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Sensor Tower ASO Tool Review: Keyword Spy, Research & Apple Features

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The bottom line

Sensor Tower is a strong ASO tool for iOS, where batch keyword rankings and competitor keyword spying show which terms are worth targeting. Pair it with Mobile Action, which is more accurate on Google Play difficulty.

Key takeaways

  • Sensor Tower's traffic and difficulty data is accurate on iOS, but weaker on Google Play difficulty. 1:13
    • Mobile Action is more accurate on Google Play difficulty, so he pays for both tools.
    • He prefers Sensor Tower's interface, and it is the longest-running tool he has used.
  • Tracking a long keyword list shows which terms deserve a place in the name, subtitle and keywords field. 4:10
    • For clients he builds lists of 100 to 200 keywords, sometimes 400, separated by commas.
    • His plan allows 80 per app, so he deletes and re-adds the app for each new batch, then copies the data into a spreadsheet.
  • Keyword spy shows which keywords a competitor ranks for that you do not. 7:47
    • Comparing against Headspace surfaced terms such as chakra, happiness and a type of meditation he did not know.
    • The tool only guesses from where apps rank well, and it can't see what a competitor actually targets.
  • A keyword is worth targeting when the apps that rank for it are in your category. 9:30
    • Headspace is third for chakra and the rest are meditation apps, so a Calm-sized app could reach the top five.
    • The keyword "kami" returns games, so it is a poor fit even though a competitor ranks for it.
    • For big clients like Calm he cares less about difficulty. A new client would skip a hard term like "meditation".
  • The download and revenue estimates work as rough benchmarks, not exact figures. 3:00
    • He says to take the numbers with a grain of salt, since they could be over or under.
    • They are most useful for comparing similar apps, such as Headspace, Calm and Simple Habit, against each other.

If I'm looking at a keyword and seeing the top results and seeing that they're games, that might not be a keyword that I want to target.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Apple's Today tab shows what Apple features

Sensor Tower's Today view lets you see which apps Apple is featuring, and check whether you were one of them.

  • The Today view lists featured apps in one place. 1:53
    • Open Top Charts, then Featured, then Today.
    • It shows only the past four days. Older data costs extra.
    • It shows what Apple is focused on when it picks apps to feature.
    • If downloads spike for no known reason, check here to see if you were featured.

2:37 The app overview adds competitor context

The overview page shows where a competitor's users come from and how it advertises.

  • Overview data helps with competitive analysis. 3:04
    • It shows reviews, all-time reviews and where the bulk of users come from.
    • Calm's page shows it advertising on Instagram. More detail costs extra.
    • A Sensor Tower co-founder estimated the downloads from his Page of free campaign accurately.
    • He checked this on one of his own apps over a couple of days.

4:08 Keyword rankings in batches

Pasting a comma-separated list into the ASO section gives traffic and difficulty for every term at once.

  • Commas keep multi-word phrases whole when you add keywords. 4:20
    • A phrase like "train schedule" stays together when separated by commas.
    • His demo list was meditation, calm and mindfulness.
    • The keyword optimization tab splits phrases into single words.
    • He used to paste lists there, but a phrase like "sleep stories" gets separated, so he no longer does.

5:36 Research, suggestions and translation

Keyword rankings is the workhorse, and the other tools fill small gaps.

  • Keyword research gives traffic scores without tracking a term. 5:49
    • Mobile Action has no such mode. It only shows data once a keyword is tracked.
    • He uses it for one or two terms, like "sleep stories", when he only wants traffic data.
    • The scores match what tracking gives, and he can start tracking from there.
  • Keyword suggestions are too generic to rely on. 6:21
    • Trying phrases can turn up long-tail terms, but the results are obvious.
    • Other tools he showed earlier work better, so he mostly sticks to keyword rankings.
  • The translation tool is a cheap way to localize a listing. 6:56
    • It translates a phrase into many languages and shows character counts, so a VA can copy and paste.
    • He tried it on a weak game that gets hardly any downloads.
    • Traditional Chinese fits a lot of meaning into few characters.

7:47 Keyword spy in practice

Keyword spy is a source of ideas, and tracking each idea shows whether it is worth chasing.

