How Can We Find the Best Selling Spy Apps?
The main spy app companies don’t publish their sales figures although some do make claims as to the number of downloads or active users. We can’t really accept random claims as true. I did reach out to the providers for sales data but unsurprisingly they didn’t want to share.
So, how can we get an accurate picture of the best-selling spy apps without actual sales data? We can’t! But we can get some clear indications of popularity using tools to estimate traffic. The amount of traffic going to a website could give us an idea of the popularity of the product.
This still presents some challenges. First off, there are several online tools that can estimate traffic to any website but they all give different results. Each tool calculates the traffic in different ways and uses different data to begin with. This leads to substantial differences in the final estimates.
The tools all acknowledge this and are meant to be used as relative guides. To overcome this, all the data I have used is collected using Ahrefs. In theory, at least, they are all being judged in the same way.
Ahrefs is one of the big players in online analysis but they recently published some research on the accuracy of their traffic estimates. They explain in detail how their estimates are calculated and why their numbers are off by as much as 50%.
I can confirm that using their traffic estimates against my own accurate website data does amount to more than a 50% deviation.
But, as I said at least by using the same method and tool we can judge the traffic to each site relatively. All things considered, the numbers should be off by similar amounts.
All Traffic is Not Created Equal
Measuring the traffic is not the only challenge. Other factors can influence the Value of website visitors. Where (in the world) does the traffic come from? Is it to a blog article or a buy now page? I delve into this a bit more in the charts below.
What About Paid Traffic?
For this analysis, I did not look at any sources of paid traffic. Ahrefs can provide organic search data – so to keep things simple that is what I used.
The Top Spy Apps Stats – Our Sample
There are dozens of phone monitoring apps online of varying popularity and quality. New ones come and go every year. For this analysis, I chose 15 of the most popular apps. Some have been around for years and some are fairly new.
The purpose of this experiment isn’t to discuss the quality of these apps – just to estimate their popularity. Here are the programs we used:
- mSpy
- Hoverwatch
- Xnspy
- Spyic
- FlexiSPY
- Clevguard
- Minspy
- Umobix
- iKeymonitor
- Cocospy
- Spyzie
- Spyier
- Thetruthspy
- Spyera
- Theonespy
So let’s have a look at some figures and see how we go:
Total Website Traffic and United States Traffic Data
This graph shows you the total traffic to each website for every spy app in my sample. Beside this is the amount of traffic the apps get from the U.S.
When looking at this data you need to take into account the potential value of the traffic based on where it comes from. U.S. traffic is widely accepted as the most valuable. This is apparent in most statistical analyses.
Simply put, the chances of making a sale online are greatly increased if your visitors come from the United States. Advertising costs also reflect this. Depending on where you source your data the largest e-commerce countries are the U.S. followed by the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, and Japan.
Looking at the graph you can see that Hoverwatch has almost 300 thousand visits worldwide but only 60k visits from the U.S. Over 150k visits to Hoverwatch are from India – half their total traffic. Think how this could be reflected in sales figures.
mSpy comes out top on U.S. traffic with over 95k visits. Remember this is for total website traffic – so it includes visits to blog articles as well as shopping pages. A visitor is much further down the buying funnel if they come to the site through a blog article. Next, I looked at traffic to the homepage only.
Traffic to the Spy App Homepages Only
This data set aims to see what traffic levels are like if we take blogs and informational articles out of the equation. A visit directly to the app homepage is much more likely to result in a sale.
Here again, we see that Hoverwatch comes out on top with 171k visits to its homepage. mSpy comes second with almost 103k. But again we need to take into account the fact that the majority of Hoverwatch traffic is not from the U.S. it is from India making it potentially less valuable.
Brand Search Volumes – U.S. and Global Searches
Next, I wanted to look at the popularity of the spy app brand names. The table shows the estimated volume of searches for the brand names. You can see Global brand searches and then U.S. brand searches for each phone spy app.
Here mSpy comes out the clear winner with 284k global searches for “mSpy” and 58k U.S. searches. This data gives a clear indication of how well-known each app is both globally and in the United States.
The table below gives the totals pulled from Ahrefs reports:
All Spy App Data
All data is from Ahrefs – June 2022
| Spy App | Total Traffic | US Traffic | Homepage Traffic | US Brand Search | Global Brand Search |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mSpy | 177,547 | 90,548 | 102,883 | 58,000 | 284,000 |
| Hoverwatch | 299,000 | 59,800 | 171,000 | 33,000 | 114,000 |
| Xnspy | 94,214 | 30,148 | 35,964 | 15,000 | 108,000 |
| Spyic | 70,778 | 20,525 | 24,803 | 12,000 | 44,000 |
| FlexiSPY | 65,877 | 20,421 | 24,053 | 11,000 | 47,000 |
| Clevguard | 122,679 | 53,978 | 16,981 | 11,000 | 46,000 |
| Minspy | 18,590 | 8,200 | 11,746 | 11,000 | 26,000 |
| Umobix | 7,900 | 5,100 | 3,450 | 7,000 | 14,000 |
| iKeymonitor | 46,327 | 16,214 | 12,664 | 6,500 | 25,000 |
| Cocospy | 31,900 | 7,018 | 9,600 | 5,800 | 30,000 |
| Spyzie | 42,325 | 4,655 | 9,894 | 3,600 | 65,000 |
| Spyier | 15,599 | 3,000 | 8,092 | 2,900 | 16,000 |
| Thetruthspy | 53,320 | 17,595 | 24,384 | 2,300 | 19,000 |
| Spyera | 10,242 | 4,700 | 3,281 | 2,100 | 11,000 |
| Theonespy | 21,710 | 3,907 | 4,209 | 1,300 | 4,800 |
So What is The Best Selling Spy App?
As I said from the start without access to the actual sales data we can only make an educated guess. By analyzing the website traffic data we can draw some conclusions. Taking into account:
- the value attached to visitors from the United States
- Homepage traffic (not blog articles)
- Brand search volume (and recognition)
mSpy is clearly the market leader in this analysis. It is far ahead in all United States data which is much more likely to lead to paying customers.
Although Hoverwatch has some impressive numbers, over half its traffic comes from India. Digging deeper into their traffic reveals lots of traffic from other countries. Almost half the visitors coming to Hoverwatch do so through their blog articles.
The next group of apps is interesting as they all compete very closely based on the data. Xnspy, Spyic, FlexiSPY, Clevguard, and Minspy all have strong U.S. brand searches and traffic.
As stated, this analysis is not looking at spy app quality or recommendations. It is frustrating that it is not possible to get any accurate data on spy app sales statistics but this analysis does give some clear indications of popularity.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to reach out on our contact page.
