Rank tracking

Rank is not a number, it is a curve. Somebody checking weekly misses both the day a rival shipped and the day their own change took hold; they end up with two points and have to imagine everything in between.

The second benefit gets discussed less: it preserves the difference between “measured for the first time” and “went up”. A keyword measured for the first time has no previous rank, and rankcusp claims nothing on that day.

The daily sweep searches a phrase once and reads every tracked app's position out of that one search. A rival's rank costs no extra request, and a phrase two accounts both watch is measured once.

Because cost follows the number of distinct keyword-country pairs in the pool rather than the number of customers, adding a storefront does not multiply the price.

Being 7th for a phrase looks like a good thing. It may be; it may not. Four things have to sit next to the number before it can be decided on.

Popularity first: being first for a phrase nobody searches brings nothing. Visibility is rank multiplied by popularity - being first for a lightly searched phrase reaches fewer people than being fifteenth for a heavily searched one.

Country second: the same phrase can sit at 7 in one storefront and 84 in another. Merging countries into an average makes you decide wrongly in both.

History third: 7th is a loss if you were 3rd last month and a gain if you were 24th. The same number carries two opposite meanings, and only the history says which.

Control group fourth: in a week when every phrase fell three places, yours falling three places is not a signal, it is the market. Read together these four turn a rank into a decision; on its own it is just a number.

Ranks move a little every day and most of that movement is meaningless. Separating what is not is the most practical skill in rank tracking.

A single day's movement is not interpreted. Two places in a day happens to almost every phrase and is usually small differences in measurement conditions. Three days running in the same direction is a signal: something is behind it - your move, a rival's move, or the market shifting.

The size of a movement is read against the rank itself. One place inside the top 10 is a large event; ten places at 150 is almost nothing. Density is higher at the top, so the same distance is harder to cover.

That is why measurement runs once a day. Measuring more often does not produce better data; intraday movement is the measurement's noise, not the market's. Once a day, stacked up, makes the trend visible - and a trend is clean of noise.

If your app is not in the first 200, the rank is unknown. We write that as "outside 200" and show a short dash; we do not invent 201 or 999.

The reason is practical rather than technical: an invented number becomes sortable and makes the difference between two measurements meaningless. Worse, a person seeing a number on screen reads it as a measurement and decides on it.

The same rule holds for popularity. Where no search suggestion returns, popularity could not be measured and the field stays blank. Written as zero, the phrase would drop to the bottom of the list and look worthless - when nobody measured it to be worthless.

This is less a product preference than a rule of honesty. Every number on the screen is a number that was actually measured; where one was not, a dash sits instead.

Three months of history gives you things single measurements cannot.

Band persistence: if a phrase has sat in the same band for three months, that is its natural place. Phrases oscillating between the top 10 and the band are on the edge and the most fragile group - a small move by a rival puts you on the second page.

Accumulation: a single move's effect is small, a few places. The question is whether those small effects stack. If they do not, either every move is winning in one place and losing in another, or the market is moving at your speed.

Silent losses: gains get looked at, losses do not. A phrase falling from the top 10 into the band goes unnoticed because nobody looks at something already won. Scanning the history backwards every quarter - which phrases were higher three months ago than they are today - usually produces a surprising list.

Seasonality: a phrase's popularity is not flat across the year, and when popularity rises so does the number of apps entering it. The right comparison is the same period last year; comparing to last month turns a seasonal move into an apparent effect of yours.