The Charticle

100 million strong, but how has Angry Birds Go! found its audience on Google Play?

Checking out Angry Birds Go!, Epic, Stella and Transformers

100 million strong, but how has Angry Birds Go! found its audience on Google Play?

It's been almost a year since Rovio released its first from-scratch free-to-play game, the Exient-developed Angry Birds Go!.

And despite some early misgiving about the gameplay - it's a downhill kart racer, not a pure kart racer - the game seems to have performed well.

It's been top 10 top grossing in 104 countries for iPhone and 128 countries for iPad; indeed Rovio has just announced that across iOS and Android, the game has received 107 million downloads.

Of course, following Angry Birds Go!, Rovio has released a bunch of F2P games, with Angry Birds Stellar, Angry Birds Epic and most recently Angry Birds Transformers covering different genres and audience types.

Angry Birds Go!

So in this sponsored version of the Charticle, we've decide to delve into how taking its key franchise free-to-play has worked out for Rovio.

Angry or happy?

One of the nice feature of the SimilarWeb Pro platform is that you can compare the performance of multiple games on the same graph.

Using the 'Google Play Keywords' feature on SimilarWeb, we'll find out which apps are ranked for the term - 'Angry birds'. We can do this across different countries, but for this example we'll pick 'United States'. Going over the apps that are ranked for the main brand term of games released by Rovio, we can compare their popularity over time.

Looking at the US top grossing Google Play chart over the past three months, we can see that as the oldest game Angry Birds Go! isn't a particularly strong performer.

Instead, it's Angry Birds Epic that is highest in the charts, at least until the recent launch of Angry Birds Transformers.

Angry Birds Stella, meanwhile, launched fairly strongly but then quickly fell away.

Tracking traffic

Aside from app store graphs, SimilarWeb lets you drill down into store analysis; something estimated by its tracking of user behaviour.

For example, we can see the relative ranking of search in the following graph, which shows that Angry Bird Epic was the top search term for the majority of the past six weeks. 

The comparative search ranking of four Angry Birds games in Google Play

In additional to analysing specific keywords, we can also analyse the performance of individual games - in this case we'll look at Angry Birds Go! performance on Google  Play, looking at ranking graphs that can be filtered by chart, country and time range.

We'll first look at the In-Store Traffic sources for Angry Birds Go! in the US over the past three months.

In-store search is the key traffic source with 35 percent, closely followed My Apps pages. Referring Apps and Charts are roughly at the same level, although Featuring is much lower, accounting for around 7 percent of traffic, although 4 percent of this came from when the game was featured in New Releases Games, which was the third largest single traffic source.

Traffic from Rovio's Developer Page is smaller still - 4 percent.

In-Store Search has been the main traffic source for Angry Birds Go! within Google Play

If we look at External Traffic (that's external to Google Play), search is once again the highest single traffic source at 47 percent. Referrals are another strong source at 32 percent, while Direct Traffic is the other significant traffic source for people coming to the Angry Birds Go! page.

Search and Referrals have been strong External Traffic Sources for Angry Birds Go!

We can also get more detail about traffic sources, with Google unsurprisingly #1 accounting for 37 percent of traffic, followed by Direct traffic at 19 percent, referrals from the Angry Birds Go! website at 19 percent, Bing search at 5 percent, with Softonic's Angry Birds Go! page being the fifth largest traffic source at 2.5 percent.

The top 10 External Traffic Source Details for Angry Birds Go!

Next we can look at the In-Store Keywords people are using to find Angry Birds Go!.

Unsurprisingly, "angry birds" and "angry birds go" make up the vast majority of traffic: 82 percent. Indeed, of the top 10 search terms, only three don't contain the phrase "angry birds" and one of those is "bad piggies" which is clearly part of the overall Angry Birds franchise.

The top 10 In-Store Keywords for Angry Birds Go!

The final piece of analysis we can do is look at the wider key words being used external to the store. Again the vast majority include the terms "angry birds go". The first one not to is "skylanders swap force android app" at #18, which accounted for 0.37 percent of traffic.

You can sign up for SimilarWeb app analysis platform, which covers an in-store and external traffic analysis, as well as keyword analysis within Google Play.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.