The last weeks I was working hard to improve my game Scribble Racer in terms of retention and monetization. That worked quite good: Retention rate and also ARPU increased after the last few optimizations I made. It seems that most of the people who find my game on Google Play really like it.

But the game still has a visiblity problem on the Google Play Store. It’s hard to get enough people to download the game. Comparable games have up to 50 times more overall installs in less time. There must be something wrong, I’m at a point where it’s clear: I have to do some ASO (App Store Optimization).

I already tried it in the past. I was thinking about keywords to add to the description of Scribble Racer in the market. I took words that I thought people would use to search for a game like mine. But these keywords where just guesses and I think some of them really helped to improve the visibility but others where quite useless.

A few weeks ago I stumbled over a very useful tool called Sensor Tower. It seems to be the tool that keeps me from just guessing keywords.

It comes with a lot of features to find and optimize good keywords:

Sensor Tower suggests you keywords:

The simplest way to find new keywords is to let Sensor Tower suggest you keywords based on seed keywords.
You simple add some keywords to the list as seeds, click on “Suggest Keywords” and you get a new list with potential keywords for your app.

Spying keywords from competitors:

For me more interesting is the possibility to spy competing apps to find out what keywords others use. To do that you simple open the “Keyword Spy” view and type in an app name. Sensor Tower lists all the keywords this app is using. You can also compare it to your app to find out which keywords your app shares with your competitor.

This is a great way to find relevant keywords you never have thought of before.

What traffic can be expected and how difficult is it to be ranked high in the result:

Once you found relevant keywords using either the suggestion tool or by spying other app’s keywords (or both) it’s time to find out which keywords we should really try to use for our app or game.

To do that I added the relevant keywords in the “Keyword Rankings” view. There you can easily see how good a keyword is. It shows you a number that indicates how many people search for the keyword in the traffic column. The higher the traffic value the more people search for it. Sensor Tower also estimates how difficult the keyword is. Difficulty is a value between 0 an 10 and a lower value means it’s easier to rank in the top search results for the given keyword. You can see the value in the difficulty column.

So a good keyword is a keyword with a high traffic value but a low difficulty value.

How is my app ranked for a specific keyword:

Once you found good keywords and added them to the description of your Google Play entry, you can track the performance of these keywords. You can see how your app or game is ranked for a specific keyword and a given country. This is useful to optimize further. You can remove keywords that are not performing well for your app an try some others instead.

Conclusion:

I can’t share results of my ASO with you because I’m still working on it. I will let you know as soon as I see an effect of my optimization using Sensor Tower.

But from what I have seen so far I would say it’s definitely worth to give Sensor Tower a try.

I just mentioned Sensor Tower in combination with Google Play. Of course it also works with the iOS App Store but I tried it with my game Scribble Racer which is only available on Android for now.

You should also know that SensorTower is not for free but there’s a 14 days free trial. And as a student or indie developer you have the chance to get free access to Sensor Tower if you write about it on your blog 😉