60 percent of users find their new app by searching with specific keyword in App Store. Trending Search is a place where users can immediately tap on a keyword and see the apps ranking for this keyword. It is a very easy way for users to discover new apps, since it basically shows the popular searched words in a country. Trending search is an area, which highlights the popular apps of the moment located below the search box in IOS.
We wanted to analyze how being in a trending search list effects overall ranking of an app. In order to find out this, we analyzed 40 apps from top 400 most popular apps whose old rankings were between 11 and 392 before trending. Then, a data frame was created which includes app, keyword, date, trending duration (hour), old rank, new rank, increase percentage, increase percentage per trending duration (hour), estimated rank and ranking difference (model error) variables.
We computed all apps’ percentage of rank increase per trending duration hour individually. For example, MERGED! which is in the game category has the biggest ranking jump in this list whose rank increased by 3.75% per hour throughout four hours of being in trending search list. It moved up to 17th from 20th overall during that period. On the other hand, the lowest ranking jump is related to PHOTO GRID that is the most popular Instagram collage maker. It climbed up only five step from 88th overall whose percentage is 0.71 per hour throughout 8 hours of trending search.
When other variables are examined, estimated rank is our calculated estimation of a specific app for being in trending search list and ranking difference is the difference between real rank and estimated rank for each app. Let’s continue with the analysis of this data frame.
According to the output of our analysis it can be summarized as follows:
- Our estimation model is represented by 40 observations (apps).
- While maximum ranking jump per hour is 75 percent, minimum is 0.71 percent.
- Average ranking increase is approximately 06 percent.
- We are 95 percent sure that the average percentage of ranking increase will be between 80 (2.06-0.26) percent and 2.32 (2.06+0.26) percent.
As we summarized above, 2.06 is the estimated average ranking increase per trending hour. So, this value can be used in order to estimate new ranks of apps after they appear in trending search. Then, we computed estimation values and named it ranking difference of the model. For example, as you can see in the graph, old rank of Retro Collage Photo Editor is 123 and while new rank is 111, however our estimated rank is 113. It means that ranking difference of this app is (113-111)= +2.
All this analysis gives us a simple equation in order to estimate the resulting app ranking if it appears on the trending search list in Turkey as:
Estimated Rank = Old Rank-(Old Rank*Trending Duration*2.06)/100
Let’s put this data into another real example and test our equation:
Steam mobiles’ overall rank was 261 in 26.01.2016 and after 7 hours of trending duration, it had gone up to 229th rank. If we put values into equation, we can find estimated rank as follows: Estimated Rank = 261-(261*7*2.06)/100 = 223
Ranking difference is (223-229) = -6
In this analysis we have tried to find a value in order to estimate overall ranking of an app in Turkey’s top 400 list, after being trended for a keyword. We know that each country has its own dynamics and needs to be analyzed separately. Note that app’s ranking is the only publicly available data in the market about an app’s performance. Similar estimations can be done for download volume expectation by showing up in the trending searches.
