How to make your app stand out in today’s digital world

This article is part of our Opinions section.

Did you know that 88% of mobile time is spent within apps? It’s not a surprise then that the mobile app market generated around $500 billion of revenue in 2023. 

But it’s a very competitive market. There are over 1.6 million apps on the App Store and 3.5 million on Google Play, with tens of thousands of new ones added each month. And only 0.5% of new apps are successful. This means that only a fraction of new apps generate any profits and the majority will fail for various reasons. 

What’s more, 70% of all apps have fewer than 1,000 downloads and the very top 1% of app publishers drive around 80% of all downloads. 

Competitive market? That’s an understatement. However, don’t be scared by these numbers. You can make your app a success. You just need a plan. 

It isn’t enough to just have an app with great features and the best user experience. You need to be able to get your app from the app store into the phones of your customers. And with the app market being so competitive, this is no easy task.

Don’t just rely on organic growth 

While a few years ago App Store Optimisation (ASO) may have been the most important part of your app marketing strategy, to stay competitive in the busy app marketing landscape, you need to power up your paid User Acquisition (UA) strategy. This doesn’t mean that ASO is no longer important – it sure is – but it has to be combined with your paid user acquisition strategy for an app’s sustainable growth as both have the main goal of driving quality conversions while maintaining a low cost per conversion.

To start with, you need a solid ASO foundation to maintain a stream of high-quality users across channels. It is essential as the user will ultimately land in your app store listing. You are literally wasting your money if you haven’t invested time in ASO and optimising your store listing.

Paid user acquisition can lead to more organic app installs. Ads will bring new attention to your app store listing. The more installs your app generates, the higher your app will be ranked in the app stores. As a result, it increases visibility across search results and browse sections. Due to increased visibility, more and more users will land in your organic store listing and download your app. Hence the growth loop continues!

A successful strategy is about understanding the correlation between ASO and paid user acquisition efforts. You need to understand how your paid funnel impacts organic growth and vice versa.

Analysing your app’s performance

After putting a lot of effort into optimising your UA, don’t just sit back and hope to see perfect results. Throughout the campaign, you should be analysing your app’s performance and asking the right questions.

You’d probably like to know how much growth your ASO efforts brought. Or was it your paid UA traffic that led to an increase or decrease? It can be challenging to answer all these questions, especially considering many factors that can play a significant role. As an example, let’s look at a couple of scenarios. 

Scenario 1: a drop in app installs

Seeing a drop in installs? It might be concerning at first sight. However, the good news is that there is most probably an explanation for every decrease in installs. And for every problem, there is also a solution. 

One crucial impact factor you need to consider is paid user acquisition efforts. When you notice a decrease in downloads, you should first check whether you had ads running during that specific time. Ads can bring a significant amount of traffic to your app, and once you stop or reduce them, this might have a substantial effect on your results. Check the correlation between organic and paid conversions, and then analyse how your paid conversions impact your total growth and understand whether an increase in installs might be due to reduced Google App Campaigns or Apple Search Ads.

What should you do now? First, try to get a better picture of the situation by looking at the last 30 or 90-day timeframe and understanding how significant the impact was. If pausing your Google App Campaigns or Apple Search Ads greatly decreased your installs, you should consider re-activating the ads.

Scenario 2: an increase in app installs

This is the result we are all aiming for. Ideally, you’d want this to continue throughout and beyond your marketing campaign. But for that, you need to know what was impacting the increase. Transferring and attributing success from one place to another can be tricky if you do not know where the success is coming from. 

Your best bet would be to look at the conversion breakdown to help you find the answer. Is it Google Ads, Apple Search Ads or ASO? If you ran Google App Campaigns or Apple Search Ads at the same time as the installs increase then it is most likely that that was what influenced your overall app growth.

It is worth also evaluating which ad platform is the most efficient. Do you get a better cost per conversion with Google Ads or Apple Search Ads? To get an idea of whether your app is performing better or worse, you may want to compare the figures with previous campaigns – how did your impressions, conversions and costs perform compared to the previous period? Taking all of this into account will help you determine whether you should change your focus or make tweaks to your campaign.

Analysing the impact of paid and organic user acquisition is no easy task. The bottom line, though, is that you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You can’t rely on just organic UA or just paid UA. For a successful app marketing strategy, both areas have to work in tandem and if properly managed your app will soon be reaping your strategy’s benefits. 

Don’t lose sight of your competition and monitor trends

Competitive research should be the foundation of your mobile app marketing strategy. You also shouldn’t lose sight of what your competitors are doing post-launch. The activity of your competitors is the reason behind fluctuations in average costs per tap and download.

Monitor your competitors to spot new trends and opportunities. New custom product pages, keyword expansion – all these can be signals that they spotted an opportunity you missed. Don’t be afraid to go for it.

In today’s noisy world, only thoughtful, creative and relevant ads stand a chance of triggering any interaction from users. This means tailoring your content carefully to suit their preferences, showcasing different app features with custom product pages, following events important to users and choosing where to advertise carefully.

The app market is more competitive than ever and it can be daunting keeping your finger on the pulse of new and emerging trends in the industry. However, as long as you make sure to look after your ASO foundations, and your UA efforts, and build a good product, you will be reaping the rewards of your marketing efforts sooner than you thought.

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