On the podcast, Ariel dives into the fundamentals of ASO and how to research and optimize keywords. He also explains why ratings matter much more than reviews, and why you should never, ever duplicate keywords.
Top Takeaways:
🔍 It’s not that it’s hard to get discovered with ASO — it’s that it’s hard to get discovered without doing enough ASO. Expect to spend more time exploring on the front-end, but this isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy.
⭐ Make sure that you're optimizing for ratings: they are more impactful for discoverability than download numbers alone.
📛 When choosing an app name, make sure you put the most important keywords as early as possible.
📊 Don’t rely on intuition for your ASO strategy — always look at the data.
🔑 Spend as much time using the keywords as you do on finding them — beyond just in your text meta.
About Ariel Michaeli
👨💻 Founder and CEO of Appfigures.
💡 “If you only trust intuition, you probably won't see results.”
👋 LinkedIn
Links & Resources
‣ Appfigures’s Advanced ASO Secrets Guide
‣ Join Appfigures (they’re hiring!)
‣ Connect with Ariel on LinkedIn
‣ Which Keywords are Your Competitors Targeting?
Episode Highlights
[1:48] The A to Z of ASO: Should I care? they ask. Usually, it’s because they don’t know what ASO is. But it’s harder and harder to get found in the App Store, so you can’t deny the benefits.
[4:09] Black box optimization: If ASO is for conversion and SEO is for discovery, how do you blend the two? Ariel suggests you forget about the algorithm, and focus on the people instead.
[5:52] ASO vs. SEO: So what is the difference? It’s hard to explain briefly. But you have much less control over ASO than SEO — it’s about limitations.
[9:16] Great expectations: It’s not hard to get discovered with ASO — it’s hard to get discovered without enough ASO. Understanding your app and core competitors is the foundation of changing how much impact your app makes.
[12:46] Artificial boosting: Why should older apps get more traction? The good news for new apps is that Apple has now leveled the playing field.
[18:10] ASO key factors: App name, subtitle and keywords all affect ASO. Get relevant, important keywords in as early as possible because that’s where the value is, says Ariel. Plus: Some live keyword help.
[27:24] Capture their attention: People have to understand what they’re looking at before they download an app. With apps for everything now, how do you stand out? Screenshots and video previews are the answer.
[31:35] Rate beats review: Apps with more ratings beat those with more downloads. Ratings feel more organic to users, so Apple — and its algorithm — factors this in.
[35:35] The ultimate sin: Keyword duplication is the biggest no-no. But other common ASO mistakes include ignoring popularity scores, trusting your instincts, and failing to utilize app names for keywords. (Cleaner isn’t always better where it really matters: downloads.)
[39:12] Competitive focus: With some niches, like games, up to two keywords matter. Category rookies and those in highly competitive environments should be focused. Those with more ratings and downloads should angle for other keyword combos.
[43:59] Do your research: You need to look at the data to see what keywords really matter for your app. It helps to check competitor reviews.
[49:32] Paid marketing: Number of ratings, especially on Google Play, really matters. When people don’t download, it signals no one wants it. Expect Apple to follow suit.
[51:08] Secondary ASO localizations: Apple uses English localization for keywords, but — in the U.S. — Spanish too. Use both, and you’ve got twice the keywords. Russia and other countries are on the way too, which means you can duplicate between sets (even if not within them).
Full Episode Transcript:
David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Ariel Michaeli, co-founder and CEO at Appfigures, my personal go-to resource for ASO tools, analytics and app intelligence. On the podcast, I talk with Ariel about the fundamentals of ASO, how to research and optimize keywords and why you should never, ever duplicate keywords. Hey Ariel, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Ariel Michaeli:
Thanks for having me today.
David Barnard:
I wanted to do an overview of ASO. It's something I haven't really talked about on the podcast and you are the go-to ASO expert. So I'm hoping, I think our audience is pretty mixed, we have everything from CEOs who haven't really thought much about ASO, it's maybe three levels down from them, somebody's thinking about it, all the way to ASO practitioners who do, live and breathe this work. But I wanted to get an overview where this episode could just be an A to Z of ASO. So on that topic, let's just dive right into what is ASO and why does it matter to developers?
Ariel Michaeli:
Ooh, I'm glad you asked. One of the biggest things that I hear a lot from, and you said CEOs and maybe product managers and people who don't necessarily do ASO because that's how you do ASO, if you think about it, and something that I get asked a lot is should I care about that to begin with? And they ask me because they don't know what it is, I think that's really what it is. So many people say, ASO, ASO, ASO, and some people say SEO and we have an SEO team, so do we need ASO? And that's something I guess we'll talk about later, but at the end of the day, you need discovery and that's what should matter to everyone, whether you own the company, you're the founder, you're the CEO, you run the company, or if you are responsible for a product, whether it's marketing or product or really anything else, and that's where ASO comes in, that discovery, the ability to get found in the App Store, that's also becoming harder and harder and harder to get.
And in the old days, the days where there were fewer apps and a lot of really interested users, you would get it a lot more easily and the way the App Store was would lend itself to seeing more apps that are out there, not necessarily the curated because curation didn't happen until fairly recently. Today it's a lot more difficult. So one of the main ways to get found on the App Store is someone comes in and they look for something that they have some sort of an intent and you come up as a result for that intent. That's really the best way to get found. And for that you need App Store optimization because you need to help the algorithm see what it is that your app does because it just doesn't know. And that's really the base of everything, the way I see it. You want discovery search is a good way to get discovered and you need to help the algorithm.
David Barnard:
How do you see the blend of ASO as that discovery engine and then ASO as optimizing for the black box that is the App Store? I mean, to get an app, you have to go to the App Store. So some people will just go search a branded term like Pinterest or something, but Pinterest still needs to think about ASO even when people are searching their brand name because the screenshots still need to be engaging, the title and subtitle. So how do you think about that blend of optimizing for ads that are sending people to the store, brand searches that are sending people to the store. So there's kind of that side of ASO that is optimizing toward conversion, and then there's a side of SEO that's optimizing toward discovery. How do you think about blending those two?
