Track Your App’s Share of Voice on Top Keywords

Have you ever wondered how often your ads were showing on the Play Store? With our new Google App Campaigns feature you can now track your app’s share of voice for any keyword and compare it with your competitors and other apps.

In a previous article we presented the first part of our new Google App Campaigns feature. The first three tabs (1 to 1 Comparison, Title Keywords and Cross Competition) allow users to compare the number of keywords on which Google is placing the ad of the main app and its competitors.

In this second part, we will focus on the last two sections of the menu : Organic Downloads and Paid Keywords. In these features, the user can go deeper into the analysis to understand, keyword by keyword, which ad is appearing the most.

Once again, let’s explore this feature by studying the ad strategy of Homescapes and its competitors.

Organic downloads

It may sound weird to have a section called “organic downloads” when we’re talking about Google ads but this section is probably the most important one.

In the table below, we show all the keywords that drive the most organic downloads to Homescapes. To determine these keywords we look at the keywords where Homescapes is ranked in the top results and that have the most traffic (volume is high).

The goal of this feature is to understand whether your organic visibility on certain keywords can be threatened by competitors ads.

Under the column “protection” you’ll see a shield that represents different degrees of protection of your current visibility on each keyword of the list. It is important to have a high protection rate (%) on your Organic Downloads Keywords, as they bring the most downloads to your app.

We have established four levels of protection:

Unprotected

If we go back to the previous example, we can see that several keywords such as “homescapes”, “gardenscapes” and some typos of app titles have the status unprotected. This is because Google doesn’t place ads on keywords that are branded.

However not all title keywords are considered brands by Google. Only strong and notorious brands are promoted organically in the search results. Here is a comparison of the live search of branded and generic keywords.

Protected

There are also many keywords that have the status protected. On these keywords, Google is placing Homescapes’ ads more often than the competitors. As you can see most of these keywords derive from the title.

Attacked

On seven keywords, Homescapes is being attacked since no ad is being placed on this keyword while other apps are. For “garden escape” and “austin”, Gardenscapes, another game from the same publisher is appearing the most. However for the other ones, competitors are stealing part of the traffic. For example, the game Lily’s Garden is appearing more than 60% of the time on the keyword “playrix” which is Homescapes’ publisher name.

Defended

Although Google is placing Homescapes on these keywords, the other apps have a higher share of voice. Hopefully for 8 out of the 10 keywords in the list, Gardenscapes is appearing the most.

Overview

At the top of the page, you’ll find a recap of all the insights we have been able to draw from the table analysis.

The first chart shows the share of voice ads coverage. In other words, it indicates the overall SOV of Homescapes vs. other apps on the top 50 organic keywords. This analysis helps you gauge how visible the ads of the selected apps are compared to the ads of other apps on the same list of keywords. We can see that for most keywords where Google did place an ad, Homescapes had the highest SOV.

The second chart shows the competition ads share of voice. This graph indicates which app has the highest paid visibility on Homescapes’ top 50 organic keywords. This analysis helps you understand which competitor might be stealing away the organic downloads of Homescapes by running ads on the top keywords.

In our case, we can see that Homescapes is number one in terms of SOV and Gardenscapes is close behind. On one hand, this is good because it means that competitors are not stealing away traffic from Playrix games, but on the other hand, it’s a shame because both apps are cannibalising each other on those words.

The last chart represents the ads protection status. Basically, this chart shows the percentage of keywords for which the app is protected or not. In this case we can see that Homescapes is protected most of the time.

Paid keywords

The last tab shows the top 100 keywords for which Google has shown ads in the last 90 days. For each keyword, we show the organic rank, volume, SOV and other bidding apps.

This list of keywords is a precious insight for app publishers since Google App Campaigns doesn’t provide any information regarding the keywords and where it is placing the ads. With this feature, you can see what is going on behind the scenes and where your bids are going.

If we sort this keyword table by volume to show the keywords that drive the most traffic, we notice that Homescapes and the other Playrix games, including Gardenscapes and Fishdom, are by far the apps with the highest SOV.

Even on keywords where Homescapes is unranked, the app compensates the lack of organic visibility with ads.

Finally, below the top 100 keywords list, you’ll find the full list of keywords where we found Homescapes’ ads in the last 90 days.

For big apps like Homescapes, this list of keywords can be more than a thousand keywords long that’s why we’d rather show only the top 100 in the table.

However if you see a keyword that you find interesting, just click on the keyword to learn more info, including the top bidding apps and the organic results.

We hope that you enjoyed exploring the full Google App Campaigns tab together! As you can see you can get amazing insights by using this feature. And even if you’re not running any campaigns at the moment, it’s always good to keep an eye on the competition. As usual feel free to reach out if you have any comments, questions or feedback about the feature!