ASO Case Study: Tag Me

October 7, 2021

Firstly, what is ASO?

ASO stands for App Store Optimisation and it is the process of improving the visibility of an app in app stores such as the Google Play Store for Android, and the App Store for iOS. With roughly 5 million apps already in the Play Store and App Store combined, a new app will be faced a lot competition. In order to achieve real growth and come out on top, you must focus on ASO.

Keywords are at the core of ASO, however the App Store and Play Store assess them differently. For this post, we will be focusing on the Play Store.

Google uses a sophisticated algorithm to rank your app in the Play Store, therefore when it comes to keywords, it is important to research them and place them expertly in the right fields to achieve optimum growth.

Google considers the following when ranking an app:

  • App Title
  • Short Description
  • Long Description
  • Ratings and Reviews
  • Downloads
  • Engagement
  • Updates
  • In-App Purchases
  • some unknown factors that Google wish to remain concealed

Keywords should be repeated in the above fields as much as possible for good ASO. However, be careful not stuff your fields with non-sensical sentences, as Google will weed out your efforts as forced, spam-like marketing.


What is Tag Me?

Tag Me is a hashtag finder and generator that Josef Wilhelm developed in his spare time in 2019. It helps its users find, save and organise hashtags for their Instagram posts. Other features include the ability to categorise one's own hashtags, search for inspirational quotes, browse hashtags by category, and much more.

It is currently available for download:

App Store

Play Store

It now has over 100K downloads in the Google Play Store.

Now that we've covered the who and what, we'll address the WHY?

Since its initial release in September 2019, little has been done regarding ASO.

  • The app has been updated twice.
  • The long description has been updated twice.
  • The app store screenshots have been changed once, during an A/B experiment that was conducted in August.
  • User reviews went unanswered from March - November 2020.

As of November 23, 2020, Tag Me:

  • 4.6 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating in the Play Store
  • 533 reviews
  • 70,000+ installs
  • version 1.2.0

Despite not having done much ASO, Tag Me has continued being a top player in the hashtag app game.

We have now decided to prioritise Tag Me and see what it can actually do in the Play Store with some attentive ASO upkeep. On November 11th, we decided to begin recording our ASO steps to learn more about how it actually functions, and to see what is actually possible for our hashtag app.

Tag Me's Play Store Reviews

As previously mentioned above, the last reply to a review was in March 2020. In the graph below, we can see how this influenced our app performance in a very poor way.

A record of what we did:
11th Nov 2020:
  • Responded to 50 Tag Me reviews
12th Nov 2020:
  • Responded to over 100 Tag Me reviews
19th Nov 2020:
  • Responded to recent Tag Me reviews
Nov 11th - Nov 20th:

As you can see from the graph above, since having replied 10 days ago, the traffic to our app has gone up by 20%.

→ This quick 10-day case study has revealed that responding to user reviews truly does have an impact on ASO, and suggests that continuous engagement over an extended period of time would greatly improve an apps visibility in the Google Play Store.

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