  • Keyword spy splits terms into those both apps share and those only the competitor has. 7:47
    • He leaned on it heavily early on and now has other research tools.
    • The gap list included odd terms like "Smart Watch", which may be localizations.
  • Unfamiliar terms are added to tracking before judging them. 8:34
    • He doesn't need to know a term's meaning to track it.
    • In keyword rankings, the new terms all looked difficult.
  • Traffic and difficulty scores rank the candidates. 10:16
    • A traffic score of 3.4 is decent, and 2.8 has similar difficulty.
    • He is already sixth for "kami", but the results are games.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, app marketing agency. A walkthrough of how an ASO agency uses Sensor Tower's keyword rankings, keyword spy, translation and Apple featuring tools to pick keywords for the app name, subtitle and keyword field. It shows a repeatable workflow of bulk-loading 100 to 400 keywords, scoring them on traffic and difficulty, and mining competitors for gaps.

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

Transcript307 lines
0:00

shut up I'm gonna show you how we use and pay for sensor tower and how you can use it to find new keywords get accurate data and obviously grow your downloads stay tuned what is up app nation it is Steve P Jung founder of app master Socko as you can tell I'm trying to go 5 videos this week and today I want to talk to you about one of my favorite ASO tools called sensor tower so I've been trying to review a ton of different tools to show you guys how we use these tools to help our clients grow downloads and Center tower is one that I use and pay for as well so I'm going to show you some of the paid features that you got that I like a lot and how I sort of leverage the tool to grow your downloads so without further ado let's get in to sensor tower here it is sensor tower so if you want to check them out it is sensor tower comm they were actually one of my early early early sponsors back in

1:04

probably 2014-15 time range but been using the tool ever since for a very long time actually probably the longest tool that I've been using and you know as I did tell you in previous videos I do think mobile action has more accurate data when it comes to difficulty especially on Google Play but I do love sensor tower in terms of the UI and Center tower is more accurate too so that's why I use both so I pay for both and I really like if I had a vantage for either tool I would probably say Center tower is great when from a UI perspective too and then also it has pretty accurate data on iOS from traffic and difficulty but on Google Play it's kind of its accurate on traffic but not so accurate on difficulty well black shins way more accurate on difficulty when it comes to Google Play okay so let's get into this this is the today feature and I kind of mentioned this in a previous video but I want to highlight

1:57

this again but if you're curious to see what Apple is featuring and in a nice little easy way this is the where you go so you go to top charts and use featured and today and you click this and you can see as a today's recording these are the apps that's being featured now it'll highlight up to I think it's four days the past four days and then you're gonna have to pay to get more data but you've got to get a sense of what Apple is really focused on in terms of featuring apps or if you've made a feature like you're getting tons of downloads you have no idea where maybe check this out and see if you made some lists here as well all right let's get into what you guys really care about the ESO side of things now I've already added sticking to the theme so I'm gonna click here you can still look look at this if you want by I'm using calm again because I used it a penny so I forget a why not keep doing that but you can look at this

2:54

overview the reviews and all-time reviews and all this stuff it has the user and estimated revenue these I don't know how accurate these are but you know this kind of gives you a sense if you're doing some commend competitive analysis alright where are they the bulk of their users coming from and actually had a meeting with Alex one of the cofounders and I think he's a CEO of sensor tower and he's pretty accurate so I gave him one of my apps and one of the days he was pretty accurate in terms of we did the page of free campaign he's pretty accurate in terms of saying how many downloads we got in those couple of days but here you can kind of get a sense of a couple of different things so here advertising on so it looks like they're advertised on Instagram that you have to obviously pay if you want to do more and these download numbers and revenue I don't know how accurate they are just take them with a grain of salt

3:43

but you know it is what it is I mean there aren't other ad you know I don't know like it's just they could be overestimating they could be under who knows really but it give you some type of benchmark so you can put like I would probably put all the same categories like headspace calm simple habit and then just put them in through here and see how well they rank in terms of revenue and I think it's more of a benchmark how close they are to each other okay so here's the things that I want to talk about the things that I use a lot is the ASO section so keyword rankings now if you have a long list of keywords right usually what we do for our clients we build a list of about 100 to 200 sometimes even 400 sometimes just depends on the client but we build a long list of keywords and then we separated them by comma especially if they're like a phrase like train schedule here and then add we added them into this tool that's the

4:35

best way to get data really quickly so I will you know throw in some keywords for you guys so meditation let's say calm mindfulness now I just put them all back on and then I use this data like traffic and difficulty to determine if it's worth targeting if these keywords are worth targeting in my app name my subtitle and keywords field right so this is the tool that I use a lot now it's limited to 80 this is the version that I have if since we do you know 400 of time here's how I do it I just delete the app and then I add it back in and then put my next 80 cents which I was really good about that so hopefully they don't change that yet but that's the best way to do it put 80 at a time and then copy all this data into a spreadsheet to figure out what to do with it next all right let's see keyword optimization I used to put them in here don't put them in here because you it will separate if it's

