FunnelHound / Guides / Did your ASO change work?
How to tell if your ASO change worked
Three rules: note the date you shipped the change, watch the one metric that change can actually move, and judge after two weeks — not two days. Indexing alone takes 2–4 weeks, so most "my ASO isn't working" verdicts are just impatience with a lagging chart.
Every change has one metric that judges it
The most common measurement mistake is watching downloads for everything. Downloads sit at the bottom of the funnel — three stages of noise away from most changes. Map the change to the stage it touches:
- Title, subtitle, keyword field → search impressions. These fields decide how often you appear. If impressions don't move, the keywords didn't move.
- Icon → tap-through rate. The icon shows in search results, so it's the one visual that changes how many viewers open your page — the tap-through guide covers what else is on that ballot.
- Screenshots, preview video, promo text → page-view-to-download conversion. They live on the product page, so they can only move what happens after the tap — benchmarks in the conversion rate guide.
- Price, paywall, onboarding → purchases and deletions. Store metrics won't flinch; money and churn will.
One change, one metric, one verdict. Ship two changes at once and you'll never know which one did what.
The waiting rules
Apple gives your new metadata no instant credit. Indexing takes 2–4 weeks for keyword and title changes, and App Store Connect data itself lags real activity by roughly 2–3 days. That produces a hard discipline:
- Write the date down. Every change, every time. A month later, "when did I swap the subtitle?" is the difference between a verdict and a shrug.
- First honest read: two weeks. Anything earlier is reading tea leaves through a data lag.
- Don't swap keywords again before week six. A keyword that hasn't finished indexing can't be judged, and replacing it restarts the clock at zero.
- Compare like with like. Same weekday windows, similar season. A Tuesday–Monday window against a holiday week proves nothing.
Separate search from browse before judging
Keyword changes can only move search traffic. If a featuring week or a viral TikTok pours browse impressions into your totals, your blended numbers will swing for reasons that have nothing to do with your metadata — in either direction. Judge a keyword change on search-sourced impressions, or at minimum note when a traffic spike from another source overlaps your test window and extend the window past it.
What "worked" actually looks like
A successful metadata change is a step, not a spike: impressions settle onto a higher plateau over a week or two and stay there. A spike that decays back down within days is usually a traffic event, not a ranking gain. And remember the difference between rank and reach: a keyword tool can show you moved from #40 to #12, but only impressions tell you whether anyone was searching that term at all. Rank is the means; impressions, installs and eventually purchases are the result.
Mark the moment, then stop squinting
This whole discipline is one feature in FunnelHound: milestones. Mark the day you shipped the change, and the app shows "since this milestone: +X% installs, +X% purchases" right on the funnel — the before/after comparison done for you, on your iPhone, straight from App Store Connect. No spreadsheet with dates in it, no vibes.
Judge your next ASO change with numbers
FunnelHound marks your change as a milestone and shows exactly what moved since — impressions, installs, purchases.
Get FunnelHoundData notes: the 2–4 week indexing window and week-six patience rule are practitioner consensus, consistent with our own tracking; Apple does not publish indexing timelines. App Store Connect metrics lag roughly 2–3 days. Metadata fields and their edit paths per Apple's App Store Connect documentation as of 2026.