Hi, this is a minute of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. This week I wanna talk about how to increase your google play app store downloads. Today, I kind of wanna go through some of our strategies on keyword optimization for Google Play.
There’s a lot of advice out there on optimizing your iTunes page or your iPhone apps and there’s lots of really good tools out there, we use sensor tower a lot. But for Google Play, sensor tower doesn’t that great for us so we try other things.
And if you just released a Google app, you may be experiencing this “Oh my God, it’s not working” kind of feeling. And I know, I know the feeling so I kinda wanna show you the kind of things that we do. So let me show you Ear Spy here, which is our Google Play page for Ear Spy. myskywings.online
And you can see here like on a consistent basis, we have some delays today, but we get a round off, between four to five thousand unique downloads a day, daily installs. It does really well and it brings in a lot of money. If I show you, but it wasn’t always that way, if I show you like the all time growth here of this curve, you could see that we started off kinda small here when we started out a couple of years ago.
We had like a what’s new and noteworthy kind of bump and then it just sort of gradually grew over time and it was introducing new things. We see some spikes here when it gets mentioned in like Gizmodo or some other blogs and we see kinda how it grows. So that’s the idea
We wanna have more apps like this where we have a lot of daily downloads, we have a lot of people installing it, a lot of people clicking on ads, or purchasing or upgrading to a bigger version. So let me contrast this with one we just released a few weeks ago, which is Algebra Study Cards.
Now Algebra Study Cards, you see here we got a few downloads, sixty-five downloads, that was the day where I was running Facebook ads, so it didn’t really compared to how much money we spent, it was not a lot of downloads. And we’re lucky with this one, we’re lucky if we get ten downloads a day. And this is typical of a lot of apps on Google Play. This is a lot of our apps. You put it out there and you have to try to get those keywords up. And keywords are the one way to improve the app ranking.
I mean you could do ads like this but this ad cost, I think we spent about forty pounds, and we got hardly any return on it. I mean ads used to be so much easier with Facebook and Twitter and Ad Mob. But now, it’s a much lower return on the investment. So this is to give you an idea when somebody goes in to Google Play is this organic searches or the things that you wanna really key for.
So, like for example, somebody goes into Google play and they type in “Spy”, Ear Spy comes up first. If they type “eavesdrop”, it comes up first. So you have to think about how you want people to actually find it. Now we have Mandarin Bubble Bath, which is our Mandarin learning game, one of our Mandarin learning games, so one of the keywords that we try to search for well is learn mandarin.
So, ideally, when I type in “learn mandarin”, Mandarin Bubble Bath would come up near the top but it doesn’t. So you see here we’ve got Learn Mandarin Chinese, we got all of these and we go way farther back down and we could see Mandarin Bubble batch way down here at the bottom. So it’s not doing well and we need to kinda play with that and get that up. If we type something that’s a bit less popular like “learn Swahili”, then you can see our app comes up relatively high, but ideally, we like the first one. So, how do you get higher search rankings for those keywords?
And, to be honest with you, since Google is pretty much closed doors, so is iTunes, a lot of these people have theories that almost borders on superstition because nobody really knows for sure, so we all try different things. And it has to do with the name, the right keywords in your name.
So for example, this app is actually called Swahili Bubble Bath, but for Google Play, we changed it to Learn Swahili Bubble Bath in order to try to increase those keywords and get that up. So, one of the tools that we use to measure these changes that we make, and it’s always tweaking, that’s the nice way about Google play is you could always change things all the time.
You don’t have to keep uploading and build every time, the same way you do with iTunes. For Google Play, mess around with the description, do different things. I mean, Google Play, the keywords are driven from the title, the subtitle, and the description. So, let’s take you into App Annie. For Google Play, we use App Annie all the time. Sensor tower is good for iTunes, however, I think sensor tower, when it comes to Google Play, it doesn’t quite work well for me so we do things like this.
If you go into App Annie, and set up an App Annie account or don’t, you could go in and search on any app and go down to this section here called keywords and ASO. And what this will do is it’ll give you a list of all the keywords, or a lot of keywords that you’re ranking for and list them here in a graph. You can see here Ear Spy is working for “spy”, it’s working for “eavesdrop”, it’s working for the word “hearing” which is fantastic. That’s kinda new. So that kinda drips a little bit. And you can see like a history of this.
Now if I show you Algebra for example, we can see that for Algebra Study Cards, which is our new one and I put in “Algebra”, it’s actually not ranking that well. It started off at, coming in at 235, now it’s kinda growing. Right now, it shows up number seventy two if you type in Algebra. If you type in Algebra game, it comes in a little bit better. It comes in at thirteen.
So, what we do is we keep making changes and checking this every few days and try to see where it is. Now this service on App Annie is completely free, which is probably the best feature of App Annie. Sensor tower costs eighty dollar for I think, usually it’s about three apps, it’s actually based on the tracking of the keywords but I find it a bit overpriced however, it’s worth it if you could make that work.
And down here on App Annie, you could type in any keyword that you want so let say “multiplication”. So you see for multiplication, it’s out. It’s not even in the top 250. But this is the kind of thing that you should do. You release your app to Google Play, sometimes we’ve actually played around with actually changing the title of the executable to see if that made any impact.
We did that with Chinese Heroes, we called it Chinese Mandarin Alpha Team just so we get the words “Chinese Mandarin” in there. And the nice thing about this is you could search on any other app. So here we go,i already did a search on DragonBox, which is one of the top Algebra apps out there and you can see how they rank for things.
And they automatically put some stuff in here at DragonBox, algebraic, they ranked at number four at the moment. And it changes on a day-to-day basis and that’s a nice thing to see; the history over time. So let’s say I changed the description a little bit on Tuesday, I could check it on Wednesday and see it it’s actually gone up any. And also, I could do things like adding back links that go to the Google Play page.
I could try to get people to add more reviews and see if that’s had an effect. And it’s really a case of making a change, testing that change, and seeing how well it works. I hope this has been helpful. It’s longer than a minute as always, but I hope this has been helpful. One of the most discouraging things about releasing an app is not seeing it take off.
And when I showed you that Ear Spy graph, at first it was that way for me too, it really was a slow burner but it’s building and building and building and trying to get those rankings up. It is possible. So that’s it for this week. If you’re watching this on the iTunes podcast, please leave a review, I’d love to know what you think. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, please leave a comment. Or on Facebook or LinkedIn, please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Good luck with your apps on Google Play and I’ll talk to you next week.
