When’s the time you got annoyed seeing a mobile ad because it was irrelevant or the 87th time you’ve seen it already? Probably not too long ago… maybe even today. 

Beyond wasted budget, that brand’s image has likely taken a hit, and may have been tarnished beyond repair. And all because its marketing team failed to set up proper ad targeting.  

Building an audience on mobile demands a deep understanding of the nuances within. Mobile audiences constantly change, while the variety and scale of data signals in this environment can be overwhelming.   

So how do you manage all of this complexity, and make it work for you? 

The answer: Segmentation. 

Audience segmentation is the key to harnessing the right data points among millions of users and transforming them into installs, engagement, and revenue. And also, making sure you’re not annoying your users.  

Types of mobile segmentation defined 

What is mobile audience segmentation exactly?

It’s the building of a group of potential and/or existing users based on specific, shared criteria that can be targeted, sometimes with bullseye accuracy.

Segments can be incredibly granular, depending on the platform you’re working with. In audience segmentation, data is the gift that keeps on giving. With every subgroup you create, you can test to find the personalized messages that work best and continually iterate to find ones that work even better. 

When you master segmentation, each layer of interaction with every single user and each point of contact is rooted in shrewd segmentation.

There are lots of ways to segment an audience, but in broad strokes, these are the most common approaches: 

• Geographic: Country, state, city, and sometimes even down to a specific zip code; Geographic mobile data is rooted in what users have already input into apps, e.g. Facebook app users who have indicated they live in San Francisco.
• Location-based: Based on the device’s GPS signal, where a user actually is at the time an ad can be served, e.g. the user is within a specific radius of a storefront. 
• Demographic: Gender, age, income, e.g. female users aged 50 and over with an income of over $200,000. 
• Psychographic: Values and interests, e.g. users who routinely install and engage with news apps or content.
• Technographic: The pint-sized tech stack in every mobile device, e.g. an iPhone 11 user with a device that has at least 4GB RAM. 
• Behavioral: What users actually do on their phones, for how long, and with what results, e.g. mobile gamers who tend to engage with games for 20 minutes or more in a session and have made at least 2 in-app purchases.

To illustrate, here is an example of audiences that were built by combining GEO and behavioral data.

This example combines behavioral parameters:

There are all sorts of other ways you can segment an audience – these are just a few examples.     

Targeting options on top media platforms

Now that we’ve covered what is possible in terms of segmentation, let’s drill down into targeting options on common media platforms. 

Facebook targeting capabilities are considered unrivaled. The social network offers three options when it comes to creating custom audiences: 

1. Core Audiences: Allows you to set parameters for location, behavior, demographics, connections, and interests
2. Custom Audiences: Leverages your own data extracted from your CRM and/or email lists, your site’s visitors, or your app’s existing users (for the latter you deploy Facebook’s SDK)
3. Lookalike Audiences: Targets users that are similar to the ones you already have. (More on Lookalikes in a bit!

Facebook’s Audience dashboard:

Google’s App campaigns product is mostly automated, but you can define GEOs and languages to target, and also upload lists to run re-engagement campaigns. The machine does the rest.

Apple Search Ads naturally leverages keywords to allow marketers to present ads to users with a high level of search intent. These can be broad or exact matches. The platform also enables targeting by GEO, age, gender, customer types (all, new, returning, users of my other apps), and device type (only among iPhones and iPads of course). 

Twitter’s marketing segmentation options are also refined: You can segment by age or gender, @user (people and the brands they follow), interests, conversation, or by tailoring (similar to Facebook’s Custom Audiences).

ironSource, a network that serves game developers, offers a primer on segments where you can learn how to segment based on device tech stack (network connection, device model, OS version) and monetization data (e.g. if users spend on in-app purchases, and if so, how much they spend). 

Snap also has a range of options when it comes to segmentation, from its Predefined Audiences to Custom Audiences, which include Lookalikes and tools that match Snapchatters with your own data on device IDs or email lists.

