The mobile advertising space is extremely competitive. As a supply-side platform (SSP), this means your revenue is always in jeopardy, whether from rival SSPs, emerging technologies, or the inability to adequately address app publisher concerns and objections.

To guarantee the success and competitive excellence of your platform, you need the best app market research tools available. With 42matters, you can benchmark competitor solutions, track threats to your market share, create detailed product collateral, and make data-informed roadmapping decisions—all of which contribute to robust, churn-proof installed bases.

In this article, we demonstrate three ways to use 42matters for securing your revenue. We focus on how SSPs have used our data to optimize data collection, sales and marketing, and win-loss analysis.

Here are three tips for protecting your revenue with competitive intelligence:

1. Keep an Eye on Market Trends: Track winning SDKs to help your product team build market-informed roadmaps.
2. Equip Sales and Marketing With Better Data: Provide detailed collateral and intelligence for outbound campaigns.
3. Enhance Win-Loss Analysis: Use data to assess threats, understand churn, and contextualize wins and losses.

Tip #1 → Keep an Eye on Market Trends: Track winning SDKs to help your product team build market-informed roadmaps.

Market conditions are in constant flux. New competitors emerge, old competitors fizzle out, and innovative technologies create sudden shifts in demand.

While it may be tedious staying up to date on these changes, they’re nevertheless important to monitor as they provide valuable intel on SSPs dominating both your target verticals and the mobile market more generally. Once you’re equipped with this information, you can evaluate how your offering stacks up and make informed product decisions based on your learnings.

Indeed, with the right set of tools, you can identify trending SDKs and infer why they’re having so much success. This will help you triage your product roadmap, prioritize high-value updates, and ultimately build more attractive offerings that draw in new publishers, foster “stickiness,” and generate reliable revenue.

How to research competitor SSPs with 42matters:

With 42matters, you can use SDK integrations and app-ads.txt files to identify competitor SSPs and begin collecting competitive intelligence. We’ve covered the app-ads.txt side of things before, so for now we’ll show you how to fit the 42matters SDK Explorer into your workflow for competitor research.

First, launch the 42matters SDK Explorer and select the Ad Networks filter in the Categories section:

Next sort by installations:

From here, scroll to the solutions that are more or less in the same range (or higher) as your platform. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your SDK is installed in roughly 2,000 apps. Here are your near-peer competitors:

Next, review each SSP by clicking on their SDK name and opening up their 42matters profile. Let’s use Taboola as an example:

Here you can see a variety of insights, including all iOS and Android apps that use their services, their market penetration by store category, their installation and removal trends, and more.

With this information you can assess whether they’re growing or contracting, which apps they target, and, most importantly, whether they target the same apps you target:

To do this, click the View all apps button in the Apps That Use This SDK section. This will take you to the Explorer:

To see which of these apps also use your SDK, add your platform to the SDK Integrations filter and select HAVE ALL.

If you find any overlapping apps (and assuming you have a good relationship with them) you can touch base with the publisher to gain valuable competitor intel. You can then leverage this to inform how you respond to them as a competitive threat.

Tip #2 → Equip Sales and Marketing With Better Data: Provide detailed collateral and intelligence for outbound campaigns.

Along the same lines, the intel you gather from surveying the competitive landscape can be used to guide the production of high-value sales and marketing resources and launch highly-targeted outbound campaigns.

In the first case, you should start by identifying the biggest threats to your business and zeroing in on their unique selling points. From here, you can craft ultra-specific content designed to counter their advantages and position your product as the more attractive offering. Recommended formats include competitor battle cards, objection handling documents, and other pieces of collateral designed to win over and retain app publishers.

In the second case, you can use competitive insights to prepare outbound sales and marketing campaigns with clearly defined audiences and purposeful messaging. Common outbound strategies include poaching campaigns and Ideal Publisher Profile (IPP) campaigns. Poaching campaigns are a fixture of account-based marketing (ABM) and refers to campaigns that center on converting publishers that use competitor platforms. IPP campaigns, meanwhile, entail pursuing publishers that share certain key traits with your existing installed base. Either way, both require deep insight into app intelligence—both app metadata and SSP installed bases.

