ASO & iOS 11 - What Really Works

Are you tired of seeing titles such as “10 tips to improve your ASO” or writers that give you the “golden rules” that will boost your app’s ranking just like that? Even I have written such posts. The evergreen posts, the articles that give just some basic information that anyone who’s been in the App Store Marketing for some time, already knows.

This is why today I’ll give you real analysis including different ASO strategies of over 20 apps. You are about to read a truly data-driven look at the impact of iOS 11 on conversion optimization and keywords.

Note: The analyses were performed by Jiri Chochlik, an ASO Specialist at AppAgent.

The selected apps cover categories, such as health & fitness, finance, travel, and gaming. See the executive summary of the analysis below…

  1. The title has a bigger impact than the subtitle when it comes to ranking.
  2. The subtitle allows the creation of more keyword combinations, using them alongside the title and the keyword field.
  3. 30-second app video with portrait screenshots converts better than 3 videos or a combination of video with landscape screenshots.
  4. Duplicating keywords in title, subtitle, keyword fields won’t increase rankings.
  5. Keyword optimization remains the same in iOS 11.

This is what the article is all about and if you are interested to learn more details about that, keep reading.

#1. The strength of the title, subtitle, and keyword field

Jiri Chochlik’s analysis shows that the title has the strongest impact, followed by the subtitle. The keyword field takes the 3rd place, and this was proven by switching keywords and looking at the statistics.

What this means is that you should use your main/best keyword in the title. Instead of duplicating the same keyword in the subtitle, use another important keyword in the subtitle, and include all the other keywords in the keyword field.

#2. Keyword combinations

cross-keyword-combinations

 

 

 

 

This scheme summarizes how the title and the subtitle can interact with each other and you can get many keyword combinations. The goal is to create as many combinations as possible between these fields. Also, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that there are even more combinations than the ones shown. The idea was just to help you understand how to visualize keywords. There are much more longer-tail keywords.

Of course, you can put the rest of your keywords in the keyword field and you can still try to combine them with those fields. You’ll definitely rank higher. So, what’s different in the iOS 11? Yes, this was working on iOS 10, and it works just as good on the new update. The only difference is that you now have only 30 characters for the title (and not 50 like it used to be before).

#3. Screenshots and Videos

It makes sense that providing 3 screenshots (one large landscape screenshot/preview video with autoplay) will give visitors enough information to make a download decision without visiting the app’s page.

I’ll give you the right combination of using screenshots and videos which resulted in a 66% conversation rate during the analysis.

A single, 30-second video in portrait mode with 2 screenshots works best. It beats 3 screenshots, it beats 3 videos, it beats using two split screenshots with one message, it beats landscape previews. This combination shows between 15 and 30% better conversion.

#4. Duplicating keywords

While duplicating keywords is proven to work on the Google Play Store, duplicating your keywords in the App Store is just a waste of character space. This is why I talked about keyword combinations and it’s much more efficient if you use more keywords and find more combinations than duplicating the same keyword in the title, subtitle, and the keyword field.

Overall, there the keyword optimization remains the same in the new iOS update (for now). I hope the information provided was helpful and I’ll be glad if you share your opinion about it in the comment section below.