Markets: country and language, per store

A market in Applyra is three things at once: a store, a country and a listing language. Everything is measured at that granularity, because that is how the stores themselves work. There is no global position, no worldwide difficulty and no average rank across countries, and any tool that shows you one is averaging things the stores never put together.

Why the language is separate from the country

It is tempting to treat a country as a market and stop there. The stores do not. Both serve a different listing and a different set of results depending on the language, which is why Applyra keys on the pair.

Two examples that make the distinction concrete. An app listed in French and English on the Canadian App Store gets indexed twice, on two sets of keywords, competing against partly different apps. And a Spanish keyword in the United States is a real market, served by the Spanish localization of the US storefront, not by the Mexican one.

That pair is also the first thing to check when a number in Applyra does not match what you see in the store, because two storefronts answer differently by design: Applyra shows a different number from the store goes through that comparison.

How many countries and languages Applyra covers

Google Play's country list is the App Store's plus Bangladesh, where Apple runs no storefront at all, so that market exists on one store only. The language gap is wider and simply reflects what the two stores support. Apple's list is a strict subset of Google's.

What a market costs you

Each store, country and language combination you follow is one tracked app. Two markets for the same app are two entries, with their own keyword list, their own positions, their own visibility score and their own ASO Health audit. That is not accounting for its own sake: the numbers genuinely are unrelated, so merging them would produce an average that describes nothing.

The free plan follows one app in one market, which is enough to learn the tool on the market that pays your bills. What each plan includes is on plans and limits and on the pricing page.

Picking your first market, and the next one

Start where your installs already come from. The point of tracking a second market is to answer a question you cannot answer from the first one, and there are really only two worth the slot:

• A market you already sell in but have never localized. Your listing is in English on a storefront where people search in their own language, so you are reachable by your brand name and nothing else. The score will say so loudly.
• A market where the same keywords are cheaper. Difficulty is per storefront, and a term that is hopeless in the US can be wide open in Portugal or Poland.

Once you have picked one, how to launch an app in a new market takes it from the storefront to the first measured position.

Localizing is also the cheapest keyword expansion there is, because the character budgets are per localization on iOS and per language on Google Play. Every locale you add hands you a fresh title, a fresh second field and, on iOS, another 100 indexed characters in the keywords field. The numbers are in the metadata fields each store indexes and in our character limits reference.

How to work with several markets

Adding and switching markets is covered in tracking an app across markets. Two things are worth knowing before you start.

Keywords are per market too, so a term you track in the US is not automatically tracked in France. That is deliberate: the same word rarely deserves the same place in two languages, and it means your keyword budget goes where you decided rather than being multiplied behind your back.

And the market is fixed when you add the app, so what you audit is the listing that storefront actually serves. If your app shows an English title on a Japanese storefront, that is what gets audited, because that is what a Japanese user sees. If the app does not come up at all in the storefront you picked, it is usually not published there: I cannot find my app when adding it covers what to do.