Ariel Michaeli:
So when I think about it, I think about how do you optimize for people more so than the algorithm, more so than for discovery, more so than conversion because ultimately they're all fairly the same. If you think about it. And there was, I believe an article by John Gruber, this is maybe a year, maybe a couple of years ago, maybe a little bit more time during COVID is weird for me at this point. So there was an article about how, I believe it was Dropbox was using App Store optimization and was saying something about photos in their name. And his whole point was that this app is about more things than just photos and they should just be called Dropbox. And I had a problem with that because at the end of the day, if my mom comes into the App Store and she's looking for a way to store her photos because maybe she lost her iPhone once and they all disappeared and she really wants to see her grandkids, she needs to have an app to do that.
If she goes into the app store and she sees Dropbox, she's not going to make that connection in her head necessarily. I will, you will and maybe some or most of the viewers will, but not necessarily. And so when you optimize, you're not just helping the algorithm see that this app can help with photo storage, you also see that as a human, this app will help me with photo storage. And that's kind of the same at the end of the day. There are a lot of little things that you need to know for the algorithm, but those are usually not the kind of things that take away from optimizing for people. Those are the kind of things that you'll do in the background.
David Barnard:
Yeah, that's a great way to think about it is like you can optimize for both simultaneously because you're ultimately just optimizing for people, better understanding the app and seeing some value in it. And that's great. And then just briefly, what is the difference between ASO and SEO? I mean people are so familiar with SEO, what is ASO and what makes it different?
Ariel Michaeli:
Ooh, I don't know if briefly can be done, but search engine optimization is taking your website and optimizing it for Google in most cases. So Google will come and read all of your pages and we'll try to understand what they're about so they can float them for relevant search queries. App Store optimization on the other hand, you don't really have pages in that same sense. You don't have control over the content that you have on the page. So really what you have is just the one page with three-ish elements that you are in control of. So it's totally different. Although at the core the ideas are somewhat similar and that's why some companies, especially the enterprise believe that their SEO guy or SEO person can easily do ASO and they usually see that that's not the case and then come to us. So really it's about the limitations that the App Store and Google Play impose on what you have control over and then how do you use that to help the algorithm. And also the algorithms are very different, but that's secondary at this point.
David Barnard:
Right. Do you ever think about SEO optimization as part of the ASO optimization? So when you go into Google and you search like weather app, especially if you're on a Mac platform or an iPhone directly, you're going to get as a top few listings, actual links to the App Store generally. Do you think about that crossover at all about how Google indexes the apps versus how the actual App Store algorithm indexes those apps?
Ariel Michaeli:
So yes and no, and maybe. I think it's more difficult to think about how Google will index app pages specifically. They're a lot more strict about it because it's all really templated. But if you have a landing page for your app, an actual website for your app, that can drive a lot of traffic because that you can optimize specifically for Google. And on the Google side of things, if you have an Android app that does actually impact the landing page on Google Play. So there's a lot of flexibility. For Apple, it's a lot more about the website if you end up making one, which I know is time continues less and less companies do or less and less companies invest in those websites.
David Barnard:
Since we're on the topic, how much influence do links into the App Store actually have on ASO? So like my apps over the years have gotten featured by TechCrunch. They've gotten links in Wall Street Journal, The Verge and all these other sites, and then I have my own website that links to them. Do those inbound links or Facebook sending a lot of organic traffic from shares and things like that, does that impact ASO at all to your knowledge?
Ariel Michaeli:
Not on the App Store. It does on Google Play. So on Google Play, it's a big factor of what helps you go up or down in that case, on the App Store, it doesn't to my knowledge.
David Barnard:
Yeah. So the Play Store algorithm works a lot more like the Google search algorithm.
Ariel Michaeli:
It's considerably more sophisticated in what it looks at and how it reacts to different changes in apps and also in demand in general.
David Barnard:
So one of the things I wanted to touch on is that it is hard to get that discovery attention through ASO these days. You can optimize for all the keywords you want, but pretty much every keyword is so crowded these days. We'll talk about ways to find less crowded keywords, but what do you think are realistic expectations from ASO optimization both for new apps and then for modifying and experimenting with ASO on an existing app?
Ariel Michaeli:
It's an interesting question. We'll leave it at interesting. One of the main challenges for ASO is that it's not, that it's hard to get that discovery with ASO, it's that it's hard to get it without doing enough ASO. So ASO is really a scale just like everything else. When do you finish with that design? When do you finish with code? There's no end in most cases and you can continue to iterate and the same thing happens too ASO. If you start with a basic set of keywords and you set it and forget it and it doesn't work and it's just not going to work and you shouldn't really expect any sort of real return from it because you haven't really put in the time. But as you put in more time and you start to understand specifically your app and your core competitors, that's when you can start seeing real results.
And it doesn't mean that every time you make a change, you're going to see a huge impact. But for the most part, once you start making those bigger changes, you'll see an impact that will allow you to understand is this direction I want to be on? And that should be more immediate and also more pronounced. So for example, something that happens all the time is people will open the live chat on our website and ask me why is my keyword selection not working? And I'll say, "well, is this your first experiment? Is this your second, your third?" And it's usually their first or their second and then they'll say, "I don't think ASO works. I don't know what to do. The App Store is broken."
And it might seem like it and you have because you have this big expectation, but you haven't really put in the iterations. Unless you use a tool or something else you really won't have that intuition upfront. So I think from an expectation standpoint, expect to spend more time on the front end thinking about things, maybe exploring the competitors, exploring opportunities and then running four or five different iterations and then seeing actual results. So results will come at the tail end once you've spent enough time understanding what it is you're trying to optimize for.
David Barnard:
What should those expectations be? Can somebody in 2023 launch a new weather app and expect to get much traction in any relevant weather keywords with a 1000 other weather apps out there? What should expectations be going into ASO?
Ariel Michaeli:
So I know I'm going to probably get a ton of questions after this, but the answer is yes, absolutely. You can launch an app tomorrow and expect to be in the top five results for a very successful keyword. And on my series keyword teardowns, I show that almost every week there's usually an app that doesn't have the downloads, is just too new, doesn't have really any sort of popularity yet, ranks really high because everyone else is doing something wrong and you would expect that the doing something wrong doesn't happen in important keywords, but it still does. Maybe by 2025 that's not going to be the case. But as of 2023, it still is. I looked at an important keyword this week actually on the series, I believe I looked at investing or trading or one of those and you can still see issues and the biggest apps don't actually rank at the top for those reasons.
