Since paid search ads for the app store is not yet launched or implement, we can only speculate or make sound assumptions on what could happen in the ASO industry.
We have answered a couple of questions already like:

• What ads really mean?
• The danger of ASO tools?
• Ads VS ASO?

Well, here goes another question. Will “paid search ads” gives us an insight at good keywords for ASO?
I think yes. For sure, Apple and Google will provide their own insights or analysis tools for their paid search advertising customers to provide them with more transparency into the ad campaign. A tool, that can provide us with competitive metrics, performance metrics, and conversion metrics (Ad position/ average position, quality score, clicks/downloads, impressions, cost, interaction rate, and much more).

Competitive Metrics

These are some of the most useful metrics that we would like to see in the future from these app stores for us to understand the performance of their PSA campaigns.

• Search Lost IS (rank) – the percentage impressions that your paid ads did not receive because of poor ad rank.
• Search Lost IS (budget) – it is the estimated percentage of impressions that your paid ads did not receive because of low budget.
• Display Lost IS (rank) – the estimated percentage of impressions that your paid ads did not receive because of poor ad rank.
• Display Lost IS (budget) –the estimated percentage of impressions that your paid ads did not receive because of low budget.
• Search Impr. Share – the higher the search impression share, the better. This means that your ads are receiving a maximum number of the impressions, they are eligible for.

Performance Metrics

The following metrics are known to measure the performance/effectiveness of Paid ads campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords, that we would also like to get from Apple and Google.

• Clicks – number of clicks on your paid ad
• (impressions) – the number of times your ad is seen by people.
• CTR (click through rate) – the number of times people click on your ad after it is shown to them. This measures the effectiveness of your ads. Formula: CTR = ad clicks / ad impressions.
• Cost – the sum of total ad clicks cost and the total ad impressions cost.
• Pos.- it is the average position of your ad.
• Views – the number of times your ads were viewed.
• Interactions – it is the total number of ad interactions or ad clicks

Conversion Metrics

These are some of the following data for your ad campaigns, ad groups, ads, ad placement, and keywords:
Downloads – it is the number of  downloads generated by your campaign.
Cost/download – it is the average amount you pay for a download
Converted clicks – it is the number of unique ad clicks which resulted in one or more downloads.
Cost / converted clicks – it is the average amount you pay for each converted click.
These are just some of the metrics that I am looking forward to getting/see from these app stores, once they implemented their paid search ads scheme. I do hope that these app stores won’t bring us a tool to leverage the competitive spirit in all of us app marketers just to bring them further $$.
OK, pessimism aside, I just hope that it would be helpful enough and I want to see clear data – it would be awesome to get an idea of who you are competing against through individual searches and I have found tools such as Mobileaction and Sensortower to be very accurate. If Google or Apple develops this kind of product, so that large competitive reports can be run, that will allow us to estimate the probable spend of our competitors (or at least the keywords that each competitor is focusing on) then it will be incredibly useful.
I guess, if you had 1000 reports of a specific competitor and then found out which keywords they are running in the top ranks, then you could understand more about what is working for them; and this data could then be cross-referenced with app checks on their store pages to see what they are doing better than you in these areas.
You may also find practical uses for this data. The main one I can think of at this time is actually putting their insights aside and uses it at a wider piece of market research to develop your own ASO or marketing strategy. The inclusion of competitor’s data would save a lot of work doing ASO, and can even be argued to be better data seeing as you have a strong idea of who is successful in your chosen market space based on the impression share they receive. I would love to hear anyone else’s ideas on how to use the data that these app stores will provide.
The role of maths and statistics in the world of ASO is not yet clear to the US as of this moment. Well, simply because the “paid search ads” scheme is not yet implemented, and there’s no info yet on the usage of statistics and data science in conversion optimization behind it. That is why I have written this article to give you guys a heads up and somehow fill this knowledge gap.
I do hope that this will teach you, how to leverage all the pertinent information, in order to accurately interpret the app analytics data and take ASO, business, and marketing decisions which can quickly improve the bottom-line of your app business.