How to build better outbound campaign audiences with 42matters:

With 42matters, you can build highly targeted audiences for outbound campaigns. Let’s go over the two types mentioned above: poaching campaigns and IPP campaigns.

For poaching campaigns, start by finding your key competitors in the SDK Explorer. To do this, search for their SDK using the search bar. Let’s use PubMatic as an example:

As with the previous tip, open up the SDK’s profile and navigate to the Apps That Use This SDK section.

From here you can select either their iOS or Android installed base. For now, let’s go with Android (and in any case the steps are the same). Select View all apps to open up the Explorer:

This will show all Android apps that use the PubMatic SDK. If you’d like to refine this list to focus on the highest value targets, you can filter by a variety of metadata and performance metrics. For apps with larger user bases, filter by downloads or MAUs. For apps that target the American market, use the Country Availability filter. Etc.

Here are all Android apps that 1) use PubMatic, 2) have at least 500,000 downloads, 3) have at least 10,000 MAUs, and 4) are available in the United States:

The next step is to export this list so you can use it for building your campaign. To do this, begin by clicking Edit Columns and selecting the data points you want to include in your export.

Once you’ve finalized your columns, click the Export Apps button next to Edit Columns. You’ll need to add a few details for your export, but once you finish this process, you’ll receive a CSV doc via email with your poaching campaign audience.

Next up, for IPP campaigns, a good place to start is with the SDK Explorer’s Market Share by App Category section.

Review your top categories. In this case Card, Board, Word, Weather, and Puzzle are PubMatic’s top five. From here, launch the app Explorer and begin your query by setting the Categories filter to your target categories:

Once you apply the filter, you’ll see all apps in these categories:

Now, obviously 106,866 apps may be more than you’d like to target. So consider it a launching point. Apply more filters to zoom in on best-fit apps and follow the steps above to export your list.

Tip #3 → Enhance Win-Loss Analysis: Use data to assess threats, understand churn, and contextualize wins and losses.

Finally, when analyzing wins and losses in the app market, it’s worth noting that not all accounts are of equal value. Some publishers are more popular than others—they have more downloads, more monthly active users, more user reviews, etc.

So, when putting together win-loss analyses, you should conduct in-depth reviews of lost deals to understand not only which competitor was chosen over your platform but also the comparative quality of the lost opportunities.

That is, you should analyze churned publishers based on the value of their ad space. Ask the following questions: How many impressions did these clients generate for advertisers? What percentage of your revenue comes from these impressions? Use the answers to prioritize win-back efforts, retention strategies, and more.

How to analyze wins and losses with 42matters:

The 42matters Explorer is a great tool for conducting win-loss analyses. You can use it to put growth into perspective by reviewing localized and global performance metrics like downloads, monthly active users (MAU), ratings, and reviews. This will help you appraise the reach of your inventory.

For example, let’s say you onboarded one new app (OneFootball - Soccer Scores) last month, while another churned (AutoScout24: Buy & sell cars). On paper it looks like the addition of OneFootball merely offset the loss of AutoScout24, but let’s look at the numbers:

Over the last three months, OneFootball averaged ~10 million monthly active users (MAU), while AutoScout24 averaged just ~8.6 million. So, the actual change isn’t one app for one app, but an audience of 10 million replacing an audience of 8.6 million. That is, in this scenario, the win-loss analysis should show a net gain of 1.4 million potential ad impressions.

With these same performance metrics, you can also see whether newly churned or onboarded apps are growing or shrinking to ascertain the general trajectory of your inventory’s reach.

Moreover, with the country-specific stats, you can see where these apps have the majority of their audiences. So, if you know that 1,000 impressions in Japan tend to generate more ROI than 1,000 impressions in Canada, you can weigh the win-loss analysis accordingly.

Finally, you can use the Explorer to spot patterns. By conducting a holistic review of churned apps, you can see if there are any ad sellers that typically win over your clients, if apps in particular categories are more likely to churn, etc. The same goes for analyzing patterns among onboarded apps. In essence, with 42matters, you can look beyond mere wins and losses and understand the true value of each account.

To learn more, take the Explorer out for a free test drive!