How to find out your competitor’s mobile app revenue, downloads, traffic sources and audience?
Leonid Zverugowrote this on Апр 15, 2016
Oleg Yakubenkov has been asked about how to find out the amount of downloads of a competitors' mobile app many times. People also wonder how do they attract users and what are their audiences and how much are their revenues.
It’s often useful to know competitor’s mobile app indices and it’s always interesting. Today we've translated Oleg's article which describes services which will help you to do it.
As a bonus, at the end of the article the myth about the way Telegram has got 100 mln active users in a month will be unveiled.
Competitor’s mobile app downloads and revenue
Sensor Tower has a premium product called Store Intelligence. Just as the one by App Annie, it’s paid and expensive. But Sensor Tower has a limited free version which is usually enough in most of cases to get answers to basic questions.
With the help of Sensor Tower you can learn the number of downloads of any mobile app for the previous month.
For example, this link tells us that Telegram was installed 880k times (iOS) in February 2016. And this one says that Android Telegram was installed 190k times during the same period. Remember these figures, we’ll need them later on.
Sensor Tower also allows to evaluate mobile app revenue from inner purchases.
Let’s take a look at MSQRD which had leading positions in App Store charts of the majority of countries last months.
The thing is that services like Sensor Tower and App Annie often have problems with evaluation of downloads and revenue for apps taking TOP chart positions. Suchlike services evaluate downloads and revenue on the basis of app position in store charts. But it’s quite difficult to predict the number of downloads for a TOP 1 app, as it doesn’t have an upper limit (even the number of devices doesn’t always help).
Sensor Tower shows that MSQRD has 9,2 mln downloads during February. It was 1 mln for January.
According to my observations, the tool is quite accurate. It was a hit on almost all the projects where I had a possibility to compare real numbers and Sensor Tower evaluations.
So, now you can evaluate your competitors’ mobile apps number of downloads and revenue.
I also want to remind you that you can evaluate the number of app downloads in Google Play right on its page on the market.
Competitor’s mobile app audience
Evaluation of a competitor’s audience is a nontrivial task.
There was Insights Onavo service once. It evaluated app audience for the USA. But it was closed after Facebook bought them.
Of all the free ways to find out another app audience I know only one, but it isn’t trustworthy. Facebook has a small hack: search for an app name and here’s what you’ll see:
Unfortunately, I don’t know how it’s calculated and whether it can be trusted. In the majority of cases the numbers are confusing as they look lower.
For example, Game of War has 1,5 mln downloads per month, but Facebook shows only 100k+ MAU. I have some ideas, explaining such low numbers. Maybe, DAU is shown here, not DAU. Or maybe, the reason lies in the peculiarities of Facebook SDK building-in for some apps. But I’m not sure.
Competitor’s mobile app traffic sources
Where do your competitors get downloads from? It’s an interesting question. And an answer to it gives many ideas on how to increase traffic of your own mobile app.
Similarweb will help you to do this. It’ll give you an approximate picture of how do people find the app: via search/charts/featurings/other store mechanisms.
There’s another interesting possibility of the service: you can learn what search requests lead people to the app page. Revelations are rare there, but sometimes you can find something interesting there.
Where do competitors buy traffic for their mobile apps?
The question is especially interesting for those people, who promote apps in advertising networks. To find new traffic sources and skillful approaches for popular advertising networks is the only way of survival on a super competitive mobile market with limited traffic sources.
If you wonder whether some app buys users or not, use Sensor Tower Ad Intelligence .
It’s paid but you can get limited information for free on the page. You can learn whether an app has ads in networks that Sensor Tower tracks. If yes, it will tell the number of networks.
Basing on my own experience, I can say that the service works OK for iOS, but as for Android - considerably worse.
Here’s what we can learn:
- App in the Air has been experimenting with ads in Instagram for several months
- King of Thieves buys traffic in 9 networks
- Walking War Robots shows video ads in Adcolony
Here other services, which allow to track competitors’ advertising activity:
- WhatRunsWhere. I got acquainted with the service when it was on Beta-stage and offered a free access. Now it’s paid. It allows to learn where mobile apps place ads, what creative concepts they use and what are their key indices.
- Appscotch. I personally haven’t worked with the service. But people say that it covers only several big advertising channels but gives very detailed information (including the budget spent).
ASO (Appstore Search Optimization) and tracking competitor’s mobile app activity
The main traffic source for many mobile apps is a store. People find apps via search, recommendations, featurings and so on.
The following services will help you to track positions on keywords in Appstore and Google Play, ASO activities, store chart positions and featuring of both yours and competitor’s mobile apps:
- Sensor Tower
- AppFollow
- ASODesk
- App Annie
Services from comments
Thanks for everybody who shared the following services:
https://prioridata.com/ – downloads and revenue of other apps with a good detalization
https://www.apptopia.com/ – downloads, revenue and installed SDK
http://admobispy.com/ – tracking other apps ads
http://www.androidrank.org/ - the most popular apps by categories in Google Play
http://www.adstracker.io/ – tracking competitors’ ads in Facebook
Why is is important to know competitor’s mobile app indices?
