On todays blog post I’m going to talk about key metrics that are most important in mobile business especially when it comes to App Store Optimization.
What are the main goals when building mobile products?
Mobile app success is never a overnight thing. It takes a lot of time, work and money to build successful mobile application. The key to success in mobile is about understanding the processes, measurement and analysing the effectiveness of the certain growth actions. So which metrics are the most important for App Store & Google Play?
The goals of mobile applications depend directly on the growth stage at which a given application is located.It can be conversion rate increase, organic growth, getting more downloads, reducing user acquisition cost, increase revenues, improve retention, improve engagement or increase Daily or Monthly Active Users. But in general we can name 5 core elements of app growth goals, which are:
- Visibility
- Conversion
- Growth
- User feedback
- Monetization
App Store Optimization is equally important at any of above growth stages of the mobile product. The main ASO goal is to improve visibility and discoverability on the app stores to bring more organic traffic and downloads. The more organic downloads you have the less you spend on performance marketing so user acquisition cost are decreasing. At the later stages ASO will help to keep at the top in charts and search, benchmarking with competition, improve conversion, retention and user feedback. It also help keep higher LTV and engagement of a users on average 30-40%.
The App Store Optimization Strategy is a long-term and complex process that should be implemented and measured to achieve steady organic growth. Below I’ll describe main KPIs that well designer ASO strategy should measure on each stages of app growth.
Visibility KPIs - ASO
The main goal of ASO is to increase visibility of apps and games on app stores. Improve discoverability in search, charts, categories and to be Featured to get more organic downloads.
ASO KPIs that are important on this stage are:
Category Rankings - On what place your app is in overall country/specific category ranking.
Organic Downloads - number of downloads from the Search organic channel for the selected app in the selected country.
Keyword Rankings / Total Ranked Keywords (TOPs) - On How many keywords your app is indexed in TOP 5/10/20/50/100. After every successful ASO iteration, the number of indexed keywords should grow to enable more users to find the app.
Search Visibility Score - Very important KPI which is calculated by using all keywords that the app is ranking for, with the highest popularity and highest position. The more Top-10 positions the app has for the popular keywords — the better the visibility score, which means more chances to get downloads. This is the major ASO metric and allows you to see how the app’s organic visibility is changing over time, compared to the competition.
Featured - whether app gets featured on the stores’ main page.
ASO Conversion KPIs
Improving the conversion rate to install of an store listing is the second important goal after visibility. ASO conversion is also crucial for Paid UA. When the user discovers the app no matter where - Ad or in store, it is vital to create a great first impression about it – here is where the role of the conversion rate becomes important.
iOS Conversion types:
- Impressions -> Page Views - a percentage of users that come across your app in store (in Search, Top Charts and Featured), and tap to view its product page.
- Page Views -> Installs - the percentage of visitors of your product page that have downloaded your app.
- Impressions -> Installs - all app installs divided by all app impressions.
Android Conversion types:
- App Listing Visitors -> Installs - installs divided by all impressions of an app in Google play store.
All Conversion types are crucial parts of the conversion funnel of your listing on the store: by optimizing them, you ensure that out of all the users that somehow find your app on the store, the maximum percentage will get interested, engaged by the product page, and end up downloading.
Mobile Growth ASO KPIs
There are different ways to measure mobile growth. The main growth trigger for ASO would be the number and velocity of the installs, but in the whole set of App Marketing strategy, the growth is more than that.
One of the main goals of App Store Optimization is organic growth, so the number of installs plays a great part here. Installs is the basic KPI that can be tracked inside developer console on the stores. However, in case you are doing paid marketing, you would like to separate your organic traffic from non-organic one.
Organic Uplift - measured as a percentage of organic installs divided by non-organic installs, and a higher organic uplift leads to the lower eCPI of user acquisition.
Another important metric to analyze the growth is the number of active users. The main KPIs to measure in this case are Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU).
User feedback
App Ratings and Reviews are extremely important of a stable and healthy mobile app. In ASO ratings and reviews play 2 roles:
- Ratings & Reviews are taken into account by stores algorithms for ranking in search and TOP Charts
- They have great influence on users’ download decisions.
More about why app ratings are important you can read it in separate article.
The more ratings and reviews you have and the better is the overall user sentiment, the greater impact they’ll have on the rankings and overall visibility of an app. In turn, a lot of negative reviews and low average score can significantly decrease the conversion of the product page and lead to less organic installs.
Monetization ASO KPIs
The last, but not the least important goal for mobile developers is the successful monetization of their products. To measure the revenue several KPIs are used:
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU) – total revenue divided by the number of users.
- Lifetime Value (LTV) – a prediction of the net future profit for a particular user.
- Revenue – total amount of income generated.
For an effective monetization of mobile app, the quality of the users matters more than the quantity of installs. Users that came from organic UA channel like ASO are 30-40% more engaged and have 3-5x higher LTV.
Summary
ASO doesn’t have single metric that we are able to measure success. All of them mentioned above are equally important, and successful ASO strategy should cover them all. If you need help with preparing ASO strategy for your mobile app, you can contact with our App Store Optimization experts to help you get the most out of the ASO for your app.
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