We’re excited to officially announce MAMA London! Join AppsFlyer this July 4th in London as top mobile marketing experts share their knowledge and experiences. At AppsFlyer, we know how challenging a mobile marketer’s job is: measurement, attribution, analytics, multi-touch, cross-device, omni-channel, cohorts, LTV, ROI…. it’s a handful, and that’s an understatement. That’s why we’ve set out to help marketers overcome these challenges and help them do their jobs better.

Enter MAMA (Mobile Attribution & Marketing Analytics in case you’ve wondered). At our MAMA events we aim to bring together a compelling, entertaining, and inspirational agenda dedicated to the mobile marketer. MAMA is built on two pillars, value driven content and localization. MAMA London is our 7th iteration and we have secured some of the most interesting and influential speakers in the UK.

Learn at MAMA London

The theme we chose for MAMA London is Mobile Matters; we want to spark discussions on the key issues that matter most to the mobile marketer. Here are some select topics on the MAMA London Agenda:

• The State of App Marketing in Europe – a deep dive in the data behind apps in the UK and Europe
• Investing in Mobile UK & Europe – leading UK and European investors discuss why they invest in mobile and apps
• Best Practices – Learn from top mobile marketers about how to create better creatives, secure budgets and other key issues facing mobile marketers 
• GDPR – Get a first hand perspective of how a top app, Treatwell, is dealing with GDPR and UA
• Sports & Data – Rory Campbell from West Ham United discusses what marketers have known for a long time, good data gives you a competitive advantage.
• Fighting Mobile Fraud – Learn how to fight mobile fraud from leading UA experts and mobile marketers.
• The Future Mobile Marketer – What will the mobile marketer look like in 10 years? Come listen to young accomplished mobile marketers talk about their day-to-day and what they think about the future of mobile marketing
• Agency + Brand – Hear how a leading mobile agency and some of its biggest clients work together in an open discussion on-stage.
• Have a laugh – Special guest comedian, Dara O’briain, will be tickling everyone’s funny bone, because life can’t all be business.

Meet (some of) our Speakers

	Nenad Marovac – Founder & Managing Partner, DN Capital Nenad Marovac has more than 25 years of venture capital and private equity investment experience in the technology and media sectors. Nenad is the Founder and Managing Partner of DN Capital. Nenad focuses on investments in marketplaces, software as a service (SAAS), fintech, consumer mobile applications and digital health companies. Amongst his select investments are Shazam Entertainment (sold to Apple), Auto1 (largest online marketplace for used cars), Apsmart (acquired by Thomson Reuters), Datanomic (acquired by Oracle). Nenad received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
	Greg Grimmer – COO, Fetch Formerly MD of Zed Media and founding partner at HMDG, Greg joined Fetch in 2014 with a brief to expand the company into new markets and services. A noted spokesman on digital advertising, and author of an influential column, Greg’s also a failed stand-up comic and self-confessed frustrated writer.
	Ira Krachanovskaya – Growth Marketing Lead, Badoo Ira is the Growth Marketing Lead at Badoo, the world’s largest dating app with over 350 million people. Previous to Badoo, Ira did business for Avazu Holdings running UA projects for companies like Amazon, Lazada, OLX, Namshi, IGG, Square Enix, Playrix, GameLoft, SocialPoint.
	Rory Campbell – Head of Technical Analysis, West Ham United Head of Technical Analysis at West Ham United, Rory oversees all of their analysis around player recruitment and opposition analysis. With a background in professional gambling and using statistical modelling to gain a financial edge he now implements similar models and processes in the professional game.
	Oded Onn – Global Head of Digital Marketing, Gett Oded Onn is the Global Head of Digital Marketing at Gett, leading user acquisition, re-engagement, ASO and SEO worldwide.  He has more than 15 years of experience in various leadership, marketing, and product roles in the mobile, management consulting and gaming industries with Funtomic, Deloitte Consulting US, PayPal and others.  Oded holds an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and History from Tel Aviv University.
	Lukasz Kwiecien – Senior UA Manager Huuuge Games Lukasz Kwiecien is Senior User Acquisition Manager, he leads the media buying team for Huuuge’s flagship title: Huuuge Casino. He has been with Huuuge for 4 years, being responsible for Huuuge Casino since launch as well as may other projects. Passionate about new technologies and of course – gaming. Holds M.A. in Sociology and postgraduate studies in coaching.

If you will be in the London Area on July 4th and wish to attend MAMA London – Request a Spot.

If you a leading mobile marketer and would like to present at MAMA – please email London@appsflyer.com

The post Mobile Matters: MAMA is Coming to London appeared first on AppsFlyer.

This is my second post in the ‘AppsFlyer Story’ series, following my previous post, Uncovering Unbiased Attribution.

Every few months, following our board meeting, we gather all of our employees from 15 offices around the world, for an ‘all-hands’ meeting. We do this to bring clarity to the entire team and share some of the items discussed with the board. Last month, as we celebrated our 400 employee milestone, we held an ‘all-hands’ meeting that was especially important in our development as a company, which is why I decided to share some of what we discussed with you here.

From the very beginning, we made the decision to represent the buyer/marketer side in our ecosystem, and avoid any internal conflicts of interest. This positioning allowed us to have an open and transparent dialog with customers and build the ultimate technology, product and services to represent their interests and eventually make them even more successful. Deciding to be radically unbiased and independent has been a major factor in building the trust our clients and partners have in us. In retrospect, while we never officially defined ourselves as a customer-obsessed company, that was our northern star from the getgo and the key to our success. This vision is what led the development and growth of AppsFlyer as a company.

Customer Services was the very first department we built, while the last department we started to build was our Sales organization. Up until 2016, we didn’t really have sales teams, and any ‘selling’ was executed by our Client Services team, who truly understood the prospects’ needs and how we can deliver them value. After all, what’s better than talking to someone who knows the ins and outs of the product and the market? The fact that the same person demoing the platform, was also the one taking care of on-boarding and ongoing support was extremely successful at the time. It enabled a very healthy discussion with customers and prospects and we gained a very intimate relationship with our clients that enabled us to listen and build the best product to fit their needs.

When we opened each of our global offices, we hired customer service executives to lead them, to make sure that our existing customers will enjoy a great user experience, that will eventually lead to more sales. My simple mission to every new country manager was this: let’s make the companies in your region as successful as possible.

We finally started to build our sales team to support enterprise clients that required tailored processes, legal agreements, compliances, and InfoSec due diligence. Even then, the core DNA of what made us successful from those earlier days, remained our primary target when building the new sales organization. There is nothing more frustrating than speaking to a sales person trying to push a product they don’t really understand, and we wanted to make sure our customers will never have to experience that.

People are often surprised to hear that this is the AppsFlyer story. I noticed that many companies tend to ramp their sales teams first, without having the right product and/or client services teams to deliver on sales’ expectations. How can a company build its brand with over-promising and under-delivering? It really can’t. So we decided to have an honest and transparent sales process, and always prefer to over-deliver. This enables us to provide a better user experience, even if it means we occasionally lose an opportunity due to our honesty. In fact, we did lose a few potential clients in the past to other companies who over-sold their product. Many of them chose to switch to AppsFlyer after losing trust in companies that couldn’t deliver on the promises made by their sales teams.

Today, I’m thrilled to say we have an amazing sales team made of marketing attribution and analytics experts. While we are not a consulting firm, we have gathered a unique set of knowledge and expertise within our market that is now deeply integrated within the entire company, in an effort led by our newly formed Learning & Development department.

#2 is driven by #1. Which makes the framework even simpler, “Let’s make our clients successful” and everything else will follow

What does it mean to be Customer Obsessed?

This could mean different things for different companies. For us, above all else, it means to continue being unbiased and independent and place our customers’ at the forefront of every decision we make.

Being customer obsessed is all about how we make people feel about AppsFlyer. While feeling is a complex metric, there is no doubt that it is driven by the user experience. Though user experience might be confused with a branded product design and interface, we see it as driven by a combination of every touchpoint people have with AppsFlyer. Our Products, Client Services, Support, Partners, Training, Sales, Marketing, Vendors, Candidates, Employees, and Investors,  every one of these affects how people feel about AppsFlyer. For example: There is no way a company can provide a great user experience, and a bad employee experience. Happy, motivated employees are part of what makes the company great.

In the weeks leading up to our all-hands meeting, we held an anonymous survey among company employees, to gain insights on employee satisfaction and learn what we can and should change. We were delighted to learn that, when asked “How proud are you to be part of AppsFlyer?” the average answer was 9.1, with 95% of the ratings being between 8-10. What drives this feeling? Everything! The people, teamwork, our product, the mission, our company culture, and so much more.

We decided to build these simple frameworks that will enable AppsFlyer’s 400+ employees to make better decisions independently. We encourage all of our employees to keep these two thinking frameworks in mind and think about how they can support them.

User Experience is our Brand. We call it the AppsFlyer Experience

These days, you can’t have a great brand if you have a sub-par product or service, while trying to cover for it with fancy advertising and old-school branding. Think about how cable companies, cellular companies, banks, and insurance companies make you feel. Today, everything is much more transparent and amplified, for better or worse. The way we see it, the AppsFlyer Experience IS our brand, as well as a core part of our company culture.

