Analytics 2.0: A New Way to Monitor App Performance

The Analytics section is a crucial part of AppTweak since that is where you can measure the impact of your ASO efforts. In this section, you will find your app’s category rank, App Power, downloads, revenue, and more. These are all KPIs that can help you judge how your app compares to the competition.

Part of this big revamp was to review the old structure of our Analytics page and change it into something more intuitive and consistent with the rest of the AppTweak tool. Our goal was two-fold:

1. Simplify the structure: we wanted to deliver an interface that’s easy to navigate through while showing transparent and comparable data.
2. Offer new insights: we wanted to give you the necessary tools to assess the impact of your ASO work on your app’s metrics.

AppTweak ASO Tool’s New Analytics Interface

Our interface is structured in 4 to 5 sections, each section gathers a set of metrics we believe are essential when assessing your app’s performance:

• Category Rank
• Store Performance
• Conversion Analysis
• Financial Analysis
• Google Keywords

Read below to learn more about each of these sections and how to use them in your app reporting.

Category Ranking: Rapidly compare your app’s rank against the competition

The category rank is the most elementary metric to compare your app’s performance against your competition. Both Apple and Google define an app’s rank based on a series of criteria such as total downloads, download growth, app quality, etc. For instance, themore downloads an app has, the higher the category rank.

In AppTweak, we give you an estimation of the number of daily downloads your app needs to get to a certain rank in its category. This can help you gauge how far or how close your app is to the next rank level. As you can see in the example below, as the rank gets higher, the number of daily downloads needed grows exponentially.

New feature: n°daily downloads to reach a rank in a category (Health & Fitness – Android US)

When it comes to benchmarking your app against your competitors, the Ranking History graph will show you in a glance which app ranks highest, and the ranking history over a selected date range.

Comparing entertainment apps’ category rank from December 2020 to early January 2021 (Android US)

This graph will allow you to identify any unusual ranking movements that might need extra attention, such as a competitor’s new feature or promotion you need to react quickly to or an issue you could take advantage of.

For instance, in the example, above we compared the category rank of big streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu. We noticed some unusual movements for the apps Tubi and Amazon Prime. In the last week of December, Tubi’s category rank suddenly dropped from 3rd to 8th position. This drop mostly benefited the Amazon Prime app which saw its own rank jump from 8th to 3rd in a couple of days. With a little research, we found that, on December 26th, Amazon Prime was the only platform to stream the NFL game (with exclusive rights), this can explain the temporary jump in rank at that date.

If you wish to compare your app’s overall performance, without looking at the day to day movements, you can use our Summary Table. The table gives an overview of how each competitor ranks in its category (Rank Today or Average Rank). In just a glance, you can see who is the top player and who is lagging behind. The average rank allows you to check the performance of each app over a selected date range so that you don’t limit your analysis to one single day.

Quick view of entertainment apps’ rank today (Jan 8th) vs. average rank over the last 30 days (Android US)

So although Amazon Prime overtook Tubi in the Entertainment category during a couple of days in December, we can see that, overall, Tubi ranked higher (4th on average) than Amazon Prime (7th on average) during that period (Dec 9th to Jan 8th).

The Summary Table is also helpful to check in which category your competitors are referenced. You’ll be surprised to see that they might not all belong to the same category as your app. In the example above, you can notice that YouTube isn’t referenced in the Entertainment category but rather in Video Players on Android.

Comparing your app’s performance with apps that aren’t in the same category can become a tricky business. In this case, both Netflix and YouTube rank in the top 10 results within their respective categories. However, when we look at their rank in the All category, we can see that the Netflix app actually significantly outperforms the YouTube app, with an average rank of 29 in the All category vs. 319.

App Power: Easily compare your performance with apps listed in different categories.

So how can you better compare the performance of your app with competitors listed in different categories? That’s precisely where the App Power comes in. The App Power is an authority score developed by AppTweak. It is a number between 0 and 100 and helps app publishers understand how powerful their app is in the stores.