So there's still a ton of opportunity, but it's not going to be the kind of thing that you just look at it and go [inaudible 00:12:21] put it in your name and within three days you're going to get the number one. You're probably going to have to do a lot of research. You're probably going to have to spend some time trying things and after that you can expect to have that sort of [inaudible 00:12:34] talk to you, a bunch of developers who read my newsletter and watch my live streams and have done this and in their own respective areas of the App Store managed to get popularity. So it is possible.
David Barnard:
Yeah. And then tell me about, I know there's [inaudible 00:12:48] I remember a seven-day boost for new apps, so when you launch a 1.0, you get a seven-day artificial boost and funny enough, I've been bugging Apple about this for years. I think this was actually specifically on my suggestion complaining that new apps were so disadvantaged because historically there was a lot of weight put on the history of an app. So the older an app was the more kind of long-term traction it had, the better chance it had at ASO.
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah.
David Barnard:
And so Apple seems to have put this in as this artificial seven day boost to give new apps a shot. How does that end up playing out and does it just trail off after seven days or do you see apps that stick the landing and how would they stick the landing?
Ariel Michaeli:
So from what I've seen, and this is fairly new, not yesterday or last week but not many, many years, what ends up happening is Apple is very lenient. So one of the things that you see with the App Store, and I guess we'll get to that once we start talking about how is the App Store actually ranking gaps is that they're looking at keyword placement, meaning where you put the keyword in your App Store metadata, and that could be the name, the subtitle or the keyword list and each one of them has different impact, but also how many ratings you have? And ratings are just a way for the algorithm to know that people care about your app, whether they like it or hate it, they still care about it in some way. So the boost takes away the ratings component so you don't need to have as many ratings in order to still rank.
So they will look at the keywords that you use and if those make sense, we'll float you up and that's exactly what you want. So that's why you want to take that time in the beginning to figure out your keywords a little bit better and that's how you stick the landing. If you get into keywords that actually are really, really relevant for your app and your app can sell itself, meaning the icon looks good, the screenshots look good and people do download it, those people will likely convert and go and leave a rating. Those ratings will help. So you're getting artificial visibility that's turning into actual downloads, actual ratings, and then the visibility will become organic. That's kind of the idea.
You also want to make sure that you're optimizing to turn as many downloads into ratings. Something I can't stress enough. And if you do that, you would have the ability to continue and see more downloads and I don't know about maintaining that rank because it really depends about who else is competing for that rank and they might have 10x more ratings and you won't be able to compete, but then you'll just go to the bottom as opposed to just dropping off completely. So there are definitely ways to do it.
David Barnard:
Even after Apple implemented that, which I think it has been like three to five years now that I first started seeing it, it's a little frustrating that, okay, I launched my 1.0 that's like the worst the app's ever going to be, and so I get a boost for seven days on my 1.0. Have you seen them do any boosts on updates or is there any other way to get a boost like that that you would get those first seven days?
Ariel Michaeli:
So there are a bunch of boosts, but what they've also done in the process from what I've seen is they took off the really high positive impact that being around for a long time had on apps. So if you've been around for 14 years or 8 or 7 or 6 at this point, doesn't make as much of a difference, which kind of offsets that a little bit, not a ton, but enough that I think it's easier to see conversion happening and to see apps shifting up and down. But you have a bunch of other boosts that they introduced and we all know that Apple really likes their tech and every time you use their tech you have more potential to get featured. It's the same with ASO. I've looked at a few different ways in which apps will get a boost, and again, the ratings are not going to make sense, but the app is still going to be up high.
So if you promote an in-app purchase, you're going to get an immediate boost. And I think now enough companies do it that it's beginning to lose its relevancy but still doesn't happen all the time. So if you have the ability go and do it, seems to work better for subscriptions than consumable in-app purchases, but I've seen both work. I know that in-app events or in the same boat and once news came out that in-app events help you with ranks, almost every app that I've seen had some sort of in-app event including updates. Apparently Apple allowed that to happen for some reason. So you would see a lot more of those. There's also a case to be made for naming your in-app purchases, the promoted in-app purchases. If you have a promoted in-app purchase that has the keyword in its name, you're also supposed to get a boost, works I would say 50% of the time or depends on more factors than just the name of in-app but does give you a boost.
David Barnard:
I've argued for years that apps that get featured should get a boost. So I've told multiple people at Apple this, I've given the feedback as much as I possibly can. Do you see any evidence that that's happening yet?
Ariel Michaeli:
Not as much.
David Barnard:
Yeah.
Ariel Michaeli:
It might happen but it's just not pronounced enough that it would make a substantial difference and would kick up an app that isn't supposed to be where it is.
David Barnard:
Well, I took us down a rabbit hole going very deep. Let's return to our ASO 101 and I wanted to talk about the key factors that impact ASO. So I've listed some out here and what I'd love to do is just do a high level overview of why it matters and then maybe some anecdotes or maybe kind of a top two tips for each of these factors that matter for ASO. So the first and most obvious one is the app name. So why does the app name matter and any tips around ASO strategies for the app name?
Ariel Michaeli:
So the app name works in conjunction with the subtitle and then the keyword list. All those I kind of see as one thing at the end of the day. And what Apple does is it concatenates all of them. It joins all of those chinks and gives value based on the position of the keyword starting from the name all the way down to the keyword list. And the biggest tip that I can give for the name, but really all of those is take your most important keywords and put them in the beginning because that's where all the value is. And you would see, if you go on the App Store, you'll see two schools of thought. One is brand name, keywords describing the app and the other is keywords describing the app and then brand name. The reason for doing that is you want those keywords all the way in the beginning as early as possible because those are going to get all of the value, all of the good juice from the algorithm.
So whatever keywords you think are most relevant for your app, stick them in the beginning whether before the brand name or after. That's kind of a personal choice, depends on how you want to brand your app, but that's the best way to do it. And extending that to the subtitle, you want to continue and place your keywords in order of importance. And so earlier in the subtitle is still better than the end of the subtitle. Now there is a catch. I discovered this bug in the algorithm. It's really strange. I can't really explain it, I can't explain it, but it doesn't make any sense. Apple hasn't told me anything about it, so I don't know if they're going to fix it, if they have fixed it. I haven't seen it being fixed. So what it is, and this is very technical, if you're using characters that are now alphanumeric, so an ampersand or one of those characters, even a dash in some cases if it's one of those special dashes, it takes up two characters as far as the algorithm can see, but it doesn't-
David Barnard:
It's a Unicode thing. Oh, that makes sense.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly. So what ends up happening is you can feed it more than 30 characters in App Store Connect. So your name is less than 30 characters, but the algorithm truncates it after 30 total characters. And so if you have Unicode characters that extend beyond, what you just do is you cut the last keyword and so you'll come across situations where an app has the perfect name. This happens in recipes, I believe I did an app teardown and a keyword teardown on one of those keywords and I saw that one of the apps was doing that exact thing. So if you look for the keyword then cut it in half, they're number one, but if you look for the proper keyword, they're not even in the selection. So-
David Barnard:
That's great.
