In its own words, Komorebi is “trying to make services that can be used by as many people as possible with easy-to-understand design.” With more than 60 million downloads and over 100 apps in its portfolio, Komorebi is well on its way to achieving its mission.

Komorebi’s Challenge

Komorebi released its latest app, Roulette+, in December 2021 and aimed to expand it into several new geographical markets to increase the chance of boosting its app installs. To prepare, they required textual metadata for 10 new localizations: US, English & Spanish Mexico, Korean, UK, CN Traditional, German, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and France.

The problem was that while they had experience in ASO and store optimization, they didn’t have a dedicated in-house ASO expert who could spend the required time and effort to impact organic installs. So Komorebi went looking for a service that could do it for them, and they chose AppFollow, where they had a successful experience with the Professional Services team back in 2020.

The install boosting strategy

The key point in our strategy was to find the least difficult (to rank for) search terms and prioritize them first to maximize the number of keywords ranked for the app in every locale.

The first step in our strategy was undertaking keyword research to find search terms that were the least difficult to rank for and prioritize them as targets. By maximizing the keywords that showed the app in the search results for each of the ten locales, we believed this would increase visits to the app page and ultimately lead to more installs.

To bolster our initial keyword research, using AppFollow’s Timeline feature, we did a competitor analysis to find what keywords were working well in bringing in traffic for others in the same market, both for the App Store and Google Play. We then collected more keywords from competitors by digging into their ASO strategies and keyword placements using Organic Traffic Dashboard and Keyword Intelligence for every localization.

Finally, using AppFollow’s Keyword Tracking tool, we checked which keywords Roulette+’s competitors were ranking for but had not been used in their metadata. These keywords are valuable nuggets of opportunity to find as-of-yet untargeted traffic. You won’t always find them, but we were lucky enough to find a number of low-hanging fruits.

Other tools we used to get ranked for keywords were:

• Cross-localizations in App Store
• Competitor keywords in App Store
• Google Natural Language for Google Play storefronts

When finally evaluating the results of our strategy, we checked the Traffic Channel Analytics tool in AppFollow, which is useful because it provided a breakdown of the installs by channel: Search, Browse, and Paid. An interesting thing that we discovered was that the paid acquisition work that Roulette+ was doing around the same time had a positive effect on Organic traffic in both stores, as it increased keyword rankings, and therefore discoverability.

“With the text for our app page prepared with well researched ASO from the very beginning, our new app has grown the quickest among our apps. Even though it’s only been 8 months since its release, our daily download rate has reached 6000. It's really incredible that the downloads come not only from Europe and the United States but also from new regions such as Brazil and the Middle East. We could never have achieved this on our own so I’m really glad I asked you.”

The result of the install boosting strategy

The outcome of the 3 month project was hugely positive — the client saw a significant improvement in Search Visibility and an increase in Downloads, as shown in the graphs and table below:

It is worth mentioning that this organic growth would not have been possible without the quality and performance of the app and the simple fact that users loved using it.

Interested in getting our help in creating organic growth for your app? Let's chat.