With the explosion of apps during the past few years there has also been a need to measure the performance of apps, hence the surge of app store analytics and optimization tools. Up until now, SimilarWeb’s claim to fame has been providing a wealth of Website traffic and market intelligence data. And then they came out with Their App Analysis and Engagement features, which provides app developers and marketers with actionable insights into better app optimization. During the past few months I’ve found myself using it frequently as my top “one-stop” source for App competitive analysis.

Here are a few of the key app performance and optimization needs that SimilarWeb’s PRO platform quickly solves. I ask these questions when I’m starting or following-up with an ASO or app marketing process:

1. What  are the Top Apps per Country & Category in the App & Play store & what’s their ranking performance over time?

When you’re just starting the marketing process with a new app, you’ll need to identify your competitors for both iOS and Android in the most relevant country markets. While there are a few app performance tools out there, not many of them support a high number of countries (most are focused in the US) or provide data for both the iOS App as well the Google Play store.

Besides supporting top apps per category for a large number of countries in the App and Google Play store, SimilarWeb’s app platform allows you to filter them by price model (free & paid) as well as the top grossing, and by top new free & paid. You can then list them based on their position and ranking change, enabling you to discover new players and potential competitors that might be climbing the ranks.

Once you know your competitors and the main market players, that’s when your app marketing process really begins. You would do well to monitor your own performance vs. your competition’s over time. With SimilarWeb you can select an app and compare their Rankings and Ratings per country over time with any other competitor. You can monitor up to 4 other competitors at once.

2. What are the number of installs, daily active users & usage patterns of your competitors apps? 

Although you can directly track your own app installs & usage activity, you also want to be able to compare it and follow-up with those KPIs of your main competitors. This is how you can identify trends, seasonality and also opportunities that can arise over time.

In addition to your competitors’ number of installs, active users, usage time and sessions per user over time, you can also obtain information about your app usage times and daily usage patterns vs. your category leaders and any specific competitor.

3. What are your competitors’ app churn & retention rates?

What about loyalty? How loyal are users of your competitors’ apps or category top leaders vs. the loyalty of your app users? SimilarWeb offers a ‘Retention’ benchmark feature illustrating the percentage of returning users after a certain number of days and the median lifetime of users for any app.

4. What are the main traffic sources for your competitors’ apps?

Once you identify a competitor’s app or a popular apps’ ranking, install or usage pattern, it’s helpful to understand what’s driving growth for the top players. You can do it with in-store traffic sources, external traffic sources, in-store keywords and search engine keywords reports.

You can start by identifying the top traffic referrers from “inside” the app store to your competitors, whether via in-store search, recommendations as a “featured app” from the “developers page,” or being referred by other apps.

If one of these top referrers is from in-store search you can obtain the most important keywords from the in-store keywords feature. This is very helpful when planning your own ASO process.

You can also identify if your competitors apps are receiving traffic from external sources beyond the app store. Lots of apps are able to do this by growing their traffic through a social media campaign to promote their app, or by incentivizing their app usage from their own mobile site or an email marketing campaign, or organic web search results – just to name a few possibilities. You can identify any of these sources with the External Traffic Sources section.

If one of the top external sources is Search, you can also identify which keywords are driving traffic through search engine rankings:

5. Which other apps are being used by your target audience?

This feature is useful in order to better understand your users’ preferences. It also helps you learn where to establish potential partnerships, advertising or contributions with other apps you might want to know about and follow-up on. The apps listed here are similar and are also being used by the same users. You can gain a lot of interesting information that will help your future efforts in this Audience Interests section:

As you can see, the kind of insights you can draw from the PRO platform are pretty valuable for app operators and marketers too. Hopefully this helps you advance your app competitive analysis and identify more potential app growth opportunities!

Sources: SimilarWeb