Why mobile app developers and marketers must run competitive analysis to better improve their app reviews and retention and how it's done.

1. Mobile Apps Competitive
Analysis Done Right

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
What it’s all about
What are the questions you should ask?
Which competitors?
App Stores analysis, growth, installs and usage
PR Coverage
Content
Social Media
SDKs!

3. WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
knowing that you must run competitive analysis is one thing.
Doing it right is another.
Running a smart competitive
analysis will help you add more
hacks and tactics to your list.
It’ll also uncover which tactics
your competitors aren’t using so
you can leverage them.

4. Many app publishers focus almost their entire efforts on keywords
research (on ASO tactics), and they tend to neglect other vital areas
such as:
High level business data, partnerships, content strategy, PR,
and social media strategies.
WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT

5. Here is a more comprehensive
list of competitive analysis areas,
that aims to cover all aspects of
mobile app business and
marketing, or at least most of
them.
WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT

6. What are the questions you should ask
(warning, there are a lot):
BUT FIRST…

7. 1. What funds / budgets do direct competitors or
competing products own?
2. What milestones have other companies (with similar
resources to yours) already managed to achieve?
3. What assets do other app companies own, for example,
website, social pages, communities?
4. What key roles do other app companies have (senior team
members)?
INITIAL BUSINESS DETAILS

8. 1. How many apps are developed by the same publisher?
2. What geos are they dominating in regards to installs,
retention and revenues?
3. What are their current growth rates, and what is their
current growth trend today compared to previous months /
years?
4. What retention and engagement rates do they have?
5. What monetization strategies do they have, or tried before?
APP STORE AND INSTALLS / USAGE DATA

9. 1. What public coverage have they gained?
2. Which external tools (marketing tech, sales tech, SDKs) are
they are using?
3. What kind of paid campaigns do they run?
MARKETING DATA – PR, CONTENT, SOCIAL AND ALIKE

10. You need to find the right competitors to compare yourself to.
Measure companies that are not only business relevant,
but scale relevant as well.
Remember the
complementary apps and
not just the competing apps.
WHICH COMPETITORS?

11. Once you know the right competitors, figure out how to systematically
gather all the data you need, including of course which data tools to use.
We will try to help you with that…

12. INITIAL DETAILS
Identify and learn your competitors’ basic information that will give you a
good understanding of who you are dealing with:
Company size
Location
Number of employees
Target audience and geos
How they are funded
Tools we use: Crunchbase (revealing all needed data about money raising),
LinkedIn (discovering how many team members and in what capacities other app
companies have), App Annie (data regarding when the app was first published)

13. APP STORE ANALYSIS, GROWTH, INSTALLS AND USAGE
Analyze your competitors’ store and data usage: app description, install
numbers, ranking, geos – regarding geos you can learn from your
competitors and target the best geos for you, from the get go.
Tools we use: Sensor Tower (keywords and app ranks), the information is divided
into territories, so you can learn which geo you should be focusing on), AppAnnie
(keywords and rank in specific territories), Apptopia (number of monthly installs
per geo), SurveyMonkey app Intelligence (your competitors’ apps usage trends)
Similarweb (top apps that are ranked by usage), Appbot (analyze the reviews your
competitors are gaining)

14. A cool hack:
You can learn about your competitors’ campaigns in different geos by
learning if they localized their app store pages. Simply browse to the app
page in Google Play via a regular browser.
Google Play will redirect to a
page that’s specific for your
language. But if you change the
language preferences, or even
the language section in
the URL, you can see if the app
description changes to accommodate that language.

15. Another cool hack:
Reviews are a good indicator of both quality and growth.
Write down the number of reviews your competitors have the day you
start your analysis and start tracking
the number of daily reviews.
Some of the data analysis tools we all
know and use are leaning on
calculating the number of reviews that
are added in each period, for instance
a day.

16. PR COVERAGE
Look at your competitor’s website, or search for their
name in Google’s ‘News’ section to find out which
publications and reporters they are involved with and what
kind of coverage they received.
Keep these publications and specific
bloggers in mind (and preferably in an
organized list) because when the time
comes, they are more likely to be
interested in writing about your app.

17. CONTENT
You should analyze what content strategy your competitors follow. What
type of content do they post, if at all? Are they sponsoring
content? Publishing guest posts?
Look at all types of content, whether it be case studies, research, or blog
posts. Learn which topics are especially interesting, which social networks
are relevant, and in what frequency should you be posting at (and what
time of the day).
Tools we use: Buzzsumo (including their brilliant Chrome extension) – to find out
how many shares your competitor’s content has gained

18. SOCIAL MEDIA
Learn how your competitors are using social media to promote their
content, and obviously their app.
networks such as Reddit, Quora and alike, are a good place to search for
your competitor’s presence. See if they have a strong online presence, if
they create any content there, or if there is any chatter about them
Tools we use: Simply Measured - gives you a glimpse into your competitor’s strate
gies in the social media sphere while taking information from major social media
sites like Facebook and Twitter, without neglecting the less known social media
networks

19. SDKS
Our own SafeDK App X-Ray tool
(FREE) will help you track 3rd party
SDKs that are being used by any
(free) Android app. This data will
shed light on the mobile
development tools (SDKs) your
competitors are using for growth,
retention and
monetization.

20. THANK YOU!
contact@safedk.com
Ask us anything over email or in the social. We are listening!