The Internationalization Module Discovers Localization Opportunities

We have been hard at work in the Sensor Tower Labs and we are happy to announce that the new Internationalization Module has been added to our App Profile Pages. You can now find out how your app is doing in other countries compared to other apps, or do research on your competition. This post will show you how to get started and how to use this information.

Check The Internationalization Of Any App

Let's use the popular photo sharing app Instagram as an example. Now when you visit the Profile Page of any app you will see a new globe icon on the left side of the screen. Click on it to see the internationalization information for that app.

Here is a sample of what we see when we view the internationalization data for the Instagram app.

Going from left to right, let's take a look at what information you can get from this module. After the name of the country is a set of four icons: description, title, language support and keywords.

When an icon is green, the app has localized for that element in the primary language of that country's app store. If it is red, it has not been localized. This makes it really easy to see the localization strategy for that app when you are doing research on your competition.

The Relative Internationalization graph and corresponding percentages shows the user base distribution of the selected app versus all app store categories. The graph below is from the US App Store. It shows us that the Instagram app has 49.17% of its user base from the US, which is also represented by the green bar on the graph.

Across all categories, apps average a 41.17% US user base, which is represented by the vertical black bar on the graph.

The last number is the ratio of the user base of the selected app to the apps from all categories. Instagram has a ratio of 1.19x, meaning that it is doing 19% better in terms of percentage of their users coming from the US, versus all the other apps out there.

Change The Comparision

Comparing your app or a competitor's app with all the other apps out there is fun, but it doesn't really give you category specific competitive information. Not to fear, you can also compare the selected app to a category or another app. When we compare the Instagram app to all apps in the Photography category, this is what it looks like. The results are pretty similar when comparing Instagram with all apps.

However, when we compare Instagram to another top rated photography app, Snapchat, this is how it stacks up. Although Instagram is not doing as well as Snapchat in terms of percentage of US users, it is doing much better when it comes to percentage of users in China, France and Germany.

How To Use This Information

You can use this information in two ways. First, you can see how your app is doing in different countries, compared to your competition. If you have done extensive localization for a particular country and you are not doing as well as your competitors, it is time to find out why.

Second, you can research opportunities to target other countries that are perhaps not being properly serviced by the existing apps out there. As we wrote in a previous post about all the Clash of Clan clones out there, you do not have to reinvent sliced bread. You just have to figure out how to make an app idea better or in this case, how to get more niche and target a different country. Or if you see successful apps in your category targeting a certain country, maybe it is time to move into that market.

A word of caution however, most apps target the US market for a reason, it is huge. If you are going to go after other markets, be sure that they can potentially give you enough downloads to make it worth the effort.

Conclusion

This is just another module that you can add to your arsenal of App Store Optimization weapons. We hope that you find it useful and utilize it to uncover internationalization opportunities in your category. In the next post, we will go into how to track and optimize your keywords with the new localization features that have been added to the Sensor Tower subscriber modules.

You can now do the same keyword research and tracking that you have been doing in English, in any other App Store language. If you cannot wait to check it out, login to your account or sign up for a free trial. This is a paid

What do you think of this new module? Let us know in the comments below.

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