Insights from the latest AppsFlyer Performance Index
Our partner AppsFlyer recently released its latest performance index, timed to align with this year’s Mobile World Congress, and we were delighted to see how highly AppLovin was ranked in a few important categories.
The index slices and dices data on media sources by geography, gaming and non-gaming, and by platform, and then arrives at Power Rankings and Retention Scores. It covers a year’s worth of data and measures 2.5B installs (organic and non-organic). More than 5,000 apps and over 1,000 media sources are included in the survey.
We checked in with Shani Rosenfelder, senior marketing manager at AppsFlyer, for the inside scoop on the methodology that underpins this statistical report card. He said that a key factor used in the Retention Score is a comparison of organic retention of the same apps a particular media source ran with (per region, per platform). “Organic is a natural ‘normalizer’ for the data and it minimizes variation across apps. As a result, a comparison between media sources running different quality apps is more fair.” Then, he said, AppsFlyer factors in time by giving more weight to engagement at a later stage.
With the Power Ranking, scale of course is crucial and the calculations are slightly less complicated. “We factored the number of installs a media source was able deliver with retention for a quality-quantity power punch in the form of a power ranking,” Shani said.
We were also curious how much time the AppsFlyer team spends on the project. Shani said it requires a lot of work and that pulling the data is the easy part: devising the methodology and working with data in Excel takes hours and hours. Then there’s the production of the PDF version and the online version, which displays the data dynamically. “It’s a really cool way of showing a lot of data in a friendly and interactive manner,” he said.
Shani added that the work has paid off with significant impact: over 10,000 visits to the online version of the index, 10,000 hard copies printed for the Mobile World Congress that were snapped up, and welcome media coverage. “That shows how much thirst there is in the industry for such aggregated performance benchmarks from an unbiased source,” he said.
Here is a recap of how AppLovin ranked in the study:
Gaming iOS Global
AppLovin is #1 in Retention, ahead of Facebook
Gaming iOS North America
AppLovin #2 in Power Ranking, just after Facebook
AppLovin #2 in Retention, ahead of Facebook
Gaming Android Asia Pacific
AppLovin #1 in Retention
Gaming iOS Asia Pacific
Applovin #1 in Retention
Gaming iOS Latin America
AppLovin #2 in Retention, ahead of Facebook
Non-gaming iOS Global
AppLovin #2 in Power Ranking, just after Facebook
AppLovin #3 in Retention, ahead of Facebook
Non-gaming iOS North America
AppLovin #2 in Power Ranking, just after Facebook
Non-gaming iOS Europe
AppLovin #2 in Power Ranking, just after Facebook
AppLovin #2 in Retention, dramatically ahead of Facebook
Non-gaming iOS Asia Pacific
AppLovin #2 in Power Ranking, just after Facebook
