In ASO, the standard way of doing keyword research involves compiling a list of short-head search terms and stuffing them into the indexed assets of the store pages.

At the end of 2018, we introduced the Conversion Rate Optimization Loop. This framework is meant to help ASO practitioners to improve the conversion rate of their app’s store listing through 6 different steps. Looking back at this a couple of months after, we realize that an important step is missing. If you have invested time and energy in researching for experiments and transforming these ideas into hypotheses, you will have gathered an extensive list of things to test. However, we discarded the complexities of the day-to-day optimization workflow: what should you start with? The order in which you will test your experiments, or how you will prioritize them, deserves as much thought as the research itself.

With Google I/O 2019, the biggest update since the new organic acquisition insights is being released on Google Play. One of the most significant innovations is the apparition of custom peer groups to benchmark your ratings and Android Vitals to your main competitors. This empowers developers by helping them know where they should focus their resources to gain a competitive edge.

When optimizing for Google Play and evaluating the impact of their tests, marketers typically monitor their organic data. However, one of Google Play Store Listing Experiments’ main flaw is the inability to segment the users when running a test. It means that the outcome of your test will indicate the overall performance of the tested asset — not its impact on organic installs.

“My keyword rankings are shooting up, my search impressions have never been so high, but my listing doesn’t seem to be able to convert enough of those views into installs”. Should you face this problem today, then you’re reading the right article. There is no doubt that today, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a core component of your ASO efforts.

For the hundreds of shopping apps that flourish at the end of the year, Black Friday, Cyber Week, and the holidays present big opportunities in terms of App Store Optimization. On the other hand, productivity apps for businesses have opposing trends. On the app stores, just like in other marketplaces, demand fluctuates annually per vertical or category.

A glitch in Google Play search results has first been reported by members of the ASO Stack Slack: search results loop in every 5 apps on mobile and every 50 apps on desktop (as shown by TheTool).