App Store Optimization for Apps Ready to Scale (Part 3/4)

What is up app nation. It is part three of this YouTube live series where we're talking all about ASO for beginning our apps. Now this part apps that are ready to scale. And then on our last part apps million-dollar apps that are already hit to scale. How do you. ASO in that. And in this part, if you're just on the precipice, that's the right word of ready to scale. How do you really optimize your keywords? How do you incorporate ASO into your UA strategy?

We're going to cover it all with my friend, David Margarie on who is the head of ASO at CECK ASO. Check them out. If you're really trying to do some competitor analysis or you're looking for an ASO tool. This is the one that I recommend. CheckASO.com David. Welcome back. Hi Steve. Hi everyone. All right, David, let's start with this. How do you really structure ASO? So, in part one's in two, we talked about how do you really prioritize keywords?

What do you, how do you use ASO to jumpstart your app? Um, this one you're ready to scale. You're getting thousands, maybe hundreds, if not thousands of downloads a day. So how do you really structure your ASO when you're now ready to see. Yeah, well, I think, um, everyone knows that optimization means continual improvement, uh, and scaling. And especially for starters, it may be worth defining two different approaches to scaling.

So let's divide them. Uh, the first one is, um, scaling within the same local within the same country and implies, it implies the growth of metrics. You know, a single country, which is you to, uh, increase organic traffic. When you have already done with your primary optimization in several iterations and made some progress in your ranking, your downloads and et cetera. Uh, and at this stage, you should already have a steady flow of organic installs for, uh, and the quantity is not so important here because it, it can vary depending on the category.

On the niche country, et cetera, in different news, different crunches, you will get different. Uh, it's necessary to focus first, first of all, uh, on keywords and text elements, uh, that is, uh, gradually expand the semantic core and, and, uh, more popular keyboards to your metadata. Um, these requires a lot of, uh, iteration and, uh, less than metrics mandatory. You need to embrace the fact that not all iterations will be successful.

Um, comparative analysis is very important on this Tasia of course, and, uh, study the strategies of your competitors, track their performance. That's how you can get more data and make the right decision decisions. Uh, when. This should, uh, should also be stimulated by the growth of traffic forum, external external sources, and to sum it up, uh, we can say that, um, a deeper dive into data and deeper diving to testing different sets, uh, creative sets.

Metadata is a master of course, at this time. And, um, as for the second approach, um, uh, it's about scaling in, in other countries. So this approach, feats, any stage of development of developing, uh, an app, uh, or a game. And nevertheless, it's better to apply it to. Uh, once you have, have got stable metrics in at least in one country, and this applies not only to installs and ranking, but also, uh, to apps, stability, uh, of your user retention, lifetime, well you revenue, et cetera.

And the approach, uh, uh, to optimization in, in different countries. It's pretty similar and doesn't differ, uh, significantly. Uh, but, um, scaling in new countries too has a number of challenges of course. And the first step is, uh, to research the market for relevant traffic. If, uh, it's not there, if there is no traffic than any effort, uh, will be meaningless for you. For example, an app that teaches snowboarding tricks, uh, Completely irrelevant in Saudi Arabia or maybe in Turkey, in, in countries where people don't ride snowboards and don't do snowboarding.

There are much, uh, many, many such examples. So first of all, it's a market research for relevant traffic, um, to localize your app, you can also hire a native speaker. Uh, to do the tax optimization or you can do some research. Uh, a native speaker can help you to look for translation errors, bad wording, irrelevant screenshot text in opera in opera pictures, unpleasant colors, and et cetera, offensive texts, um, uh, choosing, um, a native speaker is.

I think the major challenge, there are many options, but the outcome may not be exemplary since the person can elect experiencing. So, uh, an understanding of how mobile industry and marketing works, or maybe, or maybe he, or she simply don't know, uh, what your app is about. So, uh, that's why you may want to. You may want to provide them with affidavit details. First of all, and explain what he's ASO show, maybe some, uh, some case studies or examples, uh, tell what your app is about what you want to achieve and what you have already done.

Uh, what brand or legal restrictions they are. If any, if you have any, uh, the native speakers. Help I think is necessary if at this stage of forming texts elements. First of all, when you are working with your text metadata, uh, this is, uh, equally important, uh, to get index by necessary keywords and also to keep your conversion rate high, and many apps has text metadata. That's not quite legible. Uh, such apps do not inspire confidence among users and lose a lot of due to low conversion.

Uh, Subsequent monthly, um, affects their ranking. And I often find such apps, for example, in Russian app store, when apps from different countries come and try to localize their apps, titles, and subtitles, and it looks quite weird. So that's why you should, um, you should find the native speaker, hire him and use his, um, And, and ask him to help you. And another way to localize the app is, uh, is the research. You can start by analyzing your apps, a user statistics, how they behave, uh, in different countries.

