ASO Strategies for Small Apps vs Large Apps

First of all, let’s differentiate what makes a small app and a large app:

Small Apps:

• Less than $5,000 monthly marketing budget
• Reliant on ASO for growth
• No brand name

Large Apps:

• More than $5,000 monthly marketing budget
• Uses other acquisition channels for growth, such as Facebook ads
• Brand name recognition

For ASO tools, I recommend using the two most accurately ones out there: Sensor Tower and Mobile Action. For Sensor Tower, we pull Traffic and Difficulty scores. The latter is what I deem as low competition and the lower the score is, the better. For Mobile Action, we pull Search Scores and Chance. Anything above a 70 in Chance is what I deem as low competition or a high probability to rank well.

Now, let’s go to the strategies –

• ASO for Smaller Apps

Target keywords which have:

Traffic: 10-50 scores. The higher the traffic, the better but anything about 50 tends to be more competitive. Anything less than 10, you might not get a lot of growth.

Chance (or difficulty): at least 70, 80+ preferred

• ASO for Larger Apps

Target keywords which have:

Traffic: 30+. Go for high traffic keywords as this is going to drive growth. You are going to rank higher in these keywords because of other acquisition channels, downloads and it has probably good reviews as well.

Chance (or difficulty): doesn’t matter as long as it is relevant and there’s real traffic.