While Sensor Tower's Network Analysis feature allows you to track where your competitors are advertising and their Share of Voice %, it can also be used as an ad spend benchmarking tool. Whenever your marketing / UA teams start paid campaigns, you know internally how much spending you're allocating into each ad network. However, what isn't known is the amount of ad spend for your competitors - for obvious reasons. This use case will walk you through how to use Network Analysis' SoV% and Rank features to benchmark your ad spend with competitors to obtain a directional signal for theirs, and the additional amount of resources you'd have to invest to have comparable results.

Comparing Share of Voice Percentage

One of the best ways to benchmark ad spend is to look at Share of Voice percentages across different networks. Each Network is unique though, so you will have to do this separately for each network. Use this information to understand how much additional spending you would have to do to match your competitors. The steps below will walk you through this process.

1. Navigate into Ad Intelligence > Advertisers Insights > Network Analysis and enter your app and your competitors' apps in the search field.
2. Select the appropriate date range, country, and network filters at the top.
3. Look at the average SoV% for your app in a particular network and use that number to benchmark against your competitors. 

Note: While there is a general correlation between Ad Spend and SoV% (higher ad spend = higher SoV%), this will not always be the case as there are other factors that may contribute to an app's SoV%.
You can also view more accurate SoV% figures with additional decimal places by downloading the CSV.

In the example above, we're comparing two popular shopping apps in the App Store - Rakuten and Ibotta. Looking at the Facebook ad network, we can see that Ibotta has been advertising pretty heavily (and consistently) on Facebook. Assuming we are Rakuten, we can use this information to benchmark our own ad spending.

By looking at the first two months of August, there seems to be a pretty significant difference in SoV% between Ibotta and Rakuten. If we know how much we're spending on the Facebook network, we can make a generalized approximation as to how much additional spending we would have to make to have comparable results. This also gives us a ballpark estimation of Ibotta's ad spend. This is not a one-time solution though, you will need to do this multiple times over different ad expenditures to determine how far your dollar goes when it comes to the SOV metric.  
 

Starting Campaigns On a New Ad Network

On a related note, perhaps you're interested in a new ad network that your competitor is running campaigns on, but you're not. One way to benchmark your potential ad spend is to run a few "trial" campaigns and observe how high SoV% your campaigns achieved, and the network ranking. From there, you can look at the differences in SoV% between your campaigns and your competitors' campaigns to gauge whether this particular network would be a profitable investment in the long-term.

In summary, while we don't explicitly display ad spend or revenue on our platform, we can compare our SoV% and our competitors' SoV% to obtain directional signals of whether we should increase ad spend, and by roughly how much.



Please reach out to support@sensortower.com for any questions. We hope you enjoy using the Sensor Tower platform!