Dave Bell

The App Store and Google Play Store are digital eCommerce platforms and in eCommerce search, the long tail is much more important. The introduction of search suggestions in the App Store is going to drive new behaviors, making long tail more important.

Long tail is not a game of targeting one keyword over another. It’s a game of having a cadence where you’re updating your app and shifting your metadata regularly to allow Apple/Google to experiment with your app on different terms. Over time, you will rank for more keywords if they’re relevant and if you have a good conversion rate.

You may get different results when you’re doing a direct search vs. using a search suggestion, most likely based on what Apple’s algo thinks is the best result. Example: “jobs online” vs. “job” then tap the “online” suggestion. FYI in language learning it looks very much the same.

App Analytics will now provide a pre-order dashboard, making pre-order marketing more measurable.

With In-App Events, new metadata is going to be included in the stores. An assumption is that the event names will qualify as keywords (i.e. indexable) and the descriptions will only be used to understand relevance to keywords and for the ASA relevance score (like the standard description).

There is a relationship between singular and plural for a specific keyword. You will most likely rank for both if you only use one version (i.e. either singular or plural) but you’ll most likely rank lower for the other. If both singular and plural are really important to you, you should target both.

A/B tests variants on your organic listing and observe the conversion rates separately per source (search, app referrer, web referrer), then use the winners for each source (or at least the learnings) in the campaign specific pages (custom product pages). Details below.

The Primary Store Listing Page can be A/B tested, but custom product pages do not appear to have A/B testing available. You might need to get learnings on your organic listing and then adapt your custom product pages.

When you look at long tail keywords, you want to measure before and after: growth in impressions coming from search (subtracting ASA or Google Ads data) and conversion rate.

Even for very large apps, Gummicube still changes the selection of keywords every 30 days before Apple and Google have a linear degradation in the value that they see for older keywords. If you stop making incremental changes while competitors do, Apple and Google will start to see you as less relevant.

For the Play Store, ask yourself what are the core keywords you're targeting and what are the phrases related to these keywords that have a similar audience. Then look at placements (title, short description, description). You don't want to feed Google only keywords, you want to feed it context too.

If you're A/B testing on the Google Play store it will be traffic across all sources. Once you find a winner and choose to deploy it, look at every channel through your MMP to see how conversion has been impacted to get some channel granularity.

The reason user-facing metadata tends to perform best is because users searching for these keywords see the actual keywords and convert better, leading to better rankings.

With a new app in a high volume category you will need click data first, so the goal is to build relevancy. Focus on what your core set of keywords is going to be, find the related phrases (because they will index faster), target them and build a footprint as large as you can. You can then double down through ASA to improve the top keywords.

Volume and velocity is not going to have a huge impact on your search rankings, but it may have an impact on indexation time because Apple and Google will crawl your app faster.

If you have a perfect keyword metadata optimization but you're struggling to get above top 20 it's not a CTR problem that you have so think about conversion optimization.

Apple will tell you "do not use search ads data for ASO" because the timeframe of the trend they are reporting is short term. You can not use a short timeframe for ASO because it takes 2-3 weeks to get your keywords fully indexed.

Paid marketing can support organic success but organic success is not a pay-to-play model. If you do not set the foundation with ASO then you won't get volume for ASA.

For an established app, don't be afraid to go after top keywords. Look at the themes where you're ranking well (top 10-20) and start building out a footprint that is broader.

Apple will still index you for 2 to 3 weeks after an update. If you have good rankings already, you can do keyword metadata optimization every 30 days and have a solid view of how an optimization performed.

The format of your Google Play description can be more important than where you place keywords: inside a fixed place paragraph vs. somewhere that is easier to crawl. You want to balance user experience and easiness to crawl for Google.

The Search Ads placements are not going to always be valuable. A few times where you can consider it: when Apple is featuring similar themes in “discover” keywords, when your app is seasonally relevant (and only in this window) and if brand initiatives (e.g. offline marketing) drive your search terms into discover.

For new apps or during major updates, ASA can help achieve 2x-3x indexation speed for keywords (it provides additional CTR data).

The Apple Search Ads algorithm does crawl descriptions. So even though your description does not improve ASO, it can improve ASA.

The introduction of in-app events and the re-engagement analytics (re-downloads in App Analytics) are an indication that in the longer term Apple wants to provide more methods of re-engagement inside the stores and even more customized experiences for existing users.