SurveyMonkey takes on App Annie with launch of its mobile app insight platform

SurveyMonkey will now provide mobile app insights, thanks to the launch of its SurveyMonkey Intelligence platform. This offering gives developers, product managers, and investors access to data around not only their own apps, but also those of their competitors. Essentially, the company wishes to become the “Nielsen’s for app intelligence,” helping businesses better understand the market they’re in.

SurveyMonkey Intelligence came about through the company’s 2015 acquisition of Renzu — a data analytics startup founded by Zynga alumni Abhinav Agrawal, Arjun Lall, and Jason Tomlinson. It has become the backbone of this new product largely because SurveyMonkey wants to solve four key problems: identifying and tracking competitors, benchmarking app metrics, identifying mobile trends, and conducting better diligence on apps, partners, and advertising campaigns.

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“Mobile will be the leading platform in which businesses connect with customers. With our acquisition of Renzu and the launch of SurveyMonkey Intelligence, we’re removing the barriers of time, difficulty, and cost in getting mobile app data — just as the company did 17 years ago when it established the online survey space and democratized the feedback process,” said Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey.

SurveyMonkey Intelligence provides users with granular data around mobile usage, revenue, and even churn. It tracks information like monthly active users, weekly active users, user engagement, sessions, audience demographics, app affinity, number of downloads, revenue, average revenue per daily active user, and more. You can compare up to five apps against each other to see how they stack up, how they overlap, and more.

You can scan across iOS and Android to see any comparisons, as well as adjust the time period according to your research. There are over a thousand apps that you can look up data for, and Agrawal told VentureBeat that if one wasn’t listed, it’s probably because its sample data doesn’t pass SurveyMonkey’s comfort test.

A leaderboard section is also available in this offering and can show you data around the top active users by month or by week, separated by overall or newer apps. Other categories include top apps with the most average days used per week and month, retention, and more.

All data can be exported as a CSV or an image so you can share the graphs and information with others.

Agrawal explained that SurveyMonkey Intelligence data is pulled from a “large national sample of users that have agreed to join our panel and share data.” It’s all aggregated and anonymized, something that SurveyMonkey customers may find useful in determining who’s using a particular app. He declined to provide specifics on how large the sample size is, but he said that the data only applies to app usage in the U.S., although SurveyMonkey is looking at expanding internationally later.

For the past few months, a few companies have participated in SurveyMonkey’s beta program providing feedback. The mobile app insight model was validated by customers that felt “the data was good enough to make good business decisions.”

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It might seem that SurveyMonkey is entering the same market as services like App Annie and Yahoo’s Flurry, but Agrawal disagrees, saying that his offering is more than looking at your own app — it’s about tracking the data of your competitors. Also, he thinks that it’s frustrating that some services charge what he sees as exorbitantly high prices for that data. Instead, SurveyMonkey democratizes the data and offers a self-serve model, Agrawal said.

SurveyMonkey Intelligence is available today with a freemium model. At its most basic level, customers will receive up to 14 days of historical data, along with limited metrics like monthly active users and download rankings. There’s also a $79 per month starter plan that gives you 30 days of historical data and additional metrics. For $849 per month, you’ll get access to 180 days of historical data, revenue access, and leaderboard views. There is an enterprise model that provides virtually unrestricted access to everything on the platform, but the price for that hasn’t been disclosed.

“SurveyMonkey Intelligence makes it easier for app publishers to get the critical data they need to remain competitive in today’s crowded mobile landscape,” Agrawal said. “Our platform empowers users to confidently research what to build next, understand areas for improvement and identify emerging mobile trends.”