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We spent the last 2 weeks analyzing the intricacies of the App Store rankings, and here are the results. Questions more than welcome :)
Nice bit of data mining but the data doesn't seem quite right -- an unusual balance of foreign keywords that seems quite surprising to me at least (look at "Smurfs' Village" for instance)?
This is because apple's search has approximate match, so a word like "historiska" will cause the smurfs village to be found if they used the word "history" in their keywords. For example, try searching in us store for "historiska centex" - it will find smurf's village. Also, some apps seem to simply use Spanish words as well, for example google uses "busca", which is Spanish for search if I'm not mistaken. In u.s app store search for "google busca" will find google
I'm on mobile, sorry for formatting etc :)
The article says that the app store ranking algorithm is more or less known and is linking to the following presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial
Which does not actually say anything about the actual algorithm, just tips and tricks for indie apps and SEO.
It would be the same as saying the Google algorithm is known and then link to some SEO tricks.
Perhaps the link to the presentation wasn't too fortunate.
The app store ranking algorithm is quite well known, and the presentation also includes information about it. In brief - first go the apps with search query in title/publisher name/in-app purchase names, then apps with search query in keywords. The sales are used as a tiebreaker.
The problem is in the details & special cases. And that's what we more or less figured out :)
I have still no clue how you guys are pulling this off. are you spidering descriptions of apps inside the marketplace? maybe look for similar keywords in different languages? or do you have actual access to search queries?
In short (i'm on mobile) we're guessing the keywords an then verifying them with apple.
verifying them with apple = typing them in to iTunes?
We've been working on a similar idea for a few months now, and have some pretty solid data and sophisticated algorithms which are now giving us quite reasonable insights. We support iOS App Store and Android Market. We want to really focus on how to get better at organic distribution within the app stores (e.g. what keywords should I focus on based on my competition and, most importantly, where the search volume is in the app stores).
TechCrunch wrote about it a couple weeks ago and since then we've been on a tear (thousands of signups representing tens of thousands in monthly revenue): http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/aso-app-store-optimization-...
App Store Optimization (ASO) is a big deal today, and is going to be a HUGE deal shortly. The growth of mobile is just too much, too fast for search not to become massively important. You can see Apple bet on this fact with its acquisition of Chomp recently.
Even more broadly, there are too many players in the mobile app ecosystem who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through various paid means, but not enough (virtually none) who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through organic (unpaid) means. Yet this is exactly where the vast majority of downloads come from.
We want to focus on the organic side of app distribution: search, rankings, social/sharing, earned media, web landing pages, etc. All things that help app marketers promote their apps without paying per download. Marketing channels that really scale. It's the SEO/social/viral channels for mobile.
Check out our product at: http://www.mobiledevhq.com/aso
And always feel free to email me with any questions, ever: iseff@appstorehq.com
This sounds like a pitch more than a comment. How do you differ from Appcodes?
Thanks for the reply iseff, it's always nice to hear from the competition :)
I totally agree that ASO is going to get huge. There is also an interesting "fight of tools" coming up, as there are many ways to organize the whole process, and no "right one" discovered yet.
For example our tool (http://www.AppCod.es) has a totally different interface from yours, and we offer a different set of functionalities (like for example the prediction tool and the keyword guessing module), while of course there is plenty that we can learn from you :)
What I also think is that a good tool should not only track your position in the store, but also help - at least a little bit - with your PR actions. Suggest & teach you how to get the word out about your app.
Cheers! :)
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-stor...
Poker games have some weird results, like having numbers for keywords. Is this some way of gaming the system or a bug?
http://www.appcod.es/appsearch/poker
More like an "artifact" :) You can actually find the poker apps by using these weird keywords, but I doubt they appear in the keyword list.
In case of the apps with in-apps our system cannot distinguish between a keyword from the in-app, and a keyword from the keyword list. Also, Apple uses fuzzy matching, so if a poker app has an in-app like "Stack of 22,000 chips", our system may try to guess that one of the keywords is "22ch".
Finally - usually the big players don't use keywords for promotion, but the more traditional PR techniques. It's interesting to watch their keywords, but it's far more interesting to see how the little players (i.e. your competition) perform.
Interesting. Thanks for the response.
Sounds great - but how can I check if it works, before opening a real account?
Try it here: http://www.appcod.es/appsearch/
Interesting. I checked their guess of keywords against one of my apps. They guessed 13 keywords for my app. 5 of their guesses are most assuredly not in our keyword list.
However, of the remaining 8, 5 of them are pretty general keywords (that most of our competitors use.)
But the really interesting thing is, three of our keywords that were guessed are ones we consider "proprietary" as they relate to unique features of our app, that our competitors are not using.
That's a pretty impressive result. You got some that I think no human would likely figure out. But you also had some guesses that are way off the mark.
Very interesting!
Thanks :)
Checked a few games for which I know what the keywords are.
I would not say it is completely of the mark, for all games it guessed 1-2 keywords correctly (out of 10-15 it suggested). Long way to go.
Can you send the keywords/games which didn't work to support@appcod.es? And how did you check whether the keywords worked? This result seems below our average.