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Best Free ASO Tool: App Radar Overview

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App Masters11:53Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

App Radar's free plan gives app makers keyword tracking, competitor analysis and store metrics that other ASO tools charge for. That lets small teams on a budget research keywords, track ranks and plan optimization without paying.

Key takeaways

  • The free plan covers far more than other tools offer for free. 0:57
    • It tracks up to 200 keywords, analyzes 5 competitors, shows 30 days of history and covers 2 apps.
    • Most ASO tools won't track any keywords for free.
  • The best keywords have high traffic and low difficulty. 3:27
    • One keyword shows decent traffic and no difficulty, and the app already ranks third for it.
    • A keyword with difficulty 54 can still be worth chasing if only about 150 apps compete and traffic is decent.
  • The competitor inspector shows which keywords rivals rank for and where you stand. 6:25
    • One rival ranks 15 for white noise while the app ranks 169.
    • For sleep sleeper the rival ranks 32 and the app is not ranking at all.
  • Store metrics and the changelog show where installs come from and which changes worked. 7:15
    • Most traffic comes from App Store search, and the country view shows high conversions in Vietnam and Japan, which points to localizing there.
    • The changelog records past keyword changes, so you remember what you tried and can link download boosts to specific edits.
  • The free plan has limits that experts should know. 2:01
    • You can only add apps you own, because you must connect your App Store or Google Play credentials.
    • The quick editor needs a paid plan, and the optimization score is often inaccurate for advanced users.

Most ASO tools won't give you the popularity, the difficulty, your ranks, all for free, but App Radar gives you up to 200 for free.

Steve Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Setting up and tracking keywords

Once an app is connected, tracking its keywords and its rivals takes a few clicks.

  • Connecting an app loads its keywords, and research starts in the keyword explorer. 1:37
    • You can add keywords by hand or search the explorer for new ones.
    • Heavy keyword research is the first job when you start optimizing.
    • The explorer sorts by popularity but shows no difficulty, which Young wants added.
  • Tracked keywords give a daily rank email and a view of who beats you. 2:47
    • The rain sounds app ranks 25 for sleep sounds, and Young wants it higher.
    • The radar icon lists the apps ahead of you for a keyword.
    • White noise is another keyword he wants to push up.
    • Sound machine and rain sounds are competitive, yet the app ranks well for both.

4:18 Finding keywords with the keyword finder

Start from a base word and let the suggestions show which longer phrases are worth tracking.

  • Searching a base word returns related keywords with popularity and difficulty to compare. 4:32
    • Typing "sleep" surfaces Sleep Number IQ, which has no difficulty and may be worth tracking.
    • Searching "sleep sounds" shows the number of apps competing for each phrase.
    • "Sleeping apps" looks very difficult, but he tracks it anyway.
    • Sleep watch, sleep tracker and sleep stories are too difficult to chase.
    • For meditation, go from the base to meditation music and meditation sounds, then to long tail phrases.

5:57 Competitor inspector and store metrics

Competitor data and store metrics show where rivals beat you and where your own traffic converts.

  • The competitor inspector turns a rival's app into a keyword list. 6:09
    • Pick a competitor, then click the radar icon.
    • It lists each keyword's popularity and the rival's rank.
    • The example rival is Music Zen. A link also opens its App Store page.
    • Some keyword sets have no traffic at all. Five dead keywords in a row are no good.
    • Top charts are skipped. They matter more to big publishers than to an indie.
  • App metrics show the full funnel from impression to sale. 7:13
    • The view covers the past 30 days and splits impressions by source: search, browse and referrer.
    • Conversion runs from impressions to store views, then installs, then sales.
    • Store view to install is already high. Install to purchase is the weak step to improve.
    • The country view can be sorted by impressions or installs. The top countries are the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Turkey is another option.

8:23 Optimizing, editing and tracking changes

Editing inside the tool and logging every change make optimization faster and easier to learn from.

  • Store listings can be edited and pushed from inside the tool. 9:07
    • The localization view shows title, subtitle, keywords, description and release notes for each country.
    • With a new version open, you edit, save and push to the App Store.
    • The demo app is localized into many countries.
    • The quick editor changes name, subtitle, keywords and description without opening iTunes Connect.
    • The optimization score suits beginners. Intermediate and advanced users should trust their own ASO knowledge, since the tool knows fewer hacks.
  • The changelog stops you repeating keyword tests. 10:09
    • It ties a download boost to a specific edit, such as moving one word.
    • It answers whether a keyword was used before and what happened.
    • He had wanted this from an ASO tool for a long time.
    • Each iteration is easier to learn from when you remember what you actually did.