If you have already like localized in, uh, for some countries, maybe what, uh, what content they like more, what elements users, uh, interact with more often. Also analyze popular tropics in reviews, what users like, uh, and what they consider unimportant. Maybe you also can analyze your, um, your competitor steps to maybe four cool screenshot ideas or differences in localization. Uh, you can explore cultural related features, uh, through ads, uh, books, YouTube videos, cases, and.

UA creative sets maybe, and other things you can use, everything that will, that can help you to, to make your localization more, uh, more professional. Uh, in general, you can use both methods, conduct, research, and then involve a native speaker. But, um, at the same time, uh, localizing the apps interfaces, uh, is not mastered. Because it's much more important to access the market, to find out how well you perform and look for your chances to succeed.

First of all. And if everything goes according to your plan, so, um, you can see the progress, then your app should be localized after that only. And this will, uh, this will help you. To significantly increase the user intersection interaction. And, uh, of course there is a expectation, but scaling, um, scaling to new market is simply not possible without, uh, localization for some apps, for example. Um, I don't know if you have, uh, Maybe stories about fairytales, uh, about fairytales for kids, you should translate your, uh, user interface.

And without, without that, you can do localization of your metadata because it won't bring you any, any relevant related traffic and you will receive a lot of bad reviews and. Yeah, a couple of things I can share with you too. David is one of the strategies, a friend of mine shared way back in the day is he would go to, you know, you can go to Upwork or there was an Amazon MTurk mechanical Turk, and he would find people in different countries and be like, Hey, here's what my app does.

Like your fairytales model, what keywords in your native language would you be searching for? For this particular app. And then that's how he did his keyword research. And I think what we've worked when we were working with bigger companies, what we typically done is I'll do the keyword research and find out all the data and the traffic and all that stuff. And I'd be like, Hey, here's my recommended title, subtitle and keyword field or long description.

But can you guys just make sure you have a native person to look it over and make sure it looks good? So I do the bulk of the work and then they just finish it up just to make sure it looks nice and tidy. Yeah, it's a great approach. So sometimes it's better to hire some native speakers, not only one because one of them can be not so good in this language. Yes. Other people have done that strategy to where they'll hire a few on there.

All right. Let's move on to this. When you've now done all that stuff. I love the expansion stuff. When you're ready to scale and you've optimized all the keywords. What should we be focusing on next? Besides cause ASO? You know, we think about keywords a lot, but the time it incorporates a lot of stuff like screenshots app icon, you know, maybe optimizing the short description. So what should we be doing next after we've optimized the queue?

Um, so, um, once you, you've got, you've gone beyond the initial stages and you are quite, uh, efficient when it comes to text metadata, and you can proceed to the. Uh, stage of working with additional aspects, which will affect your metrics too. And the first and most obvious thing is working with conversion rate, of course, and the Mo because, uh, the more organic traffic you get, the higher, the role of these metric and conversion is not only about, uh, graphic assets.

Not only. Screenshot, I can, uh, as many Billy, but also about additional factors, uh, the most important, or which, uh, in these steps, I think it's, uh, apps ever trading, uh, because this metric can have a serious impact on conversion. Uh, as about two thirds of users pay attention to it before they installed. And for example, a free Freestar app can lose up to half of potential until installs while a one or two star app can lose up to 90% of potential install.

So it's very important to look for your average rating, uh, uh, in order to start improving your rankings. You need to, to understand the root of the. Uh, for example, your competitors might, might leave negative reviews on your page. On purpose. In this case, you should stick to a professional approach of course, and response to such reviews correctly. Uh, for more, uh, efficient results, you should, uh, involve store moderators to deal with search reviews, report the reviews, describe the problem and explain why they are fake.

And for more of a, for many people, it may seem that, uh, such a scenario is quite fresh. It's very common in tier two tier three countries where blackhead is so methods are actively used. For example, in Brazil, Russia, India, a lot of this stuff you can find when your competitors can leave. Negative reviews can buy negative reviews on your app. So it's very, very usually, and. But if you're a low rating, uh, is YouTube the quality of your app quality in broad sense, uh, then it might be necessary to improve your product.

First of all, because as a rule, there is a, this is the most common issue that cannot be solved in a single day. And in this case, you may want to work with, uh, reviews and communicate with your users. Try to communicate. Um, to communicate your position and resolve as many issues, as many problems of your users as possible. And of course, feel free to ask users to change their rating if you're managed to resolve their issue, because some of them can do that.

