Adjust x AppTweak: New integration to measure organic impact
Antoine Bentin, Product Manager, AppTweak, May 25, 2023.
User acquisition (UA) teams spend a lot of time optimizing paid campaigns with the main goal of increasing paid traffic on app stores. However, many marketers are missing a trick: paid and organic efforts are symbiotic. With a side-by-side analysis of both strategies, marketers can assess the impact of paid campaigns on organic uplift and avoid cannibalizing their own traffic by paying for users that otherwise would have been attracted organically.
To help UA teams better measure the impact of their paid campaigns on organic uplift, we are pleased to announce that Adjust is now integrated with app store acquisition platform AppTweak! This integration aims to allow mutual clients to save time and enhance reporting by combining AppTweak’s ASO data, your console data, and Adjust’s MMP data in one centralized place. Now, you’ll be ahead of the game with side-by-side ASO and MMP analysis.
Identify the impact of paid campaigns on organic performance
There are many connections between paid and organic app performance in the app stores. For instance, you might want to measure if a paid campaign increased your rankings for specific keywords, cannibalized your organic downloads, or increased negative reviews for your app due to incorrect audience targeting.
To get the complete picture of your paid campaigns’ influence on your organic performance, it’s important to compile data from a few different sources:
- An MMP (Adjust): Provides all the attribution and analytics details about your paid campaigns (ad spend, paid installs, ROAS, etc.).
- App Store Connect / Google Play Console: Measures real downloads and other metrics as logged by the stores and provides a breakdown by acquisition channel.
- An ASO tool (AppTweak): Stores data such as app category rankings, keyword rankings, installs per keyword, keyword volume, etc.
With AppTweak, you can now centralize your data from all these different sources. App Tweak’s brand new Reporting Studio is a visualization tool that allows you to plot any data from these sources on a single graph. Reports get automatically updated and can be shared with anyone in possession of the report URL (and password, if protected)–an AppTweak account is not required to view.
Three ways to measure organic impact
Below, we’ve presented three ways you can leverage Adjust data in Reporting Studio to measure organic impact more accurately.
Disclaimer: To avoid showing real data, the images shown in the following examples have been created for representative purposes only.
1. See how keyword rankings increased after your ASA campaign
First, your paid app store campaigns can positively impact your organic keyword rankings. Let’s take the example of “Mountain Climber,” a fictional iOS app with the core purpose of finding mountain trails.
If Mountain Climber were to launch an Apple Search Ads campaign on the generic keyword “sports app,” it would also be interesting to measure the impact of the campaign on the app’s organic ranking for that keyword.
To measure this, we would suggest adding the following two metrics to a report:
- ASO Intelligence > App Keyword Rank (for your chosen app, country, and keyword)
- Adjust > Installs with the dimension “Campaign Name” (filtering for your chosen campaign)
The above graph shows the number of daily installs driven by an ASA campaign (purple) compared to the app’s daily rankings for the bidding keyword (in this case, “sports app”) in orange.
In this example, the paid campaign began on February 28, when the app’s first paid downloads were driven. Before this campaign, we can see that Mountain Climber ranked in 5th position for the keyword “sports app.” A few days after the campaign was launched, the app’s keyword ranking increased to #3, reaching number a peak #1 spot in March. This is what we would call a positive feedback loop of paid acquisition on organic ranking.
2. Understand the impact of ASO on your paid campaigns
The inverse relationship is also true: Your ASO efforts can positively impact your paid campaigns, and ultimately your cost per install (CPI). How? Suppose you’ve recently changed your app screenshots. As these creatives appear in App Store search results, you might be wondering if this update has any impact on your downloads.
Using the ASO Impact feature in Reporting Studio, you can easily visualize the impact of any of your app’s metadata updates:
Then, you could add the following metrics to your graph:
- Adjust > Installs from campaign A: The number of paid installs generated by your campaign.
- Adjust > eCPI from campaign A: The effective cost per install for your campaign.
In the example below, we see that the app updated its screenshots on March 3. At this point, installs suddenly started to take off while the app’s cost per install went down. Monitoring these connections between all your relevant metrics and efforts is just one example of how ASO can positively impact paid campaigns, increase conversion rates, and therefore reduce costs.
3. Measure paid cannibalization of organic downloads
User acquisition teams are often concerned about the potential cannibalization of paid campaigns on their organic downloads. Cannibalization is when users that would have probably downloaded your app organically download it through your ad – meaning you end up ‘unnecessarily’ paying for their installs.
Using the Google Play Console data source in Reporting Studio, you can visualize the total downloads (paid and organic) recorded by Google Play. To measure cannibalization, it would be interesting to compare the following two metrics:
- Google Play Console > Store Performance > Store Listing Acquisitions: this will show all paid & organic installs.
- Adjust > Installs > Breakdown by Channel with “Google Ads” selected.
In the example below, suppose that the app didn’t have any paid campaigns running until February 28, at which point it started a Google Ads campaign. This means that all previous downloads from the Google Play Console (blue line) were organic.
After the Google Ads campaign started, the app’s Store Listing Acquisitions began to increase–but not as much as the downloads coming from Google Ads. This suggests that the Google Ads campaign cannibalized some of the organic downloads the app had previously been driving.
Before running the campaign, the app had recorded 30,000 downloads from the Google Play Console. After the campaign, the app had driven 40,000 downloads, 20,000 of which came from Google Ads. While the total number of downloads had increased by 10,000, we also see that 10,000 downloads that were previously coming from organic search were now being driven by paid campaigns.*
*Keep in mind that attribution on Adjust vs. the Google Play Console does vary, and should be considered when comparing metrics. For the purpose of providing a clear explanation, we have kept this example simple.
To learn more about Adjust and AppTweak's integration and how you can improve your measurement and performance reporting with this seamless analysis, get in touch with AppTweak.
About AppTweak
AppTweak is the trusted app store acquisition partner for mobile leaders worldwide; we provide innovative solutions that help apps and games optimize their app store presence and increase downloads. For 10+ years, companies including Uber, Adobe, and Zynga have trusted our unique metrics, actionable insights, and expertise to make informed decisions and achieve long-term success in the competitive mobile market.
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