CaddieOpen in CaddieDownload for Mac

4 Dirty Little Secrets of App Store Optimization (ASO)

Shared by Caddie Library · Updated
App Masters16:38Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Many top keyword rankings are boosted by bought reviews and incentivized keyword-search downloads, not just good optimization. Knowing this helps you verify your data and choose advisers who show real results.

Key takeaways

  • Developers buy or incentivize reviews to rank high right at launch. 2:04
    • In-app offers like 500 free coins if you leave an app store review break Apple's rules and can't be policed.
    • One app launched April 27, 2017 and had 49 reviews about five days later, ranking number one for a competitive term.
  • Campaigns that pay people to search a keyword and download the app also lift rankings. 9:51
    • Some companies charge tens of thousands of dollars for them.
    • They work, but the effect is not long lasting, so money can be wasted.
  • The data in ASO tools is often inaccurate. 4:28
    • For one keyword, Apple Search Ads showed a search score of 5 while Sensor Tower showed 2.2.
    • For another, Sensor Tower showed 0.5 when Apple's number was about 10.
  • Using two tools and checking Apple Search Ads gives safer keyword choices. 7:01
    • Mobile Action and AppTweak pull search scores straight from Apple, so those are the ones to trust.
    • On one keyword, Mobile Action gave a 95% chance to rank while AppTweak called competition high, and the app ranked number four.
  • Many self-styled ASO experts only know the basics, so ask them for advanced tips and results. 11:26
    • One advanced tip: in the US store, adding the Spanish Mexico localization can double your keywords.
    • The same trick works for the UK and Australia.

I think there's too many experts out there talking about ASO when they really haven't done ASO by themselves.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Why tactics get the focus

Fundamentals are easy to talk about, so specific tactics are what show real results.

  • Tactics prove skill more than fundamentals do. 1:00
    • Fundamentals are a well-designed app, good retention and clear monetization.
    • Anyone can talk about them and pose as an expert.
    • Tactics change over time, while the fundamentals stay the same.
    • The examples come from real client data.

1:43 Secret one: incentivized and paid reviews

Reviews are bought either with in-app rewards or with cash, and both can lift keyword rankings.

  • Review incentives are black hat and nobody can police them. 2:04
    • Apple bans the practice, yet developers bury it inside their apps.
    • The usual reward is virtual currency.
    • A developer can't confirm that a user actually left the review.
    • An app with many reviews and no real brand, unlike Facebook or Yelp, probably runs incentives.
  • Paid reviews can be written to carry target keywords. 2:52
    • The reviewers can be bots or real users.
    • Steve P. Young has used this strategy himself.
    • Big games with huge review counts right after launch made him suspect it.
    • The example app's details were hidden so no one is called out.

4:28 Secret two: inaccurate tool data

ASO tool scores can disagree with Apple's own numbers, so check them before choosing keywords.

  • Apple's search score is the benchmark for judging a tool. 4:51
    • The data comes from a client's real keywords and rankings, pulled from three tools.
    • Sensor Tower seems to use its own algorithm instead of Apple's number.
    • On Google Play the check is the Keyword Planner.
    • The ideal keyword has decent volume and low competition.
    • A score of 5 is too low to justify ranking number one.
  • Comparing tools shows which score to believe. 7:01
    • Search scores of 34, 41 and 3.7 were close across tools.
    • Sensor Tower rated the difficulty at 1.9, which he counts as low below 3.
    • AppTweak's chance score was 46.
    • He finds Mobile Action's chance score usually accurate.

8:19 Checking odd search scores

A search score that looks wrong should be checked against Apple Search Ads before you act on it.

  • Any score that looks off should go into Apple Search Ads. 8:42
    • Apple then showed the keyword as competitive, all three tools agreed, and the app ranked number 23.
    • Another keyword had a Sensor Tower score of 3, well above Apple's lower number.
    • Sensor Tower could pull volume straight from Apple but uses its own score, so he trusts it less for search volume.
    • Most other fields in these tools are guesses. Only volume and search score are real data.

9:51 Downloads with keyword search

Paying people to search a keyword and then download is a black hat tactic that works but needs care.

  • He believes the number one app from the earlier example uses this tactic. 10:00
    • His agency has run it for clients, and he does not name them.
    • He says a white hat version costs a fraction of what others charge.
    • His agency has not been penalized so far.
    • He holds back details because he sees things change after he shares them. He thinks he has found a way to make the effect last.

