In this age of rampant digitization, every business is moving its front-end operations to online platforms. Therefore, we are seeing a surge in app development and publishing. Moreover, several new businesses and start-ups have built their base on online mediums only. This requires a mobile or desktop application as an intermediary. Additionally, apps by themselves are a full-fledged business.
Services such as editing, games, etc., are offered via robust applications. Today, the sustainability of a business depends on the use of the concerned mobile application. We live in a technological age, so there is a huge virtual competition that affects the reach of applications. Therefore, app developers incorporate certain digital marketing and data mining techniques to ensure greater reach of the application. One such technique is ASO cannibalization. In this article, we will talk about everything you need to know about ASO cannibalization.
Apple Search Ads (ASA)
Before we talk about ASO, we must understand the concept of ASA, which provides the background for our topic of discussion. ASA is a service provided by Apple where an app developer can publish his/her ad on the app store’s search tab and search results. When searching for apps on the app store, we find a section titled “Suggested Apps” that keeps flashing on the window.
Yes, you guessed it, that’s the power of ASA. The far-reaching effect of ASA is that it crawls through relevant keywords and offers suggested apps as ads to the user. Apple also published a report regarding ASA implementation, where it stated that 70% of users find the app they look for through search. Also, 65% of the app downloads happen immediately after the search operation.
Lastly, ASA is an effective marketing tool because it results in a 50% conversion rate. Almost every iPhone user visits the app store for all their needs, so there is no better way to reach a large audience. Moreover, the traffic on the app store is the relevant traffic, which makes it easy to convert the published ads. According to Apple, the organic users and search Ad users have the same level of engagement rate.
The relationship between ASA and ASO
Let’s draw a comparative example for a better understanding. Suppose you want to display your website on Google search results as a part of the ad campaign. Now, you engage Google ad services for this task.
However, you will have to tell Google when to display your website as part of the search result. Moreover, there may be other competitive websites that would have engaged with Google’s ad services. In this case, you will have to optimize your website in a way that achieves a high ranking on Google crawler.
High-ranking websites are displayed at the top of search results when a particular keyword is triggered in the user search operation. This keyword-building operation is known as search engine optimization.
Similarly, if you want your published app to appear at the top of the search result ads, you will have to optimize your app’s home page. This process is known as App Store Optimization. You can optimize your app’s home page by posting catchy graphics to catch the viewer’s attention. Additionally, as part of the optimization program, you must also pay attention to the text metadata. Text metadata pertains to app name, keywords, and subtitles. These factors determine the relevance of search ads.
What is traffic cannibalization?
Now that we are clear on the fundamentals of ASA and ASO, it’s time to learn about traffic cannibalization on ASA. The two primary reasons that organizations use ASA is to market their application and collect relevant user data. However, there is a third reason in play too here. Sometimes, developers launch ASA campaigns to protect branded search terms.
One of the features that ASA provides is that a developer can promote his product by using brand terms from a competitor. This is detrimental to the competitor’s businesses because the organic search traffic gets diverted to the competitor’s app. ASA, in this case, does traffic cannibalization in the organic search results.
So, what happens in ASO cannibalization is that a user does a search using a particular keyword but ends up downloading the app from the search ads. This phenomenon is known as the consumption of traffic by one channel (Apple Search Ads in this case) from another channel (organic search result). Using ASA, apps launch brand protection campaigns to protect brand search terms.
This is done by deploying the services of ASA and optimizing the keywords and other search terms. So, what happens is that when a user does an organic search, the ad result, as well as the search result, displays the same app on the screen.
ASA offers two types of brand protection, complete and partial. In case of complete protection, the entire search result screen is captured by the organic search term. Whereas, partial protection ensures that the first two results are occupied by organic search while the other results will be search results. This is the entire story about traffic cannibalization and brand protection.
Conclusion
Cannibalization is a great way to beat the competitor’s in the game of digital marketing. Therefore, you need to build a keyword pool and enable a broad search campaign. Additionally, it is recommended that one should regularly update the list of keywords to add more relevance to the campaign. This can be a hectic process, so we suggest that an organization should engage on a platform that will help in campaign optimization.