Searchmetrics now shows where your app appears in App Packs

SEO and content marketing analytics service Searchmetrics has announced several new features, including the ability to see where your mobile apps — or those of competitors — appear in the Google App Packs or where your paid app ads show up a mobile search results page.

The San Mateo, California-based company said this kind of analysis in its Mobile App Rankings is the first of its kind. The new features were made available in Europe in March, and are now being rolled out to the U.S.

For example, Director of Product Helen Shaughnessy told me, if you search for “free music downloads” on a smartphone, you’re “highly likely to find Spotify and SoundCloud apps in the accompanying App Pack.”

A Google App Pack is a group of up to six suggested apps that might be returned in a Google mobile search, appearing as colorful tiles with app names, icons, prices, and ratings. They link to the app download pages in the Google or Apple app stores. Searchmetrics reports that about ten percent of Google mobile searches return an App Pack.

Searchmetrics now shows where the App Pack appears in the results, and where specific apps appear in the Pack. Previously, she pointed out, Searchmetrics did not show App Pack results. Here’s a sample App Pack results screen:

And here’s an App Pack:

There is also a new capability to see where paid ads for your or your competitors’ apps appear in the results. “You may be paying for app ads but your competitor may not be,” she pointed out, so the tool can help a marketer assess whether the cost is worth it. Paid App Rankings are similar to Organic App Rankings, in that it shows the position of the app ad in the cluster of ads in a mobile search results page.

The company is also announcing two other new features. While previously its Competitive Keyword Discovery tool showed all and shared competitive keywords for a specific web page, now it shows which page-level keywords are unique to you and which to your competitor’s page. For example, if you wanted to know the unique keywords for a page that features a pair of Nike shoes, now you can.

Additionally, the Visibility Guard that Searchmetrics had earlier made available in its beta phase is now out in an updated release version. It sends email or chat alerts about problems affecting ranking that a search engine crawl might encounter. Shaughnessy suggested this might include a “do not index” that was mistakenly left on a site update after it was moved from a staging server to a public location, as well as common errors like 404 “not found.”

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