There are literally millions of mobile apps today, and either you are new to the market or not, you can’t deny the fact that you will face with a fierce competition sooner or later.
As a result, ASO competitor analysis is an important aspect of your success. You can’t possibly reach the top or stay on top of the competition if you don’t know who you are up against.
So, in this post, let us go through the actions you need to take for doing an ASO analysis of your competitors in less than 60 minutes!
What is a competitor analysis in ASO?
As its name implies, ASO competitor analysis is simply the process of analyzing data about your competitors to increase the visibility as well as the conversion rate of your app.
What are the goals of ASO competitor analysis?
Each mobile marketer might have different goals to achieve by doing a competitor analysis for ASO. While there may be different targets, here are the most common reasons that urge them to analyze their competitors:
Find relevant keywords
You can identify the keywords your competitors are ranking for with competitor analysis. This is very important because it gives you an idea of which keywords you should go after or prioritize. You can check which keywords you can rank easily and which ones might take more energy and time.
ASO competitor analysis helps you enhance your keyword pool even further. It gives you an idea of which keywords your competitors are going after and also the ones they might be ignoring.
Determine the performance of your competitors
If you know where your competitors are in terms of ranking and visibility, you can easily adjust your ASO strategy accordingly.
For example, if your competitors updates their metadata, it may have an impact on your keyword rankings. By doing a competitor analysis, you can find out the reason why your keywords rankings are changed.
Respond to the changes on your keyword rankings
Since you will have a better understanding of the changes that are happening on your rankings, you can respond to them quickly if you do a decent competitor analysis. You can mitigate the damage and formulate new strategies to stay on top of the lists by doing a competitor analysis.
Know the things you’re doing right
Competitor analysis can help you identify the factors, activities, and campaigns that contribute to your increased ranking. If you know the reason why competitors can’t outrank you, then you can capitalize on that, further improve it, and even use it to dominate your niche.
Why you should do an ASO Competitor Analysis in just 60 minutes
Timing is the key. When you can quickly gather important data for ASO efforts of your competitors, you can immediately make informed decisions to deal with their ongoing updates.
If you can’t respond to the changes as quickly as possible, your competitors can easily leave you behind.
Of course, doing an ASO competitor analysis for the first time may take more than 60 minutes. You first have to lay down some groundwork before you can get your engine running full-speed.
That’s why, let us give you the basic steps on how you can perform a competitor analysis in the quickest and easiest way possible.
Step 1: Identify apps for ASO analysis
The first step in a competitor analysis is to know who your competitors are. You need to know who you are competing against so that you know who you should track, study, and analyze.
But the biggest question is how do you know who your competitors are? There may indeed be direct competitors you are already aware of, however, there are most likely some others that you haven’t heard of their name yet…
To find competitors quickly, you simply need to identify apps that:
- Offer the same core services and products.
- Fall in the same niche and app category.
- Target the same audience.
- Use the same keywords.
It can be difficult to create a list of your competitors manually. If you have the budget, use an ASO intelligence tool that helps you find all the relevant competitors.
Step 2: Choose your core competitors
Now that you have a list of potential competitors, you should narrow down your list. This is crucial if you want to simplify your ASO competitor analysis. The more competitors you’re trying to beat, the longer your analysis will be.
For now, focus more on your direct competitors. If you have more time, energy, and money, you can then stretch your list of competitors and include more apps in your list of competitors.
How can you identify your direct competitors?
Your core competitors are those that offer the same products or services that you offer. For example, Telegram is a direct competitor of WhatsApp.
Depending on your needs and budget, you can expand your competitor analysis later on. This means you can also focus on competitors who may not offer the same services as you, but they may fall in the same niche or category. Aside from that, you can analyze the apps that target the same audience and keywords as you do.
Step 3: Analyze the categories and the top charts
You have a list of competitors. It is time to know who is among the best on your list. This step is crucial as it gives you an idea of who you should analyze first.
Remember, there is a reason why apps are trending or popular. These are the apps the people find beneficial and enjoy using. So, you should analyze what the top apps are doing that put them on the top spot.
With that being said, determine which apps in your category are ranking in Top 10. You can easily do this by simply doing a search by category.
In addition to the App Store and Google Play Store, you can use ASO intelligence tools for your competitor analysis. You can easily have more detailed data about the top charts by country, category, and device type.
Step 4: Compare the metadata for ASO Competitor Analysis
This is where your competitor analysis really starts and how things would get a little more complicated.
The key here is to learn how to study, research, and compare app elements that may or may not contribute to the success of an app.
Start with the most popular app in your competitor list. Visit its app store page and take note of the following:
- App title/name
- App icon
- Screenshots
- Preview video
- App description
Look into these elements and study what makes them stand out from the crowd. Since the top apps use these elements, you may consider implementing them in your app as well.
Step 5: Compare the keyword rankings
Let’s go deeper into our competitor analysis. By now, you should already have a list of keywords you want to rank for. If not, you should do keyword research first before you proceed.
Assuming that you already have a list of keywords, you can then do a quick analysis of the apps that are ranking in the top categories for your target keywords.
To give you an idea on how it works, let’s take the use of the Appfigures as an example. It is an ASO intelligence tool that helps you do a competitor analysis.
It allows you to get a quick overview of your keyword ranking together with the competitors.
The screenshot above shows all the keywords that Ultimate Guitar ranks for. You’ll see the list of keywords with their corresponding position, change in ranking, popularity, competitiveness, and the competitors that also rank for the same keywords.
This tool makes it extremely easy to learn your ranking as well as the ranking of your competitors for any given keyword. With the right tools, you should be able to perform ASO keyword analysis against your competitors in less than an hour. There are different tools out there in the market, you can choose the one that suits your needs the most.
Step 6: Identify areas of improvements
After listing your competitor apps, taking notes of the metadata of them, and gathering keyword data, you are now ready to find areas of improvement.
Competitor analysis that you do for your app gives you an insight into the following areas:
- Strengths – The ability to check what your app and your competitors are doing right. Identify the strengths of your competitors and use a similar strategy in your app, or improve the strong parts of your ASO efforts even further.
- Weaknesses – Seeing what your app and your competitors are doing wrong. Take advantage of the weaknesses of your competitors and eliminate your weaknesses.
- Opportunities – Competitor analysis helps you identify opportunities your competitors might have missed. There can be opportunities in keyword rankings, testing new screenshots, etc.
- Threats – you must be alert to any problems that may arise in the future. Competitor analysis allows you foreseeing the changes that may happen and proactively prevent or at least mitigate possible negative effects.
Step 7: Monitor competitors
ASO competitor analysis is an ongoing process. If you would like to stay up-to-date on what your competitors are doing, how their keyword rankings are changing, and how they affect your success, then you need to add competitor analysis to your workflow.
Final words
Time is gold and that’s true when it comes to ASO analysis. If you want to ensure you don’t get dethroned from your top position, you need to know your competitors and what they are doing. So, it’s a must that you perform competitor analysis as quick as possible to take the necessary actions immediately.
With that in mind, if you follow the steps discussed in this post above, spending an hour to analyze your competitors and creating ASO strategies based on your findings will help you reap the benefit of it.
To sum up, data is vital when making decisions and your ASO effort would come to nothing if you don’t have the necessary data. That’s why ASO competitor analysis is crucial. Be sure to start your Metrikal free trial and discover a new, powerful, and effective way of analyzing the necessary metrics you need for an effective app store optimization on an ongoing basis.