Think about the last time you had a really good user experience, a WOW moment, from one of your vendors. WOW moments are rare. They are rare because it is hard to keep up the same level of work throughout the entire life cycle of the customer. We make an effort to WOW our clients and prospects at every step of the way – from marketing, to sales, to support, and throughout their continued success. In doing so, we build mutual trust, and eventually turn them into our best advocates (And these are just a few recent examples).

This is one of my favorite examples. We made a habit of sending our clients a cake to celebrate their major achievements and exciting milestones. This is made possible thanks to strong relationships we built with them, primarily through AppsFlyer’s incredible Customer Services team. Our clients love receiving these, which not only makes us happy, but also amplifies their positive feeling towards the AppsFlyer brand and the people behind it. That being said, try to imagine a vendor that provides you with poor service throughout the year, and then sends you a cake to celebrate your latest funding round. I very much doubt that it will put a smile on your face. If anything, it will create resentment, and damage your view of their brand. It’s old school in the worst possible way, and you’ll see right through it. Brands can’t get away with that kind of behaviour anymore. For them to really succeed, the user experience they provide needs to provide value, be honest, transparent, and consistently amazing.

WOW is officially added to ‘Our Beliefs’

To us, WOW means going the extra mile, over delivering, and providing the unexpected to everyone around us and to each other. We also encourage our team to think about these WOW moments in their personal lives, with their community, friends, families and each other.

We always wanted to create a culture book (and we will) but in the meantime, we decided to make it an iterative process and started by updating our current list of beliefs that we started writing back in 2011. One of them being what we did here  “Make it work, then make it better”.

This list of beliefs all ties back into where I started – the AppsFlyer Experience. It touches every single thing we do and affects every single element of our business. We are better for it, and so are our clients.

So when is the last time you WOWed someone in your life? If it’s been a while, you might want to get on that. There’s no feeling quite like it.

The post Organically Building a Customer Obsessed Culture appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, Spain’s gradual economic recovery has helped fuel a rebirth of Spain’s hi-tech scene (post dotCom boom). The country is slowly building its reputation as fertile ground for start-ups. Both VC investment and the availability of government funds have risen sharply in recent years. Barcelona and Madrid are leading other Spanish cities as tech hubs, but the entrepreneurial ecosystem is expanding to include Valencia, and Bilbao. 

Spain as a Tech Hub

According to Pagan Research, in 2017 Spain’s tech startups investment grew by 45%. Venture capital investments exploded from about €150M in 2013 to almost €800M in 2017, marking an all time high in both investment amounts and number of deals.

A number of notable Spanish tech startups include Letgo, Ticketbis, Privalia, Social Point, and Cabify. Letgo is a free, person-to-person mobile classifieds app named among the “Hottest Startups” by Wired and “Best Apps” by Google. It has raised $475M to date. Ticketbis, an online platform for buying and selling tickets to events, was acquired by eBay for €160M. Privalia, an online e-commerce platform for top fashion brands, sold for €500M. Social Point, one of the top global developers of social games, was acquired by Take-Two Interactive for more than $250M. Cabify, a mobile app startup that has raised $407M, offers a car service with personal vehicles driven by their owners.

And of course there’s Telefonica, Spain’s largest telecommunications and broadband operator and the 7th largest telecom multinational in the world. Telefonica recorded revenues of 52 billion euros in 2017.

As a sign of Barcelona’s recent status as Spain’s leading tech hub, the city hosts the only conference for app marketing & mobile growth professionals in Spain. Applause welcomed almost 300 app marketers to Barcelona in the beginning of June. The event, organized by TheTool, PickASO and AppsFlyer, celebrated its third and most successful year to date. Topics discussed included app store optimization, user acquisition (UA), engagement / retention, and mobile analytics.

Applause 2018 participants

According to a Mobile World Capital Report, in terms of “the most attractive city for founders” Barcelona is on the 3rd place behind Dublin and Berlin.

Mobile is by far the leading sector in terms of share of capital investments. During 2016, Spanish private equity and venture capital firms raised €2.3bn in new funds, 49 per cent more than in 2015; they raised another €1.3bn over the first nine months of 2017. There were 449 venture capital investments in start-ups during the first nine months of 2017, up from 361 deals over the same period in 2016.

Spanish Market Insights

In our analysis of the market, we compared data from Q1 2017 and Q1 2018. This included more than 100 million non-organic installs of 1,100 apps. Overall, we measured $80 million worth of in-app purchases. 

Install trends: The rise of non-organic

Like in the rest of the world, Spanish app marketers are also experiencing the challenge of organic app discovery. The two main reasons are an ever increasing number of apps in the major app stores (over 2 million each in the App Store and Google Play) and fierce competition. As a result, apps increased their investment in marketing to drive new users.

The numbers in Spain clearly illustrate this: from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018, there was a 33% increase in the share of non-organic installs in contrast with a 15% decrease in the share of installs from organic traffic.

Year-over-Year Change in the Share of the App Install Pie (Spain)

In Spain, the ratio of non-organic to organic is 40/60, which is considerably higher than in the rest of Western Europe — Germany, UK, France, Italy, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

Western Europe: Lower Share of Non-Organic Installs

Retention

Retention numbers for Spain paint a bleak picture of app loyalty in the market with only 6-8% of users opening the apps they downloaded after 30 days. But this is common across the globe as engagement, or rather a lack of, is a significant pain for apps.

We can see that non-organic retention is stagnate with only a 2% increase from 2017 to 2018. It appears marketers, overall, can do better as far as retention-driven optimization is concerned. For example, by using retention and cohort reports, in addition to more aggressive re-engagement activities like paid retargeting, push and email. We can see that there is potential with an organic uptick.

Day 30 Retention Rate

Media Cost

The Cost Per Install in Spain increased from $0.80 in Q1 2017 to $1.11 in Q1 2018, a significant 40% jump. But this cost is still significantly cheaper than other Western European countries like Germany and the UK, which could explain why the share of non-organic traffic in the app install pie in Spain is so high. With rising cost, apps need to drive more revenue to remain profitable, which means smarter media buying and a focus on granular measurement of revenue events and other monetization streams for proper optimization.

CPI Trend (USD)

LTV

Indeed, we can see that Spanish marketers focused on revenue optimization, which grew 2.5x From Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. During this time, there was a 20% increase in the 90-day LTV of non-organic installs by Spanish users as compared to only an 8% increase for organic installs. This translates into increased confidence among marketers as a result of their effective use of data for growth marketing.

Day 90 LTV

To demonstrate the innovation coming out of Spain, we recently published two case studies with leading companies: Telefonica and eCooltra.

Telefonica

With $52B in revenues in 2017, Telefonica is Spain’s largest telecommunications and broadband operator. Their mobile app brands include Vibo in Brazil, O2 in Germany and UK and MoviStar in most Spanish speaking countries.

Their goal was to grow their app brands fast using growth marketing. To do this, they needed a clear picture of where users were coming from and what they were doing once they launched the app. In the past, one difficult challenge for them was to integrate additional SDKs anytime they needed to test a new media source. This impacted their product roadmap and app performance.

Telefonica is a company completely driven by data with a wealth of information sources. One common complaint they had was that sometimes data from one side was not the same as the other side and they spent a lot of effort syncing data.  

As they decided to expand into more countries, it was critical for Telefonica to have complete control of what was going on with their apps.

When they decided to go with AppsFlyer for their growth marketing, they realized that with just one SDK, they could execute campaigns easily with any partner in the world. In addition to Facebook and Google, Telefonica is integrated dozens of other media partners around the globe.

AppsFlyer gave them one place to check all of their marketing efforts, optimize and glean valuable unbiased, accurate insights. With AppsFlyer, they measure the entire customer journey and optimize campaigns not based only on an install but also on generating active users. They also track their owned media activities such as short messaging, emailing and push notifications.

eCooltra

eCooltra, a leading scooter sharing platform, was well positioned for expansion beyond their launch cities in Spain, Portugal and Italy. As a seasonal business with aggressive growth targets, they needed an agile and accurate way to identify and optimize every available growth partner and strategy. Recognizing the importance of growth data and user experience optimization, eCooltra selected AppsFlyer as their mobile measurement partner.

ECooltra’s plan was multi-faceted: Paid media optimization, data and reporting flexibility, Audiences, postbacks and targeting optimization, and eliminating user experience friction.

In just their first year of focusing on mobile app growth, eCooltra’s growth rate jumped by 5X. By emphasizing user quality and delivering a seamless customer journey, eCooltra’s improved their first-ride rate by 60% and doubled user loyalty. 

Click here to read the full case study.

Final note

As the numbers show, Spain is currently demonstrating steady and significant growth in its high-tech sector and specifically in mobile apps. Historically overlooked in this sector, Spain is now one of the most attractive tech ecosystems in Europe. In the past, Spain experienced a “brain drain,” with a lack of investment and job opportunities at home. Today, smart, ambitious and well-educated Spaniards are staying at home, while also attracting foreign talent. Overall, the market is benefiting from the new influx of investment money and technological innovation. 

The post Market Deep-Dive: Spain as an Emerging Hub of App Marketing appeared first on AppsFlyer.