Using attribution data for user segmentation

Attribution data is the building block for all types of segmentation. In short, it covers the path to install — organic or non-organic — and the subsequent post-install activity. 

For example, attribution data can inform a marketer that 1,000 app installs were driven by a Twitter campaign, while the total revenue generated by this group was $2,000 (or $2 per user). 

Attribution data is mainly used to segment re-engagement campaigns (after all, you’re working with data you already have on your own users). Because securing ongoing usage is a major challenge for most apps, re-engagement — paid retargeting or owned media campaigns (email, push, blog, cross-promotions, social etc.) — is becoming an extremely important activity. 

In fact, between 2017 and 2019, the share of apps running retargeting has nearly doubled, while the share of retargeting conversions (among all conversions — retargeting and non-organic installs) increased by more than 2.5 times:

The growing importance of re-engagement reemphasizes why accurate segmentation is a key factor in mobile marketing success. 

You can also use attribution data to power user acquisition campaigns with lookalike audiences, known in the industry as “LALs”. These are audiences that mirror (or nearly mirror) your high value users. 

LAL targeting is only going to get more robust as other networks meet the demand for it. Having said that, it takes abundant resources and a significant scale of data to be effective.

Looking to take your re-engagement and UA campaigns to the next level? Here are a few ways to capitalize leveraging user attribution and segmentation:

Attribution data is pivotal to effective mobile segmentation but before you commit to a provider, be sure to learn about what to look for in terms of security, precision, and seamlessness — all crucial factors for any ambitious mobile marketing plan.

Privacy: The no-go zones

You can’t talk about mobile audience segmentation responsibly without talking about privacy and the No-Go zones in terms of industry standards. 

We live in a world that is hypersensitive to privacy (for good reason!), and it’s your job to work with vendors and media partners that meet all standards, are compliant,  and deploy industry-standard shields to keep your data secure under GDPR & CCPA (General Data Protection Regulation, adopted by the European Union, and California Consumer Privacy Act, respectively). 

Even if your company is not headquartered in the EU or in California, these laws will almost always still apply because you will invariably have users in both California and the EU. Always adhere to the fine print in your own agreements with users — it’s your legal responsibility. 

But it’s not just about what you do with user data… It’s also about how much data you expose to your partners. Attribution providers and platforms should allow you, the app marketer, to control the data sent to ad networks. For example, sending only device IDs you want to segment to media partners. 

Picture a scenario in which your app sells medication. When you want to reach a group of your users that have previously bought medication via your app, you can send along the list of device IDs to an ad network without exposing the fact that the users bought medication. Device IDs are all the ad network needs. 

Ultimately, any PII (Personally Identifiable Information, e.g. a name, phone number, or an email address) should only be passed on if there is clear consent from the user. 

Mobile marketing has every bit as much to do with responsibility as it does with being savvy. There are some No-Go zones, such as selling data to 3rd parties, and others that are fine, such as sending a push notification when your user might be out of a product assuming user consent was given. 

Bottom line: You can segment very successfully without overexposing data to third parties.

8 tips for effective segmentation

Now that you’ve completed your audience segmentation crash course, here’s a checklist for driving results with your next campaign:

1) Perform continuous testing on multiple ad networks with new segments (never stop testing!).

2) Run incrementality tests on segments for more granular optimization, down to message types, bid types, and creatives.

3) Use granular engagement data such as in-app events (the post-install actions that mark engagement, such as in-app purchases, the completion of tutorials, leveling up in a game, placing an item in a shopping cart) to create more targeted segments. 

Power tip: Make sure you’re measuring the right amount of events for your vertical! 

4) Consider both web and mobile audiences in your segmentation strategy. For web users, build segments that ultimately drive users within them from web to your mobile app as it is the consumer touchpoint with the best performance, as with smart banners.  

5) Pair customized messaging with deep linking for each segment to create a truly relevant, even memorable customer experience.