I like to learn numbers of various apps.
Firstly, because it’s interesting. You get an access to data which is usually hidden.
Secondly, it’s a good tool for evaluation of an approximate size of a market segment interesting for you and understand what you can count on.
Thirdly, such an analysis often allows to find many invisible product peculiarities and distribution mechanisms. For example, it turns out that many similar products has absolutely different monetization. Or some app has a huge traffic or revenue increase after a regular update.
Spend several hours of your time on studying your competitor’s mobile app with the help of the services I have already described in the article. I’m sure, you’ll find a plenty of interesting things.
Bonus. Is this true that Telegram has 100 mln active users per month?
I like Telegram as a product a lot. I’ve been using it regularly for a long time. But I like the way Pavel Durov promotes it even more.
There was an announcement on MWC that Telegram has 100 mln active user per month and 350k new users daily. The news appeared all TOP mass media.
But it was evident for me, that real Telegram indices are significantly lower. I couldn’t understand the reason why mass media publish the information thoughtlessly without checking it. Because it’s extremely suspicious that the app got a round figure right before a big conference.
Why Telegram’s MAU is lower than 100 mln users? #1.
There’s a graph below which illustrates the growth of Telegram’s audience on the basis of public announcements.
If we assume that the data was true, then Telegram increased MAU by 40 mln users during last 11-12 months.
Now it’s time to remember the number of Telegram downloads which we discussed at the beginning. According to Sensor Tower, Telegram is downloaded 3 mln times per month.
Here’s the first weak place in the announced data. As we see from an announcement on Telegram’s website, the app gets 10,5 mln new users which is 3,5 times more than what we see from Sensor Tower evaluation.
Yes, new users often come higher than downloads, but it can be 3,5 times. And I don’t think that Telegram has some significant traffic sources other than Google Play and Appstore.
Let’s go further. I checked Telegram’s store positions for the last year on the main markets (I haven’t publishes pictures as there are too many of them but you can do it on your own with the help of App Annie). Telegram’s positions in stores were increasing in the majority of cases, that’s why 3 mln downloads a month can be an upper limit for previous months. Thus, let’s assume that Telegram got no more than 36 mln downloads for the last year.
So, how many of those new users stayed in the app? Messengers tend to have high retention rate. To be more precise, it fixes on the level of 62-65% several months later (on the basis of Statista data on an average messenger Retention by months).
What do we have here? 36 mln downloads, approximately 60% stay in the product. Thus, yearly MAU increase should be 21-22 mln on condition that there wasn’t an old audience drop-off.
If the 60 mln active users per month is a correct number for last March, it means that Telegram’s monthly audience for February 2016 was approximately 80 mln people. But it will take another year to reach the level of 1oo mln MAU.
Why Telegram’s MAU is lower than 100 mln users? #2.
Here’s an easier way to disprove the number of 100 mln users. The number of Telegram’s downloads in Telegram is somewhere between 50-100 mln.
Telegram is especially popular on the markets dominated by Android. According to February data, iOS got only 30% of downloads. If we assume that the app had 80 mln downloads in Google Play, then the number of downloads on both the platforms will equal 100 mln.
Here are 2 important facts now:
- Downloads ! = unique users. People change devices, some have several devices, apps may be deleted and downloaded again.
- Retention for messengers is approximately 62% in 6 months.
Thus, if my evaluations of Telegram’s downloads are credible, app monthly audience makes up approximately 50-60 mln users which is significantly lower than 100 mln but totally corresponds to the number announced in March. Though, it’s likely to be exaggerated too.
From comment discussion
There were some fair moments in comments which I want to mention in the article as well.
- Telegram has a desktop client. I assumed that desktop users are a subset of mobile users.
- Telegram has a WP version. WP platform is very small, so it can be neglected.
- Telegram has alternative clients. I checked the ones ones that are found by Telegram keyword and they appeared to be small. There are quite popular apps, launched by alternative brands (1, 2) giving approximately 10 mln downloads.
- There was a version that Telegram is popular on Chinese Android stores. I also had such a hypothesis, but Telegram is blocked there. I also checked Telegram Bot Store for bots on Chinese and there were very few of them.
- It turned out that Telegram is spread via an alternative store Cafebazaar. It has 18 mln installations there.
Taking into consideration additional sources, we get approximately 30 mln app downloads which makes the number more credible, but still it doesn’t reach 100 mln, according to my evaluation.
Telegram promotion
In order for you to understand why I mentioned the brilliance of Telegram’s PR campaign, I’d like to show you installation amounts of other popular messengers.
Telegram’s number of downloads is only 2,5 times higher than that of ICQ but 10 times less than the amount of installations of Facebook or Whatsapp. Telegram is a medium player on a messenger market, but it manages to attract wild attention of mass media. And it’s worth learning.
