Glossary
Organic installs
Installs that come from people finding your app in the store themselves, mainly through search, rather than from paid advertising.
Organic installs are downloads your app earns without paying for them: a user opens the App Store or Google Play, finds your app through search, a chart, or a browse section, and installs it. They are the counterpart to paid installs, which are driven by ads.
Search is the dominant source of organic installs on both stores, which ties them directly to your keyword rankings. When your app moves up the results for a term people search, more of those searchers see it and a share of them installs it; when a ranking slips, that stream quietly shrinks. This is why organic installs are the outcome metric of ASO.
Because they cost nothing per install, organic installs usually determine whether an app is sustainable. Paid campaigns can buy volume, but the apps that last are the ones whose store listings keep converting searches into installs on their own.
On AppTracker, your real daily install numbers are imported from your own store accounts and charted against your keyword rankings per country, so you can see how ranking changes and organic install volume move together.
Read the guide
How to connect your app downloads to your keyword rankings
Rankings tell you where you stand; downloads tell you what it earned you. Put the two on one timeline, per storefront, and you can finally see what a climb toward #1 pays in installs, and what a slip costs. Here is how, with your own store data.
Why your app's keyword position matters
Almost every organic install starts with a search. If your app is not near the top for the terms people type, it is effectively invisible. Here is why position is the metric that matters.
Related terms
Keyword position
Where your app appears in a store search results list for a given keyword, counted from the top (position 1 is the first result).
App Store Optimization (ASO)
The practice of improving an app's store listing and signals so it ranks higher in store search and converts more of the people who see it.
Active device installs
Google Play's measured count of devices that currently have your app installed, reported daily in the Play Console statistics exports.