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APP STORE OPTIMIZATION · HUGH KIMURA · SEPTEMBER 2013

Publisher Profile Pages - Why Top App Publishers Are Successful

Discover what successful iOS app publishers are doing by looking at the Sensor Tower Publisher Profile Pages.

Back in July, we announced our App Profile Pages, which make it easy to see detailed information about an app, at a glance. Then we launched our Leaderboard, which ranks the top apps in each category, according to our proprietary algorithm.

Now we are excited to announce that we have launched Publisher Profile Pages to give you deeper insight into every single app publisher. The best part is that this information is available to anyone, you do not have to be a Sensor Tower subscriber to access this information.

Publisher Profile Pages are only available for iOS publishers for now, but we will be working on a similar feature for Android. In this post, we will go over the features in our Publisher Profile Pages and how they can help developers like you.

Available Anywhere On SensorTower.com

To view information about a publisher, just click on the publisher name link on our Leaderboard, on our Rankings Page, or anywhere in the Sensor Tower subscribers area. This makes is very easy to do research on any publisher and see what they are doing. You might be surprised what you discover when you look at an app portfolio as a whole.

lt="App portfolio

Publisher Summary

At the top of each Profile Page, along with the publisher name, is some information about the publisher. You will be able to see how many apps a publisher has on the App Store, which app store this information is for and the total number of reviews that this publisher has received across all of their apps. The page also includes Estimated Publisher Worth, which is based on the total Estimated App Worth of all of the apps in their portfolio. Finally, there is a search box where you can search for other publishers by name and country.

lt="Publisher information

All Apps By Publisher

Below the publisher summary is a list of the apps that the publisher currently has available on the App Store. You can quickly see information on number of global rankings, category, number of countries the app is available in, Estimated App Worth and cost.

lt="All published apps

In addition, you can click on any app in the list and drill down to the App Profile Page for that app, to get more detailed information.

lt="Detailed information

Compare this to what you see when you view a publisher's apps on iTunes. There is only information about the cost of the apps and the category.

lt="Minimal information on iTunes

One convenient feature that we have included is the ability to see which countries have the largest number of users, just by looking at the Countries drop down menu. If you look at the light blue bars to the left of each country, it will give you a relative graph of the number of users in that country. In the example below, the US has the most users, followed by China and Great Britain.

lt="Country analysis

How This Information Can Help You

The ability to see the entire portfolio of a publisher can help you "connect the dots" in terms of the strategy that a publisher is using to create successful apps. Maybe they don't have the best apps in the world, but they have a lot of them and are doing a great job of localization. You would be able to see that when you look at the Countries column. Then you could look at which countries they are doing well in and possibly figure out where you should be focusing your localization.

By looking at other publishers in your category, you might also notice certain patterns or areas where the most successful publishers are concentrating. Perhaps apps in your category cannot be successful without a certain feature. What kind of pricing strategies are they using?

Once you look at this high level information, you can then start to drill down into the App Profile Pages and actually download their app to check out their design, cross promotion and monetization strategies. You will also be able to see how the biggest publishers have grown their portfolio, which can be a template for how you want to grow your app portfolio too. Having this knowledge will not guarantee your success, but it will give you a more complete picture about your competitors.

Conclusion

Our Publisher Profile Pages will give you more insight into what successful publishers are doing in their business. For example, Gigabyte Solutions has chosen to specialize in "talking" entertainment apps. They have had varying degrees of success with their apps, but they are getting downloads with what is basically app reskinning. They reuse the same backend programming that handles the voice logic and just put a different voice and graphic front end on it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, looking at Publisher Profile Pages can also help you identify individual apps or entire portfolios that may be underperforming and would make good purchases.

Go ahead, give it a try. You might be surprised at what you discover.

What do you think about this new feature? What would you like to see on our Publisher Pages? Let us know in the comments below...


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Hugh Kimura

Written by: Hugh Kimura, Head of Content

Date: September 2013