Competitor Analysis in the Mobile App Market Using Free Tools | Mobio Group
Staying ahead of competitors in the battle for user attention and loyalty is vital to success in the vibrant mobile app market. For app owners or developers, understanding your competitors and their strategies can provide invaluable information to help improve your own app and attract more users. While free analysis tools may indeed offer more superficial information compared to their paid counterparts, they can still provide enough data to draw meaningful conclusions and adjust your promotion strategy accordingly. In this article, Mobio Group’s mobile marketing team will look at free tools for up-to-date information in key areas such as app downloads and rankings, social media presence, creative strategies, and competitor ASOs.
When it comes to app promotion and marketing, flying blind can lead to costly mistakes. Competitor analytics can provide key data and key insights to help you make informed decisions. Competitor information can be invaluable for answering questions like these:
- How much revenue can my app bring in? Competitor analysis allows you to assess the potential profitability of your app by analyzing the performance of competitors in similar categories.
- What tools and utilities should I use to promote and monetize my app? By studying the tools and SDKs your competitor uses, you can make thoughtful decisions to optimize your development, marketing, and monetization strategies.
- How many downloads do I need to reach the top of my category? Knowing the number of downloads needed to achieve a certain ranking in your app category allows you to plan effective mass campaigns. Competitor analytics can help you plan your spending on ad and time to maximize your results.
- Which countries should I advertise in? Analyzing your competitors’ downloads by country helps you identify the markets with the most potential. By focusing your advertising campaigns on countries where your competitors are well-established, you can optimize your advertising costs.
- What audience should I target in my paid ads? Competitor analytics provides demographic data about your competitors’ user base. Knowing the demographics of your highest performing apps can help you refine your ad targeting strategies and improve your campaign ROI.
The goal of studying your competitors is not to be completely guided by them and imitate their every move, but to get relevant information that will help improve your app’s promotion strategy.
How to Know the Downloads and Rating of a Competitor’s App
Knowing the number of downloads and app ratings of your competitors can provide valuable benchmarks for understanding their performance in the market. While free tools may not provide accurate numbers and complete information, they can help you determine potential growth opportunities for your own app through data on estimated downloads, user reviews, and even competitor revenue, using free functionality or trial periods of various platforms.
Android Rank
Free
On the service you can get general information — the number of ratings and installations of a competitor’s app, the average rating, growth rating for 30 and 60 days and the percentage of market leadership, as well as get a list of the most popular Android apps by category with the number of ratings received.
AppFigures
Free period — 7 days, minimum cost per month depending on available features $9.99 — $3749.99.
This platform makes it possible to track how competitors’ apps perform — the total number of downloads regionally and globally, their ranking in categories, how many times an app has been rated in a certain timeframe, the largest gender and age groups that make up the user base, the underlying SDK and API apps. A competitor’s estimated net revenue can only be known from the paid version of the product. Note, however, that revenue estimates are not applicable at any rate if the app does not offer embedded purchases or subscriptions and can be downloaded for free.
Sensor Tower
Free basic version when you create an account, the price depends on the number of products, the number of users and access to the API, to receive specific information contact Sensor Tower.
This service provides an opportunity to collect general information about a competitor in the dynamics over the last month: total revenue, the number of downloads on iOS and Android, the daily rating by category and country. As usual, when registering without a paid subscription, a minimal set of functions is available in the system — Top Charts, Featured Apps, App Profiles, as well as information about application publishers.
MobileAction
Free light version, the cost is announced when contacting the site.
The MobileAction site will help you find out the approximate amount of revenue for a competitive application per month. The data can be viewed by platform and country. In addition to rating history and analytics by network, it will be interesting to look at competitors’ creations, user feedback on the app, and the top advertisers in the category.
AppMagic
Free — limited functionality, Premium plan cost per month $380.
The service can help you quantify the effectiveness of a competitor’s app featuring, its number of downloads over the past 30 days broken down by country, its place in the top free chart rankings, and a comparison of publishers’ performance across countries and platforms.
How to Study Your Competitors in Social Networks
Not many business owners are not represented on social networks nowadays. Useful information for understanding competitors, both direct and indirect, can be obtained by tracking their activity and popularity on social networks. This can provide insight into their marketing strategies, content creation, and user interaction tactics. Almost all major social media platforms provide their own free analytics tools. For ad research on Instagram and Facebook, check out the ad library, and on Twitter, the Ad Transparency Center. LinkedIn’s built-in tool allows you to assess the number of posts and user engagement levels of your competitors. Paid services always provide more in-depth analysis, but we have selected several good platforms that offer free trials for use.
Sprout Social
Free trial period with a good set of features — 30 days, paid plans from $399.
