The main goals of Mobile Apps and Games

The success of a mobile app is never built overnight – it takes a lot of time and work, and it’s all about deep understanding of the processes, measurement of the results and analysing the effectiveness of the certain marketing actions we perform. But which KPIs are the most critical for a success on App Store or Google Play? Which are the metrics we have to track in order to success?

Mobile apps pursue different goals depending on their product stages. It can be organic growth or the increase of conversion rate, getting more installs and reducing user acquisition costs, increase in revenues or improvement in retention, achieving certain engagement levels or improving the volume of Daily or Monthly Active Users (DAU and MAU).

ASO KPIs and Metrics – How to measure success

App Store SEO / ASO is equally important at any stage of the product growth cycle.

In the beginning, it is aimed to improve the visibility and discoverability on the app stores, with a main goal to drive organic installs and reduce the costs of user acquisition and paid marketing actions. On the later product stages, ASO strategy aims to sustain the growth and keep the top positions in charts and in search, benchmarking the performance with competition, improving conversion, retention and user feedback.

The ASO strategy is a long-term process that should be implemented and measured in order to achieve and maintain a steady organic growth of an app. Let’s take a closer look at the main goals within app marketing strategies, identify the corresponding KPIs or metrics and see how to measure and optimize them. Because what is not measured, can’t be optimized!

Goal 1: Visibility in the stores

The main goal of App Store Optimization is to improve the visibility of mobile apps and games on the stores, in order to improve the discoverability in Search, Top Charts and Featured, and get more organic installs.

The KPIs involved in this stage can be measured with any ASO tool:

• Keywords rankings – position in search results on your target keywords and keyword combinations
• Top Charts rankings – positions in the Top Charts (Free, Paid or Grossing)
• Category rankings – positions of an app or game in its category (e.g. arcade, or music)
• Similar / Related apps – Which apps are linking to our app? How many apps are linking to our app? Similar Apps traffic matters.
• Featured – whether it gets featured on the stores’ main page. This KPI can be tracked, for example, with AppAnnie.

The above metrics are essential to understand and measure the visibility and discoverability on the stores. Tracking their evolution daily and monthly, in all countries and benchmarking these rankings with competitor’s products are forming a basis of App Store Optimization strategy.