If you’re responsible for producing app strategies, you’re familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO). It doesn’t matter whether you’re an app agency or app publisher, working in app marketing requires ASO and app intelligence to be successful.
Getting their apps to be discovered is the major challenge for app publishers. They face this challenge because of the everlasting competition in the app market. Powerful and proper ASO, including good app intelligence, helps you improve your app’s ranking and visibility, by putting your app in front of the right & eager users organically.
Challenges and Problems
Some serious challenges and problems app marketers face while working on ASO can vary. However, some of the main & most important ones might be:
- making your colleagues believe that ASO really works.
- not being aware that ASO is a long-term business, not just a one-time thing.
- accepting some failures that might happen even while working hard on ASO.
- assuming that you’re the best on the market, working without any mobile app intelligence.
- unable to see the effects of the strategies implemented by competitors in the market.
The first part of the summarized concerns are somehow self-conscious, and you can handle them internally. But to overcome the last two, you would definitely need professional support. That provides you with reliable and comprehensive market data, and accurate ad data across many apps to craft the best growth strategy for your app.
Analyzing your competitors helps you to identify and discover your and their strengths and weaknesses.
The strengths are the things you should also try and follow to implement on your strategies. On the other hand, the weaknesses are things you should be on the lookout for and avoid when you can.
If you’re about to build an app or product that offers the same features as your competitors, it’s a must to analyze their strategies by using an app intelligence for your own sake.
However even though competitor analysis is a good start, it shouldn’t completely influence your strategy. Otherwise, by doing more or less the same things, you might lose your unique brand value and make the same mistakes as your competitors.
What is App Intelligence?
Now let’s find out what app intelligence is and what kind of benefits it might provide.
Briefly put, mobile app intelligence is intelligence for your and your competitors’ apps. App intelligence analysis consists of data collected from mobile apps and app store platforms.
With app intelligence, you can monitor and reach all aspects of your app’s performance, track, test, and optimize keywords and also analyze your competitors. Through such analysis, you’d be able to see what they’re doing right or wrong which would give you ideas for your own actions in the market.
So, who should use app intelligence? Mobile app intelligence can easily support you and your app to achieve your goals in the app market. That’s why app intelligence is not only for the sales but also for the app producers, app marketers, product developers, and/or sales consultants and managers.
With these awesome benefits, app intelligence stands at the center of App Store Optimization (ASO) which is the key pillar of app growth and user acquisition. ASO and its complementary strategies like competitors’ intelligence, campaigns, etc. can help you to reach your aimed app store rankings and growth.
What are the subfigures of App Intelligence?
There is so much information in the app market and the data covered grows day-by-day. So the subfigures of app intelligence we’ll lay down are effective for today. Therefore you should keep in mind that there can always be more and different figures tomorrow. That’s why the very first rule is that “change is indispensable for development. They are not to miss but to watch closely.”
Mobile app intelligence includes every kind of information and data in the mobile app market. These data vary from app profiles, app downloads, user activities, user reviews, ratings, current and historical rankings, keywords that are used by the apps, campaigns, creatives, and impressions of their own apps as well as the competitors’ apps.
All this intelligence data can be collected by tracking the following sub-intel approaches. However, these data are to be analyzed individually as they are infinitive and therefore should be evaluated case by case.
MobileAction offers one of the best App Intelligence tools in the market. Let’s take a closer look at some app intelligence features to see why MobileAction is a leading brand.
App Profile:
The App Profile gives away comprehensive insight and information. This information is the “front face” of the app and seen by millions of app users on the App Store and Google Play Store platforms. Reviewing the information here, which is mainly the app name, app description, some screenshots, current and past rank history, user reviews, and download figures, you can get a quick snap-shot of any app in any storefront in seconds.
Category Ranking:
There are different categories of applications in app stores. Publishers are to explore and compare categories to see which best describes their app. The most known app store categories are listed below. There are 26 categories in the App Store and 32 app categories plus 17 games categories (total of 49) in the Google Play Store.
Categories and rankings are very important for the publishers and for potential users. Most of the users try to select the better-ranking ones in the category they’re looking through. So selecting the proper category for your app can be a sensitive issue. Also, you should follow your competitors’ apps in the market and/or the categories they select for their apps because you’ll fight for acquiring the new users and they will be a foe somehow.
