If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I bought an app a couple of months ago.

Then I recorded myself creating its new text metadata (title, subtitle, keywords, promotional text, and description) in Brazilian Portuguese – obviously.

The video below was recorded at 5 am, and I wasn’t at home, so the quality isn’t great. Still, I think it’s a nice example of a non-scripted “quick and dirty” kind of optimization:

So on the 23rd of September, our first app release was approved by Apple.

The results were instant:

🔥 8.7x more impressions: 107 to 939 (per week)

🔥 8.2x more downloads: 5 to 41 (per week)

Not a lot, but, hey, we’re going places!

Then it was time to understand why exactly this happened.

I was able to track down a couple of keywords that are responsible for this result: “tela de carregamento” (charging screen), and “papel parede natureza” (nature wallpaper).

We’re not ranking well in the other search terms to make any difference, so I’m just ignoring those.

“Well, but it’s just 45 downloads a week”

Yes. And here’s how I see it:

• Brazil went from being our market #20 to being our market #2, right behind the US. That with just one round. Mind-blowing. What else can we do in other markets, then?
• We know we can rank in the top 25 for queries with a search score of 30 or lower now, a crucial piece of information for our next round;
• We got results right off the bat.

“What about keywords added to the Promotional Text field?”

Yeah, we’re not ranking for any of those. Apple is still not indexing it.

It’s on the roadmap

We plan to decrease our pricing now. $5,99/week for a charging animation app is borderline insane.

Once we do that, we’ll have another chance to tweak our keywords, as well as maybe launch a new in-app event.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do next, feel free to reach out.

 

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📕 What I’ve been reading

New Ad Placement Options – Apple Search Ads: Apple continues to push its ad game aggressively. Now they added placements on the Today Tab and… The Product Page tab. That means developers can finally buy their space on a competitor’s page. Interesting.

Creating an email lifecycle “welcome/onboarding series” that actually drives results: I love every single part of this post by Elena Verna. Idk who said that onboarding emails always drive results. Most of the time it actually doesn’t. So she shares four pillars on how to create welcome series your users will actually want to click.

One-year challenge: Turn a $20k Investment into $500k: I’ve been following this challenge since day 1. He’s using Facebook to grow and it turns out it’s working pretty well. There are many mud-throwers at Meta right now and companies are pulling investments from there. My take? That might be a great reason to consider Meta if the traffic costs are going down there. Why not?