Mobile App Store ASO: Social And Engagement Signals

August 18, 2014

Once you chose the keywords that you want to rank for, and added a great title and description to your mobile app listing in the mobile app stores, you are done with ASO, right? Wrong! This is just the beginning. What you must do now is focus on social and engagement signals to make your apps stronger in search. Let’s get into some detail about what these signals are.

Engagement signals measure the level of engagement that users have with your app. How many times are they opening your app? Are they deleting the app from their devices? Or are they keeping the app? How long are the session lengths? How many sessions does an average user have? All these metrics show how much users engaged with your app. If users engage with your app, that is a signal to the app stores that people like your app, and that it is good. If that is the case, this should help your app rank above your competitors in app store search for the keywords that you originally chose. On the other hand, if your engagement signals are worse than those of your competitors, you still have to improve your app to make sure that your app is competitive with them on many of those metrics.

Social signals are very similar to engagement signals. Social signals are things like the reviews that your apps gets. The frequency with which your app gets reviews, and quality of the reviews are important.

Note that the app stores do not officially state that they actively monitor the social and engagement signals of your app. They also do not openly say which of the signals have more or less weight when it comes to influencing search rankings. Almost none of the major search engines (Google, YouTube, Amazon, Yelp, App Stores, etc) make such information public. But they all work on these principles. As the marketer of your app, it is your job to acknowledge that these signals will be important for your app ranking, and experiment with raising these signals, and monitoring search results for your app to see what starts working for you. It is a relatively time consuming process so unless you have a large marketing budget, do not expect great results immediately. Be patient, and continue to experiment.

Mobile App Marketing Book And Course

This tutorial is just one section of my mobile app marketing book. Check it out on Amazon. It is available on the Kindle which means that you can read it on the Kindle app of any smart phone. Or take my mobile app business course on Udemy.

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