If you are thinking about how to promote your app, there are tons of information online. A complete user acquisition strategy for apps should have two components. First, App Store Optimization is conducted to increase the visibility score of the app, increasing organic downloads. Second, a solid paid growth strategy must be incorporated to reach even larger audiences. This is where mobile ad intelligence comes in. 

While building up your paid app marketing strategy, ad intelligence tools will provide you crucial pieces of data about the current market trends and successful strategies. Conducting a thorough app market analysis will allow you to get ahead of your competitors. 

Creative advertising is one of the main paid growth methods. By creating ads and publishing them through mobile ad networks or social media, you will be able to spread your app much more rapidly. MobileAction provides an industry-leading mobile ad intelligence tool, which is being used by people all around the world for improving their mobile app marketing performance. 

In this article, we will discuss how you can use Mobile Ad Intelligence to discover competitors which will provide you with valuable insights, allowing you to boost app download.

Locating Close Competitors

The first place to look for competitors is the Top Advertisers list. With data from over 151,000 Advertisers, MobileAction provides unrivaled Ad Intelligence data. To start off your app marketing strategy, let’s start by locating your competitors. If we were trying to market a gaming app, using the filtering options we can instantly see some of our competitors. 

Top Advertisers Basic Filtering

Through basic filtering, we can narrow down our search to a specific store, country, and category. In this case, we would like to see the top advertising gaming apps in the US App Store. 

Notice that the data is classified on a weekly basis. Thus, after we save our filtering options, we can instantly see the current data for the last week rather than getting the data for a specific week. Using App Filtering, users are able to specify their search results even more.

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Top Advertisers App Filtering

As you can see, we have set two conditions for our search, assuming that our game contains a ball. As gaming apps that have the word ball in their title probably are related to our app, we used the “contains” option. Also, by using the app keywords we are able to list competitors that organically rank for a given keyword

However, you might also want to exclude some apps from your data. For example, we do not want to see bubble shooters as they are not related to our game.

mobile ad intelligence app filtering
Top Advertisers App Filtering

We can both name specific apps to be excluded such as Bubble Pop! in this case, or we can exclude apps that have the word bubble in their title. Now let’s go over the output we get and highlight some key features.

Top Advertisers

The top 3 top advertisers fitting our criteria are displayed above even though the overall list includes more than 4,000 apps. On the far-left side, you can see the apps ranking for the Top Advertisers list. Next, you can see the name of the app and whether they are publishing or advertising. The app Word Collect seems to both advertise and publish ads. Another amazing feature of mobile ad intelligence is the fact that it allows users to track unique creatives. Finally, we can see the ad networks that the apps are using. An estimated impression score is also presented to users. 

Filtering Top Charts

What if you want to see top advertisers who are also successful in the top charts? Such an approach makes sense as apps ranking higher in the top charts should be doing something right. 

MobileAction’s Ad Intelligence is the perfect tool to do this. 

mobile ad intelligence top charts
Top Charts & Top Advertisers

We can easily add the Top Charts filtering option to view the category rankings of apps. In this case, we have chosen the Free Category, but you can also choose Grossing or Paid apps. Possessing 3+ years of mobile ad intelligence data, MobileAction is able to locate most of the apps in the top charts as you can see. 

After you have set your filters, you can easily save the search conditions and come back to check for updates. This way you can keep track of your competitors and their mobile advertising efforts. 

Segment Tracking

App Store Optimization can also be helpful for locating your competitors. Our Keyword Explorer tool allows us to discover apps that are ranking organically for a given keyword. If we search for “ball”, these are the results.

mobile ad intelligence app store optimization
Keyword Explorer

It seems that Helix Jump is organically ranking first for this keyword. If they indeed have a paid growth strategy, we can draw insights from their data. 

app store optimization ad intelligence
Campaign Analysis

Looking at their Campaign Analysis, we can easily see that Helix Jump is an advertiser. Thus we can add them to our Favorite Apps list in order to keep track of their activities. By adding various competitors to your Favorite Apps list, you can keep a record of these apps. Let’s quickly add Helix Jump to our Favorite Apps.

If you would like to view your competitors in the Top Advertisers list, MobileAction has you covered. Simply go into the Top Advertisers tab and filter by Favorite Apps. 

Subscribing to Creatives

You found the top advertisers, you filtered out your competitors and now it is time for you to dive into the creatives of your competitors. With more than 20 million creatives, MobileAction provides all the data you need to successfully grow your app. 

Creative Filtering

As you can see, we have similar filtering options for creatives as well. We have added our Ball Games list so we can see the creatives used by apps in this list. Creatives are sorted by impression as default. However, you can also sort creatives by first seen date. 

Some Creatives of Helix Jump

You might have tens of competitors and thousands of creatives to keep track of. That is why you can subscribe to the creatives you have filtered and get notified when new material meeting your conditions gets published. 


We have created the Segment “Ball Games” and subscribed to it. You can choose the frequency of notifications (daily, weekly, monthly) as well as the type of creative (top-performing or new). With MobileAction, you will never be out of touch!

Marketing your app is an intricate task. With the right app marketing tools, you can make it a whole lot easier. Schedule a free demo with us and start building your campaigns!