A practical guide to App Store Optimization (ASO) 📱

Your mission, if you chose to accept is to ensure maximum people survive in your territory. 🕶 72 hours is all you've got to accomplish this mission. Your mission has new people coming and going every minute. Your mission has a diaspora of people and each of them have only 1/3rd chances of survival in your territory. Can you increase these odds? Can you beat all systems and records and save them? What is the Art of War on the battlefield that is the AAS and GPS? 🤔

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Do not fear, because we are here to tell you all about how you can do your best to conquer this war. The war of the Apps (not, lol).

Apple App Store and Google Play Store are nothing less than battlefields. With over 3M applications constantly vying for the top spot, every app needs to do their best to ensure they are winning every battle and finally conquering the war to make it to top. Let's uncover this mission step by step and get through it - together!

So, what is ASO? 💡

App Store Optimisation (ASO) is all about increasing the visibility of your application on the Play Store / App Store. It focuses on helping your application rank higher and hence making it more visible to customers. It is often touted as the App Store SEO.

And why do we need to focus on ASO? 🤷‍♀️

Being a primarily app-driven company, it is necessary for us to establish our presence in the market that matters the most to us. Over 40% of the apps downloaded on the play store are found through organic searches. This is a channel for development we simply do not want to miss.

Weekly focus on consciously monitoring and optimizing the App's presence on the Store can be extremely beneficial for user acquisition in the long run.

Focusing on ASO efforts is additionally beneficial for FamPay: since we are building an entirely new market and, we don't easily show up on the regular search results.

Further, with FamPay building this entirely new market with never-before-used keywords (what people are really searching for), it is equally challenging and important for us to focus on devoting time to ASO. Not only is this acting as an additional marketing channel, but ASO is also helping us increase brand exposure and audience engagement.

Here's a quick view of all the advantages:

• Free high-quality users (since these are high-intent downloads) 🆓
• A new marketing channel 😋
• Brand exposure and audience engagement 🌎
• A channel to hear out our users directly and a great way to get them to talk about us to other users. 🔊

The magic of the first 72 hours

An analysis of the Play Store states that 77% of users drop off within the first 72 hours. Additionally, the reviews, ratings, and time the user spends in these first 72 hours is a key metric to derive ranking. The Play Store is looking for apps that you can get hooked onto fast and those that can retain users and have longer than usual in-app usage time.

How long your app stays installed and how many times it is used while installed can help Play Store search rankings.

Okay, now tell us the magic ingredients! What helps better ASO ranking? 🧙‍♂️

On Metadata:

• About the App : App Name (Title), Description, Icon, Screenshots, Feature Graphic and Video Previews.
• Keyword Search

Off Metadata:

• Number of Downloads
• Ratings & Reviews

Additional/newer metrics:

• App Quality
• URL/Backlinking

These massively impact the conversion rate of users on the application.

ASO hacks that have worked for us at FamPay! 🧐

1. Optimize descriptions with A/B testing
2. Adding keywords to our developer name can also help immensely in keyword optimization.
3. "Spotlight Search" is an interesting tool we can enable on the app store that can increase user engagement level and expose our app more frequently to new users.
4. Apps that are constantly updated get ranked higher - be it an update inside the app itself or even in the description, updated at regular intervals, helps add more relevance to the product. (this is taken into account by both app store and play store in ranking algorithms)
5. Keyword matched inside the app, on our website, in our description will help increase visibility and create the niche we want to.
6. Click through rate optimization - this is linked with ads click through rates.
7. When posting the app on the app store/ play store, the developer's team is asked to list a bunch of keywords - optimizing this makes a huge difference!

These hacks are super easy to execute and work like a charm, kinda like Ethan Hunt making every mission possible! 🕶 For any App led startup, focusing on App Store Optimization can be game changing, so go ahead and apply some of these hacks! Until then, this message will self destruct in 3...2....1...💥