Review miningKeyword competition in the games category: from obligation to competitive advantage
What is in this resource:
How to build your ASO strategy from end to end
Learn to pick target keywords, write metadata, follow rank and base every decision on data.
From data to action
Simplify the keyword data and stay in line with App Store rules.
Tools that lift rank
Carry the keywords drawn from competitor reviews into your metadata and take your app out of the cusp band into the top 10.
What category competition measures
Before entering a category there is one question worth asking: how many apps are competing for the same phrases, and how strong are they? The answer comes from counting, not guessing.
A category is the heading Apple files apps under. For ASO it is not a list, it is a field of competition: apps in the same category largely compete for the same phrases.
Competition is not measured by app count. A category can hold thousands of apps and most of them never appear in the first 200 for anything. What has to be measured is how many apps actually show up for the phrases you are targeting.
So category competition is measured with four numbers: density, title share, the strength threshold and band spread. All four come from open data and all four can be verified by hand.
What is not measured is market share. Download and revenue figures for the apps in a category are closed. The estimates in circulation are computed backwards from rank and their error bars vary widely by category. We do not write those numbers down.
Category competition is a decision instrument, not a scare tactic. High competition does not mean stay out; it means enter through these phrases and not those.
Density: how many apps show up
Density is how many apps appear in the first 200 for a phrase. The simplest measure, and the most misread.
High density means the phrase is crowded. Every place has to be traded with somebody, and every place you win is somebody else's loss.
But high density does not mean the phrase is valuable. This is the most common mistake: people think "if everyone is going there they must know something". In fact density is usually the residue of the past - a phrase was popular years ago, apps wrote it into their metadata, the phrase lost its popularity, and nobody removed it.
That is why density is always read alongside popularity. High density with low popularity is a trap; low density with high popularity is an opening.
Density has a second reading, over time. If a phrase's density rose over three months, new apps are entering the category or existing ones are widening their metadata. Either way the consequence is the same: holding the same rank is now more expensive.
Title share: where the phrase is coming from
Title share is how many of the top 20 apps for a phrase carry it in their app name. That ratio tells you which field the phrase is being targeted from.
High means a title fight is under way. Apps have given their most expensive field to this phrase; entering from the subtitle or the keyword field will be slow. To go in you would have to make room in your own name, and that is a large decision.
Low means the phrase is probably coming from the keyword field. That is a cheaper field and competing there is easier. A phrase that can be placed into the subtitle as a sentence can produce a fast result in that case.
The middle is the most common case, and there the decision depends on the phrase's popularity. High popularity may be worth making room in the name for; medium popularity makes the subtitle enough.
Title share can be measured by hand: search the phrase, look at the top 20, count how many app names contain it. It is not an unverifiable number.
| Title share | What to do |
|---|---|
| Very high | Do not enter without room in the name; the subtitle will be slow. |
| Medium | High popularity: the name. Medium: the subtitle. |
| Low | The keyword field or subtitle is enough; a cheap entrance. |
| Near zero | Probably new, or nobody takes it seriously; check popularity. |
The strength threshold: where metadata stops
The strength threshold is the median rating count of the top 10 apps for a phrase. That single number tells you whether the phrase can be taken with metadata at all.
Between two apps competing for the same phrase, the one that moves ahead is not the one with better metadata but the one with more total strength - and the heaviest component of that total is ratings, both score and count.
The practical consequence is clean. If the median rating count of the top 10 is a hundred times yours, reaching the first page for that phrase is not metadata work. A metadata edit can carry you from 40th to 25th; it cannot carry you into the top 10.
That is not an obstacle, it is a saving. Setting unreachable phrases aside from the start leaves more time for reachable ones. The phrases set aside are not deleted; they wait on a separate list and you return as the product grows.
The threshold should also be read over time. If it is rising in a category, the category is maturing: the distance metadata can cover is shrinking and the gains start coming from the product side.
Below the threshold, metadata is genuinely decisive. A subtitle edit there can carry a few places, and if those few places are the crossing from the second page to the first, the traffic difference changes by multiples.
Band spread: the shape of the category
Band spread is which rank bands the apps in a category cluster in for the phrases being tracked. It is the measure that shows the category's shape.
In some categories apps cluster in the top 10 and the rest thins out fast. That means a few large apps hold the category; the 11-30 band is empty and the few apps that get in stay there a long time.
In others the spread is flat: a similar number of apps in every band. Competition continues at every level, and moving through 11-30 is expensive because every place is traded with somebody.
There is a third shape: clustering in the lower bands. Many apps gathered between 100 and 200 means entry is easy and rising is hard. It is usually seen in categories with many small apps.
Knowing the shape lets you estimate how long a move will take. Winning three places in an empty band is a week's work; the same three places in a full one can be a month's.
- Clustering in the top 10: the band is empty, whoever enters stays.
- Flat spread: every place is expensive and traded with somebody.
- Clustering in the lower bands: easy to enter, hard to climb.
- The shape predicts how long a move will take.
Producing the report for your own category
A category report is the output of the five steps below. You can run them for your own category too; the report is that work done in advance.
- Build the universeList the first hundred apps in the category. Apple's category rankings are public. If a hundred is too many start with fifty; the universe shrinks but the result does not break, as long as you know you did it.
- Extract the phrase poolPull two- and three-word phrases from the names, subtitles and descriptions of the apps in the universe. The country's letter-folding rules have to be applied here, or the same phrase appears as two separate rows.
- Search each phrase onceRead the first 200. Density, title share and band spread all come out of that one search. Because measurement runs per phrase, widening the universe does not raise the cost.
- Add popularityWrite the relative value returned by search suggestions onto each phrase. Where none returns, leave the field blank; do not write zero, because zero is a reading and it ruins your later ordering.
- Date it and store itStore the table with its measurement date. The real information is not in one table but in the difference between two taken three months apart.
What to do when competition is high
The measurement is done and the category came out crowded. That does not mean stay out; it means change how you go in.
The first way is niche phrases. Three-word phrases are searched less but their relevance is very high and their competition is low. Alone they bring little traffic; gathered in clusters they produce a real total.
The second is country selection. A phrase's density varies widely by country. One crowded in a large market can be nearly empty in a smaller one - the same metadata, a different result.
The third is rival reviews. In crowded categories everyone feeds from the same pool: search suggestions, category charts, app titles. Users' own words are not in that pool and nobody looks there.
The fourth is waiting. If the category has matured and the strength threshold is very high, the distance metadata can cover is short. What ASO should say then is that the work has moved to the product - and it should say it. Carrying on chasing keywords is time spent for nothing.
The fifth is changing category. If your app fits two, choosing the less crowded one is an advantage on its own. But that move affects every rank and has to be measured alone.
Frequently asked
- There are thousands of apps in my category. Is it hopeless?
- No. App count is not the measure of competition; most never appear in the first 200 for anything. What matters is how many actually show up for the phrases you target.
- Will changing category reset my ranks?
- Not reset, but it affects all of them, because which phrases Apple associates you with changes. So no other metadata change should ship in the same release.
- Why is there no market-share data?
- Apple publishes neither downloads nor revenue. The estimates in circulation are computed backwards from rank and their error bars vary widely by category; written into a table, a reader takes an estimate for a measurement.
- Does adding rivals raise my measurement cost?
- No: every app tracking the same phrase is read out of one search. What raises cost is the number of phrases and the number of countries.
- How long does a category report stay valid?
- Densities do not move on a weekly scale; monthly or seasonal is the right cadence. But if you are making a critical decision, measure again - a report is a photograph of the day it was taken.
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