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App Store Spotlight - Portal
January 10th, 2022
by David Quinn
VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Gummicube, Inc.
If you are one of the millions of people who suffer from insomnia, or if stress is a big part of your life, then you know how much your surroundings can impact your well-being. From a relaxing day on the beach to a quiet night in a forest, the ambience around you can have a huge impact on your mood. Featured today in Apple’s “Go On, Treat Yourself” collection is Portal; a revolutionary relaxation and wellness app.
Portal - Immersive Escapes
There are countless apps offering soothing relaxation music and guided audio to help you in your pursuit of calmness, but audio alone might not work for everyone. Portal by Portal Labs LTD is a unique and fully immersive relaxation app. Portal integrates relaxing audio from areas all over the world with your personal internet of things to give you the full experience of being in some of the most beautiful places in the world.
Each of these immersive setups is called a “Portal” in the app, and 44 different portals are currently available. These portals combine spatial audio recordings from different destinations with retina-quality, ultra-high definition visuals and smart lighting integration. This allows you an unparalleled relaxation experience that can transport you to awe-inspiring locations around the world.
Relaxation and wellness apps are a highly saturated market on both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, but Portal has revolutionary features not seen in most competitor apps, which contributed to Apple’s featuring today. However, in order to reach new users who don't yet know about these incredible features, Portal Labs LTD would benefit from using proven ASO tools in order to increase their keyword ranking and conversion.
Screenshots
Portal is already including some of the ASO best practices for creatives in their beautiful screenshot set. Portal’s screenshots are a calming blue theme, with high-quality in-app images gracing each screenshot. Value propositions are included as screenshot copy text across the full set in a contrasting white text that is clearly readable across all device sizes.
Portal’s first screenshot highlights its accolade as Apple’s “App of the Day” alongside a positive review from Independent. Moving through the screenshots set, each screenshot’s copy text describes the features being pictured with descriptive and compelling terms that further reinforce why users should download and convert.
The latter half of the screenshot set also includes user testimony from five-star reviews, with the final screenshot showing a calm lighthouse scene with a showcase of the publications that have featured the app. Altogether, when combined with their simple minimalistic logo, their full creative set communicates relaxation in an effective and clear way.
Metadata
When it comes to App Store metadata, Portal could use assistance from an established ASO agency. While the title is accurate, for any user who has not read through the description, the key features are not clearly communicated. Since a majority of users download directly from search results, many potential users could be lost to nearby competitors.
The title tag "Immersive Escapes" will not go a long way in building relevant keyword rankings for the app. Furthermore, the subtitle “Change Your Surroundings" may communicate the ability for users to completely reshape their surroundings, but it does not suggest the app’s relaxation features.
When it comes to ASO, finding the perfect keywords for an app is rarely straightforward. Even though keywords and phrases can perfectly describe an app and be subjectively relevant, their objective relevance may not hold up in practice. Optimizing an app requires a strategic balance between keyword representation and communicating features in a way that is attractive to users. Other apps ranking highly in the relaxation and wellness landscape tend to include keywords like “meditation,” “mindfulness,” “relax,” “sleep,” and other similarly descriptive terms. By researching which feature-based keywords competitors include in their front-facing metadata, Portal can get a better idea of which terms will help them achieve their visibility goals.
Overall
Portal is a wellness app that approaches relaxation in a new and unique way, by combining relaxing music and sounds with high-quality motion images and smart light integration to transform your surroundings into an oasis of peace. While being featured by Apple is sure to catch the eye of many new users, without a well-planned App Store Optimization strategy, Portal risks losing ranking once the feature ends. By turning to the ASO basics, Portal Labs LTD can bring their app visibility to the next level, thus assuring that more users can enjoy the serenity offered by this unique app.
Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.
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