In 2018, we can confidently say that mobile is no longer just winning; it has won. This year will mark the first time mobile ad spend will surpass budgets allocated for TV. For marketers, mobile, particularly mobile apps, offers tremendous opportunities to communicate with consumers at [almost] all times and build loyalty. Apps are just one tap away, they offer a much better user experience than mobile web, and they enable meaningful re-engagement through push notifications.

But as mobile sweeps across the globe, the competition among apps has turned fierce with millions of apps in the app stores. This makes generating engagement and ongoing usage for monetization purposes extremely difficult. And since organic app discovery is largely broken, the share of high quality, revenue-generating organic installs is also dropping. Add to that the rise in the cost of media, and it becomes clear why lower profitability is a major concern these days for app developers.

Winning in the 2018 App Economy
The good news is that success is within reach. In fact, many marketers are overcoming the challenges of scaling mobile app businesses. The proof: Marketing-driven revenue has increased by 80% since 2016.

What’s common among these successful apps? They are laser-focused on measuring and acting on lifetime value (LTV). In a nutshell, LTV is the overall revenue a business generates from an average user throughout their time using an app. It informs marketers on how much they can spend to acquire a user and still remain profitable. With an increase in importance of paid traffic amid a decrease in organic traffic, looking to LTV to make smart acquisition decisions is vital.

The only way to properly optimize LTV is to rely on data, measurement and actionable analytics, particularly as it relates to revenue generated by in-app purchases (IAP) and in-app advertising (IAA). Revenue events should be measured granularly and connected to attribution data to pinpoint which channels, networks, campaigns, ad groups, and even creatives delivered revenue-producing users and which did not.

To help marketers make the most of revenue data to drive growth via LTV-driven optimization, AppsFlyer and Facebook teamed up to create Lifetime Value: The Cornerstone of App Marketing. This report analyzed $2.4 Billion in revenue generated by 3,800 apps worldwide throughout the first quarter of 2018. It provides multiple benchmarks for key verticals across key markets. These benchmarks will help marketers understand:

• Which countries have the most active consumers demonstrating purchasing power
• How much revenue is generated over different periods of time
• Which platforms — Android or iOS — drive higher LTV
• When consumers make their first purchase and how many of them do so repeatedly
• When to re-engage existing users to boost LTV

For example, the study shows that loyal users of shopping apps propel revenue growth over a 90-day period, as the following chart shows. Clearly, the US and UK are in a league of their own as far generating revenue is concerned, while Russia shows great potential.  

Conclusion: Quality is Top Priority

An increasingly competitive space has led more and more app marketers across all verticals to put their faith in data, measurement and revenue-driven optimization to drive success.

According to Bryan Wang, Marketing Science at Facebook, “The most sophisticated app marketers are integrating LTV as a key indicator of sustainable and profitable growth. By measuring LTV – and taking actions based on those insights – they are giving themselves a clear competitive advantage over those who are only looking at CPI.”

The message is clear: measuring and optimizing lifetime value to identify, engage and re-engage quality audiences is the cornerstone of activity for successful app marketers.

All data used in the report is anonymous and aggregated data measured by AppsFlyer, the global leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics and an official Facebook Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) that measures the effectiveness of its clients’ app marketing campaigns. Data presented did not come from Facebook nor was it procured by Facebook.

The post Joint AppsFlyer-Facebook Report Reveals New LTV Data Benchmarks appeared first on AppsFlyer.

As every app developer knows, it’s an overcrowded marketplace. And that’s an understatement.

By 2018, there were over 2 million apps available in the App Store. App owners are competing ferociously for market share. And what that really means is that they are competing for audience mind share. If you own an app, then you are going to be spending a lot of resources trying to capture potential users’ time and attention.

This is exactly where content marketing comes into play. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and brings in 3X more leads. When done well, content marketing works. That’s why 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their overall strategy.

So let’s get down to business with an all-you-need guide to content marketing your app.

1. Define your audience & goals
Any content strategy must be based on two key parameters: target audience and business goals. Without these, your content is blowing in the wind, without purpose or endpoint.

The best way to get started is with brainstorming. Then, work from there to refine your answers. Here are some questions to kick off the process:

Who is the user base for your app? Where are they located? What age groups? What are their other interests? How will they use your app? Why would they use your app? What’s your target download rate in the first three months? What retention rate are you aiming for?

The answers to these questions are the foundation of your content marketing plan. They will also help you to measure the performance of your content marketing further down the road.

Here’s an example of targeted content done well.

Fitbit is a company that produces wearable technology devices to help people track their exercise, diet and sleep habits. It’s designed for people who are interested in healthy living, fitness training and personal motivation.

A quick look at the Fitbit blog shows just how aligned their content is with their target audience. The blog covers everything from yoga positions, to men’s health screening, healthy recipes and Fitbit app hacks. When your audience is well defined at the outset, it will give you focused direction for your content.

2. App store optimization (ASO)
Imagine your app sitting patiently on the virtual shelf of the app store… along with 2 million others. Fact: you need to make you app stand out. ASO is all about optimizing your app’s visibility in the app store, in terms of ranking, impressions, shares, ratings, reviews and downloads. And content marketing plays a key role.

Much the same way that SEO drives engagement with your website, ASO drives installs of your app. Content is key to this process. Although the use of content is very restricted within the app store itself (basically your title and app description…), you can and should leverage content from your other online assets, such as your website, blog or landing pages, to build awareness of your app, and drive traffic to your app store download page.

3. Create great content
Once you’ve got a content marketing plan in place, the next thing you need is the content itself.
‘Content’ is a fairly broad term, covering just about everything from blog posts, to social media posts, to landing pages, ebooks, white papers, case studies, customer testimonials, newsletters, emails, and video.

According to data from the Content Marketing Institute, the top types of content used by B2C marketers are social media content and blogs. Chances are these are strong players in the content marketing plan for your app, but don’t limit yourself to just these. Feel free to get creative and try out different tactics. In the meantime, here are a few tips to help you create rock-solid performing content:

Longer form content performs better. A study of 1 million online articles showed that longer content of over 1000 words consistently got more likes and shares on social media than short form content. But it’s not just a matter of churning out the word count.

Long form content that performs well does so because it is valuable, relevant and offers good insights for the reader. When creating content to market your app, make sure it relates in a concrete, usable way to the purpose of your app, so the user can flow naturally from consuming your content to clicking on the CTA.

Consistency is key. Blogging is not a once-in-a-while hobby. In order to succeed, blogging must be consistent and regular. This is not an easy feat. It means staying on top of the latest trends and hot topics in your app’s industry, and and providing high quality, authoritative content that people want to share.

Interactive content performs really well because it involves and entertains the user in a way that static text never could. There’s a reason why more than 80% of content marketers surveyed said that interactive content was better at grabbing readers’ attention.

A similar number said that interactive content was reusable and encouraged repeat visits. So it’s not just great for boosting app downloads. It’s also a worthwhile tactic for keeping your users engaged with your app after the download. So consider using quizzes, games, surveys, infographics and calculators to engage your target audience.

4. Distribute your content
Now that you’ve got the content, you need to get it out there to the target audience. When it comes to content marketing your app, there are three key channels you should be using:

1) Social media: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, are a top choice for customer interaction with brands. 95% of adults online follow a brand on social media. And with 2.56 billion social media users on mobile worldwide, social media is a top priority for content distribution. Social media is a great platform for boosting organic and paid reach. You can do this by posting and promoting your content across your social media accounts. Be sure to include powerful calls to action, whether it be downloading your app or clicking through to a landing page.

2) Content discovery: Content discovery is a very effective way to distribute content, with higher page views and lower bounce rates than search or social platforms. This is due to the intent of the user. When a customer is searching on Google, they’re hyper focused on the specific product or item they are searching for. When browsing their social news feed, the customer is checking out what’s going on in their network. They’re not necessarily looking for anything in particular.

However, when the customer is in ‘discovery mode’, they’re primed to discover content that is relevant, entertaining or helpful to their needs and interests. Content discovery platforms support interest targeting that lets you target the right piece of content to the right user at the right time, which makes it more likely that they will engage with your content and download your app.

3) Native advertising: This year, it finally happened – native ads surpassed display in terms of advertising spend. Internet users are twice as likely to click on sponsored content than display ads. There’s no doubt: native advertising is now a must in any content marketing strategy. You can use native advertising platforms to promote your app with high performing content targeted according to specific audiences and channels.

5. Measuring performance

Remember way back at the start when you defined your content marketing goals? This is where they really count. After running a content marketing campaign for a set period of time, you can now analyze the metrics and compare them to your KPIs. Then, you can optimize the content by making small or large adjustments, and achieve even better results.

There are a host of sophisticated tools that you can use to get deep insights into the performance of your app marketing campaigns. For example, Mobile Attribution enables you to track every app install and attribute it to the marketing campaign that generated the conversion. This is vital data that will help you optimize your campaigns.

To sum up, although content marketing is complex business, it is also a logical, measurable process that you can take step by step. It’s about knowing your target audience, creating focused content, developing the right mix of distribution channels, and analyzing the metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. Then, you optimize, and start again.

Content marketing for apps is a feat of trial and error. With the help of advanced tools and a commitment to following a methodical, fine-tuned approach, you can level the playing field and give your app the best chance of success.