11:26 Experts who never did ASO

Many self-styled ASO experts only repeat basic advice, so their advanced knowledge is worth testing.

  • Basic ASO advice is easy to Google, so ask experts for results. 12:04
    • A client had hired a competitor and saw nothing. She did not know the localization tip.
    • He gives prospects tips on the call, even if they never hire him.
    • He does not read others' content. He talks to friends and his mastermind and tests ideas on clients.
    • His calls run 20 minutes, one day a week.

14:14 Follow people who show real data

Trust advisers who show real client data, not those who lean on proprietary tools.

  • Ask any adviser for data, since tools matter less than results. 14:34
    • His chart is real client data, with the keywords and client hidden.
    • Proprietary tools are unnecessary. Tools change, and some are better than others.
    • He suspects the app stores watch this kind of content, so he will not expose everything.
    • He worries that sharing too much would make his strategies work less well.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, an app marketing agency. Covers four little-discussed realities of App Store optimization: bought reviews, unreliable keyword tool data, keyword boost download campaigns and unproven ASO experts. It shows real client keyword data where three ASO tools disagree with Apple Search Ads, and gives a localization trick that doubles keyword coverage.

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript433 lines
0:00

coming up I'm going to share four dirty little secrets that some app developers are using to hack their way into the top keyword rankings stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of app masters. the place you go when you want actionpack content in the app marketing space today I want to talk about some of the dirty little secrets or some of the little known things about App Store optimization better known as ASO that you might not be considering and that other people are using to hack their ways into the top keyword rankings I'm going to show you some real data that I've uncovered along with some of the results that we've seen for our clients all right so let's get to some of these little secrets I also want to get into some of the religion slash tactics stuff I know I talk a lot about the tactics a lot about the tactics and know that tactics change it's religion that's really important I

1:09

don't talk so much about religion because I feel like anybody can talk about it right like the fundamentals have a really well-designed app make sure it retains well make sure you understand the monetization make sure it's very useful validate all that stuff is really really important but really anybody with no skills can talk about that and pretend like they're an expert so I like to talk about more of the tactic stuff just because I feel like that shows that we're actually in the game and really providing results for our clients all right without further Ado let's get into the dirty little secrets of ASO number one incentivized or paid app story reviews you don't understand the length of people that are going through or the number of people utilizing this particular tactic so when I say incentivize obviously this is all black hat stuff when I say incentivize I mean in the app itself you're going to say

2:11

hey I'll give away 500 free coins if you leave an app store review okay that's the incentivize model apple does not want you to do this and they app developers are burying this inside their apps but they usually give away virtual currency for a review now there's no way to police this meaning that I as an app developer can't assure that this person left the review but most people are pretty honest and so when I see an app with a ton of reviews that has no real brand like a Facebook or a Yelp or something like that I generally can probably guess that they are probably doing some type of incentivized or paid app store reviews and the other side the paid reviews is just you paying people to leave reviews these could be Bots these could be users I I've shared this strategy in the past so guilty but you sort of pay people to leave reviews with certain keywords that you're targeting and you can hack your way into

3:12

the top keyword rankings I'm going show you this app I've taken away because I don't want to like call anybody out but I've taken away the actual app itself but I'm going to show you some app that launched just recently and was ranked number one for highly competitive term and a ton of reviews right from the launch so here we go this is the app now again I've taken away everything related to the app itself it launched on April 27th 2017 and it had 49 App Store reviews and that screenshot was taken around May 1st or May 4th for 5 days after the launch of the app and you can imagine like 49 reviews right upon launch that's what I started noticing for a lot of the big games out there too is like how do you have so many reviews and you just launched like yesterday I don't get this and that's when you started I started realizing that a lot of people are buying reviews and trying to hack the system and this is one case where

4:13

they're ranking really well for pretty competitive term and they're able to instantly rank right upon launch so you know some fishy stuff going on right there okay reviews on May 1st that's when I actually took the screenshot number two inaccurate data and I think this is huge huge because a lot of times we're basing our strategies on data that is provided through you know some of the big tools out there like app an mobile action a lot of the ASO tools like mobile action censor Tower app tweak are the ones that I've been using a lot lately so I'm going to show you real data that proves that they some of these have really inaccurate data right and you can you know there's a way to really obviously verify this on iOS on Google Play you're going to have to use the Keyword Planner but I'm going to talk iOS specifically here okay so this is data this is for a client of ours so real keywords and real App Store

