Competitors

Adding competitors, comparing keyword by keyword, and finding the terms they have that you do not.

Competitors belong to an app, not to the account

Each of your own apps has its own competitor list, because competition is per store and per language. The same competitor can sit under several of your apps.

When you add an app, the wizard searches your listing's strongest terms in Play and offers what comes back, with each candidate's install band so you can tell a peer from a giant. It also asks Play for the apps it lists as similar to yours; a candidate from that list is marked Similar on Google Play, and one that shows up in both is ranked higher. You can also add any package by name later.

Suggested by Google Play

Suggested competitors comes from your own measurements and costs nothing. The Suggested by Google Play card, collapsed by default, asks Play itself instead: either its Similar apps list for your app, or the other apps of a developer — yours, or one of your competitors'. Nothing loads until you press Ask Google Play, because it spends one or two Play requests; the answer is kept for a day.

Apps you already compete with and your own apps are labelled rather than hidden, so the list reads as Play shows it. Add competitor adds straight from the row.

Other markets

A collapsed card lists the (store, language) pairs where your competitors actually ranked in the last 30 days and you have no record of your own. Store and language are separate axes in ersASO, so the same package is a separate app per pair — and until now you only ever saw the pair you had added.

This is an observation, not a forecast. Nothing is estimated: a pair is listed only because a competitor left a real position there in our own measurements. An app record alone is not enough — that only means someone else added that pair — and a single competitor never suggests a market, because one app is not a category.

It makes no Play request and stores nothing. To work on a pair, add the same package again from My apps and pick that store and language; it gets its own keyword pool, competitors and score.

Ratings and installs

A collapsed card lists your app and its competitors with their rating and its change over 30 days, the rating count and how many ratings were added in 30 days, the Play install band, and a small rating line for the last 90 days.

The install band is Play's own threshold, not an estimate. When a competitor moves up a band the card says which band it left and when; the same move can reach your inbox and e-mail as an Installs band changed event. The card makes no Play request — ratings and bands come from the listings already read each night. A rating count is only known from full reads, so a competitor without one shows a dash rather than a guess.

Head to head

Opening a competitor shows the keywords they rank for with your position beside theirs, and counts how many you are ahead on and behind on. Only keywords in your pool are measured, so the comparison covers the shared set.

Terms they rank for that you do not track can be added to your pool in bulk — tick them, or shift-click a range, and add. Most of them cost nothing extra to measure: a keyword a competitor ranks for has already been measured by definition.

Share of voice

The share of voice card estimates how much of the visibility on your shared keywords is yours and how much belongs to each competitor, as a daily line over 30 or 90 days. The window is a two-way switch in the card header and starts at 30; both the chart and the share figures under it follow whichever you pick.

Export CSV downloads exactly the days on screen, one column per app, with your own app marked. A day an app was not measured is left empty rather than written as a zero — zero is a real answer meaning nobody could see it, and the two must not be confused in a spreadsheet. The file is built in your browser from what the card already loaded; nothing is generated or kept on the server.

It uses the same formula as the visibility figure on the app overview — each keyword's popularity weighted by the position it holds, first place counting fully, tenth about two thirds, fiftieth almost nothing — so your line here and your visibility there are the same number rather than two estimates of it.

A competitor's line starts on the day you began tracking them, and the chart marks that day. Before it nothing is drawn, deliberately: positions 11 to 50 are stored only for apps somebody tracks, so the absence of an earlier record means unknown, not outside the top fifty.

Keyword gap

At the bottom of the page, collapsed by default: terms a competitor appeared in the first fifty for in the last week, where your app did not. It makes no Play request; the whole input is measurements already taken. Collapsed means the query does not run at all.

The list is filtered by relevance to your listing, and this is not cosmetic. Rankings are stored globally and the same competitor may be attached to several of your apps, so the unfiltered query once offered an exercise app a coffee-machine keyword.

A term only appears if Play itself suggests it, or if it is already one of your own keywords or discoveries. Another workspace may have typed a term by hand — its own brand, say — and a shared competitor may rank for it; that term never shows up in your list.

Keywords you already track stay in the list. The question there is not whether to add them but whether you rank for them; dropping them would look like the problem had been solved. For the same reason, Track leaves the card open and the row simply gets its tracked badge.

Adding or removing a competitor refreshes share of voice, the suggestions and the gap straight away, and cards you had collapsed stay collapsed.

Creatives and category charts

The creatives page puts your icon and screenshots next to your competitors', and dates every change. Creatives do not affect which terms you rank for, but they decide how many people install after seeing the page — so a redesign can move installs while no keyword moves.

The category page shows the top chart for your app's category, store and language: your position, the move since yesterday, apps entering the list for the first time and which of them are your competitors.

→ Your listing and the ASO score