Ariel Michaeli:
What I usually say is try not to use those characters and I think in general they're not really helpful in the name. You want to keep it as succinct as possible, but if you do aim for something like 27 characters total out of the 30 or 26 even just to be on the safe side and not have anything chopped off or put a keyword at the end that you don't care about, but you should never do that because that's wasteful.
David Barnard:
I like that you lumped name subtitle and keywords all into one big category because they all essentially just have different weight but have similar impact. Does it order if the keywords also matter like keywords earlier in your keywords matter-
Ariel Michaeli:
Absolutely.
David Barnard:
Oh, wow.
Ariel Michaeli:
And that's because they're all joined together. So there're all one long set of keywords and there are many ways to optimize your keyword list. You don't need to have repetition, you don't need to have [inaudible 00:21:32] you don't need to have two word keywords. You can slim them all down because what the algorithm will do, especially because they're all combined, the name, the subtitle on the keyword list is it will start combining keywords from all three and rank you for those. But because they come with different algorithm juju, you're going to have different variety of where the algorithm will fit you. So for example, if a keyword from the beginning of your name and the end of your keyword list are joined together and the algorithm believes that it's going to be good for you, it's probably going to have the lowest score of all combinations because it touches the end of the keyword list.
And so where you put those keywords also matters even when they're combined with other keywords in the name and the subtitle. And another thing that's really important, and I call that the cardinal sin of ASO for anyone who read anything that I wrote and I write that old time is duplication is evil and the reason it's evil is Apple doesn't penalize you for any of that. They're not going to say, "hmm, you duplicated, you're trying to trick us." Not at all, but because of what I just explained, how they combine words and give them the least juju based on where they are, you end up losing. So when you duplicate, they ignore the first dimensions of the keyword and look for the last dimension of the keyword and that's what happens. So you take a keyword from the beginning of the name, the first word in your name, and you duplicate at the end of your keyword list and you ruined everything.
David Barnard:
Gotcha. Let's do a little live keyword help. I am releasing a big update to my weather app, so that name of the app is Weather Up and we're releasing a big update with some really cool widgets that's going to kind of be the main value prop is the widgets and the Apple Watch complications. So following this line of thinking and to get really practical Weather Up dash widgets or should it be weather widgets by weather up, but then I'm duplicating a keyword, so that's not good is having the up in between weather up widgets and complications or whatever the rest of the title is, does it get penalized for having the up in the middle?
Ariel Michaeli:
Well, so that depends. Is it weather up a single award or weather space up?
David Barnard:
Weather space up?
Ariel Michaeli:
That's way better because you don't really want the algorithm to try and split up words and it's not going to do it well. So you already have weather in your name, which means weather up dash or colon, really anything is going to be your best bet by far because it's weather. That's exactly what you want. The real question is what do you want to optimize for? And it's funny because I just sent out a newsletter with my weekly recap of what's new in apps and one of the trends that's happening right now is weather apps are getting more downloads because Apple Weather went down and everyone's looking for their weather-
David Barnard:
Yeah, I wish [inaudible 00:24:15] by now.
Ariel Michaeli:
But I'm sure even for the next few weeks people are now going to think, oh yeah, Apple's going to remain up forever. It's going to be okay. They're still going to look for more apps, so you're probably in a good spot. So I would do weather colon or dash and then whatever else you want to optimize for. So if it's widgets, you can come up with something that would take widgets and make them unique beyond the weather widgets because, and we'd have to look this up and see what the data says. Another problem or another challenge that many don't actually see initially is what your gut says because weather widget sounds like a great keyword, but is it really? It's hard to tell. We're not the algorithm, we don't exist in the App Store the way the App Store is and we do have that data directly from Apple that can help us guide our decision.
We should always start with that and that's the popularity score. So I would go in and look for, we have a tool called Keyword Inspector, that's exactly what you think. You put in a keyword and we'll give you one all the results from right now, but also a few more intelligence-based features including the popularity, how competitive it is and some other numbers and based on that you can see, so maybe realtime alerts because we know the algorithm is going to combine weather with realtime and with widgets, that's maybe realtime widgets, realtime alerts, something to that extent is where I would start at least.
David Barnard:
Gotcha.
Ariel Michaeli:
Fun fact about widgets. I know that for a long time having widgets in your app name was actually pushing apps down and having them in the subtitle was okay. That was about a year and a half ago, two years ago. I don't know if that's still the case. I don't come across many apps that have widgets in the name any more probably for that reason.
David Barnard:
I'm glad I asked that because it's a perfect example where intuition might actually not be a great ASO strategy. The real answer would be first to find out if weather widgets is even a popular keyword that people are searching and then once we know whether it's popular or not, then we'd need to look at whether or not my app would have a chance at ranking for weather widgets.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
And so even though weather widgets is what I'm excited about and what I think the value prop of the app is, it might not actually make for a great title and a great title keyword depending on all these other factors. Those are the kind of thought processes and why app figures and other ASO tools are so important when you're doing ASO is because your intuition on what's going to work and not work and what you should title and not title often doesn't work out and doesn't actually drive the downloads and the discovery you were hoping for.
Ariel Michaeli:
Yep. If you only trust intuition, you probably won't see results. And fun fact, I just looked up weather widgets and it's a tiny popularity score so it's not worth optimizing for.
David Barnard:
Wow. See? Yeah, totally not what I would've guessed.
Ariel Michaeli:
Mm-hmm. So I would go for something like realtime alerts and continue from there. There's a lot of realtime weather, weather alerts, all those are really good.
David Barnard:
Fascinating. I took us down another rabbit hole. Let's get back to our ASO 101. So we've talked about app name, subtitles and keywords. The next more important thing for ASO is screenshots and video previews. Tell me about optimizing for those.
