MeloDroidMelodroid ASO Case Study:
ASO for a music app on Google Play
Conversion growth: 70%;
organic traffic growth: 44x
Mobile music is a very gainful yet competitive app category
According to Sensor Tower, Music was ranked third by user spend, only yielding the higher positions to Games and Entertainment
At the same time, one can easily recall the giants holding the top places in all ratings: from Apple and Google to Spotify and Deezer.
Is it possible to capture a favorable position in this inflated market?
Yes, it definitely is! I made my app, MeloDroid, and rocketed to the category top in a few months.
Roman,
MeloDroid developer
About the app
— This is a music streaming app for Android. Only occupying a little space of 3 MB, it offers plenty of functions packed in an intuitive interface, with the current hot tracks’ playlist on the home screen. Two other tabs allow to pick a genre or open the favorite compositions. MeloDroid is free to install and monetizes through displaying ad banners.
Melodroid is avaliable in 5 countries.
Goal:
Since published on Play Market in mid-June 2018, the app has been serving a small share of organic traffic coming from the store and users driven by an ad source (a banner on the music doorway website). I’ve been seeking ways to boost my app’s visibility among other music products, and upgrade customer appeal. What does that require?
I tried to promote my app on various channels on my own, but all the endeavors turned unviable: the costs couldn’t cover even a tenth of the expenses. And even if my positions grew, they wouldn’t yield real organic users. It became clear to me that I had to go into optimizing my app page on the store—in other words, App Store Optimization, or ASO, was my objective.
The app was published on Play Market. As an unseasoned developer, I learned about ASO from one Telegram channel named MobilePirat. Back then, the chat admin, @trafficmax, held a free marathon on making money out of Android apps. Those materials included links to video tutorials where the host told how to do ASO and what to be concerned about. My first ASO was mediocre so I started searching for experienced people who could know what to do. That’s why I registered on Appbooster and then contacted manager Irina.
Music streaming is a highly competitive niche
this category counts at least 30-40 popular apps. So it was questionable whether ASO could solely generate enough organic traffic to recoup the expenses and make money?
After Roman has set the goal, we decided to concentrate on keywords, description text, and screenshots. We also decided to go with the existing icon as it seemed very appropriate.
Using the platform facilities, we have compiled the semantic kernel and defined the most popular requests in the category.
Irina Orekhova,
Appbooster account manager
Semantic
kernel
TOP 40 music and music-related queries on Google Play with frequency analysis (we also collected a number of longtail queries, making the total of several hundred)
We took the highest-frequency query from the relevant, “music online”, and embedded it into the app name.
Then, we rewrote the description and infused it with high- and mid-frequency keywords from the semantic kernel (e.g. “playlist”, “music”, “tracks”).
We also added genre names: that was one of our hypotheses on sourcing organic traffic from lowkey target queries.
After that, we started working on screenshots: analyzed rivals and category trends, laid down brief points that readers could capture and get hooked by. Also, we redesigned the screenshots filled with those points to make them stand out from other search results:
Having published the changes, we started to track MeloDroid’s daily positions for keywords
and monitor the app’s rivals.
Case Results
Our text and screenshot improvement efforts helped boost view-to-install conversions from 10.5% to 18%.
Even for that volume of views that MeloDroid had had before it came to Appbooster (77,000 views—mostly thanks to that doorway website), that meant 5,700 more users every month at the same cost! Relative growth: 70%
First-install users, users retained after installation
Installation conversion
With that, the number of Android users who learned about MeloDroid, also increased.
In a week after indexation, MeloDroid entered the category’s TOP 50 and TOP 5 for some relevant keywords.
The number of views got three times as large. Play Market installs (Search + Exploring):
From July to September, the organic traffic volume
increased 44 times
In total, Play Market visibility and installation conversions growth for the next 4 months let increase the number of installations more than 9 times: from 4,800 in July to 45,000 in late November.
Foreign
markets
Following those achievements, we made the same improvements for four other markets. Again, we defined the keywords for every language and ordered description translation.
What was special about non-English markets was local diacritics:
Czech Republic
ě, š
Poland
ś, ó
Germany
ä, ö
Even native speakers sometimes omit them in search queries and replace those unique letters with regular Latin ones. Moreover, the same number of Latin letters and specific national letters may be counted differently.
As for app stores, the results were the same — no matter whether you use diacritics or to switch the keyboard when using the store. This is why we went with the Latin layout in subtitles and used national alphabets in descriptions.
FranceMeloDroid - musique en ligne
Votre lecteur de musique en ligne. La liste de lecture sans fin de vos chansons preferees
80 / 90
SpainMeloDroid - musica online
Tu reproductor de musica en linea. La interminable lista de reproduccion de tus canciones favoritas.
100 / 90
Here’s why we did achieve good results
Irina Orekhova,
Appbooster account manager
In the MeloDroid case, we never used incentive traffic — that was the customer’s preference. Focusing on ASO, we got a double result: for starters, in-store visibility skyrocketed, and more users could find it on Play Market; secondly, page view-to-installation conversions grew, which helps reduce CPI for any traffic sources.
Remember that competent app store optimization must be your top-of-mind task after the release. Contact us to discuss the ways to drive more organic traffic to your app.
Roman,
MeloDroid developer
Frankly, I was astonished by the result! As I see it, our success can be attributed to the rivals’ poor ASO, properly selected keywords, and fancy new visuals.
My experience showed that app store optimization can solely revamp the app’s general performance and upscale the userbase!
I was full of doubts, fearing to see ASO-allotted funds to be wasted, but Appbooster’s efforts paid off in the very first months. Even today, those optimizations continue to deliver a good deal of precious organic traffic. This brings me to the answer to the most important question: yes, ASO can be profitable and even the cornerstone element of mobile marketing.
I’d like to thank the entire Appbooster team and Irina — for this top-grade job on my project!
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