Review miningGlossary · 31
The vocabulary of
App Store Optimization.
In ASO most terms are a concept and a measurement at once. “Difficulty” is not a feeling, it is a computed number; “popularity” is an estimate, and what it rests on matters. This glossary defines each term together with how rankcusp measures it.
A
App preview video
The short video on the product page. It plays first in the image strip.
App Store Connect
Apple's developer console. Title, subtitle and keyword field are written here and go live with a version.
Apple Search Ads
Apple's App Store advertising platform. The only source of popularity data that comes from Apple itself.
ASO (App Store Optimization)
The work of making an app findable in store search on the right terms, and convincing the person who finds it to install.
C
Category ranking
Your place in your category's free and paid charts. A discovery channel independent of search.
Competitor tracking
Watching rivals' rankings, ratings and metadata changes.
Conversion rate (CVR)
The share of people who see the page and install. The strongest behavioural signal feeding ranking.
Cusp keyword
A keyword the app ranks 11-30 for. Apple has already made the association; what is missing is relevance.
Custom product page
An alternative product page for the same app, with different images and text, opened by its own link.
I
L
R
Rank tracking
Measuring where you rank for a keyword, regularly. Not a model - the search is actually run.
Rating velocity (Δrating/day)
New ratings per day. The only freely available proxy for install rate.
Relevance
How well Apple matches your app to a search term. The half of ranking that is not metadata.
Review mining
Extracting keywords from rival reviews. The only way to reach the user's own words.
S
Screenshots
The image strip on the product page. It affects ranking indirectly, through conversion.
Search suggestions (autocomplete)
The completions the store offers in its search box. The most direct demand signal reachable without an ad account.
Storefront
A country's App Store. Each one has its own rankings and its own metadata.
Subtitle
30 characters. The most heavily indexed field after the title.
Why an ASO glossary is needed at all
Most ASO terms sit close to one another, and when they get confused months of effort go into the wrong work. Popularity and difficulty, relevance and rank, position and visibility - these are different things, and the difference fits in a sentence.
The second reason is that the same term means different things in different tools. In one, "difficulty" is computed from search volume; in another from the number of rivals; in a third from a language model's guess. Without knowing who defined it how, two numbers cannot be compared.
The third is that some terms have no measurement behind them at all. "Brand strength" and "app authority" sound measurable, but there is no published data underneath them. This glossary also says which terms have a measurement behind them and which do not.
Every definition here describes something with a counterpart in the panel. A term with no counterpart does not get defined.
The four pairs people confuse most
Four distinctions are worth knowing before reading the rest; most of the other terms are built on them.
Popularity and difficulty. Popularity is how much a phrase is searched; difficulty is how strong the apps competing for it are. A phrase that is both heavily searched and easy is rare; one that is lightly searched and hard is more common than you would expect.
Relevance and rank. Relevance is Apple having associated your app with the phrase; rank is where it places you among the apps it associated. Their costs are very different, and that distinction is what makes one keyword cheap and another expensive.
Position and visibility. Position is a number; visibility is that number multiplied by popularity. Being first for a phrase nobody searches reaches fewer people than being fifteenth for one they do.
Unmeasured and zero. A blank value means we could not measure it; zero means we measured and it came out zero. In the panel every unmeasured value shows as a short dash, because a zero makes people decide as if it were a reading.
- Popularity: how much it is searched. Difficulty: how strong the field is.
- Relevance: did Apple associate you. Rank: does it place you high.
- Position: a number. Visibility: position × popularity.
- Blank: could not measure. Zero: measured, came out zero.
The measurement chain behind the terms
Most definitions here rest on the same five sources, and knowing the source sharpens the definition.
Search results: a phrase is searched in a country and the first 200 are read. Position, density and title share come from there. It runs once a day; measuring more often raises the noise, not the information.
Search suggestions: the relative value for how much a phrase is searched is derived from these. Where no suggestion returns, popularity stays blank.
App metadata: the name, subtitle and description are read; phrase extraction and the metadata audit both feed from there.
Ratings: score and count are recorded over time. The strength threshold is computed from that count.
Rival reviews: review text is scanned and the phrases that look like searches are pulled out. What the five share is that they are all open - none comes from a private arrangement, and you can verify every one of them yourself.
Terms this glossary does not carry
What a glossary declines to define is information too. The following are absent and will stay absent.
No absolute search volume. Apple does not publish how many times a phrase is searched in a month; popularity is relative and is written as relative everywhere.
No download or revenue estimates. Apple does not give these to third parties; the figures in circulation are computed backwards from rank and their error bars vary widely by category.
No composite scores like "app authority". These are several measurements added together by an unstated formula, and without the formula two tools cannot be compared.
No components or weights of the ranking algorithm. Apple has not published them; we write down observable behaviour, not a formula.
Frequently asked
- Is each term written with its source?
- Yes. The measurement behind every definition - a search result, a search suggestion, metadata, a rating or a review - is stated. A term with no counterpart does not get defined.
- Does this mean the same as the term in other tools?
- Not always, and the difference matters. "Difficulty" may be computed from search volume in one tool and from rival count in another. The definition here says which components it is computed from.
- Why is there no absolute search volume?
- Apple does not publish it. Tools that give one are estimating, and an estimate presented without saying so gets read as a measurement - which is what makes it dangerous.
You know the terms. Now for your own numbers.
Connect your app and let every measurement in this glossary be computed for it. No setup, no card.