How To Find What OTHER Apps and Sites Your Customers Use

Over the past five years as a mobile and digital strategist – there is one question that is asked consistently from business partners, marketers, innovation teams and clients:

Is there a way to determine what OTHER mobile apps and sites my customers are using?

The question usually arises as companies envision new digital products, build transformation or experience strategies, make roadmap prioritization and create new partnerships or vet investments. This would be extremely important data inside an organization as it would allow them to determine what customers are doing, what types of capabilities they are using, and how often they are using them.‍

And for a long time the answer was no. But, after some review we found some available data sources and developed an interesting reporting method that can be used to make it 100% possible for your organization.

Using behavioral data sources from sources such as App Annie, SimilarWeb and Alexa.com, along with census data and your own usage data from Web and Mobile – it can be stitched together quite easily.

Let’s illustrate how that it can be done in the mobile channel specifically.

App Annie’s Cross App Usage report is singlehandedly the most impressive data reporting you can find to analyze the behavior of mobile app users on iOS and Android. It is a module in their Audience Intelligence subscription package. It allows you to select one mobile app and then breaks down the usage of other 3rd party mobile applications to create a rank of the top mobile apps that app’s audience subsequently uses.

You can sort it by category or just rank stack the results to 1000 apps.

For example, let’s use Lyft. If you have ever wondered what other applications Lyft users use most frequently, you can select the app and then see a detailed breakdown of other mobile apps and their install penetration, monthly usage metrics, etc. against the Lyft audience base.‍

In the example below the tool breaks out Lyft against a Food and Drink category, and shows that 6.47% of Lyft’s monthly user base ALSO use Postmates. And is in fact 7.83x more likely to use Postmates than the general mobile user.

This is a powerful tool providing usage insights your own in house data can’t provide.

HOWEVER – this data only shows you your mobile user base (the data is against the number of people who use your app).

To get a full breakout of your entire customer base, you need to do a little more work.

Let’s look at a financial services provider like Discover…

Discover wants to know where their entire customer are spending time outside of their mobile app. How many of them use social media apps like Facebook and Snapchat, or fintech apps like Venmo or even competitor credit card issuers like Capital One etc.

Public data tells us that roughly 50 million people are Discover customers. Financial service providers typically see about around 35% of their customer base active in mobile over a 30 day period. Using the App Annie tool outlined above we can get a read on the mobile habits of 17.5 million Discover customers. If they don’t use the Discover app, App Annie can’t track their activity.

So what about the other 22.5 million (roughly 45%) of the Discover customers who were mobile active (just not with Discover’s mobile app)?

App Annie’s Cross App tool can also show you the entire mobile universe over that reporting period. In any given month you can use the tool to determine overall mobile usage against the general US population. Usually this is about 75-80% of general population.

Using a pretty simple math model you can report out on the entire Discover customer base and their OTHER app usage based on the following parameters: their app users, their overall customer base, the general population’s mobile usage, and a couple of other data points.

We’d love to show you how that’s done and how you can use that data to create a really compelling view into the need to be a “distributed experience” company.