ASO optimization techniques and ideas necessary for APP promotion

I often hear friends complain, how can they promote their products with such little money given by their boss? We don’t have any promotion budget, but we still have to meet the company’s KPI. My boss gave me 100,000 yuan to let me try out the channels . I’m begging for help from an expert in recommending good channels! Can someone tell me how to do ASO optimization ?

The original meaning of ASO was the optimization of App on IOS, but later it gradually evolved into the optimization of App on IOS, Android and various channels. On the IOS side, because Apple's App Store dominates the vast majority of the market, general optimization strategies are targeted at the App Store market. On the Android side, there are dozens of large and small markets such as 360, App Store , Xiaomi, etc. The rules of each market are not only the same, but also the optimization of IOS and Android is very different.

Today, let’s talk about the ASO optimization techniques and ideas for promotion through these two channels .

IOS optimization

In recent years, it is not uncommon to see apps that have entered everyone's field of vision by relying on their super keyword setting capabilities. There was the legend of Himalaya , which "found it wherever you search for it", and then there was the story of Niuguwang, which "mastered the stock keywords with 10,000 popularity". This made the operation partners distracted and painstakingly studied shortcuts, hoping that one day they could shine with keywords.

Here, I want to remind everyone that only by laying a solid foundation for keyword optimization can you achieve success. Instead of delving into shortcuts, it is better to take some time to review whether your keyword settings comply with the rules. Now let’s talk about how to quickly complete the keyword optimization of an APP.

1. Six basic principles

Keyword weight ranking:

APP Title > Keywords > APP Description > IAP item Name/Description .

That is, app name > keyword tag > description > in-app purchase name or description.

APP Title and Keywords duplication: When the same keyword appears in the APP Title and Keywords, the weight cannot form an additive effect and will only be counted once. Therefore, if the same keyword appears in the Title, it should not appear again in the Keywords to avoid wasting characters.

Use subtitles to strengthen keywords: APP Title uses the form of main title plus subtitle. In addition to introducing the function of APP, the subtitle should also focus on mentioning more keywords. For example, the subtitle of Xiaokaxiu, "The most popular lip-syncing APP, a shooting artifact with built-in beauty and makeup functions", mentions keywords such as "performance", "acting", "beauty", "makeup", and "artifact", which can be said to be thoughtful.

Rotational tactics: Referring to the weight ranking in Principle 1, we can optimize each core keyword in turn when updating the version. When the existing core keywords are ranked high, other core keywords can be selected for further optimization.

The closer the keyword is to the front in the Keywords list, the greater its weight. Anyone who has done SEO optimization knows this.

There is no limit to the number of words in the description, but it is recommended to control it within 300-500 words, ensuring that the core keywords appear 8-12 times. It is best to include the company's contact information, such as the official account , corporate Weibo account, customer QQ/QQ group, etc.

Three basic concepts

(1) Relevance: The relevance between a specific keyword and your app and target users . Irrelevant keywords are unlikely to generate effective conversions .

(2) Difficulty: The intensity of competition for a particular keyword. The higher the value, the more difficult it is to rank in the top.

(3) Traffic : The more times a specific keyword is searched, the higher the corresponding value will be, which is what we often call a high-heat word.

If there is a problem with the settings of the above three dimensions or the APP itself does not have significant new growth, it is normal for the keyword ranking to be outside the top 30. When chasing high-frequency words, you must analyze them in combination with the current status of the APP.

Here is a set of integrated formulas for key keywords: high relevance + moderate difficulty/traffic + front placement = keywords attracting high downloads.

How to operate

Now that we have looked at the six basic principles and three basic concepts, what is our operational approach for solving the above concepts?

(1) How to choose highly relevant keywords?

Discover ideal highly relevant keywords along the lines of brand words-related words- competitive words -competitive keywords.

a. Competitive word query: Through ASO optimization tools , search for industry hot words, such as "sea shopping", you can find out what are the competitive products of the keyword?

b. Related word search: discover more words and be careful to filter out low-quality words.

c. Competitive product keyword query: Add competitors through ASO optimization tools and analyze the keywords of competitors.

(2) How to choose keywords of reasonable difficulty?

When setting keywords, if you can aim for a few "dark horse words" with low difficulty and high traffic, you will definitely get twice the result with half the effort. How to analyze whether the difficulty of keywords is reasonable?

Here, I give two evaluation dimensions: one is the number of apps related to the keyword and the popularity of the app itself; the other is the popularity of the keyword.

For example, for the keyword "overseas shopping", the top five rankings are Mogujie /Mitao/Bo Luomi Global Shopping/ Yangmatou /Congongtao. Considering the popularity of overseas shopping, which is over 8,700 and shows a continuous upward trend, it is very difficult to optimize it.

(3) How to choose keywords with appropriate traffic?

Traffic can be comprehensively judged by combining the ASOU index and Baidu mobile index.

The trends of the ASOU Index and the Baidu Index are different. Generally speaking, the Baidu Index will have an impact on the ASOU Index. Therefore, we need to use the ASOU Index to evaluate the present and use the Baidu Index to predict the future.