6) Implement a frequency cap for the campaigns a specific segment and/or user is sent through. (There is such a thing as too much marketing within a segment, and the last thing your brand needs is fatigue among existing and/or potential users — know that once a user is sick of seeing you, it’s going to be hard to win them back.)

7) Consider creating new segments from existing segments, either through a CRM or internal BI tool 

8) Make regular communication between your marketing and product teams a top priority — doing so helps ensure that everyone is on the same page in terms of goals and avoiding redundant campaigns that alienate users.

To conclude, great creatives and a sound tech stack can only get you so far when it comes to reaching and converting new users or bringing lapsed ones back into the fold. Without good segmentation, you will waste money on impressions that bring you nothing in return. 

When you are savvy about your segmentation, however, you dramatically increase the chances that you will get the right ad in front of the right users — the ones who will click, install, convert, or re-engage. 

The post Audience Segmentation for Mobile Marketers: A Crash Course appeared first on AppsFlyer.

As a former New Yorker, shopping was part of my daily routine. Like many of my fellow co-habitants of the city, almost every day I would make at least one purchase online, whether it was for groceries, a late-night call for take-out, a birthday present, new socks, or that impossible-to-resist sale on yoga pants that just dropped into my inbox. I was constantly connected at home, the office, and on-the-go. 

You see, as an average New Yorker, and like the majority of digital natives, I was constantly switching between devices. Whether on my laptop at work, on the subway with my iPhone, or at home chillin’ with my iPad. I always had a screen in front of me, even if it wasn’t always the same screen, and often I would pick up my shopping on an entirely different device than the one I initiated my browsing on. If this behavior sounds familiar to you, keep reading.

There are an estimated 21-22 billion connected devices in the world (a number that continues to grow rapidly) in a population of nearly 7.8 billion people globally. The average American alone is projected to have an average of 13.4 connected devices by 2022, according to Cisco. Something that makes device switching pretty much a given in our daily routines. By now, this behavior is well-known to marketers and is something we must embrace as the new cultural norm. People’s daily rituals have become immersed in this new digital space and it’s up to performance marketers to provide the best user experience for their customers with this in mind.

Naturally, marketers need to recognize that their users engage with multiple devices throughout their online journey and they must provide experiences that don’t simply ‘accept’ this reality but rather optimized for it.

If you are an avid shopper (like me), the scenario where you are browsing in a physical store (let’s say in SOHO, NYC), and pull out your phone to look up an item online may be quite familiar. Why? Well, perhaps there is a special promotion for first-time online-shoppers; or maybe that item is offered in other sizes online? Personally, I would even put an item in my wish-list for that end of the month paycheck splurge. While my phone would be the first device used in my shopping experience, knowing myself, I am also very likely to go back home, turn on the TV and flip open my iPad too.

With eCommerce experiencing ongoing exponential growth both in terms of raw numbers and the value of purchases, the online shopping experience is the new frontier for performance marketers; and therefore, making the online experience easy, engaging, and as consistent as possible is the real competitive edge marketers have over their competition. If a user is browsing at home on their iPad and completing a purchase on their iPhone after getting a push notification, shouldn’t the marketer know about it? The last thing you want to do is send an incentivizing email or show multiple ads to someone who has already made a purchase on another device. It is both a waste of your marketing budget, and can be off-putting to users who are already inundated with countless amounts of emails, ads, and push notifications.

That’s why we are excited about AppsFlyer Audience’s support for customer user ID. We made it possible for marketers to create remarketing segments based on their existing customer user IDs. This lets you easily segment a group of users who have carried out a certain action regardless of which device they used, so you can be sure to offer the right message to the right customers, on the right device, at the right time.

While shopping is one important use of this new way of segmenting users, it is not the only use case. A few months ago, I was traveling through Sri Lanka. While on my trip, smack in the middle of nowhere, I broke my phone. By “broke” I mean that my phone was dead and gone forever.