5:29

like you know let's say sleep stories if you watch the previous video it's in the subtitle it actually separates it like this and gives you data so I'd stop doing it here it's the best way to do it in keyword rankings it gives you the same data but it's a lot easier to add the keywords in here and phrases the other way you can do its keyword research so if you wanted to just look at sleep stories itself I do do this sometimes when I just want the traffic data unfortunately mobile action doesn't have this you have to track the keyword to get any data but let's say you were trying to get data on these keywords and you just want a one key or two keywords you could just do it in here and get this sort of scores so the same scores you can track it if you want or just do research okay it looks like there number two for this particular keyword awesome and then here's a great tool I don't use it this

6:23

much by filing that they're very generic these keyword suggestions so it's it's okay you know like you might want to try phrases just to find longtail keywords that might be potentially things that you want on target but they're pretty obvious you know I have a bunch of tools that I showed you already okay looks like we hit her in the limit that I showed you already that I like better and so I don't typically use this that much this part I typically use the keyword rankings the most and then translation you know in my previous video yesterday's video I talked about you it worth it if you guys did want to translate I did do this for one of my like really crappy games gets hardly any downloads but I was like let me just try it and so I did translate it so if you wanted to put meditation you know sleep stories in here it will translate since your tower will translate it to a multiple languages and then you can just

7:20

copy and paste here it's a really easy way of doing it this is probably the the more affordable way of localizing your abs in all these different languages and you can copy and paste copy and paste copy and paste so you can have the VA or somebody else do that for you but it's a great way and they tell you all the character links as well so I love it look at this Chinese traditional Chinese like this it's so many words and your keywords it's an insane okay and then the other tool that the other thing I want to show you guys is the keyword spy I I kind of use this a lot early on days again I've got other tools now to come up with the research but if you work trying to compare well let's see what head space our main competitor is going after and let's see which keywords we are sharing and which keywords they might have that we're not sharing well then this is a great way to kind of see that so you can

8:11

see hey these are things that we share we're both ranking well for and these are some these are some keywords that we aren't sharing so I don't know what pana is well add that in there and then happiness is obviously one of them Smart Watch these could be just localizations that I'm not familiar with or types of meditation I don't know but anyways so I can add these in here and I'm like I don't have no idea what this is all I'm doing is tracking it so I think this is a type of meditation great and that's a great way to keyword spy so they're they're like yeah I have people have asked me like how accurate is this data look they're just sort of making guesses right kind of like a panty you can tell you which keywords certain apps rank well for in my previous video I think you know sensor towers doing the same thing where they're seeing okay where they ranking really well for you can make certain

9:05

guesses and phrases that will they're obviously using if they're ranking well for these terms right so go back to keyword rankings and see our new keywords that we just added it looks like they're all difficult right so might not be something worth targeting you know you can click here chakra I don't know what that means but it looks like okay it's a type of meditation headspace number three for it there's checkers so it might be something that if I'm calm that might be a keyword that I want to try to rank for because headspace is number three and you look at everything else underneath it it's all checkers and everything else so like obviously it's about meditation if I add that keyword in there I should easily be three or four right underneath it and I don't know if I can beat number one because they have it in their app name but I can easily get it to number the top five if I'm calm so that becomes a potential

9:58

keyword for me and when I'm working with bigger clients like these I don't really focus too much on the difficulty because obviously you can see meditation there number three and it's really difficult so if it's a new client I'm like maybe not meditation but if it's a bigger client like headspace or calm I'm gonna go after these keywords because you know we're gonna have to find different keywords that we can rank well for and obviously they have traffic so three point four is decent two point eight is you know if I'm comparing the two they're pretty similar in difficulty but two point eight is something that I really would really want to talk it and they're already number six for kami I don't even know what kami is because look this halt games and then the number six so it can be a type of meditation but if I'm looking at a keyword and seeing the top results and seeing that they're games that might not be a

10:43

keyword that I want to target because you know they're games right but chakra I apologize if I'm messing up the the name of this pronounce pronunciations is top two or our meditation apps so these are keywords that I would really target that is the sensor tower review guys if you want to learn more about our entire playbook go check out at masters Academy I'll make it quick and easy but it is at masters Academy comm only for a call so I gotta run bye