Taking global shopping as an example, a large part of the reason for the increase in popularity of this word is that it has been hyped up by various apps. The actual search popularity is not very high. Operators must have a clear mind when doing global shopping, otherwise blindly optimizing such keywords with inflated popularity will not be worth the effort.

（4）How to track keywords?

The data that need to be paid attention to in keyword tracking are: APP ranking and keyword popularity. Use tools like ASOU (to track historical keyword popularity) and App Annie (to track historical keyword rankings).

You can add the keywords you want to track in ASOU, and based on the historical changes in popularity, you can preliminarily predict how much traffic the keywords can bring.

App Annie mainly tracks the ranking trends of keywords. You can add the keywords you want to track and pin them to the top. By playing with the tools of various platforms, you can maximize your work efficiency.

4. Continue to improve keyword rankings

After the keyword settings were completed, the rankings also improved a lot, but as a young man with ideals, I cannot be satisfied with this, but must continue to optimize and improve, right?

So the question is: What methods can be used to continuously improve rankings? Here, I will further talk to you about some practical experiences on how to quickly improve keyword rankings on Ma Haixiang’s blog.

(1) Keywords and comments

If you want to increase the number of keyword coverage or increase the ranking of existing keywords, an effective way is to put these keywords in the comments. Keywords that appear at a high density in comments will, firstly, increase the chance of being included, and secondly, improve the ranking of existing keywords.

This directly leads to many operations partners being busy exchanging reviews with various companies all day long. It is understood that many people exchange reviews for the five-star rating. I would like to remind everyone that when exchanging reviews, ask the other party to include keywords as well. You will find that the rankings of these keywords will be greatly improved.

This raises another question: how many comments will have a significant impact on the ranking? Since the popularity of each keyword is different, the quality of the comments is also different, and the daily additions of each APP are different, so the scale also fluctuates.

But I can give you a simple reference. For keywords with a popularity below 6,500, if you make 10 to 20 comments a day, the ranking will be significantly improved. For keywords with a popularity above 6,500, if you make 20 to 50 comments a day, the keyword ranking will be significantly improved.

(2) Keywords and long-tail words

Friends often ask this question: When setting up, should we choose words with high popularity or words with moderate popularity? Based on the practical experience of ASO, the answer to this question depends on the specific status of the APP. If the daily increase in your own APP is ideal or the promotion funds are sufficient, you can choose these high-correlation and high-popularity words for key optimization; otherwise, I personally recommend choosing words with moderate popularity and a strong correlation with the APP.

Of course, you can also optimize in another way: optimize the long-tail words of high-heat keywords. For example, travel apps can focus on optimizing long-tail words such as "nearby tours", "weekend tours", and "local tours". First, it may gain good traffic, and second, it will help improve the ranking of high-heat words.

This is the second point I want to talk about today - by optimizing the long-tail words of the keywords you want to achieve, and by improving the weight and ranking of the long-tail words, you can indirectly improve the weight and ranking of the keywords you want.

(3) Keyword traffic

What should we do when you have done all the above optimization methods to the extreme and the keyword ranking still does not meet expectations? This problem must be faced by many guys all the time. When the existing optimization method becomes everyone's consensus, the optimization effect will be weakened. What needs to be done at this time is to find new optimization methods, which gave birth to the more mainstream optimization method in the industry: volume optimization.

By guiding users to search for specified keywords to download the APP, a large number of search download activations can be accumulated in a short period of time to quickly increase the weight of the keywords, thereby affecting the ranking of the keywords.

The core of traffic optimization lies in the authenticity of the traffic. Judging from the rules of AppStore, the longer the iOS account is used, the higher the corresponding account weight will be, and the better the optimization effect will be. Otherwise, if a batch of new iOS accounts are imported, the effect will not be significant. If you encounter the above problems during the optimization process, you need to keenly doubt the authenticity of the traffic.

Android ASO optimization

There are two types of companies regarding their promotional capital investment: spending money and throwing money away; for different investment methods, we should also pay attention to using different promotion strategies . The company now gives us a very small budget to carry out the project. If we complete the project, what we are doing now will definitely be the most tangible growth for our future entrepreneurship and development.

The latter is that the company is very rich and gives you money to develop the current project, and it is successful. However, with this kind of experience, you may see more things and be exposed to more things (such as channels, resources, etc.). Both can help each person's development in their own way. Here are the similarities between the two.

As we all know, the general downloading behavior of users is to go to the App Market to find it. Currently, the penetration of smartphones in the country is basically saturated, and the novice users in the past have also been upgraded to mature smartphone users. Therefore, the advertising effect on the App Market is not as good as in the past. Communicating with friends from BAT further confirms this fact. The bowl is so big and the porridge is so much. It depends on how much you can drink. Let's take you into the dry content below.

1. Inflate the volume

Each application market has a classification column called “latest” and “hottest” (soaring). It is impossible to occupy the top 5 rankings here. App stores began to develop this business opportunity in the second half of 2014, because before that it was possible to get into the top 5 by brushing the charts , and third-party companies could help clients do it at a very low cost. The market discovered that there was such a sum of money that they could not make! Can’t make money! Can’t make money!