The post All You Need to Know about Content Marketing for Apps appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Deep linking has changed the game for mobile app marketing. The ability to rapidly drive users to the optimal screen within the app, and within the right context has unlocked a world of new opportunities for savvy app marketers and developers.

Whether they’re used for driving users from the mobile web to a native app, personalizing the onboarding experience or driving re-engagement from owned and earned media channels, deep links have proven time and again to be a powerful technology to boost user acquisition and retention.

Manually or Programmatically?

In most cases, deep links can be generated and managed manually. For example, let’s say that you’re running an outbound email campaign for your holiday weekend sales, driving users to a specific in-app destination (weekend sales page), and offering a discount as an incentive to make a purchase in your app.

To do so, you can generate a deep link for your email blast CTA through the Link Management interface in your AppsFlyer dashboard. That single deep link will send every user to the right page in your app (even if it is preceded by an install), parsing parameters such as the discount amount, campaign name, media source (email, in this case), promo code and unlimited custom parameters. With a single link, you can cover every scenario, regardless of the user’s device, OS and platform.

To enable more advanced use cases, you’ll need to automatically generate deep links in bulk. This is especially relevant when you want to seamlessly generate unique OneLink-based tracking links which can be used as an organic part of your peer-to-peer flows.

This is where OneLink API Comes into Play

The OneLink REST API provides programmatic access to seamlessly generate, read, modify and delete deep short links at scale. This powerful API makes the creation of tens of thousands OneLink URLs daily an effortless and automatic process.

Let’s say you run app marketing for a major shopping app and you want to drive re-engagement from churned app users. You know that SMS regularly enjoys a 94% read rate within minutes of receiving the text message, and decide to send SMS triggers to recover abandoned shopping carts. However, in this particular SMS campaign, every offer is tailored to the items abandoned in the cart (different discount) and every user should be sent to a different destination (item abandoned in cart). In other words, every deep link needs to be defined with different query parameters.

Using the OneLink API, you can create short deep links for your SMS campaigns in bulk. When the deep link is clicked on, the user is sent to the content that matters — in this case the discounted product left in their cart — while maintaining the context for an optimal user experience across mobile web and the native app.

If you’re promoting a limited-time sale, you can — once the sale period is over — edit your deep link programmatically by overriding the URL logic. Simply add the new tracking link parameters to the link, and all your clicks will be redirected to the new URL.

This SMS strategy is also remarkably powerful to bring back users who have uninstalled your app. First, they will be sent to the right app store and then, to the contextual content within your app. Best of all, you can use the contextual information sent back to the SDK to personalize the onboarding experience. (Tip: Be creative!)

That’s just the beginning. There’s a whole lot more you can do with OneLink.

Whether created manually or programmatically, OneLink is built with incredibly robust integrations for a variety of use cases — peer-to-peer user invites, email marketing, SMS campaigns, web-to-app banners, cross-app promotions, referral programs, QR codes and more. And every click and in-app event is measured, attributed and reported in the AppsFlyer dashboard so you can make informed business decisions in real-time.

Want to learn more about OneLink and the OneLink API? Talk to your Success Manager or schedule an AppsFlyer demo today.

The post OneLink API: Driving Seamless User Experiences at Scale appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Mobile ad revenue is exploding. From a global perspective, mobile in-app advertising is not only expected to account for 69.9% of all digital advertising revenues in 2018 but also, to surge past TV as the world’s leading advertising medium.

At AppsFlyer, we recognize the important and growing role mobile advertising plays in app monetization. This is why we’re the only mobile attribution provider in the industry to invest such a great deal of effort into developing ad revenue attribution features and integrations.

By combining in-app ad revenue and in-app purchase (IAP) revenue, app marketers can measure the full mobile LTV and ROI of each campaign and optimize accordingly. These insights make a huge difference for businesses reliant on in-app ad revenues — especially those with freemium business models — and are key to making important campaign investment and optimization decisions.

As the competition intensifies and media costs are on the rise, having a full picture of incoming revenue from multiple revenue streams is vital because it enables marketers to increase their spend. By including ad revenue, the average user LTV increases, enabling them to spend more while remaining profitable.

Today, we’re thrilled to roll out a set of two fully-supported integrations for ad revenue, adding to the already extensive list of integrations available for Ad Revenue Attribution — DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and Vungle.

DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP)

Google-owned DoubleClick for Publishers offers support for mobile, native and video ads, along with programmatic access to over 30 third-party ad networks. DFP offers publishers a complete ad revenue engine, helping publishers streamline operations and capture the most value for every impression. Using the AppsFlyer DFP integration you can now easily track and analyze ad revenue from DoubleClick for Publishers and / or from the DFP mediation stack.

Integrate with DoubleClick for Publishers >

Vungle

Known for its interactive video ads, Vungle offers a global monetization and user acquisition platform via in-app video advertising. Not using in-app video ads? It’s never too late. According to App Annie, spending on in-app video advertising is on pace to account for nearly 40% of overall ad revenue and is considered to be one of the most valuable channels available to advertisers today.

Integrate with Vungle>

In order to fully capitalize on the app economy’s remarkable growth, it is vital for app marketers to unlock their app’s full monetization potential. With ad revenue, mobile attribution and marketing analytics fitting together like a glove, AppsFlyer is uniquely positioned to help you achieve that.

Get started with Ad Revenue Attribution and gain a panoramic perspective of your mobile app’s marketing performance, at no additional cost, right in your AppsFlyer dashboard.

To learn more about AppsFlyer Ad Revenue Attribution talk to your Success Manager or schedule your AppsFlyer Demo today.

The post Unlock Your App’s Full Monetization Potential with Ad Revenue Attribution appeared first on AppsFlyer.

AppsFlyer, the global leader in mobile attribution, has been chosen as a Google Measurement Partner in the new program by Google. This program will allow brands and advertisers to easily measure and optimize campaigns across the wide range of Google’s media sources.

As a Measurement Partner, AppsFlyer will continue to offer advertisers many of the latest Google measurement offerings as soon as they are available, bringing innovation to marketers around the world.

Today’s news is the next step in our long-standing relationship with Google.  For the past six years, the powerful combination of Google’s mobile marketing channels and AppsFlyer’s attribution and advanced analytics has provided marketers with cutting-edge capabilities to better measure, target and maximize their performance.

By measuring everything — from app installs, engagement, revenue and uninstalls — and enabling comprehensive bi-directional data-sync for targeting and audience development and optimization, these integrations with Google empower marketers with the insights, tools and reach they need to better understand and optimize their overall performance and omnichannel ROI.

Moving forward, the team here at AppsFlyer and our friends at Google will continue to drive forward the best solutions in the market for brands and advertisers.

The post Google Names AppsFlyer as an Official Google Measurement Partner appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Influencers received a lot of hype in 2017, which doubled the market of influencer advertising. According to Mediakix forecasts, this market will grow to around $5-10 billion by 2020, depending on the estimated rate. Today, marketers agree that this channel’s performance has significantly exceeded their expectations.

As mobile marketing and app distribution platforms have evolved intensely in recent years, the competition in more traditional user acquisition channels like CPI/CPA media buying and ASO has also grown proportionally. Users are tangled in a large number of apps that are available in each category with no objective criteria to distinguish the right one — it’s only a matter of a personal choice and preferences. Influencer marketing is built on the theory that people are far more likely to develop relationships based on personal connection and trust rather than intrusive contextual advertising.

Influencer marketing guarantees improved audience reach even when drops are registered in organic traffic. It remains a fresh channel with an active audience, which is especially important in cases where common traffic sources have fizzled out.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is the promotion of goods and services on various online platforms through popular bloggers, social media influencers and cross-media celebrities. The concept of influencer marketing is based on the assumption that consumers can connect more closely to and trust public figures with authority.

Check out this example (ad insertion at 2:02):

This channel is effective for any type of business, from mobile-based sales and services to large international brands with countless product categories. Choice of the right advertising concept depends strictly on what a company has to offer and the objectives of the advertising campaign.

Influencer marketing can be used effectively to promote mobile games and apps, web-services, games and websites. It doesn’t matter what the vertical or game genre of the product actually is: only a clear understanding of the desired audience and defined key regions are needed.

Proven Benefits

Research by HubSpot shows that 71% of users make buying decisions based on recommendations from social media. Influencer marketing is becoming an important part of omni-channel strategies, as it deals with two crucial challenges: reach and engagement.

Influencer marketing can drive engagement into offline communication and be useful to brand management as a whole.

Moreover, influencer marketing reduces the chances of fake traffic or KPI fraud. In other words, only real people will click on your link. Influencers can also produce content on their own, which means there is often no need to prepare marketing materials. YouTube provides detailed audience analytics for each channel, which is very helpful when selecting the right influencer.

Here’s another example of a more personal and direct app promotion:

Getting Started

Influencer selection is the first step. It is important to keep the customer profile in mind and study the specifics of local markets if you are planning to run a campaign in several regions at once. Try not to waste money on “top” names because celebrity bloggers don’t guarantee targeted reach. Remember that conversion to response at first touch is close to zero.

When dealing with influencer media itself, be sure to prepare and specify promotion guidelines in advance for describing and highlighting key product terms and features. The shorter an ad insertion in a blogger’s Youtube video, for example, the better the linked campaign’s performance, with a recommended ad length of around 30-60 seconds. It is also important to add clear and direct motivators for the audience and attractive bonuses for new users.