Ariel Michaeli:
So that's the second part of App Store optimization because ultimately what we started talking about before App Store optimization is you want to get the algorithm to float your app up, but you also need people to understand what they're looking at and then get it. And the real reason for that is there's just so many apps that do what people want at this point. There aren't many niches where you only have one app that is just perfect and everything else isn't exactly what it is. And so it's very easy to just swipe back and forth between different apps. If an app doesn't really capture your attention immediately, and especially today because many of the apps are free or free with a trial or free with an in-app purchase, it's so much easier to just try the one that fits the best and if it doesn't work out, then throw it out, try another one.
But by that time you kind of lose unless you're that app. So you want to be that app. And so the screenshots are the biggest thing on the app page and you really want to capture their attention in a very similar fashion to how you come up with keywords. For example, we know that people are not looking for weather widgets, we just found out, but we know that they're looking for weather alerts, popularity of 31 much better. I just looked it up too. And if you know that, now you know that you can capture their intent also through the screenshots. So if you show what the keyword says and you put the keyword on the screen, the ads of them looking at the screen and saying, "hmm, I don't know if this is for me." Really, really diminish, and instead it's, "oh, that's exactly what I was looking for. Yes, I'll give it a try."
And so you want your keyword, you want your entire metadata, which is the way the icon looks, the name, the subtitle, the keyword list, your videos or your screenshots and your screenshots and even your description to an extent, but I think fewer people actually read these days. So it's all the visuals, you want them to have the same messaging and you want that messaging to be very pleasant and there are many different ways to test it. I had on my show, on AF Chats a guy who does AB testing, ran AB test for Google and he went through his entire process of AB testing, screenshots, especially across localizations. It was really, really amazing. Definitely worth a watch to see just the thought process behind it and the expectation behind it. And he was sharing information about how he ran a test for other companies that in one case he just couldn't get to something that worked and they tried 18 different tests or something crazy like that, it's wild.
Then eventually he got resolved. So it's more about the thinking of how do I take the whole brand basically or the whole intent and express it and then use colors and then use visuals and then use a video. A video may not actually help. That's also something that came up in one of our AF Chats. Some people don't like seeing videos that are kind of fluffy and markety and some people do. So it really depends on your audience, but I would say spend as much time as you do on finding keywords on using those keywords beyond just in your text metadata.
David Barnard:
That makes a ton of sense. And then before we hit record, you're actually sharing an anecdote that some engineer at Apple told somebody that they were indexing words that were in screenshots. Is that true?
Ariel Michaeli:
Not from my experience, and I really want that to be true. The technology is there. We obviously, we know if we use an iPhone and the technology is magical. So I would imagine it would be right either all the time or most of the time because those are designer screenshots. Those are not just pictures of signs that we found on the street where the iPhone does a really good job at extracting those words too. So I totally see that as being plausible. I have not seen any sort of indication that it's actually happening from all the keyword teardowns that I do. And I do a keyword teardown every week, so I see a ton of different apps and a ton of different keywords, and I always try to reverse engineer how they got to where they are. People also ask me all the time what I think about specific keywords, and I've yet to see one keyword where the screenshots actually align with that. I'm waiting. So if there is an example, I would love to see it, but I have not seen it yet, maybe that's in the future.
David Barnard:
All right. The last one on our key factors list are ratings and reviews. How do ratings and reviews impact ASO and discoverability?
Ariel Michaeli:
So if there's something to take from this ASO 101 that we're trying to maintain is that reviews don't matter and ratings definitely matter. And that's something that I get asked all the time. Most people don't believe me when I say, if you have more ratings, you're going to beat apps that have more downloads. That's just the way it is on the App Store. And every week I have a guide that shows it in some capacity because what it is, if you think about it is if your app is popular, if people care about your app, whether it's a negative rating or a positive rating, but they care about your app, that's what the algorithm is trying to continue and promote. They care less about the downloads because those you can buy or those you can get in a bazillion different ways, including Apple search ads or any other ad network, but the ratings feel a lot more organic.
You can also buy ratings and you shouldn't, there are many bad things that can happen, but let's say in a world where that's not the case, ratings are the more organic way of showing Apple that people care about your app, so the algorithm should. And one of the measures that I look at, I don't know if this is beyond the 101, but that's something that I look at a lot is what's the ability of every competitor that I have to turn download into a rating and I call that number the DPR, the downloads per rating metric. And the idea is how many downloads do you need to produce for one rating?
And you can see that when you look at keyword inspector and you can see apps that are doing really well and that number is really low versus apps that are not doing really well and that's how you know you can beat them. So if they have a 1000-year ratings and you're trying to think, "oh, how many downloads do I need to get to a 1000 ratings?" You have those numbers to really give you your own algorithm for figuring that out. And then you can go out and you can promote your app and push it to that point. And then once it's there, it will get the visibility and hopefully they'll be organic enough and you maintain that position.
David Barnard:
Very cool. Those are some great tips. You said reviews don't matter, but they don't matter to the algorithm, but they matter to the people side.
Ariel Michaeli:
Of course, yeah.
David Barnard:
I mean people do probably read reviews and if it's all one star reviews and then you still have a 4.5 star rating, probably would detract from downloads.
Ariel Michaeli:
That's very possible. I think the point at which people make the decision to get doesn't always require scrolling to the point where you see the reviews.
David Barnard:
Right, that's a good point.
Ariel Michaeli:
And so it's kind of a yes or a no or maybe. I think if you have the right average you'll be okay. And I've talked to Costa, the app hunter who pointed out that there are a lot of scams out there that buy a lot of ratings, enough ratings to have a very high average and also a very high account so they can get those ranks, but they have a very poor average if you only look at the ratings that come from reviews and people don't really have a big problem continuing to download them because they don't scroll to that point. So they don't see all the one star reviews that say, scam, scam, scam, will take your money and not give you value. So I think it's more about the average and the counts.
David Barnard:
Yeah, that makes sense. What is kind of the minimum average you see driving good downloads? Is there 4.5, 4.4-
Ariel Michaeli:
I don't know [inaudible 00:34:38].
David Barnard:
Like the more ratings actually help? I mean the higher the rating actually helped drive more downloads.
Ariel Michaeli:
I don't think so. I think there's a minimum for both. If you see an app that has a handful of ratings and maybe a 3.8 average, you're not going to take it seriously. But if you see an app with a 4.2 and a 1000 ratings, you're probably going to be okay and it's not going to play as much of a role in you getting it or not getting it. So I think you have to hit that minimum and then you'll be fine.
