4 Ways to Monitor Performance of All Your Ranked App Store Keywords

Monitoring your keyword performance is crucial for any app marketer. If you’re updating your app’s metadata without tracking the impact, you’re missing a huge part of the story.

With limited character space on the App Store and Google Play, every keyword in your metadata significantly impacts your app’s visibility and discoverability.

Without monitoring, you’re essentially flying blind—unable to determine if your keyword strategy is working or needs adjustment.

This is where our keyword monitoring tools come into play. AppTweak offers powerful features to monitor visibility in four simple steps:

1. Get an overview of all ranked keywords: Monitor the performance of all your ranked keywords with a comprehensive summary report.
2. Monitor visibility history: Track key metrics like installs, impressions, and overall visibility over time.
3. Identify the cause of changes: Understand which keywords drive the most organic growth and react to those that aren’t performing well.
4. Check your brand vs. generic installs: Determine how many installs come from brand vs. generic (ASO) keywords and compare this data to your competitors.

Once you’ve mastered these steps, monitoring your keyword performance will be a breeze. In this blog, we’ll detail how to monitor your app store keywords with AppTweak.

1. All Ranked Keywords: Get a quick overview of performance

The most efficient way to understand your (or your competitors’) visibility on keywords is with the All Ranked Keywords report.

All Ranked Keywords analyzes our database of millions of keywords, helping you make sense of your organic rankings and installs performance.

Specifically, the report covers all keywords for which your app ranked at least one day in the last 13 months. AppTweak automatically displays all your ranked keywords so you don’t need to manually add any, eliminating the risk of overlooking important search terms.

Given the vast amount of data, we filter out any keyword that has never had a volume higher than 5 in the past year. This ensures the All Ranked Keywords report focuses on relevant keywords that drive traffic to your app.

Learn more about the All Ranked Keywords report

Once we gather an app’s ranked keywords and fetch all their metrics and KPIs, we build your report. It consists of three main blocks:

• Keyword History: Monitor changes in organic installs, total keywords, and overall visibility from all the keywords your app is ranking for. Break this analysis down to understand how much visibility comes from different rankings, volumes, and keyword types.
• Overview of Ranked Keywords: Explore how many of your installs and keywords come from different ranking positions, search volumes, and brand vs. generic keywords.
• Keyword Table: Examine changes in your keyword performance by selecting two dates to identify impacted keywords and compare your (and competitors’) installs and rankings in one view.

2. Monitor visibility, installs & impressions over time

While All Ranked Keywords provides a snapshot of your overall keyword performance, our “Monitor Performance” report offers the same insights for your pre-built keyword lists.

Read this Keyword Research guide for tips to find the best keywords for ASO

First, you’ll want to get a global view of your visibility in the store.

The visibility score indicates how visible your app is in keyword search results compared to your competitors. Your app’s visibility score increases if you rank high for many different keywords.

For example, imagine I’m Triple Match 3D.

“Match”-related keywords are particularly important for my app, as they drive a lot of organic installs from search. By filtering my report for keywords containing “match,” I can more precisely track installs from my top-priority keywords.

As a result, we see below that Triple Match 3D almost tripled its organic installs from “match” keywords on July 16—while its main competitor, Match Factory, saw installs significantly decrease. Notably, this change occurred right after a new version release of Triple Match 3D.

3. Find the cause of changes in keyword performance

Next, it’s time to figure out what happened between these dates to understand what type of keywords work best and worst for your app and competitors.

The table below allows us to investigate the underlying cause of Triple Match 3D’s increased installs and impressions.

By comparing keyword rankings from July 15 to July 19, we see the app improved its rankings on the keywords “match 3” (going from #2 to #1) and “match” (going from #4 to #3). This translated into an extra 822 monthly installs based on the app’s increase in daily installs!

In late June, we saw that our visibility and installs returned to former levels. Looking at Past Search Results for the keyword “match 3,” we deduced this was because Gummy Drop stole the #1 organic position back on June 28.

These insights could be key in our app store marketing strategy, informing new ideas for metadata updates, Apple Search Ads, and more.

Learn how to find keywords for ASA campaigns

4. Check installs from brand vs. generic keywords

Finally, when monitoring your keyword performance in the app stores, don’t forget to check how many of your installs come from brand vs. generic keywords:

• Brand Keywords: These are keywords related to your brand, helping you understand brand awareness and strength in a specific country.
• Generic Keywords: These are broader search terms related to your app’s purpose, functionality, category, etc. Improving your performance for these can help you tap into new user segments and increase reach.

For example, we see that Triple Match 3D receives fewer installs from this specific keyword list compared to its competitor, Match Factory.

Diving into where these installs come from, Match Factory drives a lot more traffic from the generic keywords in my list. On the other hand, the branded keywords are much more valuable to Triple Match 3D, driving more than 3x more brand installs than to Match Factory.

Conclusion

For ASO Managers, effective keyword monitoring is not just a best practice; it’s a necessity. With AppTweak, track all your ranked keywords, stay on top of any changes, and get unique insights into the keywords driving your organic growth.

Make data-driven ASO decisions, fine-tune your metadata, and outperform competitors with advanced keyword monitoring tools

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