And, um, another important way to handle reviews, I think, um, is to, uh, implement or review requests with. Uh, users, uh, uh, much more willing to share a negative experience of course, and very rarely positive ones, a large number of heavy users, neither leave reviews or an all rate apps. And you, you should ask them to get. Uh, and review requests allows you to do these right from a site, the app, for example, right after user complete, a game level or make, uh, in-app purchase.

Uh, some bad reviews may be related to wrong timing, of course, because if you're asked to rate your app at the most interesting moment of the game, maybe it will, it will, uh, most likely resolve in a bedroom. And if you ask for it in a ride after, uh, an important in gave achievement, for example, when user finished the heart level, the event will be much more appropriate. And for, um, for, for apps, with in-app functionality, asking to rate the app right after the user has.

Um, has successfully ordered something, maybe the best option. I think, uh, another trigger may be a certain number of times. Uh, the user opens the app, say they open your app at least 10 times in three days. This means that you will limit your audience. But those who, who remain will mostly like most likely leave a positive rating or positive review, uh, the. Uh, line is to ask for a rating once the user completes the target action or is, uh, in waiting mode.

Uh, and there are various trigger option, depending on the kind of app you have a review request is a feature of course, available for. To everyone. Uh, and it's easy to introduce and configure, uh, with it. You can, you can increase the number of reviews and your average rating. Of course, um, each make, uh, makes no sense to buy a page reviews that I said later. And, uh, earlier, sorry, uh, as these approaches. We'll have a very short term effect and many developers by, uh, reviews and ratings, especially in tier two tier three countries.

But soar algorithms are very good at recognizing such reviews and ratings and removing them, um, after a day or two. And in some cases, They can even reject the app. And this approach is, uh, clearly not justified. I think. Um, well E in addition to the, to the, uh, Everett trading conversion can be influenced, influenced by reviews. Of course, uh, especially. But those featured in the page. I think everybody, everybody see the, some reviews that are featured on every app's page.

And these are several reviews that visible to all users before, uh, the full list of reviews, expanse, and, uh, the major, uh, criteria that affects how reviews get in these lists. Uh, the number of characters festival. Uh, the number of user ratings and the reviewed version of the app. For example, if the most, uh, if you have, uh, reviews to reviews, and one of the review is for the, the last version of the app, this review will be in the top.

So, um, many users love to read reviews, of course, and it's important to. I have enough of them on the, on the page. And the more reviews you have, uh, the more loyal, uh, users will be for your app since they will see that, uh, your app, your product is in demand and many people use use it and it's it's popular. Yeah. I like it. Dave, one of the things I also want to recommend to the clients too, especially, you know, this is.

Important part one, will we discuss this, but having some way of the user, like interacting with you. So online chat, you see this on every website, you can always chat with somebody, but that's a way to mitigate some of the lower negative reviews that you might be getting too. And it's also a great way to get. On where your customers are like, Hey, I don't know how to do X, Y, and Z chats chat with me. And I have a chat feature on my website and I get some great insights from people like, Hey, can you do this?

Can you do that? And people just want that immediacy of being able to talk to somebody and David, I'm going to put you on the spot here. If you had to rank in order of importance of things that you should really be focusing on or testing reviews, icons screenshots, do you have. An order that you would say, Hey, here's how I would recommend you optimizing. Um, well, first of all, after tax optimization of your data, I think, uh, first place is reviews and you're ever trading because if it's low, you will lose all your installs.

Uh, the second thing is, um, graphic assets. Screenshots, I think because, uh, it affects your conversion rate and screenshots reviews. And maybe the third thing is, uh, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe we have the icon still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean the screenshot of icons, every, uh, everything which is related to graphic, it's the second place. The third place is, uh, testing, maybe, uh, different approaches of, uh, custom solely seen, or maybe in-app purchases promoted in apps in app store and other artists.

Yeah, that's a great one. The promoted in-app purchases. We talked about that in our YouTube live stream. So you guys are gonna have to check that out, but it is one of the great ways of trying to like really dominate your search listings. I don't know exactly how to get an index yet, David, unless you have some ideas on how to do that, but like definitely do all the things, put an image in there, optimize your in-app purchase for the keywords that you want to really go after.

Anything you want to add on that, David? No, it's quite simple. You just need to use a good keywords. You can use the keywords that are in your apps, metadata, and that's why you, your in-app can rank. Um, with your app page, and I think that's enough, uh, make a description, some keywords, uh, icon and that's, that will be enough. Let's end with this. How do we incorporate ESO into our you a strategy? Well, um, Many people consider that ASO and UI, um, is completely different maybe at first sight.

