Welcome to Meet the Growthmakers, our content series spotlighting the people shaping the future of app marketing.
This time, we’re speaking to Igor Blinov, ASO Director at Yodel Mobile.
With a deep understanding of user behaviour and mobile strategy, Igor shares his perspective on data challenges, overlooked growth tactics, and what it really takes to build a winning app strategy in today’s competitive landscape.
Tell us a little bit about your role at Yodel Mobile
As Head of ASO, my main responsibility is to ensure that our team delivers the best possible results for our clients. We do this by applying tried-and-tested ASO frameworks that we’ve developed in-house over the years. One of Yodel Mobile’s biggest strengths is our deep experience across a wide range of apps, industries, and markets. That exposure has enabled us to identify key patterns in user behaviour and store algorithms, which we’ve used to build strategic, adaptable frameworks that continue to evolve.
My role involves making sure we’re constantly refining those frameworks, staying up to date with the latest changes to App Store and Google Play algorithms, new features, and best practices. It’s also about making sure we’re aligned with the direction the app stores themselves are heading. We don’t just choose keywords in isolation; we think about the bigger picture. What’s happening in the market? What are competitors doing? What’s shifting in user intent or behaviour? All of this informs our ASO strategy.
Ultimately, it’s about being proactive and reactive. Whether that’s adopting new tools like the Google Natural Language API to gain a competitive edge, or tweaking our strategy based on real-time insights, our focus is on delivering intelligent, data-led ASO that ties into wider growth goals.
What’s the most exciting part of your role?
For me, it’s the fact that there’s always something new to learn. ASO and mobile marketing are relatively young fields that’re constantly evolving. Every day brings updates from changes in the app stores to shifts in user behaviour, and there’s always movement in the competitive landscape. Thousands of new apps are launched daily, and each one can have an impact on the ecosystem in some way.
That pace of change means you’re always engaged. I love that it’s a cycle of continuous learning: testing new ideas, forming hypotheses, validating them, or going back to the drawing board to rethink your approach. It’s a space that keeps you sharp, curious, and adaptable. That constant stimulation is what makes the role so exciting for me.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I’ve ever received is simple is to ‘always test’.
In mobile marketing and especially in ASO, it’s crucial to test everything you do. Before making any major changes, ensure that your data is accurate, that you’re interpreting it correctly, and, most importantly, that it guides your decisions, not the other way around.
If you’re not leveraging data properly, your competitors will. The ecosystem is evolving constantly, and if you’re not aligned with that evolution, even the biggest apps can lose their edge. A good example is Angry Birds, once a household name, but now largely forgotten in the ever-shifting app landscape.
In short, always test, always analyse, and always let data drive your strategy.
What are the biggest challenges mobile apps face in growth today?
One of the biggest challenges is data, specifically data discrepancies and attribution.
There are countless tools available, some more reliable than others, but mobile marketing is still a relatively young space. There’s no single, definitive source of truth. Ultimately, we rely on the app store consoles as our primary data source. Apple and Google hold the data, and they decide what to share. But the reality is that the data they provide is limited and often inconsistent.
Even Apple and Google openly acknowledge discrepancies and ongoing bugs within their own reporting. This lack of transparency creates a major challenge when trying to make confident, data-driven decisions.
Another issue is the way data is interpreted. If you’re only looking at the surface-level metrics provided by the stores, you risk missing the bigger picture. It’s critical to go deeper to understand how other KPIs, like retention, engagement, or conversion rates, are being influenced by your ASO efforts or marketing activity. Sometimes, the impact isn’t immediately visible in the console data alone.
To navigate this, you need to know the platforms like the back of your hand and constantly evolve your analytics strategy. For instance, on Google Play, users can generate impressions just by scrolling past your app, yet Google doesn’t surface that visibility data to developers. That means you’re often working in the dark and need to piece together the full picture using all available signals.
In short, understanding your data, interpreting it accurately, and identifying the gaps is vital to growing an app in today’s market.
How do you approach building a successful mobile growth strategy for clients?
It all starts with a deep understanding of the product. Before we even begin strategising, we need to know what problem the app solves. What’s the user pain point it’s addressing? That means going beyond just reading about the product, we become users ourselves.
We download the app, spend time with it, test it from different angles, and really experience it as a user would. This helps us think like a user and understand what they expect to see, what their frustrations might be, and what will ultimately drive them to take action. Especially when it comes to search traffic, that kind of user mindset is critical because when someone opens the App Store and starts searching, it’s often driven by an immediate need.
However, the challenge is that attention is limited. You’re not just competing with other apps, you’re competing with everything on a user’s phone: notifications, messages, distractions. The space you get to make an impression is tiny. That means every element of your app listing and growth strategy needs to be carefully crafted and maximised for impact.
Beyond the product and the user, the third key pillar is understanding market dynamics. You need to be aware of how the category is evolving, what competitors are doing, and what external factors might be influencing user behaviour. That’s where the detective work comes in, pulling together insights from all angles to build a strategy that’s both data-informed and human-centred.
The foundation of any successful growth strategy is understanding the product, the user, and the market. Everything builds from there.
What’s one underrated tactic that can have a big impact on mobile growth?
One surprisingly powerful tactic is simply opening the App Store or Google Play and searching for keywords related to your app or your client’s app. It’s basic, but incredibly insightful. The auto-suggestions that appear as you type are driven by real user behaviour. Apple and Google won’t suggest keywords unless there’s a meaningful volume behind them.
That means those suggestions give you instant, real-world insight into what people are searching for. You can discover long-tail keywords, uncover new user intents, and even build out an entire keyword bank just from this method, without needing any third-party ASO tools.
It’s a low-tech approach, but one that our team uses regularly. And it works. You’re essentially letting Apple and Google tell you what’s trending directly in the interface your users engage with.
As a side note, I always recommend that anyone working in mobile growth make a habit of opening the app stores daily. You’ll start noticing visual tests, layout changes, and UI experiments that Apple and Google are constantly running, often quietly. Familiarity with the real, evolving App Store environment is essential to staying ahead.
Final thoughts
Thanks to Igor Blinov for sharing his knowledge and strategic thinking. Whether he’s digging into keyword data, exploring untapped opportunities, or pushing for smarter experimentation, his insights reflect the fast-paced and constantly shifting nature of the app ecosystem. As the app stores evolve, we at Yodel Mobile ensure that we are data-driven and close to the product and user, which is key to long-term success.