Despite a rigorous pre-production stage, the campaign manager must remain adaptable to unexpected changes after the launch. Keep in mind time zone differences when working with multiple regions, and always prepare for technical issues that may occur on the influencer’s end. Lastly, do not neglect the main essence of the campaign – check the tracking link and make sure it is working properly before releasing it!

Analyze

When choosing a method for measuring results, you will need to determine the key metric in advance, as scenarios will differ based on the end point of communication. Predict both worst-case and best-case scenarios.

Based on our experience, the approximate statistics are a CTR between 0.3-5% and CR ranging from 20% to 50%. Keep in mind that about 20-70% of tracked actions turn into organic traffic. Performance will ultimately depend on the kind of app (game or non-game) and its genre or purpose.

When making predictions, it is best to focus on the average number of views. In other words, consider all views of the posts that an influencer makes over a designated period of time (e.g., one month) and calculate the mean number of views from all data.

Additionally, it is possible to rely on the minimum and maximum values, which can be obtained by analyzing the frequency of content releases. For instance, if an influencer posts 5-10 per month, you will not need to analyze beyond this time frame, as this amount is sufficient. However, if an influencer releases only 1-3 posts, it’s worth analyzing a period of at least three months. After that, you will find more realistic values for your campaign.

Before starting a flagship campaign, we recommend conducting a test run to better understand the real user acquisition cost and predict the final metrics (CR, CPI, ROI). Remember that like every new tool, influencer marketing has its complexities which means it can only be mastered through ongoing experimentation and optimization.

To sum it up, in the crowded landscape of the dynamic social media world, influencer marketing remains a consistent and clear channel of communication. It is particularly effective for making the relationships formed long-lasting. No doubt, influencer marketing has its challenges, but we’re all human at the end of the day, and typically prefer the connections we can make that recognize that fact.

The post Why Run an Influencer Marketing Campaign for Your App? appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The Google Play Referrer is a standard and highly reliable and accurate method to attribute conversions through Google Play (but not Android out of store). It enables the attribution provider to send tracking parameters to the store, which then passes them back to the source when the app is downloaded.

But as fraudsters are constantly on the lookout for new ways to game the system, they’ve found a loophole in the referrer method using a form of install hijacking.

Unlike bots or behavioral anomalies, install hijacking occurs when attribution of a real install from a real user is compromised or hijacked. In referral install hijacking, malicious code sends false “referral” data to the SDK of a measurement or attribution provider in an attempt to hijack credit for an app install.

The new Google Referrer API, developed in collaboration with our partners at Google, closes this gap by authenticating referrer data and actively blocking referrer injection.

How much fraud does Google Referrer API help catch?

We can see that there is quite a significant amount of fraud that aims to game attribution platforms by injecting a click after the download starts, particularly affecting campaigns in Asia.

Referrer Install Hijacking by country

Among categories, Finance is heavily impacted, followed by lifestyle-related apps. The impact on gaming is relatively marginal probably because of the lower CPI in this vertical which is less attractive to fraudsters, and because gaming app marketers, being savvier than others in most cases, often have stronger defense mechanisms in place.

Referrer Install Hijacking by category

Transparency, certainty and deeper, granular insight

Understanding what your users are doing between a click on the Google referrer link and installing your app is a) crucial to detect and block install hijacking, and b) helps you make informed product and marketing decisions.

This is why AppsFlyer delivers comprehensive referrer install hijacking reporting in the Protect360 dashboard and makes the new Play Store data available in raw data reports.

New Play store data includes:

• The referrer string (URL) of the installed package
• The timestamp, in seconds, informing when the referrer click happened
• The timestamp, in seconds, informing when the install (download) process began

Why Google Referrer data matters:

1. Increased accuracy in detecting and blocking ad fraud.

2. Deeper, granular insights: You know exactly what kind of fraud was blocked and why

3. Deeper insights into the user journey: Whereas in the past, the only available data points were click time and install time, adding new data points offers more insights into the mobile customer journey.

4. Visibility into the referrer string means fraudsters can no longer simulate the referrer URL

5. Greater certainty beyond CTIT: Whereas standard install hijacking click to install time (CTIT) analysis typically looks for a significant volume of installs during the first 2-5 seconds after an install, some apps are slower to install than others. By analyzing the complete user journey — from click, through download, to first app open — you’ll be able to take informed decisions and customize your CTIT based on your users’ behavior

The post Fighting Mobile Fraud with Google Referrer API appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Dynamic banner advertising (dynamic retargeting) is an effective way to bring your users back to your app because they are likely to engage with ad creative that displays products they’ve already expressed interest in or products that are relevant to their interests.

Tests we’ve conducted have shown that when two types of ads are displayed to the same users — static and dynamic banners — the latter outperforms the former. In fact, we’ve seen a 20% increase in CTR (click-through rate) when using dynamic ads. That’s why we believe that dynamic retargeting has great prospects for the mobile sector and that personalized banner content is the future of mobile ads.  

Even though dynamic retargeting has been widely used for years in desktop retargeting, in mobile it is much newer. This post aims to help app marketers understand how to create and launch a dynamic retargeting campaign.

Three pillars of dynamic retargeting

Launching a dynamic retargeting campaign requires working with a platform that supports synching with the following data:

1. Event database which includes information about the targeted product (product ID).
2. Product feed, which contains information about products, brand, prices, images and link to the product page.
3. Advertising server which hosts dynamic content and generates an HTML5 banner ad.

How does it work?

Here’s the scheme for the process of automating the creation of dynamic banner ads on a massive scale:

As a part of real-time bidding process, a DSP, or demand side platform (for example, Google DoubleClick, MediaMath, Amazon Advertising Platform, Go2Mob) receives a query (1) for a banner to be shown on select device. If this device is in the targeting list, the system will search the event database (2) for a user’s actions in the target app. Then the system will determine which products are related to these events (3). The target search events will be set when the campaign is created. Product parameters are the located using a product (service) number in the customer feed. Then the text, product image, and deep link are entered into the banner template (4) which was created earlier by the media buyer. HTML5/JavaScript tag will then be sent to the ad platform and displayed on the user’s screen. All of the above must be completed within approximately 100 milliseconds.

Where can you launch dynamic ads?

Currently you can only display mobile dynamic ads on platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter (still unavailable in Russia), as well as in apps via DSPs. Many users undervalue this relatively new traffic source. According to our data, DSPs’ average conversion rate to reattribution and re-engagement (percent of users that returned to your app after a click on your ad) and purchase is higher on DSPs than on other sources. In fact, the reattribution conversion rate can be as high as 85%.

DSPs are connected to various supply-side platforms, or SSPs (services that are used by online publishers to automate the selling of their advertising space, or inventory) through a digital marketplace called an ad exchange. All mentioned services (DSP, SSP, ad exchange) help automate the media buying process. Top SSPs include DoubleClick, Mopub, Mobfox, Inneractive, Smaato, and AdColony. The more connected SSPs a DSP has the better, because it enables marketers to maximize the reach of their retargeting campaigns (essentially this means, finding these users across different apps).

It is important to note that with regards to the cost of mobile retargeting, the rich media creative in dynamic banners increase cost by about 20% compared to a standard banner ad bought in an RTB auction. However, because it has a higher CTR and conversion rate, it is ultimately more cost effective than a banner ad.

Dynamic ad insights and recommendations

1) Users may engage with more than one product (e.g. adding several items to cart or viewing all items in one category). In this case, which will you display? There are several options:

Tip: Use several placeholders (to display items) depending on the number of items in cart (e.g. a 350×50 banner can feature 3 placeholders:   

Tip: Use simple (changing images and text at intervals) or more complex (images and text change positions) animation.

2) Include a button on a dynamic banner which, when clicked, will direct a user straight to their cart with selected items. This will accelerate the click-to-purchase route and boost conversion rates.

3) Users prefer banners with text elements (showing a price and brand name) to graphics-only banners. When viewing small banners, not all users can immediately understand what they see on the screen and attribute images to products or services.

4) Customize animation styles and fonts for better UX. The customized fonts enable a brand to showcase its known product branding and design language. We have also discovered that animated banners often have higher CTR compared to standard ones.

5) Do not underestimate the value of deep linking. Setup a custom deep link for each product item and link with its picture shown on a banner. Universal links like Onelink™ are always preferable because they cover all use cases.

To sum up, despite some challenges setting up dynamic app retargeting campaigns, by following the above steps you will be able to leverage the potential of this proven method, which is becoming increasingly critical as app marketers seek to overcome the retention and engagement challenge.

The post How to effectively launch a dynamic app retargeting campaign appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The right protection is not only good for you, but also for the entire mobile ecosystem. With an astonishing 11.5% of global app installs being tainted by fraudsters, the equivalent of $700-800 million in financial exposure, anti-fraud protection is vital for marketers, app companies, and ad networks alike.

Simply put, accurate and effective fraud protection is your insurance policy against the financial risk fraud attacks create. Without it, there is no guarantee you will safely buy cheaper traffic and achieve legitimate installs.

