Anton Tatarynovich's one-week ASO audit (own listings, localisation, competitors by download share, visibility by traffic source and brand share, conversion by source and search term) and his 2023 priority takes for figuring out priorities in a new app or job, plus Nordeus's planning and prioritisation rules.

Deciding what ASO work matters — the five-part audit and prioritisation

TL;DR

New app, new job or too many “important” tasks? Run a five-part audit first: own listings → localisation → competitors → visibility → conversion. It takes about a week.¹²
Audit only your 5–6 key markets, on both stores; totals across all countries aren’t actionable.³
Size the keyword opportunity before doing keyword work: if ~30% of impressions come from search and 50%+ of that is brand, even many new top-10 ranks barely move total downloads.⁴
Pick competitors by share of downloads close to yours, not by who you admire; cut a 10–15 list to ~5 and study them closely.⁵⁶
Look inward before at competitors — you don’t know whether a rival’s nice screenshots actually work.⁷
Prioritise by expected KPI impact, test first in key markets, and keep ASO and UA creatives consistent.⁸⁹

Details

Context. Anton Tatarynovich moved from Phiture (agency) to Freeletics as its only ASO and Apple Ads manager in 2023, with no scope of work and undocumented legacy tests.¹⁰¹¹ The audit gave him a plan and an early deliverable — in the first 1–2 months nobody expects much from a new hire.¹²

The five parts.

Look inward: per key market, list creative assets (icon, number of screenshots, video, same across markets/platforms?), text metadata (when last optimised, in which languages), ratings (any market below ~4.3–4.5? read its reviews), and category rank.³¹³ Anton doubts category rank drives performance but notes executives care about it.¹³
Localisation overview: translated vs truly localised (local-looking people, culturally appropriate content), keyword-optimised or just translated.¹⁴ Collect, don’t judge yet.
Competitors and market: chart download share vs competitors; much larger or smaller apps have different brand awareness, featuring access and indexing history.⁵⁶ Laying three competitors’ screenshots side by side gave Anton several test ideas.¹⁵¹⁶
Visibility analysis: impressions/page views/downloads by source (search, browse, referral) per market, then the brand share of search.¹⁷⁴
Conversion analysis: a table of average conversion rate by traffic source × top-5 market over ~6 months, colour-coding the lowest and highest cells, shows at a glance which market and source to dig into — read it against the impression volumes from step 4 (very high impressions naturally depress CR).¹⁸ Then, on Google Play, CR per search term from the exported terms: if one generic keyword converts at ~15% and an equally visible one at 2–3%, the weak one is a priority.¹⁹ Anton dislikes benchmarks (“the best benchmark is how you did yesterday”, a line he credits to Thomas — likely Thomas Petit) but used Google Play peer-group benchmarks for this cross-market triage; App Store Connect benchmarks didn’t exist yet.²⁰²¹

Output: a ranked list, not a yes/no. Nothing gets dropped — the audit decides order. At Freeletics, weak benchmarks vs peers, little A/B testing in the previous year and poor CR on key search terms meant conversion optimisation first, keyword optimisation in ~three months.²²²³ An alternative is to colour-code each cell of Phiture’s ASO Stack (good at search, weak at Apple Ads, no localisation…) and build the strategy from the red cells.²⁴

Brand share workaround for Google Play (2023). After Play’s February/May 2023 traffic-source reclassification counted brand search as “search” but generic search elsewhere, Anton exported all search terms per market from Play Console, labelled the top ~100 as brand/generic/explore, and summed them. He treats the brand/generic split as indicative for the App Store too.²⁵²⁶²⁷

Planning (Aleksandra Zivkovic, Nordeus, 2022). Know the whole marketing plan and align ASO tests to big releases months ahead; keep a live testing plan and actually deliver it; hold bi-weekly cross-team reviews of results and creative direction.²⁸²⁹³⁰ Use test-duration calculators to schedule.³¹

Anton’s 2023 takes on priorities:

Keyword optimisation pays less the more mature the app is — each cycle yields less, the page has been re-indexed many times and brand search grows. Do it less often, not never (unless a new category or search demand appears).³²³³
Creative optimisation matters most for big growth: it is what users decide on, and AI will automate much of the technical keyword work (he curates examples at 41screenshots).³⁴³⁵
AI is worth using now for reporting and keyword mining — e.g. turn a list of single keywords into phrases, then pull their data in an ASO tool.³⁶
Third-party app stores (post-DMA, 2023) are not a priority yet — little reason for users to switch — except possibly gaming, if console makers’ stores get exclusive titles.³⁷³⁸
CPPs only pay off with enough paid traffic; in-app events matter more than he expected (In-app events (iOS) and LiveOps / promotional content (Google Play)).³⁹
The whole audit takes about a week and gives stakeholders a structured plan.²

Disagreements / caveats

Steve P. Young’s keyword-first approach (How to pick ASO keywords (search score, difficulty, relevance)) suits new indie apps with no brand; Anton’s “size it first” applies once brand search dominates.
Mateusz Wrzeszcz also puts qualitative research before competitor-inspired ideas (Store A/B tests — sample size, MDE and why bold variants win), agreeing with Anton.

Deciding what ASO work matters — the five-part audit and prioritisation

Deciding what ASO work matters — the five-part audit and prioritisation

TL;DR

Details

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes