Smart Insights: Monitor Competitors & App Store Updates

It’s Valentine’s Day! On February 14 each year, masses around the world celebrate a holiday dedicated to love and friendship.

Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity for app marketers to reach larger and more engaged audiences by tapping into user emotions. According to Statista, 441 million active users worldwide are expected to be using online dating providers by the end of 2023, and the online dating market generated $2.9 billion in the US last year (with this figure only expected to rise in future years). For dating, e-commerce, travel apps, and more, Valentine’s Day opens a fresh window of app growth opportunities.

In this blog, we discuss app store seasonality around Valentine’s Day, and explain how our recently upgraded Smart Insights in Slack can help you get an edge over the competition for important app store events. Read on to learn more about:

• App seasonality effects around Valentine’s Day
• The importance of monitoring ASO trends and best practices for relevant seasonal events
• How to get instant alerts about competitors’ ASO updates from AppTweak
• Our upgraded Slack integration

What is app seasonality on Valentine’s Day?

On the app stores, events like Valentine’s Day can bring interesting seasonality effects for many different app businesses. Seasonality refers to fluctuations in user behaviors – changes in store traffic, downloads, spending, or more – caused by time-based external factors.

On Valentine’s Day in particular, many turn to the app stores to form new connections, find the perfect gift for partners, or browse weekend getaway deals. As a result, dating, shopping, and travel apps (to name a few) often capitalize on a prime opportunity to align their product pages with Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns and drive more downloads.

Learn more about app store seasonality

Monitor app store seasonality trends in Market Intelligence

To better understand seasonality trends around Valentine’s Day, we headed to Market Intelligence: Seasonality Insights for the Dating category on Google Play. For dating apps across Europe, Asia, and South America, we can clearly distinguish February as a peak month for online dating activity.

Find new growth opportunities with Market Intelligence

To optimize growth, (dating) apps should align high-impact marketing strategies with their top seasons for downloads. For instance, just a few days before Valentine’s Day 2023, Tinder rolled out some highly awaited safety features, including a new incognito mode and profile blocking. As a peak month for dating apps in general, launching these new features just before Valentine’s Day could help support Tinder’s user satisfaction and loyalty at the perfect time.

What’s happening to dating apps over Valentine’s Day?

To understand how best to promote your app for high-seasonality periods, it’s important to monitor your competitors’ ASO updates from previous years. For this, we used our ASO Timeline to visualize updates made by popular dating apps around Valentine’s Day 2022.

Monitor metadata updates, A/B tests, in-app events, and promotional content on AppTweak

For example, on February 3, 2022, the eHarmony app adapted its screenshots in preparation for Valentine’s Day. eHarmony replaced its previous creatives (with the tagline, “the best is yet to come”) with screenshots instead referring to the event (with the tagline “be more than just a Valentine”).

eHarmony’s new screenshot directly appealed to store visitors searching for meaningful connections over Valentine’s Day, giving them a better understanding of the app’s offering over this period.

On February 16, the app then changed its screenshots again, this time featuring the tagline “real love is…” With Valentine’s Day having passed, the app promptly updated its screenshots (and product page) to be more evergreen, up-to-date, and relevant to any future marketing campaigns.

Last year, Tinder and some of its competitors were also featured in a story, “Meet someone new,” on the UK App Store the day before Valentine’s Day. Tinder was featured as “App of the Day” a few days before the event, with Apple explicitly promoting the app to store visitors who might want to “get a date tonight.”

Explore tips, guidelines, and ASO best practices to get your app featured on the App Store or Google Play

Monitor competitors’ ASO updates with Smart Insights

As an app marketer (for Tinder on Valentine’s Day, for example), it might be extremely useful to receive notifications about your competitors’ ASO updates. By getting automatic alerts whenever your competitors change their metadata or get featured, you can easily track what’s happening in your market, get inspired by the competition, and plan future marketing campaigns with ease.

With Smart Insights on AppTweak, receive ASO notifications directly in our tool, Slack, or your inbox and keep a close eye on your competitors’ metadata updates, app store algorithm changes, and more.

Activating Smart Insights in Slack will send you push notifications whenever your competitors update their metadata or get featured, for example. You can then click the Insight to see which metadata element changed, when, and a before/after comparison, directly in AppTweak.

Which ASO insights can I get notified about?

AppTweak is able to detect different types of updates for your Smart Insights, including:

• Metadata changes for your followed apps or competitors
• When your followed apps or competitors get featured
• Algorithm changes that can impact keyword rankings in one of your followed countries, for both the App Store and Google Play

Using our Smart Insights interface, you can quickly access a newsfeed of all your desired updates for your followed apps and markets, including links to more details about each change.

Use our Slack integration to never miss a single update

You can always check your Smart Insights from the newsfeed directly in our tool. However, if you’re looking for instant ASO alerts, we’d recommend you integrate AppTweak with your preferred Slack channels.

To help you with this, we recently upgraded our Slack integration for Smart Insights. Now, our notifications are even more digestible and easy to read, allowing you to see ASO updates (and their related app, country, or store) in a single glance.

Follow these steps to integrate AppTweak with Slack

You can customize your Smart Insights by selecting the specific Slack channel(s) you want to receive notifications in. For instance, you might want to receive your own app’s updates in a different channel from your competitors’ updates. Or, you might want to send your App Store notifications separately from your Google Play notifications. With Smart Insights, easily customize your ASO alerts in a way that works for your team.

Conclusion

With Valentine’s Day coming up, show your app some love with AppTweak’s Smart Insights in Slack! We’ve recently upgraded our instant ASO alerts, helping you stay more efficiently in the loop about your competitors’ metadata updates, app store algorithm changes, and more. Stay tuned for more updates to our ASO alerts!

With AppTweak, keep an eye on your competitors’ ASO strategies during important seasonal events.