So the App Market stopped doing that and started to work on a new advertising mechanism. Now you can display it in the App Market by paying! In the past, the cost of brushing the rankings for a day was about two to three hundred yuan. Now, if you put the advertisement on the CPC or CPD basis, you can easily get about 1,000 clicks a day. You no longer have to worry about not making money in the category!

You are smart enough to realize that if you can’t get the top 5, then you can get 6~26, right?

The method of brushing the “latest” is very simple. As long as you submit a new version and it passes the review, you can quickly be ahead of it. As for how long it can last, it depends on luck. When there are a lot of updates, you may be able to stay ahead for 2-3 hours. This is what I did in the past. I submitted updates every Friday afternoon when I was about to get off work. The reviewers would clock out and leave after reviewing the products submitted when they were about to get off work. On Saturdays and Sundays, I can always be in the first two screens of the latest ones!

The experience accumulated after years of hard study on how to increase the "hottest" (soar) is as follows: weight protects downloads, activations (usage), and positive reviews. Downloads can be increased, positive reviews can be increased, and activations can be purchased. Therefore, by increasing downloads + increasing positive reviews + purchasing a little CPD or CPC, the rankings can be increased quickly.

I won’t tell you that a new product can get full stars if it gets 600 reviews a month, and that maintaining a dozen positive reviews every day is enough for a shopping mall APP. After all, the reputation of the mall products is very important. I would not tell you that you can reach the top position of product keywords with 300,000 to 500,000 downloads a month. In addition, there are two other effects that can reflect the ranking: associated keywords.

PS: There are several types of keywords: Competitive keywords: Competitive product names such as: Hand Slip Comics, Rage Comics, Booka Comics, etc.; Hot keywords: comics; Long-tail keywords: comic serialization, comic editor, comic reader...

I believe that after reading this, you have a preliminary idea of ​​what to do. The user performance acquired in each market is different. Choose the best 2~3 markets to do business with. As the saying goes, you can't chew too much.

Xiaomi Market and OPPO Store are more down-to-earth. As long as the product manager and UI design are dedicated, it is easy to apply for first release and editor recommendation. App Store and Huawei Market are more picky about product appearance, attach importance to the high-end product feeling, and require product operation and UI design to be managed with care.

At present, my product is recommended by different market editors 2~3 times every month, and each recommendation will last for 2~3 days. It attracts 7,000~20,000 downloads every day. I choose the right market, have in-depth communication, and treat every interface person in the market as a friend who runs this product together. They will inadvertently reveal some information, such as what kind of products this category of people likes, what kind of quality experience they hope to have, etc.

After talking about marketing promotion ’s ranking manipulation and obtaining recommended content, let’s talk about promotion between products. Newbies can avoid taking detours by reading this.

2. Exchange

This is the method that everyone thinks of when promoting a product. More than 95% of the traffic I have seen is ineffective. APPs with small volumes will try to deceive APPs with large volumes, but products with large volumes are not stupid and will put forward conditions, such as letting them release their products for a few days to see the real effects before discussing the matter. In the end, the response they often get is "Uncle, your volume is too small, we won't make an appointment!". If you don’t want to make an appointment, then don’t make an appointment. If you don’t think highly of me, I will have my own tricks for you!

I have "Avengers" and APPs of similar size to exchange with myself, and I can often get a lot of them! But they will not tell the truth to each other, for example: there are more than 200,000 daily active users, about 1 million users, etc., even if they give the other party fake data, they will believe it, exchange names and lie, and both sides feel that they should have met each other earlier! Drool...Soon 200,000 users will come and recommend me to be a marketing manager or director, so that I can win the heart of a beautiful, rich and beautiful woman and reach the peak of my life! It was quickly arranged to go online, and then nothing happened.

In fact, exchanging volume is not a free way of cooperation for early stage products. The mentality of cooperating in exchange for volume is very important. Most novice promoters will understand the scenario described above. Junior promoters will consider looking for products with high overlap in user attributes to exchange traffic, and look for products that exchange resources on the homepage to cooperate with. Careful expansion will pay off. Although it is not as effective as advertising, the quality of users obtained is higher. After all, every little bit is still worth it!

Wait until the product has a certain number of users, and the activity and retention rate are close to the big data , then consider exchanging traffic. The effect of exchanging traffic will naturally be twice the result with half the effort. It is not an exaggeration to call the traffic-exchange resources " self-media ", which are various ways to exchange traffic.

In a word, all the above content provides some experience for students who are learning how to promote. You must be sincere in doing promotion. An operator who does not know how to promote is not a good operations manager .

Comments:

APP keyword optimization is tedious and detailed, and you must correct it from time to time and never forget your original intention. Mastering the necessary ASO optimization techniques and operation tools will allow you to quickly find the right direction and become more and more proficient.

Many people exclaim that the era of Apps is over. I think the correct statement should be: the era of rough Apps is over, and the era of refinement has arrived!

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @马海祥 compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map