With this tool, you can analyze your competitors’ Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts and get answers to questions: whether your competitors are increasing their audience, how often they post, what hashtags they use, how many likes and comments your competitor’s content gets.
Sociality.io
Free trial period — 14 days, paid plans from $99.
The competitor analysis module of this platform allows you to automatically collect data about competitors in social networks and instantly generate automatic reports on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, both in the form of tables and in the form of graphs and charts.
Semrush
7-day free trial, then $49/month.
With Semrush, you can get plenty of useful information — which countries competitors advertise in, what types of ads are most common, which devices provide the best results, which publishers are most popular, and keyword search and app rankings. You can track your competitors’ activity on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest with Social Media Tracker.
Hootsuite, Socialbakers, and LiveDune also provide free trial versions (up to 30 days).
How Do You Know What Creatives a Competitor is Using?
Creatives play a crucial role in attracting users to download an app. While free tools may not provide a comprehensive list of your competitors’ ads, they can still help you identify key elements of their ads, such as app icons, screenshots and video previews, frequency of ad impressions, their format, platforms, and more. These ideas can inspire and help you optimize the visuals of your own app and ads, even with the limited information available.
Meta Ad Library
Free
The library searches through all the ads currently shown on Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger) within 24 hours of the first showing. You can view published ad creatives from competitors’ apps or filter ads by keyword. Search by world and individual countries is also available. Anyone can browse the ad library even if they don’t have a Facebook account.
Ad Mobi Spy
Free trial version after registration, paid plans from $49.
The service helps you monitor banners, native, dual, and text ads and find the most clickable competitor ads. The networks monitored are Google Adwords, PropellerADS, MoPub, StartApp, AppNext, Popcash, AppLovin, ExoClick, Adcash, Airpush, etc.
How to Evaluate a Competitor’s ASO
App Store optimization is a fundamental aspect of ensuring your app’s visibility and availability. Staying one step ahead, ranking high, and ultimately increasing the number of downloads helps you research your competitors’ ASO strategies. You can use the same services mentioned above to track your competitors in the App Store and Google Play, and find out how users find your competitors and which words get your app to the top of the charts. For example, Sensor Tower offers these features for free:
AppFollow
Free plan and free 10-day trials of Premium and Enterprise plans
The service offers an overview of key app metadata and an analysis of relevant keywords with an indicator of their popularity. For example, AppFollow shows a table of traffic distribution between the most popular unbranded keywords for the apps selected as competitors. Both the App Store and Google Play can view the statistics.
While free tools may not offer the same level of depth of research as paid services, they can still provide valuable insights into your competitors’ ASO strategies, such as app descriptions, keywords, and category choices. These insights can help you customize your own ASO efforts and increase the overall visibility of your app.
There are quite a few services for analyzing competitors, and they offer different functions and tools. Do not underestimate the power of free trials. To get a general understanding of competitor app promotion, a trial period provided by the following sites may be enough:
Similarweb
Limited free functionality, paid plans from $167.
The service provides the most general information on a free plan — competitors’ app rankings by country, number of downloads and daily active users, audience interests and top apps in the category. Similarweb analysis by competitor web sites provides more data — publishers and advertisers, share of traffic by ad networks, incoming and outgoing traffic, % of traffic received by each social platform, and keywords that bring the most traffic to ads.
Data.ai
Limited free functionality after registration, you must contact Data.ai for specific information.
As a free tool, Data.ai is effective for tracking keywords, DAUs and MAUs with the ability to monitor nearly 100 keywords in different countries and to estimate competitors’ market share by metrics of downloads, revenue, usage and engagement. Regular updates provide accurate results, but you need to maintain a stable connection to the app stores. Access to instructions and more in-depth data requires the purchase of a paid version, which is suitable for large companies.
- ASOdesk — free 7 days, starting from $99
- AppRadar — free 7 days, starting from $69
- AppTweak — free 7 days, starting from $83
- TheTool.io — free 7 days, starting from $69
- APPlyzer — free 7 days, starting from $10
- StoreSpy — free 7 days, starting from $99
In conclusion, it should be emphasized that while free competitor app promotion analysis tools provide a solid foundation for gaining an overview of the competitive landscape and determining the right direction for development, it is critical to be aware of their limitations. For those seeking professional growth and a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, regular in-depth analytics are essential.
Our Mobio Group team understands the importance of reliable analytics for businesses to thrive. We partner with numerous analytics platforms to offer our clients detailed reports on the dynamics of the digital market in general and competitors’ promotions in particular. With our comprehensive analytics and customized recommendations, you can stay ahead of the competition and ensure your business continues to grow. Contact us today to unlock the potential of in-depth analytics and take your app to the top.