A key aspect of the right anti-fraud solution is consistent transparency for all parties. As the platform identifies and blocks fraudulent traffic, your media sources will also be notified and receive full reports with total transparency of what was blocked and why. In turn, networks will be able to improve traffic quality, making the mobile ecosystem safer and higher quality for everyone.

Most importantly, massively scaled data is the core of dynamic and adaptable anti-fraud protection, given the continuous, improving ability of fraudsters to mimic legitimate traffic. With AppsFlyer’s anti-fraud solution, Protect360, marketers have access to the data they need for preventative and ongoing fraud prevention, including deep dashboards, raw data, and APIs.

To highlight the scale on which fraud can cause significant financial risk, as well as the process in which AppsFlyer teamed up with advertisers to combat this risk, here are three case studies from several verticals and regions.

Case Study 1: Genera Games – From Scattered to Standardized

With over 100 million downloads, Spanish-based Genera Games is a leading global games publisher, collaborating with other well-known companies such as Dreamworks, Disney, Mattel, Hasbro, and Lucasfilm, among many others.

Given their great scale and success, one challenge they faced before working with AppsFlyer was their ability to accurately track fraud-free campaigns across as many as 10 different networks on a single project. When they noticed that their dashboard showed a total number of downloads three times greater than the iTunes platform, they immediately took action to combat the pervasive fraud they faced.

Using a non-AppsFlyer tool, Genera found only 1% of the fraudulent installs that were affecting them. Not only that, but the reports they were receiving from their measurement partners seemed to have gaps compared to their business results.

When Genera switched to AppsFlyer, however, they immediately and clearly were able to identify most fraudulent traffic, eliminating it from their investment decisions. Focusing on statistics such as loyal users and new devices, the AppsFlyer analytics dashboard allowed them to pull granular level data and create reports for full transparency among their networks.

Just like for Genera, while it is important to preventatively block fraudulent traffic at its source, Protect360’s reporting also makes sure both you and your networks are kept up-to-date on your campaign’s performance for the big picture understanding of your overall ROI.

Watch Genera’s full story here.

Case Study 2: IQ Option – Risk-Free Scaling

IQ Option is one of Europe’s leading fintech companies, offering a world-class online trading experience through their state-of-the-art platform and extensive support team. As an industry leader with over 20 million client accounts worldwide, heading into 2017, IQ Option was looking to bring in new partners that would scale their high-quality user base at affordable prices.

Some of the new partners that were brought on began raising fraud suspicion, seemingly generating high rates of fraudulent traffic. Implementing Protect360’s automatic detection and blocking capabilities, IQ Option moved from significant financial exposure to agility in partnering with newer or unknown networks.

In partnering with AppsFlyer, IQ Option was able to scale at the fast pace they wanted and simultaneously save over $1 million with Protect360’s automatic blocking and their resulting optimized network payout. While they may have achieved some of their current scale on their own, Protect360 emphasized a big picture understanding of IQ Option’s campaign and network investments to slash wasted budget costs and maximize the volume of high-quality users for this trading giant.

For the full IQ Option case study, see here.

Case Study 3: Teebik – Maximizing ROI, Minimizing Disruption

Based out of China, Teebik Games ranks among the largest mobile game publishers in the world with their many years of experience and high quality offerings. They offer several signature titles, including Fallensouls, Clash of Gods, and Shop Heroes, which are played by millions of users across 130 different countries.

One major problem was that increasing user acquisition costs began to affect their overall ROI. Because they were also balancing over 100 media partners, Teebik was having difficulty managing all networks on a larger scale while evaluating each of their performances for future campaign investment. The goal was simple: high quality partners at the optimal price point

The AppsFlyer universal SDK powerfully and accurately analyzes all integrated partners in real-time without additional SDKs, as well as refines KPIs based on granular-level data. With its implementation into their own system, Teebik was easily able to collaborate with their 100+ partners according to the ROI they delivered. In turn, they could optimize their campaign results, working with each partner at the right price and on scale, cutting back on marketing costs. More importantly, with the universal integration across partners, Teebik was able to boost their marketing ROI by accurately identifying pervasive fraud installs.

In the words of Jessie Chen, Teebik’s VP, “AppsFlyer’s comprehensive mobile marketing analytics are a key part of our marketing activation, helping us bring out the best from our paid campaigns in the most cost-effective manner.” With our scale of data at their fingertips, Teebik quickly maximized their ROI and spent less time struggling with pervasive and disruptive fraud.

Read Teebik’s full case study here.

Summary

Moving closer to 2019, we can no longer deny that the rise of mobile app success and development has brought with it a rise, and evolution, in mobile fraud activity. Even as recently as the beginning of 2017, what were once basic and easy-to-detect fraud tactics have since become scalable, highly sophisticated, and undetectable on the campaign level.

Bottom line: having intuitive, adaptable anti-fraud protection in this mobile landscape is a must to not only combat pervasive fraud activity for your app, but also to concentrate expansive ad networks; maintain full transparency for yourself and partners; safely scale; and optimize your ROI. It’s a full package operation and it’s our responsibility as the entire mobile ecosystem to fight it.

The post The War on Fraudsters: 3 AppsFlyer Customers Who Are Taking A Stand Against Mobile Fraud appeared first on AppsFlyer.

As ad spend continues shifting to mobile, it is more crucial than ever for marketers to understand the effectiveness of every component of their campaigns. Enter mobile attribution, a must-have when looking for thorough and accurate campaign measurement, and the heart of the modern mobile marketer’s tech stack.

At our recent MAMA (Mobile Attribution & Marketing Analytics) London event, we presented updated stats for the state of app marketing in UK and Western Europe, including industry-first predictions highlighting the growing rate of app installs and app install ad spend between 2017 and 2020.

What are the key trends of app install ad spend through 2020?

It is now widely-documented that mobile marketing is exploding, already surpassing desktop and TV as the industry leader. In fact, according to a recent study by eMarketer, mobile will claim 70% of the total digital advertising space.

Within mobile, however, one aspect stands out as increasingly more important: app install ad spend. As brands seek to foster long term connections with customers, apps are becoming more relevant as they more easily facilitate these connections across multiple channels.

Put simply, app install ad spend is taking an increasingly large chunk of the European mobile advertising budget. It’s up to digital marketers to understand these trends in order to both measure and position their own marketing activities effectively. So how much are marketers spending on app install ads exactly?

In our recent study, we predicted a whopping 127% growth in overall app install ad spend in Europe going into 2020 — a total sum of $10.9 billion compared to $4.8 billion in 2017. Breaking this increase down further, according to the following division:

• 163% growth of attributed app install ad spend, but only…
• 56% growth of non-attributed app install ad spend

The attribution market group installs were attributed to a specific source by a mobile attribution provider. In other words, the user journey from app install ads to install was measured by these providers. While the vast majority of the data came from AppsFlyer’s own database, third party market share data was also applied here to extrapolate the total market share of attributed installs.

On the other hand, non-attributed installs were all marketing-driven installs that were not measured through a mobile attribution provider.

While the overall number of installs continues to rise steadily, attribution is taking more and more of the market share each year at 39% yearly growth on average while the number of non-attributed installs continues to grow at only 16% on average.  

What is the current market relationship of attributed to non-attributed installs?

Evidently, the numbers have spoken: more and more, marketers are able to measure and assess their user’s journeys to their app and within their app – and take advantage of this capability. With the rise in mobile advertising has come greater reliance on mobile attribution, as seen by similar trends in the two graphs shown.

In 2017, two thirds of all non-organic installs in Europe were attributed to a media source. We predict that by 2020, that number will grow to 3 out of 4 non-organic installs.

It is therefore becoming not only desirable to know and follow user traffic for your app, but essential in order to execute effective mobile ad campaigns in the persistently more competitive mobile landscape.

Matching ad spend trends, the number of attributed installs will grow by 130% between 2017 and 2020, though the percentage of annual growth will gradually lessen as more app users and installs enter the mobile landscape. Likewise, similar to the rates of ad spend growth shown above, non-attributed installs will increase by 70% in the same time period, overall representing not even half of the predicted doubled new installs.

In general, the total number of non-organic app installs will jump by 103% from 3 billion to over 6 billion — more than double the original amount in only three years.

Prediction Model

Due to the complexity of these predictions, we used 5 different statistical models in order to determine the future trajectories above. These models included Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor.

These results were primarily derived from AppsFlyer’s own historic data, a sample which included 35 billion installs, $10 billion in ad spend, and 70,000 apps. Other parameters were additionally used, including 3rd party mobile attribution market share data, CPI prediction per region, number of apps in the app stores, and the number of installs. Once gathered, the cumulative data was specifically divided into two main categories as shown: the attribution market share of non-organic installs (excluding Firebase and Facebook analytics for apps) and the non-attributed market.

Key Takeaways

• As mobile is increasingly more adopted by marketers, app install ad spend is expected to boom, more than doubling until 2020.
• The mobile attribution market in Europe will certainly grow, at the expense of the non-attributed market, as more apps realize the need.
• From our data, higher cost, along with more paid campaigns, more apps, increased mobile use, and more users, has resulted in increased ad spend.
• With maturity, both install and ad spend growth slows but remains robust.
• Mobile ecosystem will become even more competitive than it already is – the only way to get a competitive edge is to become much more data-reliant
• As more money pours into the landscape, fraudsters will continue to seek opportunities for a piece of the pie. Ongoing protection is therefore a top priority.
• Growing ad spend means more opportunity for apps wearing their publisher hat and taking advantage of the increased spend to generate more revenue from their app’s ad real estate.