David Barnard:
Yeah, sometimes when I see an app that's like 5 star rating or 4.9 star rating, I kind of wonder like, "oh geez, are they buying ratings or something?" Because I mean I have seen a lot of apps get that organically, but yeah, I wonder if there's also a too high of rating where people start to question whether it's real or not.
Ariel Michaeli:
I don't know. I feel like that's a developer thing. Most people just think, "oh, this is an amazing app. Sounds good to me."
David Barnard:
All right, so we already hit the biggest mistake in ASO, which is duplicating keywords. Any other common ASO mistakes that we should hit on?
Ariel Michaeli:
So we hit on multiple ASO mistakes actually. One is duplication, and that's really the ultimate sin because it ruins everything in a way that's very hard to detect. But also not looking at popularity scores and trusting your instincts, that's another huge mistake that can lead you down a very bad path and it's really easy to do. It takes seconds. Took me a second to do that just now. That's another one of those things that I would say do first. The other is not actually looking at your app's name as a place to put keywords. That's always, always bad. There's still some companies that believe in some indies that believe that the name has to be clean. That's not true. I mean, if you want to get downloads, that's not true. And that's something that just changed over time.
David Barnard:
There used to be an ASO hack where if your app name was an exact string match for a popular keyword, like my mirror app, I actually used this. My mirror app was mirror and a Unicode symbol and it was an exact match for mirror and apparently tens of thousands of people were searching mirror every day because I was getting 4 or 5,000 downloads a day. Does that still work? Is there still that kind of exact string match bonus on the app name if you-
Ariel Michaeli:
Absolutely.
David Barnard:
Do have like a very popular keyword.
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah, so it's really the focus. Focus is how I call wanting to think about the algorithm understanding you as doing multiple things or few things. And the fewer things you do, the more it likes you for those fewer things. So by having only one word in your app name, you're really focusing. And unfortunately that trick still works and there's some apps that continue to take advantage of it and it's pretty ugly. I don't like to think of it as a trick that companies should use or people should use because I feel like eventually it will stop working and then you just have a name with a funky character, but it definitely still works.
David Barnard:
I did that a decade ago. It's one of those things, I mean, yeah, I felt like is this just a hack? But when App Store search is so broken that other apps are using those kind of tricks, you're just shooting yourself on the foot if you're not taking advantage. And ultimately my app was a really great, it actually, I think still to this day has 4.9 stars and is a really great app to be a mirror, which is such a simple thing. And so that's my moral justification for having done it myself. But the funny thing is I thought the same thing. I thought any day now Apple's going to fix this and it's been a decade and they haven't fixed it yet, but it does seem like that's actually been less of a boost than it was in the past because 5 or 10 years ago it would just rocket you to the top of really popular keywords and now it's like a boost. And maybe that kind of thinking about it as the focus, kind of explains how it helps, but it's not just rocket ship to the top-
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
Of a popular keyword.
Ariel Michaeli:
It's not a hard coded rule that if the name matches the keyword just number one automatically. And there's still other factors that play into this, like ratings and other things. And I think a lot more apps are at the point where they're doing enough to really help the algorithm understand what they do. I'm not going to go full out and say all the apps do ASO because it's absolutely not true. But enough apps do, they kind of start with ASO, and so there's still more to adjust the keywords at this point. And that's also why more companies need to do ASO and more people need to do ASO because everyone else is doing it.
David Barnard:
Yeah, you're shooting yourself on the foot if you're not paying attention to ASO.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
Like if you're a big app and you don't have a team paying attention to this kind of stuff, or at least one person who thinks about this day in day out, you're wasting potential organic traffic. So you said that not having keywords in your app name is a common mistake, but then we said that there's this element of focus. When do you think it is actually appropriate to have a short name to establish that focus? Only when your brand is very keywordy.
Ariel Michaeli:
It really depends. When I say you need to have keywords in your name, it doesn't mean that you need to take up all 30 characters or 27 if you're using any of those ASCII characters we mentioned before. But it just means that you need to think about it from an explanatory standpoint and not just have your brand name as the only keyword, as the only text in the name. You can have a little bit more than that. And that little bit more is what we can stretch with focusing around focusing. Ideally, you wouldn't have to focus too much because then you're really siloing yourself unless you're in a niche where there's really just one or maybe two keywords that matter.
And that does exist, especially around games, but not as much for almost any other app. So from my experience, you want to focus when you are either very new to a category and the keyword is very competitive and you just want to take all the algorithm juice and focus it on the one keyword and later on with more ratings, with more downloads, you'll be able to attack those other keyword combinations. That's usually what I go for. If I'm very new or I'm working with an app that is kind of weak or hasn't done any ASO for a long time and the competition is fierce, that's where you want to focus.
David Barnard:
A good example would be Dropbox. So people who are searching Dropbox, they're going to show up high for Dropbox, it's a brand name. They're going to be the number one result. They're not going to lose that number one result by moving the keyword to the side. And so by putting, I don't remember exactly what it was, but like photo backup by Dropbox or-
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah, something like that.
David Barnard:
Something like that. Then they still have their branded keyword in there or their brand name in the title, and then they have a really heavy focus on whatever it was, like photo backups.
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah, I think [inaudible 00:41:11]-
David Barnard:
So the focus is on photo backups as the first two keywords.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
And then their brand is right there. And so I think if I remember correctly, that was it. And so they weren't using, like you said, they weren't using all 27 characters. It was a very focused name on that really important keyword that they were going after.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly. And it made perfect sense to me. I think it was totally the right move, and I think they undid it a few weeks later and I thought that was a mistake.
David Barnard:
Maybe they got some of the juice and then, because isn't there a little bit of like training the algorithm that you're good for certain keywords and then you-
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah.
David Barnard:
So let's say they did that for a month and then the algorithm learns that they're a really good result for photo backup and then they move it back to the right side of the brand name, they would still potentially maintain a high ranking for those keywords, right?
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah. So even if they moved it into the keyword list or the subtitle, they would still have that sort of impact. But other apps are also competing on this. So if other apps are actively optimizing for it, that learning will diminish over time. And the more active the keyword is, the faster that happens. So you can do it. And if your niche specifically doesn't have that sort of churn or ASO experimentation by competitors, it's probably going to be okay. And I've seen that more three-ish years ago than what I see now, but it's still a thing. It just because everyone else is moving forward, the algorithm just can't hold onto you.
