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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

With nearly 40K apps released across the major app stores each month, we at App Annie recognize that competition is fierce.

The sheer volume of apps makes it difficult for even the most seasoned marketers,

investors, business development professionals and product managers to determine

which apps are your competition today, and which publishers will make a great

partner tomorrow.

Therefore, it’s important for app professionals to differentiate the high performers

from everyone else. Identifying high ranking apps has f our main benefits, allowing

your company to:

1. Identify fast growing app categories

2. Explore business development opportunities

3. See what apps customers are raving about

4. Track a potential acquisition or investment target

Compete in the global app economy using app market rankings data and review

data from App Annie’s Store Stats.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

The mobile app marketplace is incredibly diverse; as there are dozens of app categories across each of the major platforms, users are presented with a breadth of options. While consumers certainly win in this scenario, industry followers may find this challenging. The constant release of new apps makes it hard for app professionals to identify the breakout successes. Luckily, Top Charts from Store Stats allows you to easily track which apps are performing best in a given category.

Below you can see that two messaging apps, T ango and o oVoo are ranked in the top 10 in the Social category on Google Play. Use Top Charts to identify and track an app’s rankings position over time to see if it consistently outperforms other types of apps in its category. While the social networking apps Facebook and Twitter consistently rank highly in the category, messaging apps such as Tango and ooVoo have also risen in popularity.

1. Examine Breakout Genres in Specific App Categories

Click on the screenshot to see Store Stats in action. For illustrative purposes only.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

As established companies in more traditional industries work to expand their brand presence in mobile, some can find it difficult to establish partnerships that are worthwhile for both parties. For one, the identification process can be tough—a top ranked app today can tumble down the charts tomorrow. As the global app marketplace continues to evolve, brands require app market data that allows them to confidently evaluate business development opportunities, especially as they expand into other markets.

2. Find Business Development Opportunities in New Regions

Ascertain if this speaks to a larger trend by checking how messaging apps rank in the Overall category on Google Play. Below you can see that F acebook Messenger and S napchat, two messaging apps, are featured prominently at the top of the charts. This shows that while companies like Facebook are ruling the charts in Overall, the success of messaging apps isn’t limited to the big brands. Identify fast rising genres effortlessly, using rankings and ratings data from Store Stats.

Click on the screenshot to see Store Stats in action. For illustrative purposes only.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

Thankfully, Top Charts from Store Stats helps you find high performing paid, free and grossing apps, enabling you to identify potential partnerships by monitoring an app’s ranking performance in a specific category or region. In the graph above, you can see the download ranks performance for AirBnB is strong in Germany in the Overall category, especially immediately following the partnership announcement in late February (circled above). With Top Charts, you can also explore co branding partnerships across stores that can help improve your company’s visibility.

When Deutsche Telekom announced a s trategic partnership with A irBnB, many questioned why the German carrier would partner with the accommodations start up when they had already invested in 9 flats, a AirBnB competitor in Europe. However, the benefits of these types of agreements are clear. These “strategic investments” as Deutsche Telekom describes them, allows the company to allocate its internal resources more effectively by relying on third party apps to develop emerging technologies, and by aligning itself with big name tech companies like AirBnB to build out “non-core services.”

Click on the screenshot to see Store Stats in action. For illustrative purposes only.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

Have you ever felt like you were out of the loop? While this has certainly happened to all of us at one time or another, those in the app economy know that by being an outsider, you are in danger of missing out. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess what features are trending now among users or whether a competitors’ newest version release improved its rank position. Get inside the minds of an app’s user base by browsing app reviews and ratings data using Store Stats.

With Reviews, you can browse an app’s reviews by version, country, star-rating and date range, and filter comments by keyword, using the search box. Ebates provides coupons to online shoppers and using Reviews we can see whether Ebates’ “cash back” has been popular with users in the last release cycle.

3. Find the Apps that Are Popular with Customers

When entering the keyword "cash back" in the search box, you can filter the reviews to see only those which discuss the "cash back" feature. As you can see, there are 68 review that discuss this feature, which on aggregate have a star-rating of 4.3. Armed with this information, you may want to consider a similar feature in your own coupon app, or as a retailer you may consider Ebates a strong partner for a future promotion.

Click on the screenshot to see Store Stats in action. For illustrative purposes only.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

While the mobile app economy continues to expand, it’s also become quite competitive as investment firms and corporate M&A divisions spend billions of dollars to strengthen their app portfolios. The acquisition market is tough, and even the biggest technology companies must be diligent about identifying which apps will help their bottom–lines —take the recent purchase of the S unrise Calendar app by Microsoft, as an example. With over 120K employees, and $22B in net revenue last year, M icrosoft is a highly successful company that continues to evolve, investing, and acquiring apps that rival its own services. Investments like these show how important it is for businesses to discover the apps that consistently perform well, and Store Stats from App Annie helps you accomplish the task.

Looking at Daily Ranks, you can see that the Sunrise Calendar app ranked highly across multiple categories and countries; specifically, it has ranked within the top 5 in 83 markets. Determine if an app has cross -country appeal by seeing where it ranks the highest. Comparatively, Microsoft’s O utlook app also performed well since it was released in January 2015 on iOS; still, with Sunrise, Microsoft hopes to expand its feature offering by “tak[ing] your existing data and provid[ing] additional services on top,” according to F ast Company. As Microsoft shows, acquisitions of this type can help you grow your business and maintain your leadership position in a competitive space.

4. Examine Potential Investment or Acquisition Targets

Click on the screenshot to see Store Stats in action. For illustrative purposes only.

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How Do I Identify High Performing Apps?

appannie.com/store-stats | @appannie | facebook.com/appannie

To learn more about all of Store Stats’ features such as Top Charts, Reviews, Ratings and Keywords, visit us at www.appannie.com/store stats.

As the mobile app economy grows, hundreds of thousands of marketers, business development executives, strategists, analysts and product managers continue to use App Annie's Store Stats to inform their app strategies.