There are more than 3 million apps available in Google Play Store and many methods to be promoted in this competitive market. From all the methods in the Store, the most efficient and cost-effective way to be found is by showing up organically in relevant search queries.
How can your app be discovered in the Play Store?
There are thousands of apps similar to yours. Standing out from your competition is an extremely difficult exercise, even for those with a high-quality app. Your best option is to plan carefully a mobile marketing strategy based on boosting your app’s discoverability to the right audience.
You can try running user-acquisition campaigns (paid traffic) with Google or third-party advertisers or using your social media or directly optimizing your app for organic traffic, that means trying to be discovered through the search engine or navigating through the Play Store vs paid traffic.
Assuring your presence in relevant search queries
The first strategic step to boost your presence in the search queries in the Play Store is optimizing your store listing page for organic discoverability, what the so-called App Store Optimization (ASO) does. This way you ensure that the key elements of your app are the most effective ones in terms of traffic volume and furthermore, your user conversion rate is maximized.
The next steps to be followed depend on your audience, budget and app characteristics. You can pay for your presence (user-acquisition campaigns), remain with a purely organic traffic strategy optimizing your store listing page and trying to get featured in the Store or mix these strategies and boost your organic traffic with paid traffic and store listing optimization.
Focusing on organic traffic: How visitors really find you?
Optimizing your app’s store listing page is a very important part of the process in order to be discovered in the users’ search queries on Google Play.
Your app’s product page must contain a relevant and compelling title, suitable descriptions and relevant image assets. But how do you find out the best way to optimize the store listing to boost organic traffic?
Google Play Developer Console splits out organic traffic into 2 main channels: Search and Explore.
- Search traffic refers directly to the apps discovered organically from search queries
- Explore traffic includes the apps appearing by navigating through the Store, for ex. through Categories, Top Charts, etc.
Here’s an interesting tutorial about main mobile marketing metrics and KPIs explaining the logic behind acquisition metrics.
Discovering your most relevant keywords in Google Play Store
Selecting the most relevant, high-volume terms that drive qualified traffic to your app from search queries is the most important part of optimizing your store listing page. In this sense, Google Play Developer Console helps you in this task giving you insights of the terms with the highest traffic and the most popular search results in which your app appears. It is crucial to know where your app can be found by users to try to boost and improve its ranking in these search queries.
The Console discloses some of the terms that users type into the Play Store search box to discover your app, which is a very useful information, but this info is not the only data to be analyzed in order to optimize your app properly. There are some other factors not included in the Console and to be foreseen: The evolution of the keyword rankings or the difficulty to rank compared with your competitors are other factors to check out.
Google Play Console Acquisition Reports: Insights about Keywords
53% of Android users find out apps through search queries on Google Play. But what insights give us Google about it?
The Google Play Console splits organic traffic into the channels Search and Explore: Google makes the difference between a user who found your app store listing via search query vs browsing in the store (top charts, categories, etc.).
This information provides us a real insight about the evolution of the search traffic in the history of your app and its weight compared to other channels (organic explore traffic and paid traffic).
Besides this, we already mentioned that the Console gives us a breakdown of installs generated per search term. The advantages of this search-to-install breakdown are:
- It gives real data about what keywords you should target
- It helps you evaluate where your marketing efforts are working and where not
- It shows the keywords evolution (Season keywords) & Trends: It is important to optimize keywords which consistently appear week after week
- It serves to improve your graphic elements: Giving insights on how your app is discovered can help you decide which graphic concept you should use
- It provides the Visitors/Installers conversion rate as well as the retained installers per search term which is helpful in order to focus your optimizing strategy
It is crucial for a proper store listing optimization to analyze all the suggested terms of the Console and combine this analysis with the relevance of the Search channel of your app.
Takeaways of optimizing for Google Play Store
The breakdown of the search traffic channel can be very useful because it provides a better understanding of what users ask of the app. With these insights you will be able to provide the product they need and where to focus in terms of marketing strategy. Nevertheless, the suggested terms of the Console are not enough data for a store listing optimization.
Find out relevant organic KPIs and keep reading our blog!
