How to track App Store keyword rankings and read the changes

Changing your listing without tracking ranks is guessing. Rank tracking is how you find out whether the new subtitle worked, which keywords are close to the top 10, and when a competitor moved in on a phrase you own.

What to track

Track a focused set rather than everything you can think of:

• Every keyword in your name, subtitle and keyword field, and the main phrases they combine into.
• Your next targets: phrases you plan to add in the next version, so you have a baseline.
• A few competitive phrases you are not ready for yet, to see when they come within reach.

For most apps that is 20 to 60 keywords per country. More than that and the signal drowns in noise.

How often

Once a day is the right rhythm. App Store ranks move during the day, so checking hourly mostly shows noise, while checking weekly misses short drops and the start of a trend. What matters most is consistency: the same keywords, in the same countries, checked at a similar time, so that the history is comparable.

Per country, always

Every App Store country has its own results. Being number 6 in Germany says nothing about the United States. Track each keyword separately in each country you sell in, and compare them side by side: the country where a keyword is easy and you are close is usually where the next win is.

Reading the changes

When a rank moves, there are usually four possible causes. Work through them in order:

Cause	What it looks like
Your listing change	Several keywords in your new text move together, starting a few days after the version goes live.
A competitor's change	One or two phrases drop while a rival climbs on the same phrases, often right after they update their name or subtitle.
Downloads and ratings	Broad movement across many keywords, following a feature, a promotion, a spike in reviews or a quiet period.
The store itself	Many apps in the category shift at once, including ones that changed nothing.

The only way to tell these apart is history: your own ranks over time, the date of each of your listing changes, and a record of what your competitors changed and when.

Mark your experiments

Every time you ship a new name, subtitle or keyword field, write down the date and what changed. Then compare the two to four weeks before with the two to four weeks after, keyword by keyword. Keep the words that climbed, replace the ones that did not move, and make sure nothing important fell.

Turn it into a weekly habit

Once a week, look at three things: keywords that entered or left the top 10, keywords within a few places of it, and what your closest competitors changed. That is usually enough to decide what goes into the next version's listing. For choosing those keywords, see how to choose App Store keywords.