Google Play Backlinks Analysis by App Category

Last week, we introduced you to our new Backlinks Tracker Tool. Today, we’re happy to present you some research we’ve made based on the data collected! We analyzed the number of backlinks per category … and made very interesting discoveries! Read on to know more!

The Methodology Behind Our Research

As announced last week, AppTweak now provides the total number of backlinks of any app in the Google Play Store. Our Backlinks Tracker Tool also gives the top 10 backlinks along with their link power (data powered by Moz). Very useful data to take into account in your ASO strategy and benchmark!

If you haven’t already, make sure to check our dedicated blog post on this new feature:Google Play Store: New Backlinks Tracker Tool.

From there, we thought it would be interesting to analyze the total number of backlinks in each different store category to see if there were any trends.

We took the top 200 apps (US) in the Google Play in 6 main categories:

1. Finance
2. Food and Drinks
3. Game
4. Social
5. Shopping
6. Travel and Local

We then scrapped all the backlinks for each app per category and subdivided the top 200 into three smaller groups: Top 10, Top 11 – 50, and Top 51 – 200.

From there, we’ve calculated the median value of the total number of backlinks for each group of apps.

As a quick refresher, the median is “the value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half.”

In other words, the median is the middle number of a series of numbers, where half the values of that series is below that number and half of the series is above it. We used the median because averages are biased with extreme values.

Additionally, for each category, we reported the top 3 apps with most backlinks, along with the total number of backlinks for each of these apps.

While this data can be analyzed in depth, here are a couple key insights.

Social Category with the Highest Discrepancy*

The Social Category has the largest discrepancy in terms of total backlinks between its Top 10, Top 50, and Top 200.

The numbers speak for themselves: the higher the app popularity, the higher the number of backlinks.

*Out of the 6 categories analyzed.

Games Category with the Lowest Discrepancy

The Games Category has the smallest median value of backlinks. It looks like games don’t have as much backlinks as Social or Travel apps, for instance.

Not surprisingly, Pokémon GO is the #1 app with the highest number of backlinks (20546).

Conclusion

This analysis shows that the gap between Top 10 apps and apps that rank from 11 to 50 is pretty huge, with apps in the Top 10 results having 4 to 8 times more backlinks than the following apps.

It is also interesting to see that the Games Category has a much lower median value across its top 200 apps.

Please note that our backlinks data come exclusively from Moz. We’d love to hear your suggestions on the reasons behind this phenomenon!

In the meanwhile, don’t wait any longer, go spy on any app’s backlinks!

[Start a 7-day free trial]What’s your opinion on this data? Any theories to share?