much easier for us to detect A/B tests and custom store listings on the Play Store!
For A/B tests, you can now discover both when an app is running A/B tests on Google Play and see the variants of that A/B test. You can also easily identify custom store listings for specific markets on Google Play, allowing you to pinpoint the localized aspects of your competitors’ metadata for a given country.
How spying on A/B tests and custom store listings can boost app growth
Both of these features are essential to dig into your competitors’ ASO strategy. By identifying the A/B tests your competitors are running and actually viewing the variants, you can understand the elements they are testing in their text and creatives. Once the A/B test is over, you can identify the version that was most popular with users and gain some learnings for your own app.
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AppTweak also flags apps with custom store listings on Google Play. For example, we see that 365 Scores and One Football both have custom listings for their app in Colombia. From this, we understand that both apps specifically showcase Colombian players and teams in their screenshots to better appeal to Colombian users—a best practice for growth in foreign markets.
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Find your next growth opportunities with Market Intelligence
AppTweak’s Market Intelligence add-on allows you to conduct market research and identify new growth opportunities for your app. In 2021, we gave this section a major uplift, making it much easier to browse through worldwide data for a given app category. An interactive map also provides immediate insights into the countries that drive the most downloads and revenue in a selected category, thus allowing you to dig deeper into the market analysis for your country selection.
How monitoring international markets can boost app growth
Monitoring downloads and revenues across markets is a great opportunity to better understand the market your app is in while uncovering new growth opportunities around the world. This feature helps you easily compare the top-performing apps within a category and across countries, as well as their market share and download estimates. It allows you to benchmark your own app in a given market and understand the extra downloads you need to get to the top category ranks. You can also study and compare seasonality trends in different countries to make sure your app capitalizes on changes in market trends!
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Uncover the most relevant keywords for your app
Our Keyword Relevancy Score was the latest KPI made by our data scientists, and we really think it’s a game-changer. For any keyword added to your semantic dictionary, AppTweak will indicate how relevant that keyword is to your app in the eyes of the App Store or Google Play algorithm.
How choosing the most relevant keywords can boost app growth
The Relevancy Score can help you accelerate your keyword research by only focusing on the keywords worth your time and effort. At first glance, some keywords might appear relevant to your app when, in fact, they aren’t considered as relevant from an App-Store perspective.
For example, in this blog about our Relevancy Score, we show how the keyword “runner” is highly relevant to the game Subway Surfer, but “running” is not. This is because the App Store associates the keyword “running” with running apps, so it would make little sense for Subway Surfer to go after that keyword in its metadata.
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And there’s more…
At AppTweak, we already have plenty of projects in the pipeline that are ready to be released at the beginning of 2022, so stay tuned! Here’s to a year of impressive product updates in 2021—we can’t wait to continue fueling growth for your apps and games in the years to come.
Have an excellent 2022!
