Since its emergence in 2008, the mobile app market has been growing at an astounding rate. However, most apps uploaded to the app store struggle to gain traction with mobile phone users.
With millions of apps in the major app stores, getting your app discovered is one of the biggest challenges facing mobile app publishers today.
In order to generate revenue, your app needs to be visible to potential customers, downloaded many times, and used by a high number of users. Your apps are more visible in the app store when they rank highly on a wide variety of search terms and maintain a high position in the top charts. There’s only one way to make your app stand out from the competition in the app stores, and that’s via ASO. This is why understanding app store optimization (ASO) is so critical.
What is App Store Optimization (ASO)?
App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of increasing an app’s visibility to organically increase the likelihood of the conversion of app impressions into downloads. ASO is to app store what SEO (search engine optimization) is to web search engines. The former applies to mobile apps, while the latter applies to websites. As store guidelines have become increasingly strict in recent years, ASO has steadily become more relevant. The goal of ASO is to drive more traffic to your app’s page in the app store, download and use them.
Here is our list of the 7 best App Store optimization platforms:
- AppFollow Helps you manage your app’s and game’s data, increase app conversion rate, improve app store rankings and user loyalty.
- AppTweak An all-in-one platform that offers ASO, ad, and market intelligence. It employs machine learning algorithms to provide actionable insights.
- App Annie Intelligence An ASO and data analysis platform that helps organizations and developers make smarter decisions and increase visibility, download, and revenue from the mobile app.
- App Radar Enables you to identify the right keywords that drive quality traffic to your app.
- Storemaven A well-known ASO platform for A/B testing and conversion optimization.
- SplitMetrics Αn ASO platform that helps app publishers to boost organic traffic acquisition, improve conversion rates, increase app installs and learn about their users on the App Store and Google Play.
- Sensor Tower Α mature ASO tool that can help you monitor all aspects of your app’s global storefront, track, test, and optimize keyword strategy, and keep a close eye on your competition.
Choosing the Right ASO Tool for Your Business
The mobile apps market is expected to grow by $ 653.91 billion during 2021-2025. Companies that take advantage of app store optimization will surely benefit from this growth. App store optimization tools help you to reach the right target audience by increasing the visibility and discoverability of your app in the major app stores–Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
With a variety of ASO tools available on the market today, choosing the right one for your app can be challenging. For example, some ASO tools are more focused on keyword optimization, while others may be focused on user review analysis or A/B testing; and there are those that combine all of these features. Therefore, you need to identify your ASO use cases and look specifically for the tools that best address your needs. In this article, we’re going to review the seven best ASO tools in the market. Hopefully, this will guide you in the process of choosing the right one for your business.
The 7 Best App Store Optimization Platforms
1. AppFollow
AppFollow helps you manage your app’s and game’s data, increase app conversion rate, improve app store rankings and user loyalty. AppFollow ASO tools allow you to perform ASO keyword research effectively, improve texts and graphics to grow your app ranking, and increase organic downloads. The tool is supported on App Store, Google Play, Microsoft Store, Mac App Store, and Amazon App Store. AppFollow combines data mining and ASO to provide organizations and developers with all the tools they need for organic user acquisition.
It has features to track popular keywords and changes in keyword positions, conversion rates, and downloads.
Other features and capabilities of AppFollow include:
- Store Performance Index for benchmarking your app overall store performance and detection of the weaknesses for quick fixing
- ASO Dashboards & KPIs for tracking and analyzing KPIs, organic downloads and conversion rates, chart ranking, spikes, and keyword position changes.
- Competitor’s Overview monitors your competitors and keeps up with the critical changes in their products and app rankings.
- Integrates with your favorite help desk applications such as Zendesk, Helpshift, Help Scout, Freshdesk, Intercom, Usedesk, Front, and more
AppFollow price plans include a free plan to monitor two apps in all countries, a Premium plan for mid-sized companies, customized Enterprise plans for large organizations, and a 10-day free trial to enable you to test run the various plans before purchase. In addition, AppFollow has an impressive client list that includes big companies, an excellent indicator of its value.
2. AppTweak
AppTweak is an all-in-one platform that offers ASO, ad, and market intelligence. It employs machine learning algorithms to provide actionable insights. For example, by simply inputting your app, you receive an instant summary of your content with a list of all the improvements you need to make to increase your ASO score. In addition, Apptweak’s ASO intelligence provides developers with keyword research and suggestion tools that help them find relevant keywords for their app, including the difficulty score for keywords which enables you to choose keywords that have the best chance to rank.
Key features and capabilities of AppTweak include:
- Downloads to Reach Top: Provides insights on the number of downloads, including details on your app’s performance.
- Keyword Impact: Provides an advanced opportunity to leverage keyword analysis.
- Competition Monitoring: Monitor your competitors in the context of ranking growth, keyword, distribution, history, and install statistics.
- Market Share Seasonality: Provides you with data to analyze growth per year, top and worst months or days, including visual charts and density map.
- Keyword volume, translations, research, suggestion tool, search popularity, rankings, and install growth.
AppTweak provides several different licensing plans, including a 7-day free trial to enable you to test run before purchase.
3. App Annie Intelligence
App Annie Intelligence is an ASO and data analysis platform that helps organizations and developers make smarter decisions and increase visibility, download, and revenue from the mobile app. App Annie Intelligence combines machine learning and big data for deeper insights and market intelligence to drive business growth and outsmart the competition.
Key features and capabilities of App Annie Intelligence include:
- Optimize ASO: Discover keywords to optimize your app store presence and uncover competitors’ keyword strategies
- Demographics & Behaviour: Gain access to user demographics and analyze cross-app usage patterns, including user retention, downloads, and competitors’ performance.