Another mistake that people make is they don't look at ASO as something that is me against the competitors because that's really what it is. It's not us against the algorithm. It's not us against the App Store, it's us against whoever else is competing with us. And that doesn't even end up being the same set of competitors you think of for your app as a developer, as a CEO or as a product owner because the features don't have to be the same. The algorithm has to think they're the same. Those are your real, I call them ASO competitors, but those are real competitors in that sense. So if they're doing better than you, whatever it is, more ratings, better conversion rate, anything like that, they're going to outrank you. And those are the ones you have to beat, not really anyone else.
David Barnard:
Which is why ASO isn't a set it and forget it play. You need to actually iterate and keep an eye. And if you're Dropboxing, you put photo back up as your first keyword and you start to ranking really highly for that, then you need to watch that for the next six months and make sure that when you move it, you don't trail off over time. And then yeah, look at the impact-
Ariel Michaeli:
The competitor doesn't slip in there. Yeah.
David Barnard:
Right. So we touched on it already, but I did want to do a quick overview of keyword research. So how do you discover, implement, iterate on the keywords that are actually going to matter for your app?
Ariel Michaeli:
I wrote a few guides that go through really all of those things in a lot of detail and then one that has an overview of all of them. So those are great reading materials, but if you think about keyword research is you want to identify keywords where your app can compete, which means the number of ratings that you're getting or you're planning on getting, if you're going to do any sort of push kind of aligned with the top five results. I think that's the easiest way to look at it. That's number one. You have to find keywords where the competition isn't necessarily doing as good of a job as they could. And if you read keyword teardowns, you'll see what I'm talking about where some apps unintuitively, intuitively optimize for keywords they believe make sense, but without looking at the data.
And so there could be keywords that are very similar that are actually better. And if you optimize for those, you'll see that because they're not optimizing for them. And another thing that you'll see when doing ASO is most apps try to copy other apps. And so if one does it incorrectly, but convincingly enough, almost everyone else will try to copy it in that particular niche. And that's really a great opportunity because you can just do it right and then you outrank all of them. So you want to find those keyword words. The best ways that I have defined those keywords are one, look at competitors. We have a report called competitors' keywords that does exactly that. We try to name everything the way it should be. You put in your competitors and it will tell you what keywords they're using and where they're seeing success and where they're not seeing success.
And you can use both of those to your advantage. I spoke to Ian Film, the BBC, on one of my AF Chats who said he used that report to find a different idea for a different way to say a word that because his app was just so much stronger than all the other apps using it, but he just didn't think about it. Once he started using it, he immediately saw results, which was just amazing. So that's my go-to tool. I look at what they do and I try to find ones that I don't use or that I use, but I'm not ranking high enough in which means the algorithm knows me already and I just need to do some tweaking. We have an AI-based system that generates keywords, not ChatGPT stuff. We had this before, but it's actually a lot simpler.
It doesn't guess in any way. It just looks at all the other apps that are competitive and are popular in your niche. And it extracts their keywords and continues to do a few iterations on those to find keywords that are really relevant to one specific keyword. And those give you a lot of ideas for things that you can use. We have that in many different flavors, and so you can select and then we have filters that you can apply on top of it. But at the end of the day, the one that I also like is I love to read the competitor reviews and to see what their users are saying because that is their intent. And we talked about intent to before someone who's coming into the App Store to find something. They're not looking to read an article. Even though those exist, they have a problem, they need a solution. And usually in reviews you'll find those same words that identify intent from competitors. Take those and you're golden.
David Barnard:
That's great. And then what's the strategy? I mean we've touched on it a little bit, but when you find a keyword that you could potentially rank higher in, how do you rank higher? Is that where you actually move it up and you experiment with putting that in your title or subtitle? And a lot of the experimentation around better ranking is actually just moving keywords around and adding new keywords.
Ariel Michaeli:
In a sense, yeah. If you know that the keyword list, the name and the subtitle are all joined together, you have a lot of characters to play with. And we know that placement is important. You know that where you put it makes a big difference. And so depending on if it's a primary keyword, meaning it's a very core keyword that you have to be ranked in, maybe a secondary keyword, meaning a keyword that when added to a primary keyword gives you a good combination. That's how you decide where to put it.
And the more core the keyword is, the earlier in this long string that it should be because it will combine with everything else. It will combine in any case. But you want that good juju starting from left to right. And the way I like to think about it is I like to think about it as themes or sets. You want to use a set that works very well together for the name, the subtitle on the keyword list. And what I do is either try a new set for an experiment or I try to tweak a set by moving things around just a little bit. And that's optimization in a nutshell.
David Barnard:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Ariel Michaeli:
It's so easy.
David Barnard:
Does the order in the keywords matter for phrases? So like we are using the example of photo backup for Dropbox, if they put it in the keyword list and it was backup, photos, when somebody searches photo backup, does it matter what order those are in?
Ariel Michaeli:
So yes and no. In the name and the subtitle, the order matters in the keyword list because it's so much at the end and the weight is much lower, it doesn't as much. Ideally you would want to sort it out the way that would like to read it. I noticed that when you flip the order of keywords for phrases between the name and the subtitle, for example, it doesn't have as much weight, and so you don't want to do that, but the keyword list is just more at the end that it's a little bit less apparent.
David Barnard:
The other thing I wanted to ask about was the impact of paid marketing on keyword ranking. Does dumping a ton of users into the App Store actually benefit at all, or is it really strictly just the number of ratings you get out of those downloads that matters?
Ariel Michaeli:
From my experience, it's the number of ratings. And on Google Play, it does make a big difference. But one thing you have to keep in mind is that when you dump a lot of users into your app page, if a lot of them, a major portion of them end up not downloading the app, you're really giving the App Store a signal that no one wants this app. And it's not a major component in most cases. Not in all cases, but I expect Apple to look at that more and more with time, and I think we'll probably start seeing more of that later this year. Just it makes sense. And it's such a good signal. Google has been doing this for years.
David Barnard:
Right. So conversion, if your conversion rate is low from people landing [inaudible 00:50:11] I mean, does that already take in somewhat into account for keywords? So-
Ariel Michaeli:
I believe so, yeah.
David Barnard:
Researches weather app and then they land on your page and then you don't-
Ariel Michaeli:
And hit back, yeah.
