The rules for attracting traffic in overseas app stores!

There are three major challenges in going overseas: product localization, traffic acquisition, and user operation and maintenance. As far as traffic acquisition is concerned, I have been in the ASO circle for a long time, especially in China, where almost all App promotions are doing ASO (App Store Optimizationg). I think everyone has a general consensus on ASO.

However, after actually contacting some overseas companies, I found that many of them did not understand or had never done ASO. 70%-80% of the overseas traffic was mainly from the two major platforms of Google and Facebook. Many people had no awareness of ASO optimization and did not understand the value of ASO in attracting traffic.

What is even more surprising is that most overseas ASO companies focus on making icons and optimizing titles, and do not even cover keywords.

Among the seven major overseas markets, the United States, as a mature, high-paying market, is naturally the first to be affected. Below I will take the United States as an example to talk about the techniques for gaining volume in overseas markets.

How big is the difference in understanding of ASO between China and the United States?

The products launched in China have made great use of keywords, with keyword coverage reaching nearly 20,000. However, American products do not pay enough attention to keyword optimization.

The fewer keywords you cover, the fewer opportunities for natural exposure you have. The difference between the two is huge. This shows that China and the United States have completely different understandings of ASO, and overseas promotions have not tapped into ASO's traffic at all.

To understand ASO, we need to have three consensuses

First of all, App Store ASO is one of the important ways for App to gain traffic. There are many ways to promote an app. As for the most effective way to gain traffic, our recent domestic research shows that information flow advertising, KOL and influencer cooperation + topic planning, and app store ASO optimization rank in the top three.

ASO is similar to SEO. We all know that not all companies on the PC side do SEM promotion. Some companies can bring in a lot of traffic just by doing SEO.

For example, why can we find the official website of Baijing Overseas when searching for "App going overseas" and "Game going overseas" on Baidu? That’s because Baijingchuhai’s SEO is well done, the website has a high weight, and it ranks high in searches under relevant keywords.

It is these hot overseas words that bring massive traffic to Baijing. Do a good job in ASO and make your own App weight very good, just like SEO can bring a steady stream of traffic to the brand.

Secondly, there are three traffic entrances to the app store: recommendation, rankings, and search. ASO optimization mainly focuses on the optimization of rankings and search, which account for more than 85-90% of the total traffic distributed by the app store (of which search accounts for 65%-70%).

Most of the time people find and download your product through keyword searches. On mobile devices, people usually search for words, so word optimization is more important on mobile devices. Imagine that if all your related keywords can be ranked high, you can get enough exposure and get more new additions.

Third, the ultimate goal of ASO is to acquire more natural users. ASO helps apps gain higher exposure in app stores, improves product keyword coverage and keyword search rankings, and thus increases product traffic and download conversion rates. In general, it helps expose products and gain more natural users.

If more keywords are not covered, or even if they are covered but the keyword rankings are particularly low, a lot of traffic will be lost.

Some people say that I only need to use Search Ads to increase sales in the Apple App Store. Imagine that you have only done ASM, and the store shows it to you, but it still depends on whether the user is willing to click on the ad.

If you are not shown it, there will be no chance of exposure under this word. Generally, our clients use ASO+ASM in combination, just like most clients do SEO+SEM combination.

How to optimize through ASO

Get more exposure and organic volume in the app store?

Currently, there are two main means of attracting traffic through ASO optimization:

The first is to optimize metadata through the developer backend, including App screenshots, main and sub-titles, promotional text, application description, 100 characters, to improve keyword coverage. Metadata is usually created by yourself, or you can ask a service provider to help you create 100 characters.

The second is to optimize the list and search through the trial platform (high-quality, massive real user points wall), improve the keyword and list rankings, and thus obtain more natural volume.

No matter what means are used for optimization, we must understand the underlying logic of keyword search. Next, we will focus on how to attract traffic in the app store through ASO optimization.

1. Understand search popularity

If we want to do keyword search optimization, we must first understand the search popularity of the word (generally 0-12000). The higher the popularity, the more times it is searched and the greater the traffic. 4605 generally represents an average daily search volume of once, so words with a search volume ≥4605 are considered effective keywords. The more popular the words, the greater the competition. If a word has not been searched for a long time, its popularity will drop to 0.