- Market Data Intelligence: Gain data science-driven insights into the app market, advertising analytics derived from benchmarking data —
- Data Science: Combines big data, machine learning, and AI for deeper mobile market insights
App Annie subscriptions are not one-size-fits-all. Prices and subscriptions are customized to suit your unique needs. App Annie subscriptions are for teams and enterprises. Independent developers are advised to use the free App Annie Connect and the App Annie Intelligence.
4. App Radar
App Radar enables you to identify the right keywords that drive quality traffic to your app. It also helps you understand which factors influence your keyword rankings and conversion rates in App Store and Google Play. In addition, with its localization features, you can find keywords that work in various languages and edit your app for every location according to regional preferences identified by App Radar.
App Radar also provides analysis features that show how your competitors perform on the App Store and Google Play Store and offer the opportunity to strategize based on their ASO and keyword strategy. This helps gain market intelligence and competitive advantage.
Key features and capabilities of App Radar include:
- Analyze your app store rankings: Find and track keywords that are trending, track your app store rank, and visualize any changes
- App analytics: See how your app impressions, downloads, and revenues compare countries and traffic sources.
- Keyword Rankings: Suggestions on which keywords to use in your app store listings and which of them drive more downloads.
- Optimization Score: This allows you to manage app localization and define which updates boost the app’s growth, including the app optimization score
- Ads Intelligence: Know your share of ad impressions, focus on the right keywords to drive traffic, and optimize paid and organic user acquisition.
- Competitors insights: Get and analyze the keyword strategies of your competitor apps, and see when and where they were featured
App Radar’s subscription plans include free, starter, advanced, and expert plans with a free trial to enable you to test run before purchase.
5. Storemaven
Storemaven is a well-known ASO platform for A/B testing and conversion optimization. Storemaven guides you through A/B testing and the various elements to consider for conversion optimization based on actual data. In addition, Storemaven product page testing allows you to do everything that native testing doesn’t so that you can maximize your paid & organic conversion rates. Storemaven provides all the capabilities you need to create product page tests to gauge market demand and pinpoint precisely the messaging that drives each potential customer to download and install.
Storemaven enables you to measure the impact of ASO and report the actual value of your Product Page performance efforts by analyzing your keyword and creative changes over time and measuring their impact on organic and paid.
Key features and capabilities of Storemaven include:
- A/B testing and conversion optimization
- Personalized ASO strategy plan
- Competitor research and analytics
- Data-driven approach
- Test results analysis
Store Maven licensing and price plans are only available on request. However, you can contact the company directly via their website for information about their various subscription plans.
6. SplitMetrics
SplitMetrics is an ASO platform that helps app publishers to boost organic traffic acquisition, improve conversion rates, increase app installs and learn about their users on the App Store and Google Play. With over 30 different experiments available, you can test every element of your app store page, including app name, icon, description, keywords, screenshots, promo video.
SplitMetrics is excellent for monitoring your app store page interactions, A/B testing, and conversion optimization. The ability to test your app store page updates before launching them officially in the app stores means you’re minimizing the risk of a conversion drop due to failed assets. Additionally, knowing which parts of your creative assets perform the best can give you the best indication of what’s going wrong and what you’re getting right.
Key features and capabilities of SpitMetrics include:
- A/B testing: Test icons, screenshots, video preview, description, pricing, or anything else on your app page + Search and Category page.
- App page audit: Сomprehensive app page audit that helps you pinpoint the bottlenecks and growth areas.
- BehaviorKnowing analytics: Get powerful insights into visitor behavior on your app page.
- Competitor research and analytics: Track your app’s conversion in search results when displayed next to your competitors.
- API & 3rd-party integrations: Integrate with your marketing tools for a better ASO performance.
All Split Metrics subscriptions are yearly and prepaid. You can contact the company directly via their website for information about their various price plans.
7. Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower is a mature ASO tool that can help you monitor all aspects of your app’s global storefront, track, test, and optimize keyword strategy, and keep a close eye on your competition. Sensor Tower is focused on helping companies with mobile apps understand and improve their organic user acquisition, analyze their app’s performance, keep up to date with competitors and manage reviews.
The Sensor Tower App Intelligence offers millions of data points that can help you make better decisions when it comes to app store optimization, including the ability to optimize your keyword strategy and analyze your competitors. In addition, the Store Intelligence feature provides a web-based analysis of downloads and revenue estimates for millions of apps, thousands of publishers, and all major countries and categories.
Key features and capabilities of Sensor Tower include:
- App Intelligence: Enables you to drive organic growth, analyze user reviews, daily sales and app usage analytics, category and keyword ranking, detailed analysis on the competition, among others.
- Store Intelligence: Provides accurate download & app revenue estimates across several categories, types of devices, and countries to drive strategic decisions.
- Ad Intelligence: Develop winning user acquisition campaigns with mobile advertising insights and uncover statistics about user acquisition campaigns run by other publishers and app developers.
- Usage Intelligence: Enables you to discover the demographics, number of active users, session metrics, distinguish real growth from noise by following the user journey post app installation.
- Consumer Intelligence: Access unfiltered mobile user retention and engagement data, including usage trends among the audiences of some of the world’s biggest apps.
- Custom Alerts: Receive email or Slack notifications when a competitor launches a new app or adds a new localization, when a publisher hits a new benchmark in downloads or revenue when an app sees a spike in reviews or revenue, and much more.
- Top Charts: A free tool that shows top-performing apps across different categories and countries.