32 terms
ASO glossary
The terms that actually come up in a store listing conversation, defined without the marketing filler. Grouped by what they describe rather than alphabetically, because nobody looks up “CVR” without also needing “product page view”.
Store surfaces
- Product page
- The full listing a person lands on after tapping your search result. Shows the whole gallery, description and reviews.
- Search result
- The row in store search. Shows your icon, title, rating and the first two or three portrait screenshots — nothing else.
- Today / Featured
- Editorially curated placements. Not purchasable and not directly optimisable, but a listing that looks unfinished will not be chosen for one.
- Custom store listing
- A Google Play feature that serves alternative artwork and text to a targeted audience — by country, install state, or campaign URL.
- Feature graphic
- The mandatory 1024 × 500 banner above a Google Play gallery. Becomes the poster frame if you attach a promo video.
- Storefront
- A country-specific version of a store. Each has its own language, currency and often its own competitive set.
Metadata
- Title
- Indexed on both stores and the heaviest single keyword field you control. 30 characters on both.
- Subtitle
- App Store only, 30 characters, indexed. Prime keyword real estate that most apps waste on a slogan.
- Keyword field
- App Store only, 100 characters, never shown to users. Comma-separated, per-locale, and must be researched in the target language rather than translated.
- Short description
- Google Play, 80 characters, indexed and shown above the fold.
- Full description
- Google Play indexes this; the App Store does not. 4000 characters on both.
- Promotional text
- App Store, 170 characters, updatable without a review cycle. Not indexed, but useful for announcements.
Creative
- Screenshot set
- The gallery for one device family in one language. Up to 10 on the App Store, up to 8 on Play.
- Safe zone
- The area of a screenshot canvas guaranteed not to be cropped by the store's gallery layout. Headlines belong inside it.
- Device frame
- The rendered hardware shell around your screen. Must depict current hardware for the platform you are publishing to.
- Marketing icon
- The 1024 × 1024 App Store icon. Square, opaque, no rounded corners — the store applies the mask.
- Adaptive icon
- The Android icon format: separate foreground and background layers that the launcher masks into its own shape.
- App preview / promo video
- A short video on the product page. Autoplays on the App Store; on Play it replaces the feature graphic with a play button.
- Hero screenshot
- The first frame. Appears in search results, is cropped at the product page edge, and does more work than the other nine combined.
Measurement
- Impression
- Your listing appearing in a search result or browse surface. Does not require a tap.
- Product page view
- Someone landing on your full listing. The denominator that matters for creative work.
- CVR / conversion rate
- Installs divided by product page views. The number screenshots move most directly.
- Impression-to-install
- The whole funnel in one ratio. Useful for spotting a problem, useless for locating it — split it into stages first.
- Tap-through rate
- Product page views divided by impressions. Driven almost entirely by icon, title, rating and the first screenshots.
- Install-to-open
- How many installs actually launch the app. Falls when the gallery overpromised.
- Branded vs unbranded traffic
- People searching your name versus people searching a need. They convert very differently and averaging them hides everything.
Testing & operations
- PPO — Product Page Optimization
- Apple's A/B testing for icon, screenshots and preview video. Up to three treatments; each goes through App Review.
- Store Listing Experiment
- Google Play's equivalent. Free, reports installs per variant with a confidence interval.
- Metadata-only update
- Changing listing text or artwork without shipping a new binary. Still reviewed on both stores.
- Localisation
- A complete per-language version of a listing, including its own screenshot set.
- Phased release
- Rolling a version out to a percentage of users over days. Applies to builds, not to listing artwork.
- Review cycle
- The wait between submitting and a human approving. Screenshot changes are subject to it, which is why they should not be a launch-day task.
Now the part the terms are about
A gallery that does the work these definitions describe, generated from the screens you already have.
Generate a screenshot set