The secret behind search suggestions on App Store & Google Play

When you search on App Store or Google Play, search suggestions appear as you type to make it easier to find whatever you’re looking for, and for brands, this overlooked step in the user journey is quite important. It’s the moment before ads and competitors ranking for your brand keywords can steal downloads from you in the search results. But the search suggestions can include more than just your brand name. For example, your app’s full title, and by optimizing it the right way you can get more downloads from the search suggestions. This article explains why, and by how much.
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Looking at Google Play Console data for our clients, the conversion rate (CVR) is +20% higher on average for brand searches that have keywords besides the brand name, compared to searches only containing the brand name. So, consider the big brand argument that “a title only including the brand name is better for conversion” debunked.

On top of that, the more generic the brand name is, or the more it’s used by multiple apps, the greater the CVR for the brand search with keywords is—and the more important the title becomes to convert users. Or, let’s put it this way, prime users while they’re typing in their search query before even seeing your app in the store. Because as we’ve now learned, the app’s full title can show up in the search suggestions.

So how many users tap this “extended search suggestion” that includes the keywords from the app’s title? In a sample of 100 apps in the U.S. Top 200 on App Store, from the Entertainment, Lifestyle, Finance, and Productivity category, our research based on keyword volumes shows that an average of 17% of brand searches can be attributed to the extended search suggestion.*‍

‍From the same sample of apps as above, we found that for apps with generic brand names, like Peanut and Verify, the extended search suggestion is behind almost 30% of all brand searches. As is the case with Stardust, pictured above. For apps with more unique and recognizable brand names, like DoorDash and Walmart, the extended search suggestion accounts for less than 3% of brand searches.

But remember that just because your brand name is unique, that doesn’t make it recognizable... You need a lot of downloads for the extended search suggestion to shrink to 3% of your app’s brand searches, even if the brand name’s unique. At which point you’re getting so many downloads that a +20% uplift to the CVR for those 3% results in hundreds of additional downloads every month anyway. You simply can’t escape the usefulness of the extended search suggestion.

Furthermore, looking at all apps in the U.S. Top 200 on App Store, 9 out of 10 that only have their brand name in the title do not have an extended search suggestion for their brand (sorry, brick-and-mortar banks, adding “mobile” to your title doesn’t take you out of the losers bucket).

Among the apps in the U.S. Top 200 on App Store that do have keywords in their title besides their brand name, 1 out of 4 have TWO extended search suggestions. So if the CVR is good, the extended search suggestion will stick even if you change the title.**

So not only are keywords in the title important but changing them now and then is too, as you can increase your visibility in the search suggestions by having more than one suggestion for your brand show up. But you shouldn’t change your title too often. You should wait until it actually becomes an extended search suggestion—a process that can take some time, and even the slightest title change can interrupt. And if it never happens, the CVR isn't good enough. So there’s your optimal time between title changes.

To summarize all of this, on average, adding keywords to the app title increases the CVR by +20% for 17% of the traffic coming from searches for your brand, resulting in +3.4% more downloads.

Now, if you’re still planning on only having your brand name in the title without any keywords after reading this, the only valid argument for it left is that it looks cool. Unless you want to admit that you're just doing it because almost half of the apps in the U.S. Top 200 on App Store do it—and you want to miss out on an opportunity to gain more visibility and convert more users, just like them.

^{*12 apps that didn’t rank high enough for their brand name for the extended search suggestion to show were excluded from this dataset.}

^{**Venmo still has its brand name with keywords as an extended search suggestion, despite removing the keywords in Nov 2019, further proving its stickiness.}