To sum up, it is clear that we can expect significant app installs and app install ad growth along with major marketing opportunities going into 2020 and beyond. Successfully riding that wave is very much dependent on effective measurement of app marketing activities and reliance on data-driven insights to guide decisions.

The post AppsFlyer Predicts App Install Ad Spend in Europe to Hit $10.9B By 2020 appeared first on AppsFlyer.

After months of close collaboration with our partners at Google, we are excited to announce that Google View-through attribution is now officially available and measurable on AppsFlyer dashboards. With this new capability, you are now able to track, attribute and customize both click based and view-through (impression-based) Google adWords campaigns. View-through attribution provides powerful insights into your top (ToFu), and middle-funnel (MoFu), providing a panoramic picture of your AdWords campaign performance.

 Running Google AdWords campaigns? Switch your View-through Attribution toggle on, customize your lookback window and you’re ready to go!

As the mobile industry has evolved, we have learned how to best make sense of countless signals from uninstall data to automated postbacks and mobile audiences. Over the last couple of years, marketers have adopted new mobile attribution techniques to better understand and improve their customer journey and bottom line impact.

Leading up to this update, we have enhanced our reporting dashboards, segmenting performance data by view-through and click-based attribution. By measuring the impact of ad impressions across the customer journey, in AppsFlyer’s detailed reporting and dashboards, marketers can better optimize performance, and easily customize their attribution to meet business needs.

Want to learn more about Google View-through Attribution with AppsFlyer? Talk to your Success Manager or schedule your AppsFlyer Demo today.

The post Google View-through Attribution is Now Officially Live appeared first on AppsFlyer.

It’s time to face the fact that the classic marketing manager or marketing analyst position is no longer needed. A new world has begun with the increased adoption of big data. If you stick to the old-world methods, you will soon find yourself out of a job.

Stop saying, “The data is wrong!”

Sometimes a user acquisition (UA) manager will say the data is wrong, and then wait for the data analyst to fix it for them, just so they can again complain that the data is wrong. If you are a UA manager, it’s time that you learn some basic SQL so you can discuss with the business intelligence (BI) director how to resolve any issues with the data, and so you can understand the challenges and the solutions.

Stop saying, “I don’t understand this report.”

This is another complaint I often hear, as an explanation of why the client is downloading the data to Excel and building something by themselves. This is misguided in so many ways. You need to ask the BI director for the report you need. They do not know your job; you know it best, so you must define for them what you need to see. If they are incapable of supplying it, you should learn how to do it yourself and automate it; don’t wait for them.

Stop saying, “The partner/vendor interface is fine for setting campaigns.”

Partner/vendor interfaces were never easy to work with, and they are becoming more complicated every day. Above all, they require a high skill of concentration and manual work. Why keep using a tool that is more appropriate for the torture chambers of East Germany? Learn some Python skills and start building the interfaces to automate your campaigns, or hire someone with the skills and let him build you a game-changing tool.

Stop saying, “The developers don’t understand what I’m telling them.”

I often hear that developers don’t understand what marketers do, so they don’t listen to them. Well, maybe it’s time to stop this cycle. Everything the developers do should be for the users. Since you have the users’ data, start using it to create tasks for the developers. If 20% of your users land on a broken page and never convert, for instance, addressing that should be a task. Then attach price tags to the tasks: “If we do this, it will increase our revenue by X; if we don’t do it, we will lose Y each day we don’t have it done.” This will help the developers better understand your needs. If a task won’t increase revenue, it’s merely nice to do, but not essential.

Stop saying, “My soft skills are enough to survive in this world.”

If you, like me, are over the age of 30, you didn’t learn Python in school. You probably had some SQL classes that you didn’t think had much of a purpose, but today every 20-year-old has the skills to write SQL and code. It’s time to brush up your skills and expertise and learn some coding language yourself. I don’t expect you to become a coder, but understanding the basics of SQL will allow you to question the developers, which will result in a better product. The ability to write SQL will help you aggregate data easily from your database, so you won’t have to wait for the BI director to support you.

Start saying: “I will learn SQL, I will learn Python, and I will learn product management.”

We are increasingly living in a more tech-savvy world. You need not become a developer, but you should have enough technical understanding to work in synergy with your developer, to challenge them and question the path they are charting. You should learn to design a marketing product, keeping it simple and in small packages for the developers. You should start learning to use scrum. Start using lean and agile as well, and switch between them to achieve the ultimate goal of moving your product. Small, impactful packages of code will take you a long way toward building a stable product sooner.

SQL is one skill everyone should have. If you don’t know it, start learning it immediately. It will help you extract your own data, easily, aggregate it with other sources, but above all it will enable you to access data when you need it without the middleman. Become a data monster to drive your decision making, and don’t wait for an analyst or developer to supply you with the numbers.

Learn how you can become a doer at Tale About Data’s online workshop in November! Sign up here to receive a link for registration: http://eepurl.com/dysP11

The post 6 Things Marketers Need to Change Today appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Since the dawn of time (or at least since advertising began to take shape), marketers and their bosses have been asking themselves “How do I know that the marketing investment has actually generated real value?”

Their concern makes sense. After all, the fact that a campaign performed well does not necessarily mean it justified marketing spend. The million dollar question is whether the paid-for users who generated revenue would have done so organically, which basically means for free.

To help answer that question and alleviate those concerns and justify spend, incrementality tests surfaced.

What is incrementality?

Incrementality is the measure of the lift that can be attributed to a marketing campaign. In one common method, marketers compare a baseline of expected/organic activity and then isolate the benefit of marketing on that activity. The following chart explains this concept:

One specific method in an entire discipline of testing for incremental effects of ads is through A/B testing. In this test, the impact of an ad served to an exposed group is compared against a control group which is not served with that ad or is served with a ghost ad/PSA (public service announcement ad).

Enter retargeting

The notion of incremental revenue is particularly important in retargeting campaigns. In this scenario, users have already installed and used an app, so the likelihood of them engaging with it again on their own volition (organically) are much higher than the chances of a user organically discovering an app for the first time. Hence, the question that lingers in the back of marketers’ minds: to retarget [through paid campaigns] or not to retarget, and to what extent.

To help our clients understand the incremental value of their retargeting campaigns, we have recently conducted several A/B tests. We’ve found that, in most cases we analyzed, retargeting did produce incremental value.

Having said that, it is important to stress that there were instances where retargeting did not only fail to deliver incremental revenue, it even detracted from what would have been generated organically. This was most likely the result of a poor user experience driven by bombarding users with ads, which led to resentment and ultimately reduced spending!

In retargeting, segmentation is the name of the game

By analyzing the campaign of one shopping app, a clear difference quickly emerged: retargeting the segment of users who have yet to complete a purchase generated significant incremental revenue, while the segment of those who did purchase pre-exposure had a substantial negative impact.

We can see that for this app, re-engaging users who have already made a purchase is not recommended since it may deter those shoppers from buying again. Is your retargeting campaign doing the same? Make sure you check it.

On the other hand, the retargeting campaign did wonders for the segment of users who did not purchase before being exposed to the campaign, with substantial lift beyond two days from the install. A month in, retargeting proved extremely beneficial, generating significant incremental value.

What this means is that this app would be better off refraining from running retargeting campaigns during the first half of the week after an install, while allocating the lion’s share of its budget to retarget users only during the fourth week after the install.

Another example from another shopping app yielded a clear result: retargeting activity for the set segments and goals was highly incremental from day 0, particularly as far as converting users goes. This segment did not purchase before being exposed and thanks to the campaign its users converted at far greater numbers than the control group who was not exposed to ads — increasingly so over time reaching a lift above 5x during the 4th week since the install.

The campaign also had a positive effect on the number of lapsed users, effectively reducing the number of users who ceased purchasing activity. Similar to the lift of converted users, this trend only increased over time.  

Make sure to properly monetize your converting users

This gaming app managed to generate tremendous lift in the number of converted users by running a retargeting campaign. However the average revenue from these users did not perform as well, and even detracted from the organic baseline in certain cases. A more significant revenue uplift was recorded in the 4th week after the install.

In this case, we can see that the retargeting campaign delivered mixed results and the marketer is seeking ways to generate more revenue from these converted users.

Don’t forget to test networks!

In addition to testing different segments to pinpoint those with the highest incremental lift, it is equally important for marketers to test multiple retargeting networks. The following example from a 3rd shopping app whose performance was analyzed shows that different networks delivered varying incremental lift for the same segment — loyal users who made a purchase before and after being exposed to a retargeting campaign.

The bottom line

Understanding incrementality allows advertisers to optimize their ad budgets by allocating retargeting ad spend in the most impactful way possible — using the right segments, at the right time and across multiple proven networks. Indeed, we’ve seen that in most cases we had analyzed, retargeting certainly proved its incremental value.

Part 2: Dormant Users

The above analysis was based on UA users and the time between the install and the exposure to retargeting. Stay tuned for Part 2 in the series where we will focus on dormant users and analyze the time between the last engagement/purchase and the retargeting exposure.

