Part 2: New Data to Consider When Updating Your Android App Description

By looking at the characteristics and performance of over 550,000 Android apps, our data science team has created a correlation analysis to help developers continue optimizing for Google Play. Earlier this week, we shared our latest, data-driven tips for naming your app.

In part 2 of this study, we’ll take a look at things to consider when including keywords in an app’s description field.

How Helpful Is Keyword Repetition?

Writing a description for apps in Google Play requires a lot of fine-tuning. A common source of confusion is how to populate the description with important keywords. Using the sample group, we’ve created a graph to demonstrate how heavily repetition of keywords affects rankings.

The data has been divided into four groups. Let’s start with the most apparent trend. When a keyword is already included in an app’s title, repetition of the keyword multiple times in the description will likely have little to no impact on ranking.

Company name carries much less weight in Google’s algorithm than an app title. So in this case, if a keyword is included in the company name, repeating the term in the description is likely to be successful in increasing ranking for that term. Minor gains are also achieved via repetition when the keyword appears in both fields (title and company name) or neither field.

The most important takeaway here is that impact from keyword repetition is minor compared to the boost an app receives when the term is placed in the app title. If a major lift in ranking is what you need, the title is the place to look. But if that’s not an option, use this graph to help predict results for your keyword density tests.

Does Keyword Density Matter?

Choosing whether or not to use the full 4,000 characters is the first decision you’ll face, so we’ve examined trends around total description length in earlier posts.

Wondering if paring down your description is a good idea? We’ve got a graph for that, too! It’s important to note that, in this sample set, the keyword in question is not in the app’s title.

As you can see in the graph, it’s possible for Android apps to rank for terms that are not in the title or the description. The rankings for these edge cases are not affected by an increase in description length.

While the correlation isn’t dramatic, you can see that repeated keywords appearing in the description only lose impact when more characters come into play. Try incrementally reducing your overall description length to lend emphasis to these terms.

What’s Next?

As promised, future posts in this series will take a look at keyword ratings and the impact they might be having on your Android app’s rankings. We’ll also discuss the ways your Android app can rank for terms you didn’t even use!

As always, let us know in the comments section below if there are other optimization circumstances you’d like Sensor Tower to further explore.

Jump to Part 1 of this series.

Jump to Part 3 of this series.