Naturally, I purchased a new phone the moment the plane landed on the runway back home. Yes, I made that purchase online but that’s irrelevant to this story (for now). While it was only my mobile phone that changed, to a marketer I would be categorized as a “new device” and; therefore, a new customer (one that presumably had not made any purchases on the mobile app in the past). That’s a shame because it would, in turn, lead to a lot of wasted budget, since I am in fact that same loyal user, but only now with a brand new device.

To make things even more complicated for the marketers trying to reach me, while my advertising ID changed because I am now connected with a new device, my customer user ID did not. This inevitably disrupted my user experience because I was getting mixed messages depending on what device I was on. For example, on my iPad, I was still a loyal user for a shopping brand but on my iPhone, I was receiving ads enticing me to make my first purchase.

By leveraging existing 1st party customer user IDs, marketers enjoy the option to segment based on either the advertising ID (devices) or user IDs (cross-device) as part of their remarketing strategy, so that they can provide a consistent and smooth experience for their users.

Once a marketer selects the CUID method, AppsFlyer technology intelligently matches the CUIDs to cross-device in-app engagements to build a segment of users according to their entire historical engagements with an app.

Bottom line: If you segment by CUID you won’t be at risk of losing a user’s historical data.

Here is another example provided by a seasoned shopper (still me). Let’s say I made a purchase on my iPhone for running socks. Within that same week, while leisurely browsing a sports app on my ipad, I decided to finally buy a pair of shoes that I had been eyeing for some time. The purchase on my iPhone amounted to $20 while the purchase on my iPad days later was for $90.00 (the shoes). Effectively, I purchased $110 in total across both devices during that week.

The technical break-down is as follows:

Using the Advertiser ID

Audiences based on advertising ID: users with total revenue of more than $100 will result in only the devices that have generated a total revenue of at least $100 on a single device ( in my case none of my devices).

Marketers should leverage this method when looking to segment users based on actions taken on a single device.

Using the CUID

Audiences based on CUID: users with total revenue of more than $100 will result in all devices that are matched to a single CUID if the total revenue generated by all devices combined is at least $100 (in my case, both my iPhone and iPad).

Customer User ID is another advancement in AppsFlyer Audiences tool that allows marketers to intelligently connect their first party data for a better user-experience with their brand. Whether it’s related to my story or your own, there is immense value in the flexibility marketers have when building out their segments.

In addition, new integrated partners for Appsflyer Audiences

AppsFlyer Audiences is continually evolving with exciting new updates as to how marketers can measure the true incremental impact of their remarketing efforts. New partners are being added regularly making the connection to multiple remarketing networks even easier.

We are very excited to share that we have a first-to-market Audiences integration with TikTok Ads and have also added The Trade Desk to our integrated partner list. This means that marketers can sync their remarketing audiences directly with these partners via an API connection – hassle fee.

It’s great collaborating with the AppsFlyer Audiences’ team to provide our mutual clients with the benefits of this joint-integration. This feature allows advertisers to efficiently utilize their Appsflyer audiences to run successful campaigns on The Trade Desk by easily connecting via API.  – Nate Gawel, General Manager, Data Partnerships

We believe that a strong remarketing program must have the flexibility and scale needed to succeed. Whether that means testing and connecting to multiple remarketing networks, using granular in-app attributes, or having the ability to choose which method to segment users by. The possibilities are endless.

The post New in Audiences: Introducing Cross-Device Audience Segmentation appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Innovation and platform richness is one of the fundamental pillars at AppsFlyer’s core. Our product is constantly evolving, alongside the industry’s continuous growth, to deliver the most advanced attribution technology to the world’s best companies. As such, we’re excited to share with you some of the updates that we’ve released in the last few months.

