How to increase app visibility: A burning question on everyone’s mind. Who better to look at to educate us than education apps? Here’s how these apps used Apple ASO, localized keyword research, and other app store visibility techniques to boost app downloads.

duolingo is amazing at visibility 94.5

Duolingo has a great visibility score overall, so we will be comparing the strategy of Duolingo and other top language learning apps that are trying to grow more visible alongside this giant.

Duolingo VS Babbel Visibility Localization 

These top language learning apps have great visibility. How do they do it? Let’s compare Duolingo and Babbel to see what their visibility tactics are and how they use App Store Optimization localization to their advantage.

babbel vs duolingo visibility

This visibility map shows us that Duolingo has the upper-hand on language learning apps in most of the world. We will take a deep dive into their visibility strategy to find out what each app is doing to achieve success. We will also examine how Babbel uses this success to its advantage.

visibility babbel vs duolingo

Babbel generally has fewer users but in the countries where the apps have a lower visibility score, Babbel has the upper hand. This suggests that Babbel is targeting the countries where Duolingo is not as visible. This could be a good strategy if you are an up-and-coming app, or you want to broaden your audience. You can examine the weaknesses in your competitor’s localization strategy to target those areas.

Rosetta Stone is another name in the language learning app niche that should not be neglected from our analysis.

babbel vs rosetta stone visibility map

If we were to compare Duolingo along with these two on the map, Rosetta Stone would not appear at all. However, as we can see, in many countries Rosetta Stone is the closest competitor to Duolingo. Rosetta Stone does have the upper hand over Babbel in some countries as well, but it cannot manage to beat out Duolingo anywhere in the world.

ASO strategy of Babbel and Duolingo

Babbel’s Apple Search Ads user acquisition strategy involves them bidding on their brand name as well as other language learning apps’ brand names. Here we can see which apps are bidding on which keywords and what their percentage impression scores are. The popularity indicates the app store keyword search volume of that particular keyword.

babbel asa apple search ads

Interestingly, though Babbel isn’t getting many impressions for the term Duolingo, Rosetta Stone is getting a 52 percent impression share from the term. This is interesting because Babbel is the smaller of the two apps. However, they do have a more aggressive search ads campaign that involves bidding on other language learning apps. This could potentially get apps to defensively bid on their brand. We can see that the keyword “language learning” has 11k apps ranking organically, so it would be harder to rank for compared to another popular app brand name in the same category.

Keyword impressions 

When it comes to organic keywords, it is clear to see that Babbel is getting its downloads from many of the misspellings of Duolingo. This ASO strategy allows them to get a lot of the potential users for their visibility giant competitor.

babbel language learning app keywords

This data is coming from our Keyword Intelligence Tool, one of our top ASO tools. You can use this tool and our other best ASO tools in the same way for your app. This strategy means that you should include in your keywords, the names of some of your competitors who can be considered relevant to your app. You can also include misspellings and typos. This will help you promote your app for free. You can use app ASO tools like ours to track keywords, see their search volumes, their organic impressions, and so on. You can also use ASO to help you find your competitors, and then find their keywords with our tools as well.

Duolingo has a slightly different ASO strategy. This could also be useful to you in growing your app’s audience and visibility. 

keywords for duolingo How to Increase App Visibility

The app store keywords applied here include their brand name, a few brand keywords, but mostly what we refer to as generic keywords. These are keywords that apply directly to the usage of the app. Language learning is, for example, a generic keyword.

This approach is effective for Duolingo because it is already considered to be the most relevant or one of the most relevant apps for these keywords. Smaller and newer apps may have a harder time showing up in these categories since the category is so saturated. However, it is still a good idea to include relevant generic keywords in your title and metadata. This will show the Apple Store which people your app should be targeting. 

Both Duolingo makes use of this. Respectively, both apps have “language learning” tagged on to the end of their title in the Apple App Store. This way they can use their sought-after brand keywords as well as their generic keywords at the same time.

App Market Intelligence How to Increase App Visibility

Let’s look at our app market intelligence tool. Here we can see if we can find any more insights about the different strategies of Duolingo and Babbel. These app intelligence tools will let us examine download estimations as well as daily active users.

downloads vs duolingo downloads and DAU

When we use MobileAction to track the download estimations and our app revenue tracker tool, we can see an expected discrepancy in in-app download estimations. Duolingo has better visibility and a higher category ranking, so we can expect that it would also have more downloads.

babbel and duolingo download estimations How to Increase App Visibility

Something curious happens when we look at the estimated daily active users. There is a much greater gap between Duolingo and Babbel than there is in downloads. This means that people are not engaging with the Babbel app as much. This could be to do with Duolingo’s frequent and persistent reminders. This also could point to our hypothetical scenario. MaybeDuolingo users specifically want to use Duolingo and tend to stick with it, while the others are looking around more. When figuring out how to increase app visibility these are all important things to consider.

Final Words on How to Increase App Visibility

So now that you know the approach of these education apps towards ASO, you can try applying them to your apps. You can increase your visibility and grow your user base. For access to even more of our top ASO tools, sign up for a demo with MobileAction.