Top Lessons to Learn from Monitoring Your Mobile Competitors

uh simon's from app tweak are you there simon hopefully he'll be joining us there he comes hey simon how you doing uh so fingers crossed i don't disappear from you uh again but um so simon over to you tell us all about uh what what's what we can gain from monitoring our mobile competitors sure thankful um so hey everyone uh super happy to join here today um before i jump into today's topic uh i have a quick word about my company apt week uh we are an aso and market intelligence tool uh so we work with app developers and marketers uh to help them improve their visibility

and increase their organic downloads um in terms of gaming clients we work with quite a few big names already i can quote jam city zinger warner quite a few more as well but so we we actually work with uh game gaming clients and apps in different verticals also in different markets and uh personally as head of aso uh my job is to work with some of our clients uh to bring them expertise uh with a small consulting team to help them really get those boosts and find out what are the most valuable insights they can as they can see in the store um and i've been doing asl for almost four years now uh and what i find most interesting is connecting these dots with other sites of growth which is going to be mentioned in today's topic so um in terms of what i'm going to tell

you about first i'll discuss how to evaluate a competitive landscape for your game then what are the valuable insights you can get from your competition data and i'll try to also bring the debate at the end about some of the pitfalls you need to avoid when doing the competition monitoring because there are some risks in doing this and it's always important to be aware of those um before i forget uh we have some of our team members in the chat and i'll also be taking questions at the end so feel free to ask questions anytime and i'll be super happy to answer them at the end of the presentation now the first thing to do when considering when starting a competition monitoring is ask yourself who are your competitors and so obviously you already know some of them and you you should start with those you should start with the top of mind competitors and these competitors you know have very similar products

and put them very high on your list but what you also need to consider is that you might be competing with more distant rivals uh that are going to uh be in the way of some of the goals you may have even though they don't have the same kind of products and so here an example i like to give is looking at the game category card games categories especially looking at hearthstone world series of poker and uno three games that i don't think many would consider to be direct competitors for each other uh i wouldn't but still you have to think they might be competing uh in some ways because all three are in the card game category which means that if if one of their goals is to be ranking at the top of the category they have to be aware of threats coming from non-direct competitors uh if we're also looking at uh google

tag specifically um for the play store looking at who else is using the same play store tags uh we can also be discussing keywords uh obviously card games might also be a keyword online card game and so on and so these generic keywords might be targeted by competitors you didn't think about and finally a third way to find out who could be additional competitors is to look at your store product page and specifically at a similar app section to see uh which games are associated to your app you can also look at app collections if you have if your game has been featured in one of these collections you want to know who else was in the collection because these are games that are going to be fighting for the same kind of customer attention now once you have a large list of competitors the second step is going to be classifying them uh you want to consider

which are the most important competitors and for each type of competitor what kind of information you can learn from monitoring them so i took the example of hearthstone again to show you how we do it at aptweak we use a comprehensive index we've built which is called the app power and which is based on uh category rankings and the weight we give to each category depending on the total amount of downloads this category is bringing to the app store every day so when we look at hearthstone uh their main rivals uh i think should be uh yu-gi-oh because ueo has a higher app power but is not out of reach um it is a competitor that is probably quite active and that uh probably has some of the main kind of gamers uh as target and this is going to be the most

important one but at the same time you also have threats legends of runeterra and gwent games that have very similar gameplay to hearthstone but smaller app power so those are technically not not above hearthstone but you still want to keep a very close eye on them to know what they're doing a third type of competitors is going to be the market leaders so here i took the example of raid shadow legends and mortal kombat both of these are uh more distant competitors already but since they might be targeting some of the me is the same audience and because they have such higher app power it's nice to have these in mind as market leaders you can learn from by monitoring how they got there for the fourth category uh would be distant rivals and that's the example of the elder scrolls legends

a game that also has very similar gameplay to hearthstone but uh whose app power is very much lower and therefore does not necessarily need to be monitored uh at the same frequency just because uh they're not in a position to threaten hearthstone right now um last thing to remember about how to create your competitor list and classify your competitors is that you should refresh the list every once in a while so some of the situations where you should refresh your list i believe are after a competitor launch obviously adding this competitor and also checking if other competitors you might not have thought of have also entered the market uh but also after install algorithm update finding out how your visibility has changed and who has benefited from the algorithm update

