Uber does a great job with their ASO, offering much to learn from. Today we're going to look at Uber Eats, the company's food delivery app. Coming up with a good keyword strategy for an app as popular as Uber Eats may seem trivial, but it's quite the opposite.
As we initially expected, Uber's strategy here is almost spot on and is likely heavily tested. But some things can be improved.
Overall, Uber Eats gets an A-
FYI - We reverse-engineered the strategy by examining the app's page on the App Store. We weren't involved in putting it together.
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Before we start examining, here's Uber Eats' performance on the App Store in the US:
While there are quite a few food delivery services, only a few cater to enough markets to be popular in the App Store. In this case, the main competition to uber Eats comes from DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates. Download-wise, DoorDash is the leader with more than twice as many downloads as Uber Eats. Grubhub is almost the same as Uber Eats, and Postmates has about half the downloads.
However, that doesn't mean their keyword ranks follow exactly:
Putting them all side by side, we can see Uber Eats is the late entrant. It's doing fairly well to keep up but doesn't have the top rank for any of the primary keywords they're all fighting over.
The leader in this group is DoorDash, which isn't just the one with the most downloads but also creativity. Uber could learn from it and incorporate terms like "chinese food" (popularity = 22) or "pizza delivery" (popularity = 23).
Takeaways:
Now, let's look at the key components of ASO: keywords, to get found and send more people to the app's page, and visuals, to convert those people into users (aka. downloads).
For iOS apps, there are three areas Apple looks at for keywords: the app's name, subtitle, and keyword list. The first two are public, so we'll start by analyzing those:
Based on these, it looks like Uber Eats' keyword strategy is targeting the following keywords:
Here's how the app's ranked in these, along with keyword insights:
Uber eats is doing all right. The competition is pretty tough, the app's name is a bit less focused than the competition, and the subtitle doesn't contribute towards the most important search term.
Note: The subtitle likely mentions "door" so it can combine with a keyword in the keyword list to spell a competitor's name (DoorDash). It's a clever technique we see more apps starting to use.
Beyond these keywords, the app ranks in a few other popular keywords:
Takeaways:
Suggestions
Discover new keywords, monitor ranks, and snoop on competitors.
The keyword list is private and can only be seen by the developer and Apple's search algorithm, so we're going to have to reverse-engineer it as well. Based on keywords the app ranks in that aren't already in the name and subtitle, we believe it looks something like the following:
burger,dash,favor,postmate,grub,hub,seamless,takeout,yelp,meal,toast,king,pizza,comida
Takeaways:
How do you "sell" a food delivery app? Uber's way is by selling its convenience. That seems to be the focus of the screenshots here. And at that, they do a great job by highlighting contactless delivery, easy payment, and order tracking.
But there's another way. Food creates a craving. It looks like they try to leverage that with the first screenshot, but the food is covered, the text is relatively small, and there are too many options.
Takeaways:
Suggestions:
Uber Eats doesn't use an App preview. This isn't common among apps that provide a service. While videos are a great way to convey how easy an app is to use, which seems to be the focus of the screenshots, Uber Eats' young crowd may not need a video to show them that.
However, a video remind users that they're hungry, and that Uber Eats is the solution, so it's worth experimenting with.
Takeaways:
Although Uber is an extremely popular brand, on the App Store, it has to invest in ASO to be seen. Its direct competitors do that too, which means Uber has to continue iterating over its strategy to remain competitive.
How's your ASO strategy performing? The key to success with ASO is to constantly make changes, and base those on data. Appfigures has all the tools you need to find and evaluate keywords, track performance, and monitor the competition. Get started
Ariel analyzes apps submitted by the audience using his checkup process + answers questions about App Store Optimization (ASO).
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