This guide focuses on best practices for identifying successful apps and conducting performance-related research using our Top Apps module.

The Top Apps module in Store Intelligence displays an aggregated view of downloads and revenue for the top 10,000 apps in each store. Visualizing this data on one page allows you to examine cohort trends in any category or country. You can use this data to monitor any app's performance within a category, track competitors, identify marketplace leaders, and find newly growing apps in a specific market.

There are three views in Top Apps; Absolute, Growth, and Growth Percentage.

• Absolute displays the top 10,000 apps most downloaded and highest-grossing apps for any specified date range. 
• Growth displays the top 10,000 apps by an absolute increase in revenue or downloads for the selected date period compared to the similar prior period. For instance, if you select the date period of January 2020, you will see the top apps by absolute increase since December 2019. 
• Growth Percentage displays the top apps by a percentage of growth from one period to the next. For instance, if you selected the date period of December 2020, you will see the percentage of growth since November 2019. 

Note: Newly released apps are likely to rank higher as smaller revenue or download changes will reflect substantially in percentage growth view. 

Using Top Apps

Choose one of the three views and apply date, category, or country filters, to analyze the marketplace according to your specific needs. Top Apps provides insights for strategic competitor research, lead generation, and "self-evaluation." Use our Global Fields within Top Apps to narrow down your search for current or up-and-coming competitors. Conduct your research as part of a broader analysis to determine an app's current or potential position within any category.
 

We've added a checklist below to start your research into Top Apps of interest:
 

✅ Know your date range
Customize data by selecting a specific Date period and Store. A Unified view is useful for tracking aggregated data across both stores.

✅ Chart by Downloads or Revenue
Which was the most downloaded app in Q4 of 2021? Which app generated the most revenue in 2020? The results for both these questions vary greatly, so try to decide which performance metric you need to use.

✅ Narrow down your apps
Filter by Categories and Countries relevant to your research: this is the next step to investigating trends that matter to you. Use our Game Taxonomy feature to refine gaming apps into genres and sub-genres. Our Global Fields also allow you to refine your app selection. You can choose to include or exclude specific apps with tags to find more meaningful results. Click 'Display All Fields' to select tags from our preset filters and discover specific apps in your cohort.

For instance, you can choose to include apps with a specific Soft Launch Date or apps that are Soft Launched Currently to research upcoming or new entries to the market. Soft Launch refers to apps released as part of a limited market test ahead of the official launch. Similarly, you can sort apps by Publisher Country, Pricing, Recent App Updates, and more. We encourage creating Custom Fields for apps you'll regularly track. You can build out multiple Custom Fields filters to track apps of interest for your organization.
 

Results

All results are illustrated on a ranking chart and table, scroll down to view and customize the table to include other essential metrics to your results.

Configure Selected Columns to add, remove, or replace any column and include additional data to your results- like App Info, App Ratings, App Updates, Growth, and Prior. Customize columns and Save As Preset for next time. You can create multiple table views for valuable insights throughout Store Intelligence. 

You'll notice empty checkboxes in the second column (Analyze) of your ranking table.

Check these boxes to View Estimates and dive deeper into the performance of your selected cohort using our App Analysis module. 

Stay ahead of any significant changes to these apps by setting up Custom Alerts to monitor any changes, including spikes and dips in downloads or revenue. Most of the best practices in this guide can also be applied to our Top Publishers module.