Marketers and app developers often refer to conversion rate (CVR), which is the percentage of app users who download your app from a store after viewing it’s page in the app store. But what is a good conversion rate for apps? What is the industry’s current gold standard for your segment?
App Store Conversion and Install Rate
Let’s start by explaining what is conversion rate is. There are two metrics that you should be looking at when analyzing the conversion rate of your app store.
- Conversion rate (App Unit/Page views): This is the percentage of users who download your app after viewing it’s page. This metric is used by the ASO community to calculate app store conversion rates. This metric can help you gauge how convincing your app page is to get users to download it. It is possible to achieve a higher conversion rate than 100% on the App Store. How is this possible? Since every install counts, people that download your app straight from search results or browsing results without visiting your app pages, don’t count as page view.
- Install Ratio (App Unit/Impressions).: This is the percentage of users who download your app from the app store search results or browse results without going to your app page. This tells you how popular your app is in the app store searches/browse results.
In this post, we focus on the conversion rate and ignore the install ratio for the time being. So let’s get started. We take a look at the US App stores – there are some differences to other countries, but the overall numbers are more or less the same.
Average Conversion Rate and Apple US App Store Install Rate
Here’s an overviev of average app store conversion rates for different business segments for the US App Store.
| Weather | 76.9% |
| Games – Music | 69.2% |
| Medical | 63.6% |
| Utilities | 63.3% |
| Games – Trivia | 59.9% |
| Music | 57.8% |
| Productivity | 57.0% |
| Shopping | 56.5% |
| Magazines & Newspapers | 52.5% |
| Navigation | 52.0% |
| Social Networking | 51.6% |
| Business | 50.1% |
| Reference | 49.1% |
| News | 48.4% |
| Games – Racing | 43.5% |
| Health & Fitness | 42.8% |
| Finance | 39.8% |
| Lifestyle | 37.6% |
| Books | 33.6% |
| Education | 32.9% |
| Games – Sports | 30.1% |
| Sports | 24.9% |
| Games – Adventure | 20.2% |
| Photo & Video | 17.6% |
| Entertainment | 14.7% |
| Games – Simulation | 13.6% |
| Games – Casual | 13.1% |
| Games – Puzzle | 12.0% |
| Games – Family | 11.6% |
| Games – Action | 11.5% |
| Travel | 10.8% |
| Games – Word | 10.4% |
| Games – Board | 9.6% |
| Games – Card | 9.3% |
| Games – Role Playing | 8.5% |
| Games – Strategy | 8.3% |
| Games – Casino | 8.3% |
| Food & Drink | 7.6% |
| AVERAGE | 33.7% |
There are varios soures and metrics that provide information about the average conversion rates like the above. For example, AppTweak reported that between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020 the average conversion rate among all categories in the US was 33.7%. APPFOLLOW has collected data on more than 898,000,000 unique iOS app impressions as of July 2020. Food & Drink has the highest installed rate at 8.4%, while Magazines & Newspapers has the lowest with 1.3%.
Google Play Conversion Rate Benchmarks
Google Play offers native conversion rate benchmarks. The store listing conversion rate chart lets you compare your daily performance against your peers’ median, 25, and 75 percentile. This breakdown table lets you compare your total conversion rate over the selected period to your peers’ median for each of the 28 days.
The average conversion rate for the US Google Play Store in 2020 was 26.4%, which is lower than the average CVR for the App Store (33.7%). The highest conversion rate was for the Business category (58%), and the lowest CVR on the App Store for the Casino Games category (11.1%).
| Business | 58.0% |
| Education | 42.0% |
| Family – Education | 37.7% |
| Productivity | 37.3% |
| Art & Design | 36.5% |
| Family – Pretend Play | 34.9% |
| Transportation | 34.9% |
| Tools | 34.9% |
| Maps & Navigation | 34.8% |
| Photography | 34.2% |
| Games – Educational | 33.9% |
| Music & Audio | 32.6% |
| Finance | 32.4% |
| Communication | 31.2% |
| Health & Fitness | 29.9% |
| Weather | 29.6% |
| Games – Casual | 28.9% |
| Games – Racing | 27.1% |
| Games – Sports | 25.7% |
| Dating | 25.6% |
| Games – Arcade | 24.2% |
| Games – Simulation | 24.0% |
| Games – Card | 23.6% |
| Video Players | 22.5% |
| Games – Board | 20.4% |
| Games – Role playing | 19.8% |
| Games – Action | 19.2% |
| Books & Reference | 18.9% |
| Family – Brain Games | 18.7% |
| Personalization | 17.9% |
| Games – Adventure | 17.6% |
| Games – Puzzle | 17.6% |
| Social | 17.4% |
| Entertainment | 16.8% |
| Games – Word | 16.2% |
| Lifestyle | 16.0% |
| Games – Strategy | 13.5% |
| Travel and Local | 11.3% |
| Games – Casino | 11.1% |
| AVERAGE | 26.4% |
Takeaways App Store Conversion Rates
Conversion Rate Benchmarks allows you to compare your conversion, install, and click-through rates against other apps in the same industry. The conversion rate can vary depending on many factors and can increase your app’s conversion rate by optimzing your screenshots and feature graphics , icons, keywords, advertisements, and so forth.
Now, what’s a good conversion rate?
If you look at the numbers, you’ll can think of the these numbers as benchmark values: if your app is performing lower than the average, then it’s time to do something and do some serious ASO. But that’s not the whole story. You proably have a webpage that presents you product. And that’s where your customer journey actually starts. From the webpage people go into the app store and hopefully download your app and use one of your services and make a purchase.
Generally speaking, having to go into an app store adds another step on your customer journey and a potential point where potential customers drop off. Bascially, you’ll lose customers on every step: the more steps a user takes to complete a purchase the the lower the conversion rate. So, it’s critical to minimize the number of steps a potential customer has to take.
With zero install apps, we provide novel way of getting your customers into your app. The key is to gradually take customers into your app – and the best way to start is to offer an app where customers don’t know that they are already in the app. Customers gradually gain trust in your services and will eventually permanently add a zero install app to their homescreen, but this takes time and requires patience. Get in touch with us and learn how we worked with zero install apps for our customers such like call a BOX. Follow us on our blog app to stay up to date with technological developments of mobile apps and internet technology.
Photo by mari lezhava on Unsplash
Sources:
https://seoasoorm.com/app-store-conversion-rate/
https://appfollow.io/benchmark
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9859173
https://www.storemaven.com/academy/app-conversion-rate-benchmarks/
https://www.apptweak.com/en/aso-blog/average-app-conversion-rate-per-category-2019
