How to track ASO performance (playstore, appstore)?

Question

An app has many channels of marketing.

Say you have following

1. playstore / appstore ASO
2. facebook marketing
3. instagram (which is kinda hard to measure because they don't allow link except one in the profile)
4. conversion from your website that prompts install link

Unless you have the ability to append custom parameter and pass it on through app install process (which you can do in facebook marketing, and link from your website for example), it is puzzling to me how to track the effectiveness of the channel or marketing effect.

Essentially I have a bulk of downloads which I don't know where it is coming from.

• Are they result of ASO (people found my app in the appstore without knowning our app's existence)
• they maybe followers of our instagram channel and one day decided to download our app by searching our app name in the app store.

So the questions are..

1. How do you know the amount of download increases attributable to your better ASO strategy? Especially when there are multiple sources that you can't track the # of downloads.
2. Is there a way to capture the query user used in playstore/appstore when they install my app?

Answer 1

I'm only experienced in iOS apps:

1. For organic traffic, it is obvious that you will not have the relation between keywords vs installs. However, some keyword control software will provide you an estimation (apptweak or appradar for example). The maximum you can do is to try to optimize the conversions and choose the best keywords(high popularity, low difficulty/competence & target keywords). I've been working 3 years in this and every day I discover more and more tricks.

For paid installs, you can use AppsFlyer. They will give you all the data that you're looking for (paid downloads vs source) but it's very expensive for solo developers.

2. Not for organic downloads :D But if you want to test which keywords are better for your conversions, you can do it using Search Ads advanced.