Support for Open Advertiser ID

Huawei recently announced that the Open Advertiser Identifier (OAID) is supported in newer devices and market indications are that OAID will become the standard identifier in China for attribution. If you’re marketing to app users in China, you’ll be pleased to hear that AppsFlyer now supports OAID measurement for devices that do not have GAID. 
Read More >

Integrated Partner Activation

AppsFlyer provides you with advanced control over your attribution data and how you share it with partners and agencies. By making the proactive choice to “Activate Partner” in your Integrated Partners tab, your data is in your control.
Read More >

Snap Re-Engagement Support – Coming soon!

AppsFlyer is excited to announce that we will soon offer advanced support for customers running re-engagement campaigns with Snap. This will include support for view-through re-engagement attribution.
 

View-Through Attribution for Re-Engagements

Impressions are a crucial piece of the attribution puzzle. AppsFlyer recently released an upgrade to enhanced retargeting, enabling customers to assess the success of their retargeting campaigns by measuring impressions (and not only clicks).

Configuring Retargeting Attribution – Google, Facebook, Twitter, DoubleClick

With our growing ecosystem of 6,000+ partners, we know that flexibility and freedom of choice is the name of the game. You can now choose which type of conversions (reinstall or re-engagement) you would like to measure with Google and Facebook, and configure a different lookback window for re-engagement measurement with these partners as well as Twitter and DoubleClick.

Configuring Minimum Time Between Re-Engagements

Different apps have different needs, and AppsFlyer recognizes that attribution is not a one-size-fits-all solution. A new configuration in your app settings enables you to set the timeframe for new re-engagements. By determining the minimum time-frame between re-engagement conversions, you can avoid over-attribution of re-engagements and keep the data as clean and neat as possible.
Read More >

Stay tuned for more exciting updates to follow!

The post Announcing Exciting Mobile Attribution Updates appeared first on AppsFlyer.

While mobile is on the rise, web is certainly not dead. Alongside the convenience of having the whole world in your pocket, on your watch or on your TV, both desktop and mobile web still play a significant role in the customer journey.

Web is still the most comprehensive platform for brand discovery, research and the decision making process on the whole. For businesses employing a cross-platform marketing strategy, it is quite common to have customers begin their journey on the web and eventually transition to the native app for actual conversion-related activity. 

On the marketers’ side, this presents both benefits and challenges; driving paid traffic to a website is typically cheaper than paid app download campaigns. It is more cost-effective to deliver high-quality, relevant traffic to the website. At the same time, native app usage encourages brand loyalty and has shown to drive higher conversion rates and sales than web. So how can marketers consolidate these facts to capitalize on the combined benefits of both web and app?

Let’s explore a couple classic use cases across verticals.

Use Case #1: Connecting the Dots in eCommerce

eCommerce is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, with roughly 20% YoY growth in sales. Alongside the explosive growth, however, retailers are facing new challenges. eCommerce customers bounce back and forth between online platforms, such as desktop web, mobile web and app; what’s more, customers may mix offline (in-store) and online engagement as well, such as using their phones when inside a store to look up product reviews or compare prices. 

Retailers are tasked with attempting to connect the dots between offline and online, as well as mapping out the online cross-device and cross-platform journey. The case for pushing customers to the brand’s native app is strong: 67% of all eCommerce purchases are predicted to occur on mobile in 2020 (and that figure is likely to be even higher in light of the coronavirus lockdowns). What’s more, the conversion rate for native shopping apps is 3X higher compared to mobile web.

At the same time, web is a strong platform for discovery and research, and a significantly cheaper one to advertise on. Tools for buying, managing and optimizing web ads are already well-established and many brands have been investing in web campaigns for years.

 eCommerce marketers need to create an omni-channel retail strategy that provides shoppers with a fully-integrated shopping experience, by unifying measurement and user experiences from brick-and-mortar to mobile-browsing, in-app purchasing and everything in between. There is a clear benefit to driving users to make purchases in the native app, and a solid marketing strategy should aim for this goal.

