Rank tracking

How positions are measured and stored, and what the Rankings page and the keyword page each answer.

Once a day, per store and language

Every tracked keyword is measured once a night, in its own store and language, for the first fifty results. A keyword you add during the day is measured within the hour rather than waiting.

The one exception is dead weight — measured, never seen in the first fifty, popularity under 15. Those keywords are measured once a week instead of every night. The product already says they are not worth chasing, so a nightly request would be wasted; they are not dropped altogether, because a term that is never measured can never show that it has started to rank.

Positions one to ten are stored for every app that appears there. Positions eleven to fifty are stored only for apps someone tracks — measured across sixty thousand rows, the rest was 62 per cent of the table and no query ever read it.

Three different blanks

• A number — measured, and this is where you were.
• Not ranked — measured, and you were not in the first fifty. This is a real result.
• A dash — never measured. Not the same thing.

The Rankings page opens on the keywords you actually rank for, because a pool where most rows are empty is unreadable. The rank filter counts each group — Ranked, Not ranked, Never measured — so you can see at a glance what the page is hiding, and a line under the table says how many keywords were checked today without placing, with one click to show them. A new app often ranks for one keyword out of a hundred: that is not a missing measurement, it is the answer.

The keyword page

Clicking a term opens everything known about it without making a single Play request: your rank history by day, the popularity trend over thirty days, who is in the top ten with their ratings counts, where your competitors sit, which seeds surfaced the term, and the full score breakdown.

One number there is worth more than it looks: the median ratings count of the top ten, next to yours. When you are not ranking at all, that median is the honest answer to why — it is the weight you have to overcome. The median is used rather than the average because a single giant in the first ten makes the average meaningless.

Above the top ten sits a second line: how many of them carry the term in their title. Matching is by root in the app's own language, so an inflected form counts and a chance substring does not. Apps whose listing has not been read yet are left out rather than counted as a no, and the line says how many those are.

Under the chart, one sentence says how much this keyword normally moves in a day: the median and the ninth decile over the last thirty measured days. Days when you were measured but were not in the first fifty are not treated as a position, and gaps wider than three days are skipped rather than divided into a daily rate. With less than about a week of measurements on consecutive days it says so instead of showing a number.

If the keyword's normal daily movement already reaches your rank-drop threshold, the page tells you that too — alerts on that term will be routine movement rather than news. It reads your own lowest enabled threshold for this app; there is no extra setting to keep in sync. When one of your addresses uses per-keyword thresholds, the number shown is this keyword's own.

The popularity trend card also shows the same week last year: the measured popularity closest to 52 weeks ago, within a week either side. Exam seasons, holidays and the school year repeat, so a term that peaked around now last year is worth preparing for before it peaks again. Until the keyword has a year of measured history the card says so rather than showing a zero; daily history is kept for 400 days. The formula may have changed in between, so read it as a direction, not an exact number.

The rank chart

The chart on the Rankings row detail and on the keyword page draws your position by day, first place at the top, over 30 or 90 days. Competitor lines are available but switched off by default: ten lines at once cannot be read.

Diamonds on a dashed line mark a listing or creative change, yours or a competitor's, so a move can be lined up with the edit that may have caused it. Only full reads are compared, and only field names reach the chart — Title, Short description, Icon, Screenshots. The text itself never does.

A shaded band marks the day a competitor's history becomes complete. Before that day a gap means unknown; after it, a gap means outside the top fifty. The distinction matters because positions 11 to 50 are only stored once somebody tracks the app.

Movements

Two comparisons are kept: against the previous measurement, and against a week ago. A positive change means the position got smaller, that is, you climbed.

Best rank looks at your whole history, not a window. It is the one number that does not reset.

Visibility, and what it is made of

The app overview carries a visibility estimate: the popularity of every keyword you track, weighted by where you rank for it, as a share of the total popularity you track. First place counts fully, tenth about two thirds, fiftieth almost nothing. It is an estimate, like the popularity it is built from.

The figure belongs to the latest day on which most of your tracked popularity has been measured — at least 80% of it. The nightly passes run for hours, and a morning when only half the pool had been measured used to show a sudden collapse that was never real; days like that are also left out of the chart.

Under it, collapsed by default, is the breakdown: what each keyword contributes, its position and its popularity. The parts add up to exactly the headline number, which is why the list is never shortened and the shares are never rounded — a breakdown that did not add up would raise a doubt about the figure itself.

Even while collapsed the card says one thing out loud: whether most of your visibility rests on a single term. A single percentage hides that, and it is worth seeing before a competitor takes that one keyword.

If the breakdown cannot be loaded it says so on that same line, collapsed or not. An error that drew nothing would look exactly like a healthy app with nothing to report, and those are not the same answer.

A printable report

Open your app's overview and choose Printable report to get a one-page summary of the last 7 or 30 days: visibility, top-10 keywords, the #11–20 band, the biggest gains and drops, share of voice, category rank, ASO score and listing changes.

Use Print / Save as PDF and pick "Save as PDF" in your browser's print dialog; nothing is generated on our servers, stored or shared.

Moves under three places are left out as daily noise, and a keyword entering or leaving the top 50 is shown as such rather than with a made-up number. Popularity and difficulty remain estimates.

→ Competitors