Sometimes it is also necessary to determine whether the popularity of a word is too high. The inflated popularity may be due to fierce competition for a word. The competition for ASO is fierce, which pushes up the popularity, resulting in inflated keyword popularity, while the actual natural volume is not large.

To judge popularity, you can compare words on multiple platforms, such as Baidu Index, Weibo popularity, etc., to see whether the keywords are really popular, or whether the growth rate of popularity corresponds to the actual situation.

2. Understand the impact of keywords on weight

We also need to understand the factors affecting keyword coverage and their weights, which will be of great help in actual operations.

The general weights are as follows: main title and subtitle account for 40%, 100 characters account for 30%, developer name accounts for 5-10%, and others: such as app description and comments, account for 10-20%.

Generally speaking, the main title has a larger weight, while the subtitle has an average weight; the weight also needs to be cultivated and gradually increased to achieve better results. Keyword creation requires long-term iteration, not a one-time thing. Through long-term optimization, it can cover tens of thousands.

In addition, when doing keyword optimization, you can drive the desired words by using related words, and the overall weight improvement will drive the overall word improvement.

In overall optimization, we should pay attention to saving space, ensuring that important words appear and have a high natural weight, and pay special attention to localization. Now many products are either going overseas or paying attention to going overseas, so when setting keywords, we should consider adapting to the habits of users in the issuing country.

Secondly, we need to understand the factors that affect keyword weight, which are generally divided into the following categories:

• User weight: new users > paying users > low-frequency download users > ordinary users > fake users;
• Time weight: recent downloads > historical downloads;
• Search ranking weight: General: Title > Developer > 100 characters > Comments;
• Special search ranking weight: Depending on Apple's adjustment cycle, the degree to which each factor affects the product will change;
• Account: The developer’s company account > personal account, and adding core keywords to the company account will help increase the keyword weight.

In addition, the reason for the decrease in weight after the version update: keyword replacement caused some keywords that were ranked relatively high and could attract a lot of traffic to drop out of the list, and the decrease in total downloads led to an overall decrease in the weight of the APP.

Many people are concerned about the weight of comments. Generally speaking, the number of comments has an impact on keyword coverage. Comments contain keywords (brand words, long-tail words), and the volume of comments affects keyword coverage.

In addition, it is not recommended to post comments automatically as it will bring risks. For example, being low on the list is safer, but being high on the list is very unsafe and you may be cleared from the list.

3. Make a good title and 100 characters

The title is the most important for keyword search optimization. Some products can increase coverage by continuously optimizing the keywords in the title. In addition to the title, 100 characters are the most important.

When we make 100 characters, we must first fully understand the product, select 5-6 competing products, and understand the coverage of competing product keywords. Then, we analyze the keywords with high popularity and high ranking, filter out the words with high popularity or large volume for classification, and finally arrange and combine the classified keywords according to popularity (put high-weight keywords in front) and then through word grouping, word expansion, and word modification, try to fission out more keywords to form 100 characters.

Below is a keyword table that you can use as a reference when writing 100 characters.

In the process of writing 100 characters, we summarized the following points:

• Apple's automatic keyword matching has greatly increased the number of App keyword coverage, allowing important words to enter the top 100 and enter the score wall.
• Generally speaking, in the localized language, core industry words are placed at the front, competitive product words with high relevance are placed in the middle, and other types of products used by precise product users are placed in the middle and back, with post-nouns added (core keywords at the front + core industry words + core competitive products + highly relevant and popular industry words + highly relevant and popular competitive product words + simultaneously downloaded products + currently relevant hot words);
• For words that need to be emphasized and increased in weight, you can put them in front of each region when filling them out to increase their weight;
• Pay attention to the postpositions in each region to increase coverage;
• Pay attention to carefully observe the product and find out the core words of the product, industry words and other keywords that are highly relevant to the product;
• Try to save character space to cover more keywords and pay attention to fluency;

5. Play with offer wall search optimization

ASO keyword ranking optimization through the points wall mainly refers to increasing the search ranking through "search download + open trial play", and maintaining the activity of new searches and search users in the later stage.

How to optimize keyword ranking? It is mainly divided into three stages.

Early stage of optimization: when the natural volume is small, use keyword coverage optimization + focus on long-tail words; when the natural volume is large, use keyword coverage optimization + focus on industry words, competitor words, etc.

Mid-term optimization: Based on experience, select keywords with high volume and focus on their maintenance. Focus on industry terms, competitor terms, etc., and expand the effective keyword database through multiple rounds of coverage optimization.