In the growth library

Steve Young, Founder of App Masters (app marketing agency, podcast and YouTube channel). A walkthrough of App Radar's free plan and how to use it for ASO: keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, store metrics and metadata changes. The free plan covers 200 keywords, 5 competitors and 30 days of history for 2 apps, which most ASO tools charge for.

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

Transcript308 lines
0:00

what is up app nation it is steve young founder of at masters calm the blog the podcast the youtube channel where you go when you want action-packed content in the app business today i want to show you one of my favorite ASO tools out there and they just launched a free plan that gives you so much more than any paid plan out there so if you're on a budget and you're looking for an ASO tool that's gonna really help you find new keywords seamlessly integrate with your ESO workflow and help you track some of those keyword rankings well this is the tool for you so without further ado let's get into it all right guys the tool that we're gonna be talking about today is called app radar you can find out more at radar calm they've got a great service in full disclosure they are a sponsor of our podcasts today what I'll be showing you is everything that they've got included in the free account you can see here what's included so I'm

1:03

doing the free account you can track up to 200 keywords which is amazing like most tools you can't even track any keywords for free so this is just the free analyze up to 5 competitors see 30 days of historical data and I think it's up to two apps right here so you can sign up for their plan 399 not cheap that's why they're like hey here it is or if you're a publisher or agency you can do $6.99 so really really cool if they've got some UA services as well so if you're running search ads and need help with that go check them out right here but let's get into the tool here it is so I've added a couple of my different apps out here now don't pay attention to downloads I having a much time to really focus on my apps as we've been helping out the agency side of things but my apps I try to use him as a test dummy so we're gonna try to get them going but right now they're just sort of a test case scenario alright

1:57

let's go to one of my more popular apps called rain sounds now you will have to connect to your app store credentials to get all these apps to show up and so that is the downside you can't just add any app out there you have to add an app that you have access to via Google Play or the App Store connect so you can't just nilly willy add any type of app in here okay so once you have done that I've added my apps and I've connected to my apps were connect app radar will just show me these keywords now I can obviously add my own by just doing this or I can go into the keyword explorer and find new keywords in there as well which if you're starting your optimization these are the things that you want to do is do a lot of keyword research okay so here it is like these are all the keywords you can sort by popularity what I'd love to see here is the difficulty for these keywords as well but right now what do

2:56

you see the popularity in my current rank for these keywords so I'm 25 for this great keyword the sleep sounds of love to be higher so I'm gonna track this and then white noise I'd love to be higher too okay so once you start tracking the keywords you're gonna get an email every day that says hey these are the current keyword rankings the other cool thing about this is as you're starting to do keyword research maybe you're just thinking like oh these would be great keywords for example what you can see is the popularity of the keyword so the traffic volume and the difficulty so the best type of keywords are these type of keywords right here fubar but they have no difficulty so as you can see I'm number three for that keyword and they have decent amount of traffic and so you want to find these type of keywords that have good traffic up here and low difficulty so I'm able to rank for these two keywords like

3:50

sound machine rain sounds cuz I'm obviously optimizing for them but you could see the number of apps and then the difficulty so these are pretty competitive keywords but hey I'm able to rank well for them using some of my tricks on this if you could click this little I don't know what it's called but a little that little radar operator then you can see the apps that show up for the current ranks you can see these are the apps that are beating me for rain sounds let's go into keyword finder this is a great tool I love this so this is I use this all the time so let's say you know I wanted my app was it has sleep sounds essentially ok so let me put sleep in here and they will give me suggestions now I can see the popularity of difficulty this has no difficulty Sleep Number IQ interesting this might be a keyword that I want to track and start using what about here sleeping apps this has to have a lot of difficulty so I don't know

4:51

what's happening here but I'm gonna track that keyword anyways now I want to possibly use that sleep watch sleep tracker all these sleep stories pretty difficult so I don't want that but let's see sleep sounds now that's the primary keyword I want to see what else is there with that includes sleep sounds again you can do popularity right here you can see the number of apps one of the things that I would recommend to you is if a keyword has decent like a high difficulty but not a lot of apps are showing up for example this one soothing sleep sounds yeah it's 54 so it's somewhat competitive but the same time there's only 150 and it's decent traffic so that's it's definitely a keyword I want to go after so this is what I do when you're starting to think through let's say have a meditation out when you're starting to think through some of the keywords you want to start with the base and start going outside of

