Putting ASO & Boost Campaigns Together to Increase Your Downloads

Succeeding with a mobile app is getting harder because of the increasing number of apps and increasing tendency towards app usage in all categories. As an app developer or an app owner, what you face first is if you are not ranked among the BIG ones, you probably won’t reach the number of downloads and revenue you imagine.
As every app owner experiences at the beginning, you trust your app to break the stores and you have expectations about your app performance. However, let’s come down to earth. Trusting your app and waiting for it to boost with no strategy is nothing but living in a dream world. You need to dive deeper into your mobile marketing strategy and allocate more time to get meaningful results from it.
If you have heard about App Store Optimization and Boost Campaigns, let’s start with what they are and why they are important for your app.

App Store Optimization

ASO (App Store Optimization) is the set of operations to increase visibility of your app in major app stores (IOS App Store & Google Play). It can be seen as SEO for mobile apps.
To optimize your app for app stores within ASO, consider these mechanics.

1. Finding the most effective and the least competitive keywords for making it easier to be ranked,
2. Analyzing which categories are suitable for your app,
3. Checking competitors,
4. Optimizing app name, according to the best practices,
5. Optimizing app description by using right keywords,
6. Optimizing visuals of your app (screenshots and app icon),
7. Creating (if needed) and optimizing preview video,
8. Localizing your app, if needed,
9. Updating your app regularly,
10. Analyzing ratings and reviews,
11. Analyze and optimize keywords at regular intervals.

In both App Store and Google Play, people discover new apps with app store search. This means, if you are not visible in search results, you have no chance to be found and downloaded. And this means, you miss an opportunity to increase your organic users. This is why you should consider App Store Optimization in your mobile marketing strategy.

Boost Campaigns

Boost Campaign is another mobile marketing strategy to acquire organic and engaged downloads by increasing the visibility of an app in keywords and app category. The philosophy behind boost campaigns is acquiring incentivized downloads in a short time. Meanwhile, this provides an opportunity to rank higher in keywords and category and increase organic downloads.
Reasons Boost Campaigns Are Crucial

• It helps you to test your app after launch with real users.
• It gives you an opportunity to provide important metrics to your prospective investors.
• It allows you to go viral.
• It enables you to create the most suitable growth formulas with retention rate, CO, and LTV. before big investments in ad campaigns.

Do They Really Need to Work Together?

To answer this question, let’s look at the results of reverse scenarios. What happens if you prefer only ASO?
App Store Optimization is the best, but relatively the longest, way of reaching your goals. It makes your app lovable to both app stores and your potential customers. If your keywords are picked carefully and all other must-haves are done right, you have a chance to increase your rank in your category. However, if your competitors benefit from ad campaigns to be ranked higher, it will be almost impossible to keep your place safe and rank higher.
The second scenario is getting benefit from boost campaigns without ASO. The problem with this strategy is: A successful boost strategy should start after a successful ASO. Why? Because if your app is not optimized, according to the best practices, it decreases the chance of downloads, even if your category ranking is high. Besides, ASO helps you to find the best keywords to be ranked, and if you conduct ASO before a boost campaign, it also creates a blue ocean to be ranked in keywords.
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To make it clearer, below you can see the graph showing the increase in downloads of Just Say Hi in US after putting ASO and Boost Campaigns together. The strategy used there was to complete ASO operations and update it when needed, first, and creating boost campaigns, next.  While ASO operations helped to rank in keywords, thanks to boost campaign, the category ranking increased synchronously.

Putting ASO and boost campaign together makes each marketing strategy more powerful, and this increases the chance to make your app rock in app stores. This is why you should create a mobile marketing strategy that puts both together to reach your KPIs.