Losing Fewer People on Your App Store Product Page Before They Download

When a company tells me downloads are not growing, the conversation usually starts with onboarding and features. What is confusing inside the app, where people drop off.

There is a number I want to see first: conversion rate in App Store Connect. Apple defines it as total downloads and pre-orders divided by unique device impressions. An impression is the app being shown for more than one second on the Today, Games, Apps or Search tabs, and it includes product page views.

So this number tells you how many of the people who saw your search result or product page tapped Get, before anyone opened the app. If it is low, no amount of work inside the app brings more people in.

I have put several of my own apps on the App Store. This is the order I fix a Japanese store page in.

Search results show the first few screenshots

According to Apple's product page guide, you can show up to 10 screenshots, and when there is no app preview video, the first one to three appear in search results, depending on their orientation.

In search results, people compare the icon, name, subtitle and those few images. Whether they open your product page at all is decided there.

A pattern I often see in apps from Japanese companies is a first screenshot that is only the company logo or a tagline. Lined up in search results, it says nothing about what the app does. I recommend putting the actual app screen in the first image, with one line of text saying what you can do with it.

Name and subtitle get 30 characters each

Both the name and the subtitle are capped at 30 characters. Apple's guide advises against generic phrases like "world's best app" in the subtitle and suggests describing features or typical uses instead.

Thirty characters of Japanese say far more than thirty characters of English. Even so, the company name, service name and a tagline will not all fit. It gets easier if the name is the service name and the subtitle says who the app is for and what it does.

The keyword field holds less Japanese than you think

Apple's product page guide gives the keyword limit as 100 characters, while the App Store Connect help page says 100 bytes. A Japanese character takes more than one byte, so if the count is in bytes, filling it the way you would in English hits the limit early. It is safer to plan for the smaller number.

The guide also says to leave out repeated words, category names, the word "app" and competing app names. Space is tight, so drop words already in the name and subtitle, and prioritize terms people actually search for.

A page for each way in

With custom product pages, you can publish up to 70 versions besides the default product page. You can change the screenshots, app previews and promotional text. Each has its own URL, and if you assign keywords to one, it appears in search results for those keywords in place of the default page. On iOS 18 and later, you can also choose which screen of the app opens after download.

This pays off for apps with more than one way in. People arriving from a QR code at a store, from a social media ad and from search want to know different things. Show the store visitor the screens for the in-store features, and show the ad visitor the same thing the ad showed. When the ad and the page do not match, people leave right there.

Test one thing at a time

Product page optimization lets you test up to three alternatives to the default page, with different icons, screenshots or app previews. A test runs for up to 90 days, and you can choose which languages it covers.

The common mistake is changing the icon and all the screenshots at once. Win or lose, you cannot tell what made the difference. Start with an alternative that changes only the first screenshot, keep the winner, then move on. It looks slower, and it gets you an answer sooner.

Also, apps with little traffic take a long time to get a result. In that case, fixing the three things above (first screenshot, subtitle, keywords) does more than testing.

Can the screenshot text be read at search result size

Judge the text on your screenshots by whether it can be read small, lined up in search results. Looking at design files on a large monitor, this is easy to miss.

Checking is simple: open the App Store on an actual iPhone, search for your app and look at the row. Long sentences packed onto one line usually become unreadable here. In Japanese, a dozen or so characters per image, in no more than two lines, reads well.

If you also distribute abroad, build the English page the same way. As Apple's guide notes, app previews can be localized for every App Store language. A screenshot of a Japanese screen with an English caption added does not tell anyone in search results what the app is.

Promotional text changes without review

The promotional text shown above the description holds up to 170 characters, and you can change it at any time without submitting a new version. It works well for campaigns and seasonal notices. It does not affect search ranking, so it is no place for keywords.

At the first meeting

If you want more downloads, show me three things at the first meeting: your recent impressions, product page views and conversion rate from App Store Connect, the screenshots on your current product page, and where your users come from (search, ads, stores, social media and so on).

Whether to fix the app or the store page first, those three usually decide it.