As part of your user acquisition strategies, you'll need to research and brainstorm various creative strategies to ensure you're targeting a broad audience with well-managed campaigns. Sensor Tower’s Network Analysis feature provides an in-depth breakdown into where your competitors are advertising over an extended period of time. Here you can visualize how their Share of Voice (SOV%) has varied over time across the various ad networks they’re spending on by country, time range, and ad types. Similarly, you can use these insights to choose which Ad Networks to use for your creatives and understand ad spend strategies in more detail

With a similar layout to the other modules within Ad Intelligence, you can filter and customize the data on this page to gauge the impact of spikes in SOV% on an app’s performance and corroborate these changes with shifts in Category Rankings. Measure the impact of paid marketing with these signals to research into competitor ad spend and check their advertising trends to see when apps begin or end campaigns. It might be beneficial to benchmark your own performance by checking the average SOV% for your own app in a particular network use SOV% directionally to compare ad spend. 

For example, below are the impressions by Network for Trivia.io in Q1 of 2020: 

We can see they regularly advertise across 9 major networks with a variety of creative types. Looking at the chart above there are spikes in the SOV% across all these networks since Feb 2020 which indicates they have increased their advertising across those major networks. High spikes throughout March 2020 illustrate an increase in ad spend. Breaking these metrics out by individual SOV% per network allows us to visualize how often these ads were seen compared to other apps running concurrent campaigns on each network.

The ad spend/SOV% isn’t seasonal, but the increase in advertising does coincide with COVID-19 circumstances. Looking at the Category Rankings on this page, we notice that their chart position also increases which may be an indicator of how their spending impacted their popularity within the App Store. 

We can check which creatives were most popular and effective as part of their paid advertising efforts by checking our Creative Gallery. The Impressions By Network chart also illustrates the shifts in ad spend over the selected period of time. Corroborate these signals further by checking our Store Intelligence data to analyze the number of downloads within this date period.

In the chart below, we can see that there was also a huge spike in the number of downloads during the campaign period and their downloads rocketed during the initial days of increased ad spend.  

Note: Downloads data is only available as part of our Enterprise Store Intelligence data

Leverage signals from SOV% to start optimizing your campaigns by identifying the best networks to reach your target audience. Enter multiple apps to compare their SOV% side-by-side across each network. You’ll need to do this separately for each network to find the best networks to advertise on. Examine the increases or decreases in competitor advertising across selected networks and weigh up whether these campaigns were beneficial to their performance or store rankings.