5:43

that base like right here meditation okay meditation music meditation sound so yeah this is great meditation sounds so maybe you had meditation sounds and then then the longtail keywords that's where you're gonna find those key words that have a lot of traffic and low difficulty okay so these are the meditation sounds again sometimes you hit with these where there's no traffic for any of these five is no good right okay let's move on to the competitor inspector which is really cool I wanna show you guys this is I picked a competitor right here music Zen and I can click this to go out to the App Store link but I'm gonna click this again this little radar and this is a really cool tool so it can see some keywords right I can find some keywords that they're starting to rank for so they're doing really well with white noise a 15 I'm 169 but hey sleep sound sleeper I'm 32 you're not ranking at all

6:40

right so you know you're able to see what other keywords some of your competitors might be using and the popularity for those keywords and how well they rank so really cool when you're doing competitor analysis and you can go up to five competitors under the free plan now I'm going to skip over top charts because it's really how often your app has made the top charts so some of the bigger publishers might want that but for me an indie guy who's not really paying attention to his apps I'm not gonna hit the top charts very often the other cool thing that I want to show you guys is the app metrics so this is really really cool so this is the past 30 days and essentially you can see the impressions you're getting through App Store search App Store browse a prefer so most of my traffic is coming from App Store search right ASO so now you can see okay the conversion rate from impressions to store views and

7:34

then store views to install so that's pretty high install once I get that store view that people are installing the app and then the sales from install to actually people buying I got to improve that but I'm getting some sales here - so this is you're able to see everywhere where it's coming from I prefer you can see that also you can check by country so here we go what are the most popular countries that I'm in it looks like US obviously and then Canada the UK Australia Vietnam Japan so forth so when I'm thinking about localization maybe you know Vietnam might be a place that I started localizing and also Japan right here I'm getting high conversions turkey so there's a shot there and I can sort by impressions I can sort by installs and see how well I'm doing there next I switched over to a different app because I don't want to reveal too many my secrets here but next part is the optimized section of app

8:33

radar and we're going to the optimization score so I wouldn't take too much into this if you know a little bit about ASO you know go with your ASO knowledge when I'm looking at after optimization full disclosure they tend to be a little bit inaccurate because I know a little bit more hacks than the tool providers have and so I don't believe their scores right as much as I believe my own instincts this Court should suck because I haven't optimized this app but really cool if you don't know much about hazel then follow that if you're in advanced or intermediate then maybe don't follow this too much here are the cool things that I want to show you guys the localization you can see all the different localization this app I've localized for a ton of different local countries and you can see what your title is for the US your subtitle you can see some of the keywords that the keywords that you have

9:21

right here the description everything else the release notes the cool thing about this because this app there's a new version on there you can make changes so I'll hit save and then I could push this to the App Store let's move on to the quick editor there's some errors happening right here but here you can quickly if you have a paid plan you can quickly change all the different things of the app so you can do name you can do subtitle you can add subtitles here and you do have to upgrade your plan so it has to be a paid plan but you can do quickly change your subtitle you can quickly change your keywords and your descriptions all within this plan so you don't even need to go to iTunes Connect you can make all your changes within this quick editor that's the really cool part changelog really cool again as you start optimizing you start figuring out what has changed what hasn't and you can

10:19

start to see hey there's been a boost and downloads that's because you know I moved this I added app where I moved free so it really helps you kind of figure that out and I've been wanting something like this from an ASO tool because sometimes I'll make changes and be like did I use this key word have I used this key word before what's happened should I use it again you know like as you go through these iterations you want to remember what you actually did alright guys that was it a parade are really really cool tool as you can see there's a lot you can do just under that free plan that you can get away with that you would not be able to get away with under any other ASO tool you would have to pay for a lot of these features most ASO tools won't give you the popularity the difficulty your ranks all for free but a parade art gives you up to 200 for free so go check them out once again it is app radar calm let them

11:11

know you heard it on my podcasts or YouTube channel but you don't have to do that I just want to highlight some of these cool tools out there so that you can see as you're analyzing what tool that you should be using again if you're on a budget or you just need something that really streamline your ASO process I highly recommend using app radar once again app radar calm I'll see you on the next video peace click the top video if you wanna see our ASO playlist with a ton of great strategies and growth hacks and check out the bottom video to see how you can guarantee growth using ASO some of our real cool secrets in there