Optimization mature stage: further improve the ranking of effective keywords, increase attention to competitor words and popular words, and try to expand more keywords with volume for optimization from existing core words, competitor words, popular words, or user groups. Form a more favorable keyword matrix.

The effect of App brand words in bringing volume cannot be ignored. At any stage of optimization, it is best to maintain the position of brand words and take measures such as complaints immediately when infringement is discovered.

Compared with the fierce competition in domestic ASO, the situation in the United States is completely different. With very little measurement, the effect of improving keyword rankings can be achieved.

The earlier ASO is done, the higher the value. This is true in China and the United States. In Aiyingli's overseas product optimization, many 5,000+ popular keywords can bring hundreds of volumes. If dozens of high-quality quantifiers are optimized, thousands of high-quality new additions can be obtained every day.

As can be seen from the figure below, after a period of optimization, a certain keyword finally maintained the second place by utilizing the natural volume obtained every day, and continued to bring in new additions every day.

In fact, the subsequent effects of ASO optimization (including improvement of keyword coverage and App weight) are much better than Search Ads. Moreover, ASO in the United States is currently in its bonus period: the optimization scale is not large, but the effect is very obvious.

It can be said that more and more people have begun to pay attention to overseas ASO traffic. The products we connect to include e-commerce, life, finance, social networking, education, games, etc.

Taking games as an example, the picture below shows the optimization of a certain product for the stickman keyword. After a period of optimization, the product was promoted to the first place under stickman.

Subsequently, the product's ranking rose.

As of now, globally, the United States is by far the largest market in terms of user spending and downloads on the iOS App Store, followed by China, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

In terms of volume, there are not many teams paying attention to ASO in the United States. In most areas, there is no competition. Even for the teams that pay attention to ASO, most of them stay at the basic optimization. There is still a lot of room for the ASO tool that has been fully verified in China: the points wall gameplay.

When it comes to ASO of the points wall, CP is particularly concerned about security issues. Aiyingli has optimized thousands of products in China, and has optimized hundreds of products in the United States so far, including applications and games, without any security issues.

In other words, positive ASO is absolutely safe (positive ASO includes but is not limited to: main and sub-title optimization, keyword coverage, icon, screenshots and description and other basic optimizations, buying volume marketing to rush to the rankings, real user points wall optimization, real person comment optimization).

6 ASO combined with promotional activities to generate more new

In the figure below, the product wants to carry out a fission activity, which requires the product to rank first in the free overall list. Through trial platform optimization, the product ranks first in the free overall list the night before the activity, and cooperates with the fission activity on the second day to bring in massive new additions.

What this case tells us is that ASO can be combined with App promotion, including brand promotion, KOL promotion, fission activities and so on.

When you have a big promotion, such as influencer promotion on YouTube and Tik Tok, it is recommended to rank your app before the event so that users can search and download it during the event. Otherwise, you will do the promotion but customers cannot find you, but search for your competitor and download it. That would be very embarrassing.

Therefore, when we do ASO, we should not do it alone, but plan it in the overall context of App promotion. First, we should include ASO as one of the channels for continuous volume growth. Secondly, we should combine ASO with other promotions to achieve traffic fission.

Conclusion

Doing ASO means continuously improving the weight of your App in the app store, and ultimately catering to the needs of the store so that you perform better in the store. The store will then give you more exposure and better rankings, thereby acquiring more natural users.

What is traffic dividend? It's nothing more than information asymmetry! Although ASO has been mastered in China, it is a traffic gameplay that is ignored by 80% of CPs going overseas.

Taking the overseas expansion of games as an example, three types of games are currently very popular: hyper-casual games, SLGs, and elimination games. In fact, the distribution costs of heavy games are particularly high (this is why casual games and small games have become popular overseas in the past two years).

Compared with gaining traffic domestically, the cost of gaining traffic overseas is very high. In this case, overseas game exports should pay more attention to cost-effective traffic-attracting skills such as ASO.

In fact, from August last year to now, Aiyingli has been in continuous cooperation with its invested clients. Through continuous optimization, the clients' products have always been ranked in the top three for some keywords, continuously bringing traffic to the products.

The information gap is terrible. Some people don’t know how to operate ASO, while others have already attracted enough traffic on it.

Author: Sister Xi

Source: Aiyingli