Analysis of your competitor's apps. New tools from ASOMobile

Analysis of your competitor's apps as a strategic stage of its development. In an era of rapid growth, we try to keep up, but how do we know if we are ahead or left in the dust? Analyze competitors!

For mobile applications, competitive analysis serves not only as a background for an idea but also as an impetus for development, improvement, and goal setting. Why it is important and how to analyze competitors, we already wrote in the article about the TOP 10 TOOLS FOR COMPETITOR ANALYSIS ON THE MOBILE APP MARKET. Today we want to replenish this collection with several new tools from ASOMobile.

How to choose your competitors and not make a mistake?

Before compiling TOP chat apps, we recommend going through the following steps:

• Niche, type of service, product.

What is it about? The more you can imagine your product, the clearer the selection of competitors will be. If your application, for example, has a subscription or paid services, but there is no such competitor (or there is but in a different form), then the benefit of analyzing such a competitor will be doubtful.

• App Store

Depending on the place of release of your app, competitors will be different. Do not count on the same result for the App Store and Google Play.

• Geography

How widespread will your application be in terms of localization and different countries? If your competitor is a worldwide app, and you are represented only on the market of one country, there will be little benefit from such a comparison.

• Scale

Slightly related to the previous point - if you are a unicorn app on the market, comparing with a large company, their budgets, and development methods will not give you a clear picture of what is happening.

All of the above will force you to analyze your application and its environment well and allow you to choose competitors based on logic and expediency. Now we can turn to the market for competitors with the right approach.

The result of working with a list of competitors can be a small report with answers to the questions:

• what exactly competitors did wrong, and we can do well, correctly, and, as a result, win the target audience.
• what exactly competitors did right, and we are missing out, which reduces our competitiveness.
• what exactly we did the same, and it prevents us from standing out on the market.

Competitors of mobile apps in terms of ASO optimization.

Let's step back a little from the competitive environment, and focus more on competitors' apps, not only in terms of marketing but in terms of optimizing and promoting your application.

Like everything related to text optimization, it depends on keywords. It is in this area that we will focus our attention - we will highlight the main keywords of competitors, compare how your application looks against the background of the market and figure out how you can use competitors not only for marketing, but also for ASO optimization. To do this, we will use the following tools from ASOMobile:

• Spy Competitors
• Competitor Keywords
• Competitor Explorer
• Revenue and Downloads
• Rank History
• Visual Comparison

Spy Competitors

This new tool is designed to monitor competitor keywords. The importance of your competitors in the process of collecting semantics, and choosing keywords for promotion in Apple Search Ads or Google Play advertising we have noted more than once. Detailed instruction on the text optimization of the application will allow you to verify this.

Compare the position of your app and the ones of your competitors

Spy Competitors is a great way to compare your app's keyword positions with those of your competitors. Similar to keyword research in Keyword Monitor, here you have the ability to simultaneously work with an application pool (including yours and competitors) and track their keywords.

Easy to track:

• the dynamics of the semantics of your app (you observe the whole picture, and not just in the context of positive or negative);
• thanks to data on the volume of traffic, the complexity and effectiveness of each keyword, as well as convenient grouping and filtering tools, you can track the performance of your semantic core in time.

What will it give us in the future? If the dynamics of your keywords and competitors' keywords match, then any changes are caused by the mobile app market conditions (seasonality, holidays, sporting events, etc.). If the dynamics do not correlate with the general market, then something is wrong with specific applications and this is already a wake-up call for you - to analyze, find, and correct.

Detailed overview of functions and data in Spy Competitors

Analytics section - Competitors/ASO.

Choice - country, app store (form factor - iPhone/iPad for iOS)

Date - to display the dynamics of statistical data.

It is possible to add competitors in one click.

Adding competitors

You get the opportunity to add competitors in several ways:

• by name;
• link;
• add proposed competitors.

And you can track information only for the applications you are interested in - you can choose competitors. This will make the picture more visual and informative.

Adding keywords

According to the principle of ASO Mobile analytics, all analysis related to keywords takes place with the semantic core, which is formed in Keyword Monitor. The lists of keywords in these tools are synchronized, but you have the ability to add new keywords that interest you.

You can add keywords:

• manually;
• use auto suggestions .

