Even bare-minimum ASO strategies can give you an 87 percent lift. And skipping it means your app will sink, plain and simple. Learn how to step up your ASO game in our latest VB Live event, featuring VB Insight analysts and key takeaways from our latest in-depth ASO report.
“ASO is huge, and if you don’t do this right, you’re wasting your time,” says Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst at MobileGroove. “I don’t know what you’re doing in the app industry if you’re not doing this.”
Why is ASO essential? Because there are over 1,800 apps added to just the iOS app store every day, and that means you need to work to rise to the top, or you’ll disappear at the bottom of the heap.
“If I can’t find you, I cannot download you, I cannot engage with you, I can’t buy your stuff,” Salz says. “If you’re going to pour all of this money into your app and the quality of the experience and then you don’t use ASO so that you can be found and downloaded and enjoyed by your target audience, that’s a complete disconnect.”
But it’s not just ASO anymore. The days of meeting the tablestakes-minimum of getting some relevant keywords into your app store listing is long gone.
“It’s really about optimizing an app experience, which is just as important as optimizing a brand experience or a business experience,” Salz explains. “Once you have my attention as a consumer, as a user, I’m going to be continually fading in and out of engagement. So if you want to get my attention again, you need to update your app store presence consistently and continually.”
In other words, ASO is really AMO. Optimizing your presence on the app store is the first huge and mandatory step in the much larger strategy of app marketing optimization. You have to get it right on the app store to get your foot in the door, and continue to get it right after the download.
“We now all understand that a download is not a KPI, and we all understand that an install is not a KPI,” says Salz. “We’re going for the full nine yards; we’re going for ongoing engagement and we’re going for lifetime value, which was completely foreign to the app industry just a year ago.”
And that’s true whether it’s lifetime value in the form of in-app purchases, or lifetime loyalty of the customer who keeps your app on their phone and uses it every day.
The full story of app marketing optimization is how app developers — especially the smaller developers with a smaller budget, or who are just starting out — can gain a real foothold and actually compete. The market already seems impossibly crowded and impossible to really crack, especially when something considered table stakes — getting highly searched keywords — is already prohibitively expensive.
“It looks really crowded and really fierce,” Salz says. “So we’ll have to think of other approaches to take advantage of the long tail opportunities that are being left over. There is a lot of opportunity. We’re just gong to have to frame it differently, understand it differently, and approach it differently.”
“I’m still very optimistic about it,” she adds.
For more key best practices, highlights from the latest VB Insight report diving into ASO, and can’t-miss ASO insights from super-analyst Stewart Rogers, join our latest interactive VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
In this VB Live event, you’ll:
- Learn why ASO is fundamental to the success of any app
- Familiarize yourself with the pillars of solid ASO strategy
- Leverage technology to increase your lifetime user value
- Think beyond keywords for your search strategies
Speakers:
- Trey Stout, CTO and Co-founder, ScribbleChat and Handwriting.io
- Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
- Peggy Anne Salz, Chief Analyst, MobileGroove
- Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat