Achieving success in today’s financial app market requires quick adoption and keeping an eye on the pulse of the industry to stay relevant. As technology advances, emerging trends like blockchain and artificial intelligence are transforming the industry.
Two major crypto trends have recently shaken up the finance market: decentralized finance (DeFi) and web3.
- DeFi changes many rules that have been accepted for many years. It eliminates intermediaries by allowing people, merchants, and businesses to conduct financial transactions through emerging technology.
- Web3 is a broader term encompassing DeFi and other decentralized technologies such as dApps, NFTs, and DAOs.
These modern focus areas have created new opportunities for strategic up-and-comers to gain market share. Let’s look deeper and uncover valuable category insights that could help set your business up for success.
Trending Keywords in Finance/Crypto App Market
It’s no surprise that uptrending keywords contain many DeFi/web3-related topics. However, it’s important to note that many new trends are still coming from branded keywords — even if these brands are only recently becoming more widely known in the market.
Revolut: New Feature Drives ASO
Revolut is a neo-bank that has been providing online financial services to its users for years; however, this is not why the keyword “revolut card” trended up in the last quarter.
In Q1, Revolut announced the addition of a crypto spending feature that enables customers to use their crypto balance to pay for everyday spending. Following that announcement, the popularity score of the keyword “revolut card” skyrocketed, and Revolut started trending. Uncovering new features that consumers express interest in can help inform updates to your UA strategy, ranging from ASO and keyword targeting to ad creatives and partnership opportunities.
Uniswap: Adapting the Trends Brings Popularity
Uniswap enables its users to trade cryptocurrencies without involvement from a centralized third party. This means they are directly serving to DeFi and Web3 notions, and as expected, they have risen a significant amount in popularity score within the past quarter. Keeping an eye on keyword trends can alert you early to a rising competitor or a popular feature you might want to develop before you fall behind.
Chase Bank Combines ASO With Apple Search Ads to Rise to #1 in the UK
Even with the rise of decentralized finance and cryptocurrencies, centralized finance institutions can still find ways to optimize their keyword strategies. One such institution is Chase UK Bank, which ranks higher in the UK storefront than many decentralized competitors, according to the data gathered using SearchAds.com.
Earlier in April, Chase UK Bank skyrocketed from ranking 14th in the UK to the top spot. This impressive jump in rankings can be attributed in part to the successful synergy between ASO and Apple Search Ads.
In addition to their successful keyword selection strategy, Chase UK Bank created a successful custom product pages strategy to use as ad variations in their Apple Search Ads search results campaigns. They made two ad variations based on their custom product pages with different creatives for each. One ad variation is targeted explicitly towards competitor keywords, while the other is related to a new feature of their app that they want to promote.
By creating these ad variations and tailoring their ads to specific target audiences, Chase UK Bank has increased its relevance and attracted more users. This approach allows them to highlight particular features of their app to different audiences, whether they are actively searching for competitor apps or looking for a specific feature. Ultimately, this targeted approach has contributed to their success in the highly competitive finance and crypto app market.
Overall, Chase UK Bank’s success in rankings is a powerful example of how ASO and Apple Search Ads can work together to drive app visibility and downloads. Despite increased popularity in decentralized finance and crypto, Chase UK Bank was able to leverage a traditional approach and combine it with modern ASO and Apple Search Ads techniques to achieve impressive results.
Apple Search Ads Strategies From Trading 212 and Capital.com
Capital.com and Trading 212 offer investment-related services and have connections to the crypto world, forex, and finance industries. Both platforms aim to increase app installs and improve conversions from paid and organic keyword search results by utilizing paid campaigns. However, the two apps have distinct Apple Search Ads campaign strategies. This difference in campaign strategies results in noticeable contrasts in keyword rankings.
- Keyword: “crypto”
When we look into both apps’ Apple Search Ads campaigns that contain the “crypto” keyword, we see why capital.com outperformed Trading 212. For the Search Result ad placement, capital.com had 61 paid keywords that included “crypto,” while Trading 212 had 1.
While capital.com holds a higher organic ranking for the keyword “crypto trade,” Trading 212 enjoys a more significant impression share thanks to the support it receives from its paid advertising campaigns.
