Keyword Tracker
Keep an eye on the keywords that matter after metadata or campaign changes.
See Where Your App Appears in Search
Keyword Tracker watches the App Store searches you care about and records where your app appears. That makes it easy to follow changes over time after tweaking your listing, focusing on a new audience, or targeting another country.
A tracked keyword includes its market and platform. The same phrase can have wildly different results on iPhone in the US and on Mac in Germany, so those aren't interchangeable measurements.
Choose Your Data Mode
The first time you open Keyword Tracker or Keyword Explorer, Kickstart asks how you'd like to fetch keyword data. Both modes require Kickstart Pro.
- Local-only: Your Mac fetches public App Store results directly. Search popularity and live difficulty aren't included.
- Server-backed: Kickstart's servers provide search popularity, difficulty, rankings, and historical information where available. Your keywords are sent to the servers for analysis.
The choice applies across projects on this installation. You can change it in Settings > General > Keyword Data. Suggestions and related words are still useful in Local-only mode; missing popularity isn't the same as a score of zero.
Build a Useful List
Start with your existing App Store keywords, add terms one by one, or paste a comma-separated list. Include phrases that describe what someone actually wants to do, such as "plan weekly meals," alongside broader category terms.
Use tags to group ideas by purpose. You might have tags for current keywords, future experiments, and competitor research. Tag filters can match any selected tag or require all of them, which is handy once the list starts to grow.
You can also right-click keywords to track them in another country or on another platform, or explore related terms.
Read the Results
Rank tells you where your app appeared in the observed results. Popularity helps compare search interest, while difficulty describes how competitive the results look. They answer different questions: a popular phrase can still be a bad fit for your app.
Sort or rearrange the columns to focus on the question you're asking. The trend sparkline gives you a quick view of movement; double-click a row or choose Show Details for ranking history and more context, including competitor comparisons where available.
Give Changes Time to Teach You Something
Refresh when you need a new snapshot, and keep the country and platform consistent when comparing results. One jump doesn't prove that your shiny new subtitle caused it.
Record big listing changes in Journal, then compare ranking movement with App Analytics. Being found is great, but you also want the people finding your app to actually download and use it.