if you're expanding to new countries uh refresh your competitor list by looking at who is actually competing in this country and for instance if we look at strategy games uh the comparison of top 10 games between the us in front shows that only four other top 10 games are present in both countries uh in terms of being present in the top ten i mean um another situation would be there's a major seasonal event um and if all of these situations uh have not led you to refresh your list then i would still say you should give at least one or two updates a year because the store is always changing and it's important to at least check what's going on now in terms of uh data you can get from your competitors there are quite a few i'm going to start with uh lessons you can learn from monitoring

category and rankings and download estimates and that's actually a use case which we've had with one of our clients earlier this year uh who came to us uh a month before uh a new competitor was going to launch they already knew his competitor was going to be uh successful and very active especially in terms of uae and they came to us with a challenge of uh saying they wanted to outperform their competitors they were ready to spend ua budgets but they still wanted to adjust costs to not spend too much money uh just to be outperforming their competitor and so what we did was we worked with them to compile a comprehensive report that we we created for them and that we send them every day so they would be able to adjust their ua spending they focus on the app store and always get more downloads than their

competitors in the app store what was interesting that in terms of results we saw them move from the bottom of the top 10 in the secondary category to the top one spot to the first spot and this meant that they were both ahead of their competitor which was second on most days but also of on other competitors more than a distant one that they did not challenge uh usually uh in the first category uh this was a much more competitive category was it used to rank between uh the hundreds and two hundredths position and they searched to the top 15 and at the end of our studies they were ranking number 11. the second lesson we got by doing that was uh confirming that there can be uh an organic boost when doing ua because as you can see here knowing that there's been no metadata

update at the same time we started by simply increasing uh the ua spend there was a 10 percent increase in visibility in the months that followed the competitor launch and that the installs uh especially that uh came on top of what they used to have were mostly coming from generic keywords a second lesson that you can be aiming for is when you monitor competitors in terms of pure metadata and creative activity and so here what you want to be able to do is react to changes your competitors are making and possibly also understand their focus and their strategy on the store better so for this one i actually took the example of racing games

and um i will uh draw your attention to need for speed no limits uh to begin with uh so looking at the changes uh to the store page to the app store page needs for need for speed has been doing over the past year uh what i've seen is that um they've changed their icon 10 times they've changed as screenshots seven times and they haven't changed anything else and that tells me first that uh their focus is really on creative optimization and that means to me that um because they're really trying to improve creatives and therefore improve the conversion of their app i would assume most other traffic is probably coming from either uae or is that brand traffic and that's going to be interesting because if we compare this to csr2 for instance you can see that

csr2 has updated their subtitle twice as they've made changes to both text and creatives and that to me means they have a more global approach to aso but especially that they're doing keyword optimization when need for speed is not uh and so when we compare to hashiraya dresser which was the game i started with um what you can see is that hashiraj director has been more active than most of its competitors in pretty much every field and the one i took the most interest in was a promo text because the promo text does not serve keyword optimization the impact on conversion can change quite much depending on what you are promoting and in my experience games tend to use promo tags especially to promote

liveops that they have and so that tells me there might be uh more to learn from hashiraya drifter if you want to know um what kind of liveops can be run in a racing game uh the third section i would look at to learn more lessons from your competitors is going to be the reviews and ratings this is often overlooked and i think it's a mistake because i i call it kind of pompously the voice of customer intent and what i mean by that is that reviews and ratings from your game but also from competitors are going to tell you what customers are expecting and that means that if you look at positive reviews from your competitors uh you can learn what are some strong features that uh customers like in a game and that you might want to also have but also uh or maybe you want to stay away from these

because other games are going to are too successful in this already on the other hand if you look at negative reviews from your competitors you can learn what are the weaknesses what are customers expecting from them and build it yourself to show a very competitive product um and if you're looking at google play specifically i'd like to give this small tip about looking at your android device your android phone because going to a product page there can actually show you also some of the uh texts and topics that google is able to associate with the game simply by looking at the reviews and ratings so this is already also a gold mine in terms of learn what people are talking about the last type of insight i want to