- Keyword: “finance”
Trading 212 got significantly more from its search results ads for the“finance” keyword. On top of that, Trading 212 also dominated the category by getting the most impressions from custom product pages run for this keyword.
These keyword examples highlight how utilizing Apple Search Ads campaigns as part of a holistic paid and organic UA strategy creates the best results. It’s essential to keep an eye on UA trends to see where there are opportunities for quick wins that can save you money and improve your market share.
Top Performing Finance/Crypto Apps in Ad Placements
Many Finance/crypto apps use the various ad placements available from Apple Search Ads on the App Store. Let’s look at a few examples to highlight strategies you could utilize for your apps.
Today tab ads
To increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your app, there is no better placement than the Today tab, and finance apps are no exception.
But the Finance app with the most impressions on the Today tab still only had an 8.13% share based on the data provided using SearchAds.com, so you can’t rely on that alone for a successful UA strategy.
Search tab ads
Search tab ad placements are used for driving awareness and downloads of your app by promoting it at the top of the suggested apps list; this is a way to capture the attention of potential users right before they search.
In this example, we will look at Trading 212’s campaign strategy for search tab ads.
In late March, Trading 212 experienced a decline in visibility score. To identify the cause of this change, the next step is to investigate possible factors that may have contributed to the decrease.
Looking through the updates from that period, we uncovered that Trading 212 added generic category-related keywords (“Stocks, EFTs, ISA”) to their app title. This is often a promising strategy because, in most cases, it leads to a better long-term ranking due to prioritizing keywords for ASO.
However, since the algorithm knows the search queries of users who have already installed the app, changing the app title might affect the app’s rankings if the new keywords are less relevant. Even when an app provides all the features they state in the title, the algorithm might still need time to adjust. That might be the reason they experienced a decrease in rankings.
Although the app provides all the features stated in the title, rankings may decrease if the new keywords are deemed less relevant. For example, the keywords “stocks” and “isa” had reasonably high search and relevancy scores for the Trading 212 app, while “efts” had low relevancy and search scores. It’s also important to note that the algorithm takes time to adjust to changes.
Due to the decrease in Trading 212’s visibility score, running Search tab campaigns can help the app gain more visibility. Although users may not have intended to download a finance app when they first open the App Store, seeing it at the top of the suggested list piques interest. Acquiring more users through Search tab ads could help Trading 212 improve its visibility.
Another strategy here is to acquire users through search results campaigns with the keywords Trading 212 has in the title. Users downloading the app based on those keywords can show the algorithm that the new keywords in the title are related to the app and help improve the app’s visibility.
Product Page ads
Since you have some power to navigate the categories you want to run your product page ads on, there are a few strategies marketers use to stand out here.
Finance/crypto category app Fidelity Bloom primarily ran their product page ads for other apps in the same category. Although they might miss out on attracting users engaging with different types, spending the budget on more high-intent users is safer.
Another strategy is to increase your reach to users who initially searched for apps performing well in other categories. As you can see in the above example, the game Angry Birds and the education app Rosetta Stone showcased their product page ads in different types — in this case, the Finance category. This strategy can be successful, but keeping an eye on your overall keyword performance is a good idea to ensure no unintended consequences.
Benchmarking Ad Placements
The data set is sourced from anonymized, aggregate data of finance/crypto apps utilizing SearchAds.com.
Even though ads can be very effective, monitoring benchmarks over time is essential to understand how your app performs compared to competitors and apps as a whole. You never know where you’ll find inspiration. Upon analyzing the metrics for different ad placements in both periods, a clear decrease in cost metrics was observed in Q4 2022 compared to Q1 2023 in Today tab ads and product page ads, as well as in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2023 in search results and Search tab ads. Hence, acquiring users became an even more beneficial use of marketing allocation on average.
As the finance/crypto app market evolves, staying ahead of the competition requires a multifaceted approach that includes tracking industry trends, increasing brand awareness, and optimizing user acquisition channels. You can reach new users, increase visibility, and build a loyal customer base by utilizing organic and paid UA strategies, including the Today tab. Taking action on this further information is essential so you don’t fall behind the competition. While prioritizing user acquisition and continuously adapting to the market, you can take your app to the next level and achieve success in the finance/crypto category.
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