Six main mobile app promotion trends for 2023 that everyone should know

2022 is going to end and it is already high time to create a strategy to boost your app in 2023. As we know, mobile marketing is changing all the time, and new and new trends and strategies appear, so in this article, we would like to tell more about what to expect in 2023 and how to make your app successful in conditions of high competitiveness. 

The attraction of users through mobile devices is extremely important for most types of businesses as even according to Statista, the current number of mobile phones used all over the world is approximately 7.26 billion. This statistic translates into 83.32 percent of the world’s population owning smartphones. That’s why we should understand the increase in mobile app usage, as well as advertising, should become higher in 2023 even despite all the crises and problems the modern world faces.

Forecast number of mobile users worldwide from 2020 to 2025 according to Statista

1. App Store Optimization

The new year always brings new trends, but it is needed to remember that existing strategies are developing as well and a lot of them have already become the core thing in mobile marketing. That’s a complete truth about App Store Optimization (ASO). During the last years we have observed the development of ASO and now it is completely obvious that this trend will become even more important. The core thing in any successful mobile promotion strategy is optimization, which gives the next possibilities:

• the indexation for keywords, which increases the app’s chances to get more organic users from the search with text metadata optimization
• the increasing of app conversion rates with visuals optimization
• the achievement of user engagement from different regions with app localization

One more important thing to mention here is that as we know for AppStore cross-localization works, when you can, for example, add keywords for English (US) and Spanish (Mexico) and get the indexation for the USA. According to the last data provided by ASO agencies, some other geos give the indexation for the US as well, such as Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Arabic, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Traditional), Vietnamese, Korean.

2. The combination of paid UA and ASO

Paid User Acquisition will play an important role for mobile marketing in 2023 as well, as it was all the years before, as this gives a possibility to attract more users. Anyway, we need to remember that even paid UA should be based on ASO, as this combination leads to qualitative traffic acquisition, as anyway even users from paid channels will see the app page before installation which influences the conversion rate a lot. 

Paid user acquisition alongside will help to increase the app quality, as the higher in-app activity and user engagement are, the more chances the application has to be indexed for keywords and get higher ranks in the search list both on Google Play and AppStore.

3. The increase of app reputation importance

According to Apptentive, almost 79% of users read at least 1 review and check the app’s overall rating before installing an app. The statistics say that nowadays jumping from two-stars to three-stars in the app stores can increase conversion by up to 306 percent. Jumping from three-stars to four-stars still has a dramatic impact, increasing conversion by up to 89 percent. If we check the graphic provided, we see that app reputation influences the conversion rate (so the user willingness to download the app considerably).

Considering this fact, the importance of app reputation management will only increase in 2023 and it will be needed to pay huge part of attention and efforts to increase the app rating and get more positive reviews. You can read the guide about working with app reputation in the following article and be ready to improve your app reputation in 2023.

4. The increase in importance of app quality

As it is known, nowadays there are almost 2 million apps on AppStore and 3.5 million apps on Google Play according to the data provided by Statista.

Of course, we understand that the exact number of apps may fluctuate as Apple and Google regularly remove low-quality content from their app stores. But anyway, this data gives an understanding that the number of apps has been increasing over the years and this tendency will be observed in 2023 as well.

These statistics prove the fact that within the nearest time the number of apps published on the main app stores will increase even more and users will have a huge range of available applications and games to download. This makes to come to the conclusion, that during the next year the importance of app quality will become higher as well, as the more apps are, the higher the competition is. So in 2023, we would recommend paying a lot of attention to text app optimization, as well as to the creation of more professional screenshots, icons, promo videos, etc. 

For sure, this trend is connected not only with app optimization, its reputation, and metrics but also with app quality. So this leads to app development and permanent improvement of user experience, as well as fixing bugs and crashes. 

According to the article placed on Android Developers Blog on the 2nd of Nov 2022, the data that crashes influence directly the app positions for search requests, as well as the indexation process, was officially confirmed by Google. You can read the whole article here.

5. In 2023 Apple upgrades App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

This is the biggest update in pricing since AppStore launch. On the 6th of December Apple released the next announcement:

“Apple today announced the most comprehensive upgrade to pricing capabilities since the App Store first launched, providing developers with 700 additional price points and new pricing tools that will make it easier to set prices per App Store country or region, manage foreign exchange rate changes, and more.

Under the updated App Store pricing system, all developers will have the ability to select from 900 price points, which is nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for most apps. This includes 600 new price points to choose from, with an additional 100 higher price points available upon request.”

6. Google Ads app installs will be attributed as the third-party referrer

We believe that this update will be awaited by a lot of app marketers, as this will influence the analysis of app conversions a lot. Previously, the installs from Google Ads campaigns were reflected together with all the installs in the Search and Explore source in the developer console. In such a way, all the installs were “mixed” and it was almost impossible to get what type of traffic the app gets.  

But since the end of 2022 Google started to put ads installs under third-party referrer in the Google developer console. This is a great change as it gives app developers and app marketers a deeper understanding of user behavior. What’s more, in such a way it is possible to get how ASO updates influence the app conversion rates and organic traffic attraction, as all the Search and Explore traffic is separated now, which gives a deeper understanding of app performance. Try to use.

As you may see, among the trends for the future 2023 there are both old tendencies and some updates which can influence the app performance and its analysis while working with apps on Google Play and AppStore. To sum up, we would like to mention that it is needed to follow all the trends and stores changes extremely precisely as this may provide a deeper understanding of App Store Optimization, app promotion, and user acquisition. Do not forget, that keyword promotion is still one of the most popular tools which can help you to attract more organic users from the search and will boost your app or game to TOP ranks. The trend of keyword promotion will be even more observed among app marketers, so keep in touch with us to get all the news and insides.