The post Incrementality & App Retargeting: The Importance of Segmentation [Part I] appeared first on AppsFlyer.

AppsFlyer and Google have partnered to bring new transparency to View-through Attribution, with segmented click-through and view-through attribution. To give you a more complete picture of how your ads are performing, Google has launched View-Through Conversions reporting in Universal App Campaigns, also available in AppsFlyer. With VTC reporting, you can measure consistently across channels and understand which viewable ad impressions were associated with conversions.

In this webinar Ben Roodman, AppsFlyer’s Sr. Director of Partner Development, and Alexandra Whitaker, Google’s Global Product Lead for Apps, discuss how to activate VTC for UAC on AppsFlyer and the best practices around view through conversion reporting. 

The post [Webinar] Enabling View-through Attribution from Google Universal App Campaigns (UAC) appeared first on AppsFlyer.

In this article, we address the fundamentals of setting up a mobile performance campaign. We introduce the key processes and considerations required before you start investing your hard-earned marketing budget into your mobile strategy.

Mobile performance campaigns have evolved in recent years and not too long ago, marketers were restricted to buying media on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click) model, with lots of trial and error before managing to convert a user.

However, from the combination of technology evolving and the demand from advertisers, CPI (cost per install) was born, minimizing the risk advertisers took when buying media. Now we see an increasing number of technology suppliers selling their media even further down the funnel, allowing advertisers to access users who only take out an action within their app, this is brought on a CPA (cost per action) model. These actions can include watching tutorial videos, reaching a level within your game, or even making a payment.

But does measuring your marketing campaign on a buying metric truly reflect the accuracy of a successful or unsuccessful campaign? What metrics should you be using as your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

How do you translate your business goals into a marketing goal, what processes are needed to ensure you are setup for success?

A test-and-learn mentality should underpin everything you do, but before you plough ahead testing different bidding strategies, alternative networks, creative concepts, you must ensure all strategic tests fulfill your goals and business objectives.

Let’s get started…

Goal Setting

Before you start any campaign, you must know what is expected from your paid media. In most cases, performance marketers want ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) or to drive LTV (Lifetime Value), meaning for every dollar they put into the marketing budget, they expect to see a positive return from their investment.

It’s important for the app owner to understand the user journey within their own environment and have the ability to predict what users are likely to do when they trigger certain app events, ideally you’ll be able attribute physical values based on these behaviours. This knowledge will allow the advertiser to understand the value their paid media is driving for the business.

Funnel Example:

Source: Criteo

Applying these values makes it easier and more predictable to conduct your forecasting for media investment and ultimately will help optimize your campaign more efficiently to the more valuable business metrics.

Questions to Consider

• What value can you attribute to different stages of the user journey within your app?
• If the CPI costs more but deliveries a higher ROAS, does it make sense to pay more for an install?
• Are you optimizing towards an install or a post-install app event?

Tracking Solution

Before committing any mobile ad spend you must ensure you have a measurement partner in place. It is the heart of any mobile marketing tech stack.

Measurement partners like AppsFlyer are attribution and analytics platforms which enable advertisers to navigate the complex world of mobile. They allow for both a comprehensive level of tracking whilst providing a granular perspective of your campaign. This enables marketers to make more informed data led decisions, a key to any successful mobile campaign.

Questions to Consider

• What data and tools do you need?
• Does your measurement partner allow the ability to change your tier as you grow?

Tagging

To maximize your campaign, you should ensure you setup granular tagging that can help pinpoint different elements of your campaign. The goal is to produce tags that allow you to segment based on a few different variables, such as creative, the campaign, the test, the channel, and creative concept to name a few.

This is a basic tag which can be incorporated into your tracking link. You can dive deeper into your tagging requirements, which will be dependent on what you are trying to learn, the budget you have available and what the MMP already provides.

Example:

CampaignName_AppName_Vertical_Channel_TargetingGroup_CreativeConcept_Device

NewCustomers_AngryBirds_Social_Facebook_18-25CasualGamers_RedBird_Android

Questions to Consider

• Can your partners accurately run campaigns with the suggested tagging above?
• What do you want to measure within your campaign?

Network Onboarding

Those new to mobile performance could start with established channels like Facebook and Google. Both options are consistent performers and well-known to help ease you into your mobile performance campaign. There are a whole host of high performing suppliers, the AppsFlyer Performance Index is a very good source to find the leading suppliers per region and vertical.

The number of networks you work with will be defined by your budget and what you want to achieve. Larger brands scaling to over 250,000 installs a month can achieve this volume with anything from 6 – 10 suppliers and smaller scale campaigns can achieve huge scale with as many as 2 – 4 partners, this can also vary depending on the type of category your brand belongs to. The key is to not be too exposed and reliant on one network, but ensure your media mix is diverse and that you’re constantly testing.

Questions to Consider

• How many suppliers do I need – are you spreading your budget too thinly?
• What is the USP of the partner you’re working with?
• What is their policy on detecting ad fraud?

Buying Strategy

There are a whole host of different buying metrics that allow you to achieve your business goal. This can include CPC (cost per click), CPI (cost per install), CPCV (cost per completed view) and CPA (cost per action).

CPA is usually associated to in app events and allows your suppliers to optimize further down the funnel. This can be very effective when optimizing towards a return on your media investment.

Depending on the media objective, blending different buying metrics could be very effective, the key is to test, test, test!

Ultimately the goal is to work backwards from LTV (lifetime value), understanding what levers to pull.

Questions to Ask

• Does increasing your bid by 10% increase the value of the users by 10%?
• Does reducing your bid impact your scale?
• What channel drives the highest value users?
• What buying metric drives the highest LTV?
• What role does video have on your conversion path?

Creative

Understanding the messaging and what is resonating with your audience is vital to any successful mobile marketing campaign.

Testing different headlines, copy, imagery is all an integral part to understand why users are downloading your app.

To help place a structure around your testing approach, here is a testing framework example.

Testing Framework Example:

Mango Blogger

Questions to Ask

• What creative is resonating with your audience?
• What messaging drives LTV?
• When developing your creative is there a clear call to action?
• How sophisticated and simple is your app?
• Would it benefit the business to educate the user and highlight a video before they download the app?
• Would you like to further pre-qualify your user by allowing them to demo the game before downloading the app?

Testing Framework

Developing a testing roadmap is critical to your mobile marketing strategy. A testing framework enables you to test your hypothesis, learn from failures, adapt mediocracy and scale wins. A framework provides a holistic view of what tests are being considered and what you should be prioritising.  

Source: VWO

Focus and prioritize tests that provide the most actionable data points and don’t conduct a test for testing sake.

Questions to Ask

• Why are you conducting this test?
• What you are expecting to learn from this test
• What are the next steps from the anticipated outcome?
• How much effort and resource is required to setup this test?
• How saleable is this test?

Ad Fraud

Ad Fraud continues to evolve in mobile and unfortunately fraudsters are getting smarter, more agile and using a variety of different techniques to manipulate attribution methodologies, steal authentic installs from organic sources or driving pure fake installs.

Introducing basic requirements to your partners is an absolute must, they could include the following.

•        Don’t pay for installs in under 10 second installs
•        Don’t pay for installs outside of geo area
•        Include impression tracking for all activity
•        Device id required for all sub publisher sources
•        Insist all networks provide full transparency on where they are buying your media
•        Don’t pay for downloads by blacklisted apps

AppsFlyer has provided several case studies and white papers which go into far more detail on ad fraud, but make sure you have processes in place to review multiple data points and always challenge your partners to anything that doesn’t look right!

Best Practises

2018 Mobile Fraud Trends

Glossary For Fraud Jargon

Questions to Ask

• Are you confident with the tools your MMP have in place to minimize fraud?
• Has your partner provided confidence in their ability to minimize fraud?
• What data points are you reviewing to identify suspicious behaviour?

Conclusion

I hope this provides some direction to your mobile marketing strategy, whilst providing a good foundation for you and your team to build on.

For scaling brands there might be more focus on building brand equity or driving hyper growth, but for those just starting out, this document allows you to identify the key fundamentals to any mobile performance campaign.

Good luck!

The post How to Set Up Your Mobile App Performance Campaigns appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Building upon our partnership with Facebook, we are excited to support the launch of a new feature that will facilitate the flow of app event information from AppsFlyer to the Facebook ad platform. App events, also known as in-app engagements, can be used for targeting, optimization and measurement to maximize the success of your Facebook campaigns.

Available now in the Facebook Events Manager platform, this new solution will improve the integration setup process and guide you through the best way to share app events from AppsFlyer. This will make it easier for advertisers to start passing the correct app event information to Facebook, and ensure that the information shared can take advantage of your targeting, optimization, and measurement solutions.

Using app event data can help you optimize towards installs and in-app actions within a single app install campaign. For example, gaming app owners can acquire higher quality users by targeting gamers who would not only be interested in downloading their app, but would also be likely to achieve levels and make in-app purchases.

Login to your Facebook Events Manager today, and find the new setup flow that will walk you through the step-by-step process of integrating with AppsFlyer. For more information on Facebook App Events, click here or talk to your Success Manager today.

The post Facebook App Event Partner Integration Now Live appeared first on AppsFlyer.

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