App Annie Now Lets App Developers Track Ads, App Store Optimization

Mobile app analytics platform App Annie is expanding itself product lineup today with features designed to help publishers better analyze their advertising and App Store Optimization (ASO) efforts. The latter, a sort of SEO for mobile apps, involves choosing the right keywords to use in the app’s metadata in order to have the app returned higher in the App Store’s search results.

In order to understand how the app ranks by keywords, App Annie analyzes publicly available metadata across all applications, like app title, publisher name and app description, in order to identify all the possible keyword combinations. Then, for a single app, it looks at all the search terms it is ranking for, and analyzes the rank for each of those search terms combined with an analysis of the title and other fields to determine the top keywords for that app.

App Annie ASO Screenshot 1

With the ASO dashboard, publishers can also track these keyword rankings, in order to see trends, as well as analyze their competitor’s keyword selections, and find which keywords might be better to use in order to improve an app’s discoverability through App Store searches. This makes App Annie more competitive with a number of companies focused more heavily on ASO alone, including SearchMan, MobileDevHQ, Appnique, Appcodes, and others.

ASO is an increasingly important factor to take into account these days, as the app stores fill up with ever more applications. According to data from Flurry, 60% of apps are never even downloaded.

In addition, 82% of users never search past the top 25 apps, meaning an app’s placement in search results is now crucial for discovery.

App Annie ASO Screenshot 2

Meanwhile, the other new App Annie feature launched today is focused on allowing publishers to track their advertising and ad monetization data in the App Annie dashboard, without using an SDK. The company says this is largely aimed at larger publishers, who today would have to spend time logging into multiple, separate ad platforms in order to gather this data.

Instead, App Annie users will now be able to track 20+ ad networks in the updated dashboard, with data pulled directly from the app stores and ad platforms themselves, without requiring API or SDK integration. The company says they’re looking to further expand that selection in the future.

Here, publishers can track metrics like ad revenue, impressions, clicks, installs, CTR, CVR and eCPI, all broken down by day, country, store, app and ad platform. Combined with App Annie’s other features for tracking in-app purchases and app sales data, the addition means that App Annie will be able to see their complete app revenue situation.

App Annie today has over 55,000 publishers tracking over 400,000 applications worldwide. These new features will be free to Analytics and Store Stats users, and come at no additional cost for Intelligence customers, the company says.