5:10

rank but I'm not obviously showing you the actual keywords now this is data I pulled from all of the three ASO tools I currently use right now okay sensor Tower app tweak and mobile action and what I'm starting to see as you can start comparing this like if you look at the first row the first keyword for example you see that sensor Tower is saying all three tools are saying that the competition is low for so for difficulty you want a low score for competition you want a low score and for chance you want a high score that's why I've highlighted this this is just conditional formatting on my side so all three platforms are showing decent traffic five is kind of low but as you can see sensor Tower why does it say 2.2 and so if I've actually starting to move away a little bit from sensor Tower just because Apple's actually showing this data like if you look under Apple search ads you'll see a number five for this

6:03

particular keyword and both mobile action and app tweak are pulling straight from Apple their search data so I really trust their scores when it comes to search scores because a lot of times when I do my optimization I'm looking for something like this this keyword where it's pretty decent search volume and low competition this is the perfect keyword for me and so we're ranking number five four for this keyword and that's perfect right so I'm looking for these gems when I'm doing this competition or when I'm looking at the competition and the search score is how I sort it and kind of figure out like okay because I want to be there's no point in being ranked number one for this particular keyword because there's just not enough volume like five is a very very low score and I don't know what sensor Tower is doing why don't they just show the data from the from Apple like their search score is 2.2

6:51

like come on Apple's already giving you five just pull in five then rather than using their own algorithm so just keep that in mind the other thing is when it comes to data that's why I like I always recommend using two tools when you're doing ASO I know some people might not be able to afford it but it is definitely worth it when you use two tools so here's just comparison right here the search score for here for s tower is correct right it's around the same type of number 34 41 I don't know what the exact score from Apple is but they're all pretty much the same so 41 34 and 3.7 is a search File so pretty good censor Tower it's bolded when it's under three because that's what I determine as low difficulty it's saying 1.9 and then mobile action is saying a 95% chance that we're going to rank high and we're number four for it unfortunately app we is saying competition's pretty high so if I just looked at app tweak I might

7:47

not have considered this particular keyword but again that's why I really like having two particular tools cuz one says 95% chance out of 100 that I'm going to rank well for this keyword well then and another one saying 46 I'm just going to go with one that says it's really 95 right so I'm just going to pick and choose and usually I tend to find that mobile action's difficulty score their chance score is pretty accurate so so I'll go through some of these as well right as you can see good oh right here think about this so mobile action look I'm not affiliated with any of these tools is wrong right here for the search score right they they're saying 41 ape is saying oops misspelled this 11 and then search score for sensor Tower is saying .5 now it's actually around 11 to 10 I think it was 10 within Apple search ads but as you can see the the search score is incorrect here so anytime I see this type of discrepancy

8:44

I'll always put it into Apple search ads that particular keyword to see what Apple says is it a high search for term or not and as you can see all three tools are pretty much saying it's pretty competitive and we're ranking number 23 for that particular keyword so again like inaccurate data a lot and last one I point out here that's why I pulled this is sensor Tower saying this is a three when it's round 1 18 and you know if I had to guess if this was a two I would to call it out so much now it's not comp complet like dramatically different from the other tools and what apple is saying I'm just saying I I don't trust sensor Towers data as much when it comes to search volume because they could pull it straight out of apple and they're not doing it they have some funky score right now so really pay attention to the data when you're doing this like I said a lot of these are going to be inaccurate because they're

9:39

making guesses for the most part unless it's the volume and the search score so really try to use two if you can or use apple search ads to validate the volume the search scores number three is downloads with keyword search so again this is a black hat strategy where I really believe that the other app that I was showing you from number one is utilizing this where you get people so you incentivize people to search for a particular keyword and download your app and we've run this for certain clients too and we try not to you know like obviously share who these clients are because it is sort of black hat in a way but just know that this is happening and be careful because if you do want to run this strategy there are companies out there that are charging tens of thousands of dollars for this particular campaign and we've been able to execute this CU we've hacked the system with using white hat

