With data from the entire catalog of apps on the App Store, peer group benchmarks provide accurate, relevant, and privacy-preserving comparisons for apps across categories, business models, and download volumes. Learn how to take advantage of these insights to improve your app’s performance.
With peer group benchmarks in App Analytics, you can put your app’s performance into context by comparing it to that of similar apps on the App Store. Compare your results across several key metrics, including conversion rate, day 1, day 7, and day 28 retention rate, crash rate, and average proceeds per paying user to understand your app’s performance across the customer journey. Peer group benchmark metrics are defined in the same way as the standard app metrics in App Analytics and are displayed in weekly intervals.
Peer groups are created using a number of different attributes to help ensure you can compare your app’s performance to the most relevant benchmark:
Apps in the same App Store category are grouped together in the same peer group. You’ll be able to view benchmarks for each App Store category you belong to, as long as there are enough apps in that peer group to ensure individual app performance is protected, and your app won’t be included in a category that you haven’t assigned to your app. You can view which App Store categories your app is included in by reviewing your app information in App Store Connect.
Apps with the same business model are grouped together in the same peer group. The available business models are free, freemium, paid, paymium, and subscriptions. Apps with In-App Purchases are considered freemium or paymium. Apps that have an associated cost to download are considered paid or paymium. In order to be considered part of the subscription business model, a freemium or paymium app must generate at least 50% of its revenue from auto-renewable subscriptions.
Apps with similar levels of download volume in a given week are grouped together into low download volume, medium download volume, and high download volume peer groups. Apps are placed into these groups based on the number of first-time downloads and re-downloads they have compared to the rest of the apps in the peer group.
Learn how to view benchmark data
If there’s a particular metric that you want to improve, you can take advantage of helpful tools and capabilities in App Store Connect, such as product page optimization, custom product pages, and TestFlight. Here are some options to consider:
The conversion rate metric helps you understand how often people download your app after viewing it on the App Store. A higher conversion rate means you’re able to acquire users more efficiently. For example, if your app was viewed on the App Store on 100 devices for a certain period of time, and 25 people downloaded or redownloaded it, your conversion rate is 25%.
Compare different app icons, screenshots, and app previews on your App Store product page to find out which assets resonate with people most. You can test up to three alternate product page versions against the original, view the results in App Analytics, and set the best performing version to display to everyone on the App Store. For example, you might see if changing your app icon to a different style or color results in increased conversion.
Learn about product page optimization
Use custom product pages to create additional versions of your App Store product page that showcase different features or content within your app — such as a particular sport, character, show, or gameplay feature — and share them with different audiences through unique URLs.
Learn about custom product pages
Localizing your app helps make it relevant to a variety of cultures and languages, and provides an opportunity to grow your business. Consider localizing your app and product page to support different languages and appeal to local audiences.
A paying user is a unique user, based on Apple ID, who paid for an app or In-App Purchase. Proceeds per paying user are calculated as the estimated amount you’ll receive for sales of your apps and In-App Purchases divided by your app’s total number of paying users for the selected period. For example, if your app’s total proceeds for a period are $100, and your app has 100 paying users, your proceeds per paying user are $1.
If your proceeds per paying user are below that of your peer group, consider re-assessing your In-App Purchase pricing to decide whether a different price point might be appropriate. For auto-renewable subscriptions, you might view results by territory in App Analytics to evaluate whether setting different prices per region may help increase the number of repeat payers or your revenue per transaction.
Learn about managing prices for auto-renewable subscriptions
Use App Analytics to identify sources that drive the most proceeds per paying user and focus your marketing and acquisition efforts on those channels.
If your app or game offers consumable In-App Purchases, consider giving your users items for free during their onboarding experience. You might show them how to use it so they can understand the value and benefit, which might encourage a future purchase. You can also review the Human Interface Guidelines to get design best practices on offering In-App Purchases.
Learn about design best practices for offering In-App Purchases
The crash rate is the average number of crashes per session for the selected period. For example, if your app had 10 crashes and 100 sessions for the selected period, your crash rate would be 10%.
View crash and deletion data in App Analytics by platform, app version, and operating system version to pinpoint potential causes and create a better user experience. You can find more detailed crash logs in Xcode.
Learn about viewing metrics in App Analytics
Learn about viewing crash logs in Xcode
TestFlight makes it easy to invite users to test your apps and App Clips and collect valuable feedback before releasing your apps on the App Store. You can invite up to 10,000 testers using just their email address or by sharing a public link.
Retention measures how often users come back to engage with your app over time. It’s calculated by dividing the number of devices that opened your app in the days after downloading it by the total number of devices that downloaded it on the same day, and opened the app in the last 30 days. For example, if your app was first downloaded on 100 devices on May 1, and 20 devices are still active with at least one session on May 8, the day 7 retention rate on May 8 is 20%.
Create In‑App Events to highlight new, timely content updates in your app or game. People can discover your In‑App Events right on the App Store on iOS and iPadOS, so you can showcase your events and expand their reach — whether you’d like to find new users, keep your current users informed, or reconnect with previous users.
Make sure your onboarding flow successfully explains how to use your app and describes the value it provides.
Learn about designing a great onboarding experience
At Apple, we build privacy protections into each of our products and services, including peer group benchmarks in App Store Connect. Peer group benchmark values are only used to provide you with relevant comparisons that help you improve your apps. When creating peer group values, we use a technique called differential privacy, which is the gold standard for ensuring that individual values within a group remain private. Every week, we ensure that each peer group has at least a certain number of apps before it’s released, and we add a certain amount of noise to each data point to provide an extra layer of protection. Apple’s own apps are also included where the customer journey is directly comparable to help create a full and complete picture of performance for a particular category, business model, and download volume tier.
Peer group benchmarks are based off App Store, app usage, and transaction data from devices running a minimum of iOS 8, macOS 11, or tvOS 9. Peer group benchmarks only use app usage data from users who’ve agreed to share their app analytics with app developers.