Something I figured out that I found a little interesting.
When a user enters a search term in the iTunes Store, they are presented with a grid of the top items from several categories. Two items for “podcasts”, four items for “albums”, two items for “movies”, etc… What we care about , obviously, is the “Application” section. The top two apps for that search term are displayed in that section along with two additional links: “see all” and “Applications”.
If you follow the links you get a long list of every app matching the search. Where this gets interesting is how they determine the ranking. Well, here’s what I have found out using the progress of Compounds.
When I search iTunes for “chemistry” and look at the list of apps, Compounds has steadily crept the list. Now it seems stuck at #8. Oddly, if I look at top paid apps under “Productivity”, Compounds is the only chemistry app in the top 20, so what gives?
It appears the following is happening:
iTunes first displays apps with names containing the search term. These apps are displayed in order of sales rank (last 24 hours, or a cumulative over the past week, I’m not exactly sure)
Next, iTunes displays apps with descriptions containing the search term. These apps are also displayed in order of sales rank. Here’s another gotcha, the search term must be near the top of the description or the app will NOT be displayed in the search. I am not sure how close it must be, or if it gets worse the further down the search term resides. I do, however, know there is a limit.
Good news, if you didn’t know, the name of your app on the store does not have to match the name of your app displayed on the home screen. So, you can manipulate these search terms a little.
I hope this helps some of you with your naming strategy.
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4 Comments
I wonder if the search term as part of the description must fall within the 700 word limit Apple recommends when submitting an app.
I have “periodic table” a few hundred words down (but not over 700) in my app description, but a search for “periodic table” does not yield my app in the results.
Great blog! It’s nice to find someone writing consistently about the same stuff I do. I like testing my own theories against someone else’s experiences.
First, ranking seems to be a moving average of the past week or so. Second, I’ve also noticed that search is impacted by sales. As my sales have changed, I’ve ranked higher or lower in the AppStore. Third, your theory about names in search showing first is wrong. For instance, do a search for “finance calculator”. We have that term in our application title (FastFigures Finance Calculator) but a number of products that don’t have it appear before us.
@elia I didn’t look into any other categories, I assumed it to be true on all. If your experience is otherwise, there must be something else at work. There is no reason our app shouldn’t have been the number one result when searching for “Chemistry”. The only other thing I can possibly think of is lifetime sales…
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