Measuring the ROI of ASO and featuring

TL;DR

• Installs are the north star for organic; conversion rate, impressions, page views and organic revenue are helper metrics.¹²
• Conversion rate alone misleads — product teams ask for it, but Zynga’s ASO lead steers them to install growth.³
• Two ROI views: holistic (all marketing combined, split organic vs paid) or focused (one activity, where correct cost allocation matters most).⁴⁵
• No LTV model? Project 1-year value as D7 LTV × your historical D7→D365 multiplier — Nordeus found it stable over time.⁶⁷
• Featuring uplift = (daily average during featuring − clean baseline − installs from other concurrent activity) × days featured, then × projected LTV.⁸⁹
• Don’t trust console “organic” blindly — on Google Play part of it is paid (Google Ads/UAC) traffic.¹⁰

Details

Holistic ROI (Aleksandra Zivkovic, Nordeus/Top Eleven, 2022). Split new registrations into organic and paid as best your internal analytics allow (never perfect), multiply each by expected revenue per user from a predictive LTV model, allocate costs to each, and compute ROI for the period.⁴¹¹¹²

Without predictive modelling. Take actual D7 LTV of the cohort and apply the D7→D365 multiplier observed on historical cohorts; Aleksandra found these multipliers move little unless something extraordinary happens.⁶⁷ If you build an LTV model, make it useful for other marketing disciplines too, not just ASO.¹³

Worked example: was App Store featuring worth pitching for?⁸⁹

1. Daily average organic registrations over the 4 featured days.
2. Baseline: comparable days with few other activities, chosen with seasonality in mind.
3. Subtract installs attributable to concurrent activities (in her example, an influencer campaign = 100 installs).
4. Daily uplift × featured days = total registration uplift.
5. × (featuring cohort D7 LTV × historical multiplier) = estimated 1-year revenue uplift.

Storemaven’s Jonathan Fishman (in conversation with AppTweak’s Simon Thillay, 2022) suggests the same from App Store Connect: cohorted in-app purchase data lets you isolate the day-of-featuring cohort and put a dollar value on it, and CPP-level revenue gives aggregated campaign ROAS (Custom product pages — matching the App Store page to each ad).¹⁴¹⁵

Tooling. Tilting Point (30+ games, 2022) pulls both consoles via API into a Looker dashboard so a person covering several games can scan them in minutes, not a day.¹⁶ Simon notes keyword search volume doubles as a brand-awareness gauge: compare your brand term’s volume with competitors’.¹⁷

Falling conversion is often good news (Shoham Lashkar, Zynga, 2023). A brand searcher may convert at ~100%; as you rank for more generic terms, page traffic grows with lower intent and CR drops. He asks product teams whether they prefer 100% of 100 brand searchers or 20% of a million — compare CR only inside a test with bought traffic, and otherwise check that installs rise with reach.¹⁸¹⁹ Apple Ads data fills a gap the consoles leave: it shows conversion and revenue per keyword, which tells you which organic ranks are worth chasing.²⁰

Unify tracking links (Amy Monier, Zynga, 2023). Put the same MMP (AppsFlyer/Adjust) deep links on social pages, email and in-product referral invites; otherwise social and player-to-player installs are lumped into “organic/unknown” and those teams get no credit. Referral tracking also shows invite value, so you can reward inviters accordingly.²¹²²²³

Disagreements / caveats

• Every method here is uplift/correlation, not a controlled experiment; for budget decisions see Designing incrementality tests (duration, budget, CTV and brand) and The measurement stack — last-click attribution, incrementality and MMM together.
• Steve P. Young ignores App Store Connect “impressions” entirely and watches page-view→download conversion (Which factors actually move App Store rankings (2026)); Shoham Lashkar instead downplays conversion rate in favour of total installs — both agree impression-based CR is a weak headline metric.³

See also

• How much organic does paid UA create? Measuring the paid-to-organic uplift — estimating how many organic installs paid spend creates
• Deciding what ASO work matters — the five-part audit and prioritisation

Footnotes

1. How Do In-App Events Influence ASO and What is the Correlation Between Organic and Other Metrics... @ 04:55 — Jevgen Tarasenko ↩

2. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 29:59 — Shoham Lashkar ↩

3. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 30:56 — Shoham Lashkar ↩ ↩²

4. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 07:41 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩ ↩²

5. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 12:54 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩

6. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 11:17 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩ ↩²

7. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 12:08 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩ ↩²

8. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 14:32 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩ ↩²

9. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 15:26 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩ ↩²

10. How Do In-App Events Influence ASO and What is the Correlation Between Organic and Other Metrics... @ 05:42 — Jevgen Tarasenko ↩

11. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 09:28 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩

12. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 10:23 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩

13. ROI measurement of ASO activities | Aleksandra Zivkovic | ASO Conference 2022 @ 16:23 — Aleksandra Zivkovic ↩

14. Mastering ASO in 2022 with Simon Thillay of AppTweak @ 19:51 — Jonathan Fishman ↩

15. Mastering ASO in 2022 with Simon Thillay of AppTweak @ 15:29 — Jonathan Fishman ↩

16. How Do In-App Events Influence ASO and What is the Correlation Between Organic and Other Metrics... @ 28:38 — Jevgen Tarasenko ↩

17. Mastering ASO in 2022 with Simon Thillay of AppTweak @ 22:59 — Simon Thillay ↩

18. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 31:30 — Shoham Lashkar ↩

19. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 32:34 — Shoham Lashkar ↩

20. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 33:59 — Shoham Lashkar ↩

21. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 53:28 — Amy Monier ↩

22. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 54:44 — Amy Monier ↩

23. The Science of Organic Acquisition @ 55:59 — Amy Monier ↩