5 Tactics to Climb the Ranks of the Apple App Store

January 27, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

So after countless nights of pizza and Jolt cola, you just finished coding the next great iPhone app. Time to sit back and watch the money start pouring in, right? After all, some guy made iFart
and made almost half a million dollars. Of course, getting noticed on the app store isn’t quite as easy as it used to be back in 2007.
Today, launching the app is just phase one of what you need to do to ensure your app’s success and see the volume of downloads you’re looking for. The next phase is taking steps to make sure your app has the best visibility on the Apple App Store as possible. Here are five tactics to help you climb the ranks and grow your user base.

1. Optimize your app page for search.

 47% of Apple mobile users said they found apps through the App Store’s search engine, so it’s virtually a guarantee that most of your users will be typing in keywords to get to your app. Also, as the top 10, 50, even 100 apps become predictable and somewhat static, search has become even more important as users try to find the specific app that is right for them.

There are many factors to consider when optimizing for the App Store’s search engine, but it all starts with the title/name of your app and the app description. Ideally, your app’s name should also include the main keyword you’d want it to show up for in search. If that’s not realistic, make sure you craft your app’s title carefully to include keywords with the heaviest search traffic. Do your research, because it’s not a great idea to change your title once it starts getting traction.
Next, make sure your app description front-loads relevant keywords and accolades in the first 2-3 sentences since only the first few sentences display in summaries and before the user expands for more content. See what keywords your competition uses as a clue to what’s popular. The description can change as your app hits new benchmarks or earns awards, so keep it up-to-date with the latest and greatest.
Flipboard Your Social News Magazine on the App Store on iTunes
Flipboard is a great example of an app with good title and description. They tout use by “millions of people” in the second line, which is designed to let browsers know that it’s a trusted and popular app.

2. Optimize your app page for the user.

Your app’s page on the App Store is your little piece of virtual real estate to convert browsers into users, and it’s not something you can get by with simply doing the bare minimum. Once users land there, you have only a few seconds to gain their trust so your page needs to do this immediately.

One of the biggest factors, both literally and metaphorically, are the screenshots of your app you choose to upload. Now that users can compare screenshots of different apps from the search page of the App Store, keep in mind that you’re not just showing off your app; you’re also directly competing with similar apps.

Let’s compare the first featured image of two different workout apps:
workout apps comparison
The one on the left doesn’t tell the user much except that there are “1000’s of multimedia workouts” while the one on the right packs in a lot more information: there are training levels, the length of a workout, a star rating system, the ability to mark a workout as completed. The second app’s first screenshot simply tells the user more relevant information and should lead to a higher conversion rate. (Find more tips on screenshots here)
While the iOS Developer Library is a great resource to get you the technical specs you need, you’ll get more from looking at the pages of established and popular apps. See how they use their five allotted screenshots, how they write their descriptions, and how they earn user trust. Then track performance, test different combinations of images and text, and continue to optimize your app page every couple months.

3. Collect good reviews, avoid bad ones.

Aside from the number of downloads, which is the point of this blog post, the number and quality of your reviews are important to showing up higher on the Apple App Store. Sure, you’ll do the obvious things like begging every family member, friend, colleague, and stray hobo to write you five star reviews, but there’s more to be done.
For example, consider building a way for dissatisfied users to provide you feedback that isn’t simply by leaving a bad review. Adding on something like Instabug allows users to report bugs and feedback without compromising your App Store ratings; and Review Bar is another clever way to engage your happy users while dealing with your unhappy ones before they leave negative feedback. Or at the very least, include a clear support@ email in your app description to mitigate a slew of unhappy reviews. This way, you can selectively remind users on your own schedule to submit positive feedback apart from their complaints.
Since things will start snowballing as your app garners good reviews, eventually your hard work will get your app reviews to a self-sustaining critical mass.

4. Get on a featured apps list with a concerted effort of “buzz.”

Your app appearing on the top charts can be a huge boon for the number of downloads you see, but it’s a Catch-22 right? You already need a ton of downloads to get featured. Well yes, but it’s something you can make happen if you are willing to put in the effort of generating buzz in a short amount of time.

According to trademob.com, the algorithms that pull apps into the top charts heavily weigh the volume of downloads in your target country in the preceding three days, with the last 24 hours being the most important. Knowing this, there are a variety of ways to boost the number of downloads in this very specific window of time:

  • Time a press release, blog, or other piece of content to hit news outlets.
  • Buy ads, placements, or affiliate marketing buys.
  • Employ an agency to boost your app’s visibility./li>

If you have a marketing budget, this sort of concentrated marketing blast can push your app into the top lists, which can then snowball into a slew of continuing downloads.

5. Make an app people love, again and again.

Snapchat on the App Store on iTunes
Snapchat hit it out of the park nearly upon its initial release as “Picaboo” back in 2011. It was an app that people loved and it went viral quickly, and a huge part of its success came from listening to and catering to its member base.
As the image points out, a simple app that facilitates impermanent pictures is now on version eight, even though the core product hasn’t changed much. This illustrates the best way for your app to succeed: make it great, over and over again. Listen to your users’ feedback, address their concerns, be quick to fix bugs, release updates and don’t skimp on technical support.
After all, word of mouth is the second most important way users find apps after search, so retaining your user base is as much a marketing tool for new users as it is anything else. Also, factors such as average frequency of app usage, the discard rate, and app freshness (new features, versions) are all thought to be included in the algorithm for App Store ranking. Thus, app iteration is akin to app success.

For more insights into mobile app development, marketing and other insights, be sure tobookmark the Rocket Farm Studios blog!

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

The Top 5 Mistakes When Designing Mobile Apps

January 20, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Snake aside, no matter how fun it was on your old Nokias, the first mobile apps as we know them today debuted alongside the first iPhone way back in 2007. In the ensuing seven years, mobile app designers have iterated on the basics and these apps have come a long way in terms of speed, usability, and appearance.
Then why are so many of them still so awful?
There are a slew of recurring issues that seem to plague app design that we just can’t seem to shake, be it Android or Apple. Here is our list of the top five design mistakes we still see in many mobile apps.
1. Asking for unnecessary permissions.
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A report from SMobile, an online security firm, found that 1 in 5 apps requested permissions to information that could result in an attack on your device and privacy, many apps asking for the same permissions as spyware.
 
As mobile users grow savvier, they will be asking more questions as to why an app needs certain access to their private information. Too many, and it’ll throw up red flags as it recently did with the Messenger app that Facebook launched to much criticism.
When designing an app, don’t surprise your users with permission requests they are not expecting. While accessing GPS might make sense for a traffic app, it doesn’t for most games. Too many requests and many users might just cancel out of the download.
2. Pushing too many notifications.
Ever heard of the boy who cried wolf? Being a squeaky wheel is great in some cases, but research shows that this is not the case for apps. A study by inMarket reported that users started deleting or stopped checking appsthat pushed more than one alert per location. Feeling overwhelmed with notifications, customers actually checked apps three times less frequently.
On the other hand, doing push notifications well can result in an 81% increase in app usage after three months. Techcrunch defined good push notifications as “those that are highly relevant to the user and focused on meeting their needs. Remember, that’s the user’sneeds, not the app developers’ wants.”
When designing an app’s notifications, remember these three things: 1) Only push notifications the user absolutely needs to know, 2) Make it easy to turn off notifications (don’t bury this setting), and 3) Gather statistics to see how the user interacts with these notifications. If they aren’t clicking it often, then it’s a clear sign that your notifications are not very useful.
3. Not optimizing apps for specific devices.
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Yes, fragmentation is still an issue with Android (and a growing one with Apple), but this is not an excuse for design laziness. There are still thousands of apps that look blurry or pixelated, or have the wrong resolution or density, or even breaks going from profile to landscape
Here’s an example of optimization that doesn’t require a huge amount of work. Though screen sizes vary between smartphones, they mostly vary in height while the differences in width are much less drastic. Thus, an easy win is to design your app with a scrolling view so screens such as the menu will scale to nearly any screen.
Another tip: when scaling for screen sizes, keep in mind that while graphics scale poorly, white space scales very well. This is another simple way to keep your app looking sharp, literally and metaphorically, by playing with the amount of negative space in your apps.
There are many creative ways to optimize apps for different devices. Do your research and give your users the best experience, and resolutions, possible.
4. Showing the wrong keyboard.
No one really loves typing on a smartphone. With the lack of tactile response and the small screens, let alone the sizes of the input forms on many apps, it can be a chore for users to enter in data. After all, users already than on a regular laptop keyboard. Thus, it’s important to make data entry via keyboard as painless as possible.
When designing your app, be sure the relevant keyboard is displayed for specific input requests. It wastes time and angers the user when the app asks for a phone number or a numerical code, but the general QWERTY keyboard pops up. It doesn’t take much work to make sure the numeric keyboard appears when necessary, but this is still a glaring design mistake that happens with apps over and over again.
Another example is when a field asks for an email, but the keyboard has the @ symbol missing from the layout. Again, if it’s something the user will need to use when they are typing, design your app to anticipate their needs.
5. Providing no visual feedback to user actions.
feedback_2x.pngWhen one pushes a button in the real world (or IRL, as it’s known these days), he or she feels the button’s shape and can feel the button depress. In lieu of this tactile response, app designers should include visual feedback to let users know when their taps have registered. Unfortunately, this design element is often missing.
Studies have shown that children and adults alike become confused and have bad experiences using a touchscreen when there isn’t visual feedback. Apps designed this way will frustrate their users and have them thinking something is broken, often leading users to quit out of the app entirely because they think it froze.
When something is clicked, provide visual representation that the action registered. When a screen is loading, show a spinning icon to indicate that the app hasn’t stopped working. There are many way to be subtle yet clear in visual feedback. This guide from Microsoft has a great list of tips designers should keep in mind.
What are your pet-peeves when it comes to poor app design? What mistakes do you see over and over again? Sound off in the comment below, and for more mobile app insights, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.