How to Increase App Downloads: Ranking, Conversion and Retention

Downloads from search are simply how often you are seen multiplied by how often being seen becomes an install. Almost every growth problem is one of those two numbers, and they need completely different work, so the first job is telling them apart.

Last updated 20 August 2026 · by the ASOWeb team

The only equation that matters

Installs from search = impressions × conversion rate.

Impressions come from ranking for terms people search. Conversion comes from your icon, screenshots, rating and title once they see you. They are independent, they are fixed by different work, and doubling either one doubles your downloads.

This is why "how do I get more downloads" has no single answer. The answer depends entirely on which number is small.

Diagnosing which half is broken

App Store Connect and Play Console both report impressions and installs, so the ratio is available to you directly.

As a rough anchor, App Store conversion rates commonly sit somewhere in the mid-twenties as a percentage, varying widely by category. Treat your own trend as the real benchmark: what matters is whether your number is moving, not how it compares to an average across every app on the store.

If impressions are low

1. Check you are indexed for the obvious terms. Search your own category's plainest phrase and find yourself. If you are not in the first hundred, your metadata is the problem, not your competition.
2. Move your best keyword into the app name. The most heavily weighted field on both stores.
3. Expand into the long tail. Ten specific phrases you can reach beat one head term you cannot.
4. Add a second English localisation. en-GB beside en-US is a second full keyword field for the same language.
5. Add storefronts. The same app, the same metadata, more shelves.

If conversion is low

1. Replace the first screenshot. The single highest-leverage change available, and free to test.
2. Look at your icon beside the competition, at real size. Not zoomed in on a monitor, on a phone, in the actual result row.
3. Fix your rating. Below about four stars, conversion suffers badly regardless of everything else.
4. Caption every screenshot with a benefit. A bare UI shot asks the viewer to do work.
5. Run a real split test. Custom Product Pages on iOS, store listing experiments on Play. Both free, both usually unused.

Why retention feeds back into both

It is tempting to treat retention as a product concern rather than a growth one. Both stores disagree.

• Retention feeds ranking, especially on Google Play, which can see uninstall rates directly.
• Retained users rate you, and rating count and average feed both ranking and conversion.
• Download velocity is sustained by word of mouth, which only exists if people keep the app.

The compounding runs in both directions. An app with a poor first-week experience does not just lose those users; it loses the ratings they would have left, the ranking those ratings would have bought, and the impressions that ranking would have produced. Fixing week-one retention is frequently the highest-return ASO work available, and it does not look like ASO work at all.

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