10:37

strategies too and this strategy to have some really long lasting effects at a fraction of the cost so if you do want to go down this road just be careful one we haven't been penalized but I want to be careful of how much I'm sharing moving forward because internally I'm seeing some things change based on the stuff that I'm sharing so so I want to really be careful about that but two it does work it's just it's not as long lasting so really be careful with this strategy because you can spend a lot of money and not see long lasting efforts we think we found a solution to give the longlasting efforts but again I don't want to completely share everything because I'm finding that certain things are changing as I as I start sharing things so I want to be careful of what I share number four and the last one that's that's kind of bugging me look I kind of fall into this ASO experts type of thing

11:34

but I believe I'm a little bit different in that I'm showing you real case studies a lot of times these PE these guys talk about ASO and they've never done ASO in their life and so and they just read a couple of different blog posts I know people are sharing stuff that I've shared in the past I don't know until people tell me because I frankly don't read too many things that are going on I just talk to my friends my Mastermind and execute for our clients and come up with our own strategies to figure this out but I think there's too many experts out there talking about ASO when they really haven't done ASO by themselves right if you Google ASO experts I'm like who is this person on YouTube they're talking about all this stuff and it's all like generic crap right 101 I try to talk about the 2011 to be like hey man I know what I'm talking about because I obviously anybody can talk about the 101

12:29

one you can just Google it and find the 101 but really talk to them be like what kind of results or what kind of advanced tips even people who have hired some of our competitors and said look we saw nothing from these guys I said well let me share this one tip with you it's like oh I didn't even know that like what you hired some other firm to do your abs optimization but you didn't know this one simple tactic and the tactic was obviously that different the app stores index different countries so if you're in the US targeting the US you can use the Spanish Mexico localization to double your keywords same goes for UK and Australia that's all I was sharing she's like oh I didn't know that and this other company only talked about like the white you know like the generic stuff so really when you're trying to figure out which experts to follow or even which ones to hire really talk through like what some of the advanced

13:20

tips that they would do and for me when I'm talking to a potential client I just said look here's what you can focus on right I want them leaving the call which strategies that they can use even if they don't hire us because I'm playing a long game here right so I that is something that's been bothering me as of late as I see more and more people trying to capitalize on app marketing and get into the space and sell a lot of these courses or tips when really they haven't done anything or result they haven't shown any results they're just talking out of their butts all right sorry that's my little rant for the day so that is it that's the four dirty little Secrets One incentivized paid reviews two I don't even know what number two was oh inaccurate data really pay attention to that three keyword I mean you could call it different things we call it a keyword boost campaign but downloads with a keyword search in there

14:14

and lastly too many experts just be follow just be careful with the different strategies that you follow as you can see I'm showing you stats on things that are working for our clients when I'm when I say this when I show you this chart this is like client data right I'm not showing the keywords or who the client is but this is real data that's out there right now and I'm giving you the data that I'm getting from other places so ask the person like what is it some of these companies use proprietary tools I'm talking about the expert stuff proprietary tools like give me a break like some of the I don't need to build a proprietary tool let somebody else invest in that I'm just telling you tools will change and some tools will be better than others so really be careful about who you end up following on ASO that's it guys if you enjoyed it leave a comment below hit sub subscribe on the YouTube channel subscribe to the

15:00

podcast as well if you're listening to this on the audio form and if you don't want to listen or watch there is a blog post about this so the content strategy is to utilize all three the video the audio and the written word to give you Advanced strategies at marketing strategies that are working today now last C caveat just because I'm starting to experience something today that didn't expect to happen I'm to be careful about some of the things I've been saying as of late and something happened at a conference too I just want to be careful because I do think that the app stores are paying attention to some of this content and I want to be careful not to expose everything and have our strategies not work as effectively as they have in the past so I will give you that end with that caveat but subscribe to the podcast it's atms. co/ iTunes if you haven't already and you've been a long time listener I

15:55

would love a rating in within iTunes and if you haven't hit subscribed on the YouTube channel hit subscribe so you can get some cool stuff and be up to date and I can look cool for my wife as well and lastly the blog itself is atms. cblog or atms. if you want to work with us just hit the work with us Tab and just fill out the form and like I said I I do calls once one day out of the week and it's 20 minutes and I really try to provide valuable tips for you so that you can leave the call feeling like you got something out of it and you can use the tips without even hiring us if you want to hire us great look I'm not doing this for free right all right guys I will see you next time bye