We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our latest product: our Compare feedback tool, which sits within our Competitor analytics product suite. 

The new feature is your Competitor analytics tool to understanding industry benchmarks according to your app reviews, and your market positioning within them — as well as how they compare to those of your competitors’. Clients can use the tool to discover audience preferences and satisfaction levels in different countries with in-depth machine-learning issue analysis (relating to bugs, offensive content, customer sentiment analysis or top topics), and market benchmarks for ratings and reviews.

The tool also gives you the data you need to define your reviews reply strategy. Designed to help you better understand the mobile app landscape as a whole, it’s the perfect addition to product teams, product marketing managers and customer support leaders’ arsenal.

Competitor data available within the benchmarking tool includes:

• Worldwide user experience analysis with all major customer feedback metrics in the one dashboard, including insights on competitors’ reply strategy
  
• Industry benchmarking via semantic analysis of app reviews, offering app quality analysis and insights into current hot topics for users
  
• Customer satisfaction dynamics, based on user reviews across markets
  
• Number of competitors’ daily ratings with market benchmarks by store, country, and category

The feature can be found by navigating to the “Competitor Intelligence” section of your AppFollow dashboard, and is available for users of the Pro package and above. Our Enterprise customers also receive the benefit of Semantic Insights.

What's the value of our new tool?

All our clients want to improve their app’s reviews and overall app performance, but finding the right data to inform their strategies can be a time-consuming and costly process. We asked ourselves — how can we deliver even better benchmark data?

This was the inspiration behind building our Compare Feedback tool. With it, clients can:

• Learn your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses by comparing sentiment scores with market benchmarks, satisfaction levels, and share of bug reports in reviews. This will provide Product teams the qualitative data they need to better understand the customer and build a better product.
  
• Compare feedback and customer experience performance across your most important markets, and against your competitors’ - helping you to build superior review reply strategies in all your active regions.
  
• Gain a better understanding of your app’s position in the market, based on current industry trends - answering questions such as “what are my competitors’ average ratings?”, and “what is the average rating within my app’s category as a whole?”

The data available within our dashboard can then go on to inform entire strategies — from expansion programs to reply planning. Let’s take a look at three key use cases for the tool.

Competitor analysis for the mobile app landscape: rival & market analysis

Key to any app’s success is building a solid understanding of your market: your audience, your potential users, but also that of your competitors’. Our new feature allows you to conduct a Competitive Profile Matrix from thousands of real, qualitative pieces of user feedback, right from the AppFollow dashboard. Being able to easily use insights gathered from qualitative data, alongside quantitative data points, puts both product and marketing teams in a stronger position - helping to bring order to a wealth of unstructured information.

Learn about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses by comparing app rating, satisfaction level, reply rate and much more. Perhaps one of the tool’s most useful features is the Semantic Insights section, where you can benchmark other app’s sentiment scores, number of reviews relating to app quality, and top tags (such as payment or UX issues). This will help you understand their users’ pain points, without having to manually dig through reviews.

The Semantic Insights section also reports your share of offensive reviews, as well as those of other similar apps within your vertical — which is helpful to know both how many of your own reviews could potentially be deleted, and where you stand in relation to competitors. Semantic analysis is available per country, meaning you can see competitors’ sentiment score and the most popular tags per market — whether that’s refund requests, bug reports or usability issues.

Teams right across your business can use these insights to inform their strategies. Product managers can draw inspiration for their product roadmap, including a view on your competitors’ popular or hotly-requested features. Understanding feedback following a competitor's new release, or understanding the bugs reported, helps inform product strategy - and will ultimately lead to a better product.

Through the Reviews Overview panel, Product teams can also track the number of reviews and corresponding ratings over time. Tracking these metrics across weeks, months, or even years is crucial: you’ll be able to see when a competing app receives a sudden spike in positive (or negative) reviews, and can then mimic or avoid similar tactics.

This competitor analysis is also hugely helpful for product marketing and marketing teams, who can use these insights to find and develop unique selling points. Are your competitors’ users constantly complaining about poor customer service, slow delivery times, or limited features? Make sure to highlight your strengths in your advertising and marketing materials to appeal to these users, who may be willing to try a new service. 

Break into new markets: analyze your global presence

Thinking of expanding internationally? This is a hugely exciting time for any app developer, but also comes with its challenges. Each new market presents new considerations — and competitors — that need to be solved with data-driven insights. While your app may be a runaway success in your home country, that doesn’t automatically mean it will work everywhere else.

This is where AppFollow comes in. Our tool will give you clear insights of your target markets, helping you to uncover your local competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. Clients can understand where you fit within the competitive landscape: all metrics, including semantic analysis, can be broken down by country, so you can see how your average rating (and number of ratings) in a certain market compares to others in your vertical.

The tool also includes a handy helpful breakdown of your competitors’ rating distributions worldwide (such as the number of countries where it has a rating under 4 stars, or above 4.5 stars). This helps clients understand other apps’ customer satisfaction levels across markets, and find out which app is strongest in terms of customer feedback. 

Once you’ve gathered these insights, you can then begin to understand regional differences and confidently decide which regions to focus your efforts on.

For apps who already have an international presence, this feature can be hugely helpful when adjusting your local support strategy. Comparing your reply rates, average reply times and reply effect across markets with other apps can show which countries or languages require more focus from your Support team. This will help keep users’ happy across markets — and your app one step ahead of the competition.

Delight your customers: boost you review response strategy

Also available within the tool is a comprehensive overview of competitors’ feedback metrics. This includes the number of total reviews, reply rate, average reply time and reply effect (ie, how many users updated their app ratings after having interacted with customer support). You can also adjust the date ranges to see how these metrics fluctuate throughout the year — for example, after your competitor releases a new app version, or for e-commerce apps, how this might change in the run-up to peak shopping holidays. 

Understanding how other companies are working with app reviews — and what results they’re receiving — will be key to defining your own review reply strategy. Not only will this offer tangible goals to aim for, but you could also obtain ideas for your product or where you could improve your own metrics. If one of your competitors has a standout reply effect or sentiment score, it’s worth investigating further and seeing how exactly they’re achieving this — they could offer helpful tips to integrate into your own strategy.

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Knowledge is power

While the world of mobile has never been more competitive, taking a data-driven, insights-led approach is key to staying ahead. Building a solid understanding of how users perceive your app, and that of your competitors, will help you make smart decisions to ensure longevity.

Looking to learn more about the Compare Feedback tool? Reach out to your dedicated Account Manager for a run-through of its features, or book in a demo with our Sales team. For more information on how the new tool can help you reach your goals, download our Semantic Analysis guide.