So, first of all, you should keep in mind that your category will be the arena for you, and learning how to choose the most accurate and effective categories for your app is one of the first steps you should take. Additionally, for your own app and competitors’ apps, you should track situations in the category almost on a daily basis and search traffic score estimates and ratings frequently. These kinds of intelligence always help you to conduct more accurate strategies in the market.
Review & Ratings:
Analyzing the reviews left for your app should almost be mandatory as you can’t get the kind of feedback from anywhere else. If you work on them, you can understand and identify your users’ major pain points, or by working on the reviews left to your competitors’ apps you can take some lessons to complete and improve your own analysis.
To do all of that and do it fast, you need an app intelligence tool to browse all the reviews easily so you can understand your customers’ needs. Additionally, with the help of such analysis, you can uncover the frequently mentioned keywords in reviews to detect the possible bug issues or new feature ideas from your users.
👉 Read our detailed Review and Rating analysis for Plague Inc. to see how the COVID-19 outbreak affected the reviews and ratings of this Top Chart game.
Top Charts:
Users are always interested in top apps in the app stores. So, your app making it to the top charts would benefit your conversion greatly. Keep in mind that apps can’t succeed without downloads. If you want your app to compete with the other apps and you are eager to get rewarded for your labor in the market, you need to have a better understanding of exactly how people are downloading and using mobile apps and following the top apps.
While entering the app creation world or publishing a mobile app, first you decide your monetization strategy. Depending on the type of app there are different benefits of both strategies. If you charge for downloads initially, fewer mobile users will download your app. If your competitor is publishing more or less the same app and putting it to the app stores for free, your paid app most probably will not get enough downloads. Taking a look at the top charts for your app category, you’ll have an idea of how the world is going around.
Another issue is localization. If you’re targeting a specific country, you should follow the dynamics in this country and what kind of apps are most chosen. So the top charts for universal or a specific country are one of the essential parameters you need to track. You should discover the most recently published free and paid apps, either on the App Store or Google Play Store, and the country you’re interested in for the best use, in order to stay up-to-date. Sounds a little complicated? MobileAction’s Top Charts tool is the easiest way to track the top apps in all other categories and countries. You can even set custom alerts to get notified via email when an app or competitor you track makes it to the top charts. This way you wouldn’t have to worry about manual tracking, MobileAction has got it for you!
Featured Apps:
Featured apps are the apps and games selected by a team of editors to be displayed on the main page of the app stores. Both the App Store and Google Play Store have some guidelines for selecting these apps and if you want your app to get featured you should know and follow the rules.
The chosen or featured apps are most likely to be popular. These apps might have more chances to be seen and downloaded by users. In summary, the benefits of being featured apps are; they’re initially one step ahead of the competitors; they will be more visible than the others in the same category; they’ll have more increased brand awareness.
So being aware of all the featured apps as they appear in the app stores gives a very good insight into your app and/or your competitors. The apps featured in the MobileAction database can be analyzed in both current and past dates.
Biggest Mover & Loser:
Another issue you might track is finding out the anomalies in the app stores. To uncover which apps improved their category rankings the most and negative movements give you important insights about the trends in the market. Having the ability to do this kind of analysis for the countries is another good feedback for the publishers.
By doing these kinds of researches and collecting insights helps you to understand the influences in the market and create better strategies for yourself.
What do we offer?
App Intelligence of MobileAction helps app publishers rank higher in-app store searches, get more organic downloads, and understand vital metrics that will help them make the right business decisions and gain a competitive advantage.
Besides App Intelligence, MobileAction also offers ASO, Market, and Ad intelligence. Sign up for free now to gain access to all the essentials to maximize your app’s visibility and conversion with our ASO Intelligence tool. Additionally, get up-to-date insights about the market’s current trends, essential metrics, and see your position with reliable app intelligence data. Analyze various ad networks and discover the creative sets of your competitor. Interested in the mobile app data we can offer? Sign up for free to take a look at our App Intelligence product or schedule a demo to let us walk you through all the features!