mention is looking at your competitors approach to user acquisition and by that i mean paid ua what you can do using market intelligence tools like aptwik is look at who is being the most active in terms of uae but also discover which creative format they're using and even looking at the different creatives what are going to be the different value propositions what are going to be the different elements they like to promote to uh to convert potential customers to active players and so here uh the example came from strategy game uh where i saw that lord's mobile is very active when it comes to the number of creatives that are running whereas clash of clans or plant versus zombies are not running ua on facebook related channels

so focusing on lords mobile i could also see that as they're doing create creatives that are mostly based on either dynamic creatives or video there's very few images it's not necessarily very surprising but when you compare different types of games you can see that every game has a different approach so if you want to mimic lords mobile you know where to look in terms of what kind of creatives you should be also running and if you look at the creatives themselves you can see what is the cta you can see what is the gameplay that's showing to understand what uh is working for them hopefully and what are actions you can take to either replicate or take a different step to convert users in that field now before i open to questions there's two main pitfalls i want to talk about

uh when it comes to competition monitoring the first one is misinterpreting the data and forcing best practices onto your own product so for that one i came back to racing games to show that if you look at uh three of the top racing games you see that they all use a video they all use creatives in landscape format and the risk when you see this is thinking this is the only way and that's why i also like to show mario kart tour as a possible alternative because mario kart is using portrait format and that's because this is how the game is played uh and so the lesson here is don't misinterpret the data from uh seeing other games use uh landscape which means i have to use landscape but instead go a step further and think about what is adequate for your game and what

should be different even in terms of usps even in terms of creative think about what you see here that is probably working but also if this is just going to make you blend in or if there's a way to take those best practices but still apply them to your game in a way that will help you stand out the second pitfall i wanted to bring up is not looking at the whole picture and it's somehow related to the previous one here when i say don't forget to look at the whole picture it means uh that you need to make sure you understand all the implications uh of a choice made by a competitor before you choose to apply it to your own game so i took a very popular example right now which is looking at what uh player x is doing when it comes

to creatives looking at fake ads uh as they're called because they don't reflect the gameplay and so what you can see is that they're actually not just running ads dynamic ads that are uh playing minigames but also they're actually promoting the same kind of gameplay on the store page they're increasing the amount of mini games in their apps and at the same time uh we do see that users in the store are complaining about this uh are saying that the game is not uh confirmed to their expectations so with all of that in mind it's very important that you get to uh understand that if you want to take the same approach to creatives you have to know this are these are some of the risks that you will have to deal with and then it's up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not but don't forget to look at the whole picture uh before i open to q a i just wanted to

also mention you can get my slides on our website on our social media and uh i'm very happy to to take your questions now thank you very much that was fantastic i i mean so many so many areas to cover um i wanted to just decide where to sort of stick into this so let's start with one of the uh questions that was asked um so this is uh joe plute uh who is saying um can developers choose what their competitors are using keywords i mean how how does that function how do you basically identify through keywords what people you should be treating as competitors um so usually it starts with a with a keyword research uh you know what your game is going to be about so um start by looking at these key as a keywords that are going to be related to your game to find out who else is doing this and find

uh which keywords are very competitive and which are not and combining this information with the traffic associated with each keyword you can find your sweet spot and your way of addressing competitors to kind of craft those market shares yeah yeah that makes sense makes sense and i think um getting this sort of balance right is always tricky i um i often have look at games in when i'm doing better analysis i try to sort of not just go literal but try to identify audiences and to me this is important to identify uh what audiences would do instead of your game uh and you know that this is like probably because i'm an old school product owner so when we were first designing game platforms we were thinking about you know what tv shows were you watching what you know social media what are you watching and i think that that wider perspective is actually quite

