The Best App Store Optimization Tools for Your Team
The right stack makes all the difference, especially when used with the right strategy.
ASO has grown a lot over the past decade, and so have the tools built to support it.
Today, we have access to platforms that can surface high-intent keywords, simulate creative performance, and pull insights directly from the app stores. Used properly, these tools can seriously accelerate your optimization workflow and free up your time to focus on the strategic levers that matter most.
But not all tools are built equally. Some are better suited for certain teams or stages than others. So below, I’ve broken down the most impactful ASO tools by function (keyword research, A/B testing, analytics, and a wild card for AI) and offered a few thoughts on where each shines.
Keyword Research
Let’s start where most ASO strategies begin: keyword targeting.
AppTweak
This is one of the best all-around keyword tools on the market. It’s great for surfacing long-tail keyword opportunities and keeping tabs on how your competitors are shifting their strategy.
It’s hard to choose a single “favorite feature” in AppTweak, but here are a few that sped up my workflow significantly:
Use “All Ranked Keywords” to see every keyword you rank for in aggregate. Say goodbye to manually clicking “follow” on hundreds of keywords.
The Suggested Keywords panel makes it easy to see which keywords your competitors rank on, which keywords you get the most installs from, and more.
The Timeline feature allows you to track competitor updates - Not just to keywords, but creatives, as well. You can even see when and what your competitors are testing!
SensorTower
SensorTower isn’t as purely ASO-focused as AppTweak, but it’s deeply entrenched in mobile and gives you access to a massive database. It’s also helpful for tracking install trends and keyword movement over time. Your UA team probably uses it already to track competitor install and creative trends, so you might be able to grab a free seat from them if you’re on a larger team.
These tools won’t write your metadata for you, but they’ll give you the directional insight you need to build a high-ranking keyword bank.
I like AppTweak better, but if your performance or UA team already has SensorTower, you can get everything you need to get done on here.
A/B Testing
Once you’ve finalized your keyword strategy, you’ll want to start converting all of those new impressions. An ASO professional will use one of the following A/B testing tools to achieve that goal.
Geeklab & SplitMetrics (Paid)
These platforms create fake app store pages, then drive paid UA traffic to them to test different creative variants. That means you can test icon, screenshot, and video performance without impacting your live page.
That can be important for several reasons:
Maybe you’re in soft launch. Your game isn’t out in T1 geos yet, but you still want to test there. Spin up a Geeklab or SplitMetrics test. It doesn’t require your app to be live in the geos where you’re testing, meaning you can get a bead on conversion without going live.
Heck, maybe you don’t even have a game yet, but you want to test and see whether your game idea will convert well. Whip up a few sample creatives, and run a Geeklab or SplitMetrics test to validate that idea (Hint: This is what Monopoly GO did, and it worked out pretty well for them!)
Going in another direction, maybe you have a creative idea that’s so disruptive you’re afraid it’ll tank conversion. Protect your store page conversion by running that test on Geeklab or SplitMetrics, instead of natively on the app stores.
These tools are great, but there’s a catch: Because they use paid UA traffic and fake store pages, you’re not seeing the full funnel. Your results won’t reflect Organic user behavior, because no Organics can get to the fake page! Still, these tools are incredibly useful for narrowing creative options in a vacuum.
Google Play Store Experiments (Free)
If you’re on Android, this is the gold standard: True A/B testing with real organic users. And Google has introduced several new features which really make this tool shine, including the ability to test for D1 retention instead of standard conversion, as well as the ability to customize your confidence threshold and MDE.
The downside? It’s clunky, can take forever to reach significance, and limits your test design flexibility.
Apple PPO (Product Page Optimization) (Free)
There’s Geeklab, there’s Google Play Experiments, and then there’s…This.
Apple’s PPO system lets you A/B test screenshots, icons, and videos in a live environment just like Google Play Experiments, but it’s deeply limited by a needlessly archaic structure. You’ll need two app builds for icon testing, and you can’t test for retention. And between us, there’s something funky about their confidence algorithm, which can either take forever to reach confidence, or can reach it in a matter of days.
Not to mention, the tool’s incredibly glitchy and the user interface will have you running in circles.
Still, it’s free, and you’re testing with real App Store users. If you have a strong iOS presence, I would recommend testing using PPO.
Analytics
You can’t optimize what you don’t measure, but ASO analytics tools can be frustratingly limited.
App Store Connect Analytics & Google Play Console
These are the first-party sources for Apple and Google respectively, but they have their limits.
Google gives you more granularity, especially on acquisition sources and keyword performance. In a neat twist, you can actually see Product Page Views, Acquisitions, and Conversion Rate by keyword for many of your core keywords. Frustratingly, some keywords will be lumped into an “Other” category, which blocks your visibility on individual keyword-level KPIs.
But still, I enjoy the little quality of life features Google adds for us.
AppStoreConnect Analytics is also a powerful tool for ASO practitioners, though it shows you different types of - And sometimes less - Data. You can see all of the important stuff here, from impressions to installs to revenue, all splittable and sortable by source or country, just like on Google Play. But you can’t see keyword-level KPIs like you can on Google. I’ve been asking Apple for this feature for years, and I’ve heard they may be working on it.
The one thing you have to be REALLY CAREFUL OF when using these tools is historical data inaccuracy.
Both Apple and Google will sometimes change the way they attribute installs. For example, one day about two years ago, Google decided that certain keyword searches now counted as “Explore” traffic instead of “Search”. But when the platforms make changes like this, they oftentimes can’t back-adjust the data, meaning in this case that any Search or Explore data from before that cutoff date can’t be normalized with data from after that date.
Naturally, neither Apple nor Google mark these dates in their dashboards, so you’ll need to keep tabs on them yourself.
Custom Solutions
If you really want power, and you work on a large enough team, try building your own tools.
That can mean scraping console data (Apple can be more difficult to scrape, but Google is doable), or downloading CSVs and automating them into dashboards.
The benefit of this is that you get control.
I mentioned earlier that Apple and Google often change the way they attribute installs without marking it in their dashboards. With custom tools, you can add the markups yourself.
You can compare Organic KPIs to paid, or to product KPIs, all in the same dashboard. You can map keyword ranking changes against conversion.
The sky is the limit when you start tracking the exact metrics you care about, and mapping them against one another.
You’ll just need someone with a little technical know-how.
AI Tools
This is the new frontier. Most AI tools today are pretty surface-level in terms of their ASO impact, but LLMs already offer real utility in your ASO process.
Keyword ideation: Prompt your LLM of choice with your app’s core themes, and you’ll get 100+ relevant keyword options in seconds.
Creative brainstorming: LLMs can help you ideate screenshot captions, KSP framing, and even suggest different options for different geos.
Localization: This one’s a game changer. Translate and localize metadata or creative copy across all of your languages in under five minutes. Just make sure to run the copy by a native speaker afterwards, because certain languages like Arabic or Japanese can still contain mistakes.
Soon, you’ll be able to train models on your art style and output net-new creative variants at scale. We’re not there yet, but I’ve seen prototypes in action and it’s closer than you think.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need a dozen tools to do good ASO.
Start with one keyword tool, one testing solution (preferably a free one like Google Experiments and/or PPO), and your on-platform analytics. From there, build toward automation and AI workflows as your team scales.
Just remember: The best tool in ASO is still your brain. Everything else is just helping it move faster.