*Please note that the lists are synced, so if you have added a keyword to Spy Competitors, it will also be added to Keyword Monitor. The same goes for deleting keywords.

Additional features (side toolbar):

• Search grouping tool
• Light Bulb - App store keyword suggestions. Click the plus next to a suggestion to add the keyword to the list.
• Round arrow - the ability to instantly get up-to-date data on the app's position for this search query.
• Bin - remove a keyword from the list (when deleting a keyword, it will also be deleted from the Keyword Monitor).

Competitor Keywords

With this tool, we have the opportunity to find out the keywords of competitors and compare their positions in the search with your application.

Competitor Keywords allows you to quickly find the keywords that your competitors are indexing for, as well as visually compare the positions of your app with competitors. You will be able to find new keywords and also see where you are lagging behind your competitors.

For example, our application is in the 1st position for the keyword “star gazer” while competitors are significantly lower.

Detailed overview of functions and data in Competitor Keywords

Analytics section - Competitors/ASO.

Choice - country, app store (form factor - iPhone/iPad for iOS)

It is possible to add competitors in one click.

Adding competitors.

You get the opportunity to add competitors in several ways:

• by name;
• link;
• add proposed competitors.

P.S. if you have added competitors before, or you ticked the "Add competitors" checkbox when adding an app,  you can see them in the drop-down list.

List of keywords

As with all ASOMobile analytics tools, you can work with keywords. In Competitor Keywords, you will see a list of keywords with the following values:

Pay attention to the color indicators - on the left, the applications are highlighted in green (which means they are ahead of your application), and on the right - in red (you have overtaken them). The selected app is highlighted in green.

Additional features (side toolbar):

• Light Bulb - App store keyword suggestions. Click the plus next to a suggestion to add the keyword to the list.
• Magnifying glass - Click on "magnifying glass" to check the search query in the Keyword Check tool.

Competitor Explorer

A tool that will allow you to analyze competitors' keywords on Google Play and the App Store in over 60 countries worldwide.

Competitor Explorer is designed for a more detailed analysis of each competitor separately.

Here you can select a competitor from an existing list and see the list of indexed keywords. This can serve as a guideline for text optimization and subsequent evaluation of its effectiveness.

Downloads and Revenue

Downloads - help you observe the dynamics of downloads for any application. Any competitors or all your competitors - you can find out a quantity of downloads in one click.

Revenue is a tool for checking of revenue for any application - your own or competitors doesn't matter.

Rank History

Rank History is a handy tool for tracking and analyzing app ranking on Google Play or App Store categories in any country for any time period.

You can easily track the dynamics of changes in app positions in the ranking of Google Play and App Store categories.

Visual Comparison

The essential part of ASO app optimization is visual optimization. This tool, Visual Comparison, allows you to analyze the visual ASO of competitors and tracking the trends in the mobile app market.

In this section, you will find all the essential information about your competitors' apps: rating and number of ratings, downloads, category, and app value. You will be able to evaluate your competitors' visual ASO, find market trends, and compare your app with those of competitors.

Competitors are not only semantics and keywords

It is difficult to disagree with this statement since competitors are your goals and strategies, your inspirers and guidelines. In addition to evaluating your application, its indexing dynamics against the background of the market, you can get the maximum benefit from competitor research:

You will be able to form UVP effectively - the unique value of your product. Because after analyzing the pool of successful and implemented products, it is easier to understand what you missed and what you can use.

Form your competitive pool based on UVP - when you already have an image of a product or service, the list of potential competitors becomes shorter and more relevant.

Study the media space of competitive presence - having studied the distribution of competitors in social networks and other media sources, you will assess the potential audience  (whom competitors are counting on) more fully, and understand the channels of interaction with users and their subsequent attraction.

Analyze pages on app stores - from appearance to working with ratings and reviews. Here we will also talk about semantics. You will be able to evaluate the most relevant keywords that your competitors used in the metadata.

Connect professional mobile app analytics to manage the data received effectively.

Thus, we can say that competitors are an important part of your mobile app development strategy and tactics. They accompany you from the idea of an application to the very end of the product life cycle - use the opportunities they provide you to increase the efficiency of your work.

Stay competitive with ASOMobile💙