Branded keywords: how to work with competitors
«Unicorns» are almost as common in marketing as they are in real life. Every app has its predecessors and successors, clones and malicious apps. It’s better to be friends with some, use their indices in your own analytics; but it’s better to distance and detach from others as much as possible. In this guide, we will walk you through the steps you’d take to stand up for your traffic and multiply it.
1. Protect your brand
Officially register your trademark, react to unfair actions by competitors and send complaints to store editors, for example, about obvious clones. The store administration can seriously punish others for copying your logo and using your brand name in text metadata. The very existence of such an app tells that the company isn’t only inspired by your work, so it’s better to keep an eye on it.
2. Go for ASO
Metadata should be optimized with relevant keywords. Ranking only for your brand name under present conditions means cutting your own throat. Don’t miss the opportunity to get traffic from search with relevant thematic keywords and other store listings.
3. Use Search Ads and Google Ads
Ads rank high in search results and have a good conversion rate due to their natural look. If you don’t advertise, then your competitors do. Not only with their own keywords, but also with yours, that’s why they get more targeted traffic.
4. Optimize in-app purchases in the App Store
Promoted in-app purchases (IAP) let your app take more positions in search results that provide a higher conversion rate. We have already talked about this in detail in our post.
Pay attention to the app monetization and see if it’s easy for the user to reward you for the service.
5. Use supporter apps
Checkaso’s experience suggests that today more and more companies create separate (supporting) apps from their main one, as a rule, to split the company’s functions.
For example, Tinkoff has the Invest-Uchebnik (Investment Handbook) app that teaches investment then it redirects traffic to Tinkoff Investitsii (Investments). Facebook Inc. has the Messenger app, that’s a separate app from the Facebook app that comes right after it in the search results.
It’s a very popular choice for stores to create a separate food delivery app.
If a brand has several apps, then they take the visible part of the search results (or entire visible part, as with ‘google’ query). This way, it becomes almost impossible for competitors to take at least some of the search traffic from the brand name. However, many competitors overuse branded keywords by including them in their metadata, hoping to get more traffic. Try to avoid this work style, as its effectiveness is extremely low, but the risks are high.
It’s worth noting, that you should do ASO for both apps, the supportive app won’t take the second or third place in the search results by default. It’s a good choice for securing your position in the search results and crushing competitors with volume.
It is hard to say if this practice gets accustomed, because now companies with several apps are changing their functions frequently and it seems that they are still looking for the perfect balance.
Head of ASO at Checkaso
On our platform, we will introduce a branded keyword metric soon. It helps to understand if the keyword belongs to a specific company. It means that it will be much more difficult to promote with it since the conversion will be low, even if you take the second position in the search results (right after the brand app). Even if you use ‘black’ schemes and take the first position, the conversion will remain low, since users are looking for a specific app by branded queries. At the same time, it’s uncertain whether a query is branded. Especially if you work in an unfamiliar market that has its own brands. For this purpose, we have created the metric for users to filter such keywords at the step of collecting semantics and avoid them.
P.S.
Drawing up a relevant semantic core is a most important step in promoting a mobile application. It is necessary to know the competitors not only by name, but also to know their data. You can use Checkaso tools for this. Sign up for a demo or try our free 7-day trial.
