data.ai (formerly App Annie) is a mobile data and analytics platform designed to help customers create winning mobile experiences and achieve excellence. Founded in 2010, the company launched their mobile market data solution and in 2019 acquired Libring, an advertising monetization and spend offering, to expand their capabilities and comprise a complete mobile performance platform. The vendor boasts more than 1,100 enterprise clients and 1 million registered users across all geographies and…
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SpyFu
Score 7.9 out of 10
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SpyFu is the eponymous SEO and PPC research platform from the company in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on "spying" on competitors, or basically using their behaviors to refine your own through keyword and content analysis, and backlink poaching. This positional search engine optimization and paid listings management platform touts the ability to lower costs and raise rankings via a Kombat-oriented approach... basically a cute way of saying "it makes comparisons" of how well your site does in niche…
I think that App Annie will be handy for the companies that provide service in multiple countries - so they have to deal with local competitors research and track the performance of the app (by the position and by the reviews) in different stores. I think that for a one-country app, many of the features will be less relevant. At the same time, App Annie offers custom plans, so I see how the user experience can be different.
If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.
App Annie is extremely limited if you are on the free plan. While you can garner some golden nuggets from the free plan, it's extremely difficult to make needle moving decisions based on the free data. It would be great if App Annie would disclose pricing on their website, plus have a non-free/enterprise plan were you could pick and choose features they offer.
After nearly considering a paid plan with App Annie, I decided not to purchase because of the broken trust that stemmed from their sales team. I often got cold-calls from their reps - even when I never contacted them for a sales member to call me. I was bombarded for about 2 weeks straight with phone calls and hard-core sales emails with just asking to talk, no questions or personalization. This cold, unwanted and unwelcome outreach solidified my decision not to purchase.
Well the fact that the freemium features are all that I need right now, I will most definitely continue to use it on a daily basis. I might upgrade to the pro version in the future if I need more data than what I am getting now. But for now it works great for what I need.
Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.
I have not had to contact support a lot of times. The few times I did, I got correct and lengthy responses, but they took some time to answer. Their product is very complete, so unless you have a specific question, you will probably not need to contact support at any time.
SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.
We use Google 360 and are able to do a much deeper dive into the activity we see on our apps. I think App Annie is a great starting point product, but for more in depth analytics, something like a Google 360 or Adobe might be better.
I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.
App Annie has had neither a positive nor negative impact on our ROI or business objectives. Our team currently uses their free, very limited plan for data discrepancy with our main ASO tool. Otherwise, we have connected our apps and let the data flow in. We go in the account about once every 2-3 months.
With App Annie's data we have solidified that our other paid ASO tool we use has accurate data and that we will continue to pay for that tool. So in that regards, App Annie's provided us with a confirmation in our competitor ASO tool purchase decision.
