App Store Connect gives you a lot of numbers and very little guidance on which of them should change your behaviour. Some are genuinely diagnostic. Others will send you chasing a problem that is not there.
Impressions
How many times your app appeared, in search results or browsing. Impressions are a visibility number, not a quality one. Rising impressions with flat installs is not necessarily bad news: it often means you started surfacing for broader terms where intent is weaker.
The trap is treating impressions as a goal. Appearing more often for searches that were never going to install is not progress, and it will drag your conversion rate down while nothing has actually got worse.
Product page views
How many people cared enough to tap through. The ratio of views to impressions tells you whether your icon, name and first screenshot are doing their job, because that is all a person sees before deciding.
If impressions are healthy and page views are not, the problem is almost always the icon or the first two screenshots. That is a narrow, fixable surface.
Conversion rate
The number most worth watching, and the one most often misread. Read it against itself over time, not against a benchmark you found in a blog post. Conversion varies enormously by category, by price, and by whether your traffic is search or browse.
One caution: conversion rate moves when your traffic mixchanges, not only when your listing does. Start ranking for a broad term and the rate will fall even though the page is identical. Always check whether the denominator changed before concluding the page got worse.
Retention and the numbers that actually predict survival
Installs are the vanity end of the funnel. Day-one and day-seven retention tell you whether the thing you built is worth keeping, and no amount of store optimisation fixes a product people open once.
If retention is weak, stop optimising the listing. Sending more people through a leaky funnel makes the leak more expensive, not less.
What Apple will not tell you
App Store Connect reports what happened to your app, but not where you rank. It will show installs rising without telling you which keyword moved, and it does not keep a per-keyword position history you can compare a release against.
That gap is the reason rank tracking exists as a separate discipline: Apple gives you the outcome, and you have to measure the cause yourself.