Choosing the right GEO for your Application Search Optimization (ASO) efforts is the cornerstone of your success when it comes to promoting apps for Google Play or App Store. In this article, you will learn why is it so and which factors you should consider before promoting an app for a certain GEO.
Why picking the right GEO is important
Better targeting. Knowing your GEO in advance helps to pick the ideal customer segment and cater to their needs specifically — all for the sake of supreme UX and a high Retention Rate.
Controlled competition. Pick your fights for customers wisely. If you are not a seasoned ASO expert, then GEOs with lesser competition is your best bet — it’s easier to enter “new” or “trending” sections in there.
Localization. Besides finding your ideal audience, you can tailor your app to local cultural preferences by tweaking visuals and metadata. Respect like that toward someone’s culture can easily win the favor of the person.
8 steps to pick the best GEO
Research the market. Look for the regions that are interested in your app by monitoring the performance of similar apps. Assess the overall market size, i.e., how much organic traffic your market has. Do your best and see if you can achieve any significant growth of organic traffic.
Analyze the competitors. Find similar apps and see where they perform well. This way, you can pinpoint the countries and cultures that are more likely to interact with your app. Ideally, you should discover their weak points with the SWOT analysis and close these gaps with your own app.
Localize the content. It is best to translate your apps to local languages, especially if they are language-dependent or cater to specific cultural preferences. Either pick the GEO you can work with from the get-go or invest in finding a good translator (localizer). This is especially true for Tier-2 and Tier-3 GEOs, where English might be not the most common language.
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Get to know user behavior. Try to get your hands on the data, concerning user activity, to identify the regions with high engagement and conversion rates. This will help you prioritize GEOs, where your app would perform well.
Learn in-store insights. Much like Instagram, both Google Play and App Store provide insights about top-performing countries. Use this info for your ideal GEO to manifest itself.
Control your budget. Sometimes Tier-1 countries might be unaffordable. Focus on cost-effective GEOs and allocate your resources effectively.
Start testing. Commence with the most prospective GEOs, monitor your campaign performance, and optimize your targeting. It’s not only about excluding underperforming zones, sometimes you may want to expand.
Respect customs and customers. Cultural nuances can be complex, but you have to know all the specifics of the GEO you’re working with to generate the maximum of organic traffic.
How to estimate the market size
To better understand a market and its potential for organic growth, you need to look at the following characteristics:
- Semantic core size of a niche — use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Trends, and any other required resources to identify the most frequent inquiries. These are all the requests that can lead to your app.
- Daily impressions per month — based on the semantic core size above, you should look at the number of daily impressions for search request per month in a given niche.
- App store availability — make sure Google Play/App Store are available for your chosen region.
- Active Android/iOS devices — the number of devices, operating under a certain platform.
Analyze your audience
In order to understand who your target audience is, you should ask yourself and your app the following questions:
- What is the user’s problem to be solved
- Who is the user to utilize your app
- Why should the user utilize it
- How the person uses your app
Write down as many characteristics of your ideal customer as possible: age, gender, location, education level, occupation, marital status, and interests. Don’t forget to specify whether it’s an Android or iOS user — that will directly impact the store you will choose for your ASO.
Android users tend to be more tech-savvy, plus Google Store has less strict moderation rules. iOS users are more into social studies when it comes to education. As for App Store, it strives to provide a seamless experience to its users, which is why the moderation is strict, but the income of both the store and the audience is higher.
Go deeper than that and specify psychological demographics: personality, values, behavior, habits, and lifestyle. This kind of information is harder to collect, but it also delivers much deeper insights. Take the example of Heidi, a leading travel agency, and ask the questions you’re interested in through opt-in forms.
If you’re interested in knowing your audience income level, consider examining GDP, GDP per capita, national income per head, household income per head, and some other economic indicators of your GEO. While these indicators provide you with an approximate idea of how well-off a certain country is, they are not flawless. Which is why you can always ask the people who download your app about their income level via the aforementioned opt-in forms. And while this approach might seem more reactive, i.e., inquiring after the campaign is run — it is far better than nothing.
Analyze your competitors
When it comes to analyzing the competitors, it is best to learn the following metrics:
- Competitor’s ranked keywords — all the words our competitor scores in search ranking
- Estimated downloads — try to get the info on the competitor’s approximate number of downloads. If you learned the market size earlier, you can estimate your potential for organic growth this way by subtracting one indicator from another.
- Reviews & ranking — reading reviews can help you understand what the customers appreciate the most in the app of your competitor. By getting more information like that, you can narrow down your own segment or work over your own product presentation by addressing these values and pain points of potential customers.
Assess the potential for organic growth
It all boils down to subtracting the competitor’s number of installs from the total one. This is a rough approximation of how many installs we can get. Also, make sure to check beforehand if your app is localized already for the GEO you’re working with. The more languages it has — the more keywords you can use for your ASO. As an added bonus, you won’t have to worry too much about UX, since everything is already done for you.
It should also be noted that there was a clash between Epic Games vs. App Store & Google Play. This could give rise to a 3rd alternative of independent developers, who disagree with the financial policy of the giants. The downfall of both app stores seems far-fetched, but the indie developers using their own stores can become a norm one day.
How to boost your app ranking
When you’ve chosen your GEO, there are several things to be addressed to climb up your store rankings. Specifically, optimize your app store page:
- Category: pick your primary and secondary categories. The former will determine the product’s discoverability, while the latter will shape the context and give the users an idea of how your app is related to other products.
- Title: be exact, precise, and memorable — you have only 30 characters.
- Subtitle: summarize the essence of your app succinctly.
- Description: focus on providing exact solutions to user’s problems instead of highlighting product features and competitiveness. It is desirable to use keywords everywhere, but here — it is a must.
Then, make sure to work over your visuals. Don’t forget the specifics of your GEO, and do your best to hone and respect the local cultural specifics:
- Icon: this picture shapes the first impression. Make sure to A/B test everything, but especially the icon of your app.
- Screenshots: focus on UX-related apps and add even more value with some text on top of some images.
- Preview: a 30-second video showing your app in action.
Focus on gathering ratings & reviews, which are social proofs made online. 88% of purchases online are conducted after reading reviews of their peers. You can get ratings and reviews by simply asking the users to do so. Consider using push notifications to make them share their good experience with the app. And if you want to nail it, reply to all the reviews, bad ones included. Just make sure not to show anger — refrain from proving anything to a stranger online and make people feel heard instead.
Remember that the best GEOs for ASO may change over time. Regularly review and update your strategy to adapt to changing market conditions and user behaviors. A data-driven approach is essential to making informed decisions regarding GEO targeting for your app.
As for the essential KPIs to monitor, they can be categorized into 5 groups:
- Visibility: keyword ranking, top charts ranking, being featured in a store
- Conversion: Click-Through-Rate, Conversion Rate
- Growth: monthly active users, daily active users
- User feedback: rating score, quantity & recency of feedback, rating-to-review ratio
- Monetization: total revenue, average revenue per user, lifetime value
Conclusion
For the time being, it is all about deciding between greater exposure of Google Play and higher user experience of App Store. In both cases, you want to research your future GEO. Look at the economic indicators of the country, examine the competitors, see the related apps of competitors, and dig deeper into the market.
Look into the semantic core of the GEO chosen, analyze the audience by understanding what kind of problem are you trying to solve, and assess your potential for organic growth. Having done that, go for it and focus on KPIs, e.g., CTR, monthly active users, rating scores, their recency, and average revenue per user. Basically, do what you usually do for ASO or SEO, which are somewhat the same thing.