David Barnard:
Get a download. Yeah.
Ariel Michaeli:
It doesn't have a lot of weight at this point for the most part. I think in smaller categories or keywords that are less popular, you'll find that it does have more weight, but for the most part, it doesn't have that big of an impact. But I expect that to change because it's such a good signal when you have so many apps and everyone is trying to optimize. So after all the optimization and everything else that you've done, they still don't want to download the app. This app just can't be here. It shouldn't.
David Barnard:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, we do need to wrap up, but I want to know one last topic that I think is really, it flies under the radar a lot. I knew about this years ago and forgot about it, and then this week in preparing for this conversation, I found it again, and that is the impact of secondary ASO localizations. Tell me about why that matters and how to do it.
Ariel Michaeli:
So the brief version is that you can localize your app into many languages. And when I say localize, I don't mean the app, I mean the app metadata, which is that name, subtitle and keyword list. And so a long, long time ago, some developers were tweaking things and realized that Apple uses the English localization for keywords, but also in the US Spanish from Mexico. And what that means is that instead of one set of words, one set of name, subtitle, keyword list, you get two. So if you're optimizing for or if you're localizing for Spanish, all those keywords would also go into the App Store. Say if I'm a Spanish speaker and I search in Spanish, I will find your app, which makes sense. There is a large population of Spanish speakers, so the App Store wants to be accessible to them. If you are not localizing for Spanish, use English in there.
And then you have it twice the number of everything, twice the characters for the name, the subtitle and the keyword list. And fairly recently we discovered that they extended this list to beyond Spanish, Mexico to also include Russian and a few other languages. I have them all listed in an article that I wrote along with a table for all the other countries and which languages are being used. So I believe now you have five sets. The interesting thing to keep in mind is that they're all isolated, meaning where they would combine the name, subtitle and keyword list, they're not going to combine all five of them into one. They're just going to combine all three into one and have five of those. So you can't share keywords between two different sets, which means you can duplicate between different sets but not duplicate within the set, if that makes sense.
David Barnard:
Do these secondary localizations have the same impact as your main-
Ariel Michaeli:
They do.
David Barnard:
Keyword and app title?
Ariel Michaeli:
Pretty much, yeah, from everything I've seen they're pretty solid.
David Barnard:
Wow.
Ariel Michaeli:
So it's definitely worth it, even if you're just experimenting.
David Barnard:
So in our example from earlier, Dropbox could actually just leave their English language App Store as just Dropbox, and then they could make their Spanish localization photo back by Dropbox. And what you're saying is they would get the exact same benefit as if they had changed the English localization.
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly. On devices that are set to Spanish, they would see Dropbox photo storage or whatever it was.
David Barnard:
Right. And so that's a downside if you actually, which Dropbox is a bad example here because they probably do have Spanish localization. So if you have localization in those languages, you shouldn't actually use your English keywords, which would confuse people who have the Spanish language-
Ariel Michaeli:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
Set as a default language on their device. So yeah, it's a benefited drawback to actually localizing your app.
Ariel Michaeli:
But that also means that you should at least take the time to use that space, whether it's for real localization or for English, do something with it. It's useful and don't leave it empty.
David Barnard:
This seems like one of those hacks that Apple should actually find a way to crack down on. It just seems like too easy of a, it's like a cheat code.
Ariel Michaeli:
But is that bad when you think about it? Apple gives you a 100 keywords and a 100 characters for the keyword list and 30 characters for the name, 30 for the subtitle, 160 characters is not that many characters overall.
David Barnard:
True. Other than what you were saying earlier is that so many apps just don't pay attention and don't use these kind of strategies. And so it's just that, yeah, people who listen to this podcast and listen to your-
Ariel Michaeli:
Or read my articles.
David Barnard:
Chats and read your articles, just have a huge leg up over the rest of the App Store who's not paying attention to ASO. So just another great example of paying attention to this stuff can even in 2023 make a huge difference to your App Store presence and your organic discovery on the App Store by learning some of this or having somebody on your team pay attention and actually-
Ariel Michaeli:
Yeah, absolutely.
David Barnard:
Work on optimization. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. So usually I'll let the guest pitch if you have hiring or whatever, but let me just say, I have been an Appfigures subscriber since 2009. You and I go way back, but I've been a continuous user of Appfigures. I don't even know what I pay you now, like 30 bucks a month. It was originally like 10 bucks a month. You've had a lot of different-
Ariel Michaeli:
Five.
David Barnard:
Pricing over the years, and I was, five, oh my gosh, that was too cheap. But I mean, I have been a continuous subscriber for 14 years now, and I can't say enough good things about Appfigures. I've genuinely have used it all this time and gotten a ton of value. I mean, honestly, I should have paid you more for all the value I've gotten out of it. So if any of you aren't out there using Appfigures, it's fantastic. And then when I first started using it in 2009, it was just you would download the App Store Connect reports, and give me easier to read. And this is back when App Store Connect was iTunes Connect. The internal reporting was terrible, so Apple's gotten better at giving you some views on the data. But I still go to Appfigures before I go to the App Store Connect-
Ariel Michaeli:
So much easier.
David Barnard:
I like the way that you present things, you iterate more quickly, like there's just more going on in Appfigures. And then since I've been a customer, you've expanded into ASO, you have the market intelligence and it's a really full-featured product, and you have huge customers like Microsoft. You've got some of the biggest apps on the App Store using the platform because there's value there. So if you're not using Appfigures, you should at least go give it a look because it's pretty great.
Ariel Michaeli:
I agree with all of this.
David Barnard:
Are you hiring for any roles or anything else people should check out?
Ariel Michaeli:
We're hiring for a bunch of roles. We have backend, front end roles, appfigures.com/careers is going to list all of them. We're looking for more marketing people, more content people to work with me producing live streams and other things. So if you're looking for a job or you're looking for a better job, check out appfigures.com/careers.
David Barnard:
Awesome. All right. Thanks so much, Ariel. This is a fantastic chat.
Ariel Michaeli:
Thank you for having me. This was a blast. We should do this again and then we'll do advanced ASO for beginners.
David Barnard:
Yeah, I have a whole list of advanced strategies we didn't even get to. So yeah, we do need to do a part two at some point.
Ariel Michaeli:
We touched on a few of them. Cool.
David Barnard:
All right. Thanks again.
Ariel Michaeli:
All righty. Not a problem.
David Barnard:
Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.