Comparing the App Power of Amazon Prime (Entertainment – Android US) and YouTube (Video Player – Android US)

As mentioned above, YouTube doesn’t rank in the same category as other streaming platforms, making it trickier to compare the app’s performance with its peers. In December 2020, YouTube ranked, on average, in the 8th position of the Video Players category. Amazon Prime ranked on average 7th position in the Entertainment category over the same period. Does that mean the apps performed equally well? Absolutely not!

Similar rank levels across different categories don’t necessarily translate into equal app performance. As a matter of fact, each category has its own level of competitiveness, making category ranks difficult to compare from one category to another. The App Power takes these differences into account. In this case, when we compare the App Powers of Amazon Prime and YouTube, we can see that the first has a much higher App Power than the latter, suggesting that the Entertainment category is probably more competitive (harder to rank in top position) than the Video Players category.

→ Read more about the App Power

Store Performance: Advanced metrics to measure user traffic

We have been providing download estimates since 2014, but, with this revamp, you can now compare your app’s download estimates with competitors’ estimates in one single graph.

Users that have synced their App Store Connect account with AppTweak will be able to view their real App Units under the Downloads section. In the “Cross Competition” tab, they can even benchmark them against competitor estimates in one view.

In this screenshot, we can see the comparison between the downloads of the main app (in pink) and the estimates of the competitors. Thanks to the legend on the top right of the chart we can quickly distinguish the real data from the estimates.

On the other hand, selecting the option Source will hide the competitors’ data and show the breakdown by source of the main app’s downloads. As a reminder, Apple splits the traffic into five different sources:

• App Store Search: Search in the App Store, including Apple Search Ads.
• App Store Browse: Navigation in the App Store such as top charts, stories, featurings, similar apps…
• App Referrer: Referrals from another app on the store.
• Web Referrer: Referrals from a page on the web.
• Unavailable: Undefined traffic source.

This is what this graph looks like in practice. Naturally, App Store Search is often the highest because the user searches on the store intending to download an app. Browse is often lower, however, featurings in the Today tab can suddenly trigger many new installations from this channel. This is most likely what happened here.

This view by source is also very interesting to understand the actions of the users before downloading the app. If we open the tab Impressions, for example, we can see that the chart pattern is completely different from the previous one.

App Store Browse is the source with the most impressions. The traffic is very irregular and there are sudden jumps that are most likely explained by featurings.

App and Web Referrer on the other hand, always have 0 impressions. This is explained by the fact that when there is a referral from an app or a web page, the link brings the user directly to the Product Page and skips the Impression step.

Moreover, if we look at the Product Page Views we can see that App Referrer is the top traffic source.

Just like many other apps, the Christmas season is when most of the marketing budget is spent which explains this considerable increase in Page Views.

For Android apps, users that have the Google Play Console integration will have the possibility to show their app’s “Daily User Installs” or “Daily Device Installs”.

When comparing these numbers with the competitors’ download estimates we recommend using the “Daily Device Installs” because those are the ones we take into account to compute our download estimates.

→ Here is a reminder of how our Download Estimates algorithm works

To measure your downloads by traffic source, you’ll need to open the Store Listing Visitors or Store Listing Acquisition tab.

The Store Listing Visitors metric is similar to the Product Page Views for Apple. It will count the number of users that visited the Store Listing of your app. When you look at the break-down by source you will find 3 channels :

• Explore: Navigation on the Play Store (similar to App Store Browse on iOS)
• Search: Search on the Play Store (similar to App Store Search on iOS)
• Referrals: Link to the Store Listing from an App or Web page outside of the Play Store (similar to App & Web Referrer on iOS)

Above we show an example of an app that has seen a considerable decrease in its Store Listing Visitors coming from referrals. This decline was due to a reduction in the advertising budget.

By looking at the Store Listing Acquisitions, we were able to discover that this drop actually had a very limited impact on the downloads from new users. The acquisitions from referrals remained fairly steady even though the number of visitors had decreased.