hard to sort of break down i know that's not the point of what you're trying to say but i think it does have an impact on the games you choose it does have an impact and you can actually tie that loop between finding keywords and your sweet spot but also under understanding who's already occupying that space on keywords and that's something where i used to say think about keywords as also reflecting your customer intent so when you when you're thinking about a keyword look at what what's a long tail available here uh because uh you can have stuff such as um long tail about online games pvp or offline these are very different you also want to check uh in terms of live search who is already ranking their and what is their how is their talking about it because if we're looking at uh the top games that are uh ranking for something like online

card games and no one is saying online uh then either it means uh everyone is missing out or uh the algorithm doesn't need you to be saying you're online to say okay this is what is popular among online games so it's also going to inform your own strategy after that to know who's the who's there and what are they already doing it's interesting because i think it's a there's a level of sophistication which comes basically when you're in the launch stage versus when you're in a a living kind of um you know operational stage of the game mostly because i think you you don't really know who your audience is until you're actually running as a sort of functionally ongoing experience so how would somebody who's relatively sort of small um get started with a lot of this stuff it seems like a lot of this data is quite expensive to access are there areas you think which is the lowest hanging fruit um i mean there's a couple of questions here in terms of uh like um how do you look if you're running a hyper casual game is it different what

source you would use as a starting point if you're running a mid-core or a hardcore game what would those sources be i'm just interested in what you think are the kind of priority sources of data uh if somebody is coming this relatively fresh um [Music] it is a an interesting question it's not an easy one but i i'd say um you you can do all of this manually uh tools like apptweek are very powerful because we compile the data for you uh we we give it in in a ux friendly manner but uh the data we pull is coming from the store uh and so we're going to help you save time in aggregating the data finding the right data now the data itself is available on the store and what you should look at is going to be for instance if you want to know how much keyword optimization is it's if you have a first list of competitors start with that list have a look at okay

based on their metadata based on uh how often they change their creatives and based on their category rankings now is it likely that they're doing keyword optimization is it likely that they're changing traders very often um are they at the top of the category uh even though there's not really any signs that doing this pure aso style and then that means they're probably running a lot of ads um is there a very high brand popularity when you get the data from apple search ads um and that tells you what are the strong points and weak points or your competitors and that can help you understand the market as well no i totally agree and i mean i tend to use the tools like reflections or game refinery because they give me kind of a different sense of what's happening in the game but i think what you're describing about what's happening in terms of the marketing of the game i think is also a very interesting kind of area and i think you know getting reliable information about those sort of things i think is

really important and um you know obviously a lot of this stuff is aggregated uh but that's okay as long as when you step in you know what you're getting a quick question here from uh michael aggiama actually knows from tejus um i probably brutalized that name as well what kind of spends are we talking about here for user acquisition are you looking at the duration for the competitors launch case study uh i don't think i have the right to disclose a budget unfortunately uh we're talking about a major game in the us uh in a category that is already quite competitive so i i can tell you it it was a very big budget yeah six figure six six figure um i don't remember the exact figure when it comes to the monthly budget

but i remember mostly the challenge was to say okay we have prepared this budget we're ready ready to go that high but technically we don't want to be spending all of that so yeah we've been doing some work with some investors in terms of trying to assess what uh return on advertising spend looks like recently and in particular for they're doing uh ux loans so the idea is that can you prove the return therefore you can get the uh the loan to scale it and it's really fascinating trying to work out not just um the effect of spend because you can do that through attribution sources but it's the knock-on effect in terms of the organic because you often see when you've got you know high-level spend it has an effect not not proportionate necessarily to the app store optimization spend they've also done and trying to isolate the effect of of spending money on ads spending money on it so all this kind of stuff in terms of the you use your audience and then the quality of that audience is

fascinating and it's a real rabbit hole to try and get down to the bottom of yes i can definitely testify to that and i think the challenge as well and that's why i said one of the pitfalls is looking at the whole picture yeah is it on the one hand you want to know what kind of spend you should be giving to each sector but at the same time they're all connected and so at the end you also need to kind of take one step back and look at performance overall uh because it's always going to be something that's changing somewhere and you didn't think about it and it's also affecting the rest of what you're actively pursuing exactly and on that note thank you very much that was great unfortunately we have to move on you