Uh, this is true, of course, but, um, if you dig a little deeper, you can see that this is not entirely true. Uh, in simple terms, both of these, uh, areas. Uh, pursue the goal of attracting users and at the lowest cost and with the highest conversion, uh, first, um, a user acquisition has either has a direct impact on organic traffic and more, uh, the more traffic you buy, the higher, your ranking by keywords, the better you rank in collections of similar apps or related apps in stores.

And this correlation has been proved to be true by a thousands of tests with various apps, uh, by different, so managers and by, by myself, of course, uh, secondly, the quality of traffic from external traffic sources is very important, uh, in if the traffic is irrelevant with pure, uh, engagement. Uh, you can, this can affect the pranking negatively. First of all, uh, interaction over ASO and user acquisition is, uh, primarily about conversion and creative.

First of all, uh, you should consider the fact that all ad traffic is directly to the page. And this means that, uh, um, developing visuals for ads and, uh, screenshots and. Uh, on the FDA should be joined and, uh, take into account the features of each and you, you need to build a funnel that will help you achieve, uh, the highest conversion, not only for a traffic, but also for organic traffic from, from the store.

Um, misleading, uh, at traffic has got. Quite popular recently. And as that's present gameplay elements that are not found in the game, this is a common, and it's a, it's a very popular among gaming apps. First of all. And if, uh, if you use such a strategy, you may want to find a balance between, uh, uh, to retain the optimal conversion. First of all, and to maximize the effect of these strategies. For example, um, introduced many levels, many gaming levels that you use in your ad campaigns with the gameplay shown.

Uh, and this way you will get, you will not only get high conversion rate from your ad campaigns, but also keep good user retention rates in your app. Uh, These of course affects your ranking by keywords and you can improve the efficiency of, uh, ASO in UI interest interaction by implementing custom store listings. For example, um, these two is available, uh, only for, uh, games and plays in Google play and it allows to, um, up to five pages with different metadata within the same company.

And with it, uh, you will be able to divide users depending on their language and set up different ad campaigns. Uh, when users are redirected to your, a page from an ad, they will, they will see the page optimized for their language and preferences. And I think it will be, it will be good, uh, approach to test, uh, for the app store. If you've, if you have heard, uh, recently up store decided not to stand aside and announced the apple custom page, um, and this functionality will be available in near future, I believe this year, but maybe in 2022.

And it will allow you to customize a pages with different metadata and generate, uh, Unique leaks links for, for each of them. And you can, you can, uh, use these links in your ad campaigns. And I think this could, uh, significantly increase conversion from ad traffic. First of all, let it. Love it, the, the ways that we've used the UA is when we're running apple search ads. If we find a keyword that's really converting high from a tap to download perspective, then we incorporate that in our ASO.

So for our client of ours, where like, oh, I didn't know this keyword was sort of in our keyword field. Now let's put it in their subtitle because it's converting really high from apple search ads. And another thing David that we did too, was for another client who's doesn't have their most relevant terms. Does not have any traffic whatsoever. So it's like a, what do we go after? Right. What keywords? And so we started thinking through like, what other keywords we can go after.

And so first thing we did. Put these keywords into apple search ads. So we had different categories, right. And then when we ran it exact match, now they're all like, you know, branded type of keywords. And we didn't see that much. Cause apples for judges sometimes takes time. So we didn't see any impressions. So we moved that into Facebook and then we said, all right, let's set up these audiences. We're interested in this, these typic different five categories and let's see which one converts the best and that informed our ASO strategies too.

So there's a lot of ways. And like you said, it best David, you look, it's all part of the entire marketing mix. They all help each other out. So there's a lot of learnings that you can use from your ad campaigns into your search ads. Yeah. I agree. Especially with apple search ads is a great way, not only to, to attract, to get installs, but also to find different keywords, new approaches for your semantic core. And that's great.

One last tip that actually a during a YouTube live stream that we, the guests said was he used Google ads to run tests, you know, on Google ads, they just test the headline, all that stuff. And then the winning headline he used in his screenshots. So it's another yes. Yeah. All right. That's also great. We, we, we use this approach. Yeah. Sometimes that, but it, it's not only work, uh, work good because, uh, sometimes.

It can increase your conversion rate, uh, from the organic traffic, but sometimes, um, at, at traffic and organic traffic is different users are different and sometimes, unfortunately it doesn't work for, for me, first of all, for four hours. That's good to know. And in part four, we're going to talk all about all you big guys out there. How do you incorporate ASO, what you should be focusing on? So make sure you check out that part and lastly, go check out.

Or I always say check out, but go check out. Check ASO. All you gotta do is go to check aso.io. It is linked up to the YouTube description as well. Phenomenal is a tool that's going to help you from when you're there. Your story. Out to when you're ready to scale. And then last part we'll cover for you million dollar apps out there. I'll see you on the next video.