This shows that the conversion rate from visitors to acquisitions was really low before. Let’s open the Conversion Analysis section to analyze this further.

Conversion Analysis: Optimize the user engagement

In this section, you can quickly measure your app’s conversion rate from Store Listing Visitors to Store Listing Acquisitions for Android apps. If we take the previous example, we can see that the conversion rate has been increasing when visitors were decreasing.

This graph shows that the marketing budget decrease was actually a good thing because many users were not engaging after viewing the app listing.

Both on the App Store and the Play Store, Keyword Search is the source that has the highest conversion rate because most of the time, users that perform a search already have the intention to download something.

The Conversion Rates that we computed for the App Store are going to be slightly different from the one on the Play Store. Given that we have three metrics – Impressions, Page Views, and App Units – there are three possible combinations:

• From Impressions to Page Views: the user has seen the summary of the app while searching or browsing the store and clicked on it to view the product page.
• From Page Views to App Units: the user has opened the product page of the app and then clicked on the call-to-action “GET” to download the app.
• From Impressions to App Units: the user has seen the summary of the app while searching or browsing the store and clicked on the call to action “GET” to download the app with or without viewing the product page.

All about our App Intelligence

The example below shows a sudden peak followed by a drop of the conversion rate from Page Views to Downloads between December 24th and 26th. These movements have impacted only the Search channel.

Financial Analysis: Bring your ASO and Revenue Strategy closer

When are users buying the most? We have seen that seasonality has a big influence on the number of users that view and download apps. But what about revenues from in-app purchases and subscriptions?

Just like we showed in Store Performance, users that have connected their Apple or Google consoles with AppTweak will be able to compare their own revenues with the competitors’ estimates. So to answer the question, we looked at the revenues of an app and its competitors over the past 6 months.

While the summer and Christmas are two strong periods for mobile games in general, one date that really stands out from this chart was November 27th, also known as Black Friday. However, it’s interesting to note that we did not see a similar peak in the downloads history in our previous example, meaning that the impact of Black Friday was very strong on revenues only.

When we switch to the In-App Purchases or Paying Users tab, the pattern remains the same.

In this graph, for example, we see that the number of paying users increased suddenly on Black Friday, no matter the source. In other words, Black Friday bought the same number of downloads to the app, but resulted in a larger portion of users paying for something within the app.

On the Google Play side, the Financial Analysis section also brings new valuable insights. In particular, we are happy to present the new Subscriptions tab. Apps that offer subscriptions can now keep track of their active, new, and canceled subscriptions directly in AppTweak.

Google Keywords: Discover the keywords that drive the most traffic to your app

With the new Google Play Console, Google now reveals the number of Store Listing Visitors and Acquisitions your app received from a specifickeyword search AND bycountry!

This is a great new insight to see which keywords are best performing for your app. In AppTweak, we made sure to include this data in our Analytics section too.

Google Keywords: your app’s top keywords and their performance over time.

Thanks to our Google Keywords section, you can easily check which keywords have bought the highest Store Listing Visitors to your app, and answer questions such as: Is that keyword also bringing the highest acquisitions? Or, Which keyword has the best conversion rate?

With our table, you can click to sort the keywords as you wish: which has had the best progression over the last 30 days? Have your ASO efforts on a specific search term paid off?

With the graph, you can select the keywords you wish to analyze and, in a glance, see if there is any drop or peak that is worth investigating further into. Using the filters, you decide the date range and the data you want to study, whether it be the total visitors or acquisitions per keyword over the given date range, or the conversion rate history of each keyword.

We’re sure that this new layout will help you point out both highly and poorly performing keywords and take the necessary actions to fully optimize your ASO.

We hope that after reading this blog you are now totally convinced by this new Analytics. Our goal was to bring users more insights without getting them lost in this load of information and we are quite happy with the result. We hope you will be too!