Solution: People-based attribution can help paint the full web-to-app picture, attributing native app installs to web visits and the initial media sources that referred them. With mobile web banners driving web visitors to download the app (perhaps with the incentive of an enticing offer), marketers can increase conversions, revenue, and brand loyalty.

Use Case #2: Driving seamless on-boarding for banking apps

They may have been a bit late to the digital revolution party, but finance and banking have become some of the fastest growing mobile industries. User activity on finance apps has shot up 354% in the last 5 years, and mobile is expected to soon become the #1 preferred channel for users to manage their accounts. Interestingly, one of the top reasons mobile banking users prefer apps over desktop or in-store service is the enhanced personalization they offer. 

When we think about finance apps, we think in the context of two main categories: 

• Mobile-first fintech apps, such as those that offer peer-to-peer payments or virtual wallets;
• Banking apps that are historically brick-and-mortar or web-based entities, that provide users additional access options via mobile apps

Web-to-app journeys are more relevant for the second category, where the app is a complementary part of the offering. In these cases, customers are only granted app access after they have already established themselves as customers, created an account or signed up for a service. 

Apps provide banking organizations with the opportunity to create a stellar, smooth user experience, tailored to their customers needs and usage patterns. This is much harder to do in mobile web, where customization options are limited. On the development side, the organization is tasked with maintaining strict security and privacy practices both in the mobile software and in any 3rd-party vendors employed. 

These apps have proven to be a good tool for retention, information and upsell. If the organization is capable of tying together the web and app journeys, correctly attributing app installs to web visits and activity, they not only gain opportunities for well-timed offers and benefits, but also for improving user experience and personalization.

Solution: Tying together the journey from web to app via secure onboarding process with a private and secure end-to-end solution.  With customers only visiting the app once they have established a relationship with the brand, banking apps have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the user experience and loyalty by driving them to well-designed, UX-centric apps. Ensuring the smooth transition from one platform to the other, where the user identity is maintained and recognized, banking apps can drive upsells and retention easily.

Web-to-app or web and app

The story doesn’t end with eCommerce and finance apps; not even close. Businesses across almost every industry experience similar issues. Whenever any brand is utilizing multiple marketing properties, measurement and attribution becomes a challenge. Whether the goal is to drive users to the native app or just to maintain a cohesive user experience across all properties, a full-stack marketing solution can help take the guesswork and extrapolation out of the game.

The post 2 Common Web-to-App Use Cases for People-Based Attribution appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Gaming is the trailblazer within the mobile industry, and it has followed a remarkable trajectory fueled by savvy marketing teams and a sophisticated, aggressive approach to gathering and interpreting data. It’s an incredibly competitive space, and it shows no signs of slowing down. 

According to AppsFlyer’s analysis, app install ad spend* in gaming totaled $22 billion in 2019. We project that spend will more than double by 2022 when gaming app marketers will allocate $48.5 billion towards user acquisition (UA) worldwide. 

First, the overall context: We recently released a global app install ad spend projection that indicates a robust growth in UA budgets across all verticals, which we expect to hit $118 billion in 2022. That’s almost one third of total mobile ad spend (which includes in-app and mobile web ads across display, video etc).

But within the overall app economy, the gaming vertical is in a league of its own. A deep-dive reveals a projected 30% year-over-year growth through 2022, with gaming UA attracting about 40% of all app install acquisition budgets.

We project that every region will experience healthy growth from 2019 to 2022, as the following chart shows: 

Key Findings

APAC: Driven by massive gaming markets like China, Japan, and Korea, APAC’s gaming UA spend is the world’s highest, and is expected to double from $12.8 billion in 2019 to $25.8 billion in 2022.

Although China is the #1 app market in terms of spend, it is particularly challenging to measure because there are hundreds of 3rd party Android stores instead of a single Google Play (which is not available in China).

However, advances in the market’s measurability have enabled us to include the country in our forecast for the first time. As such, we estimate that gaming UA spend in China reached at least $5 billion in 2019.  

Gaming powerhouses Japan and Korea boast the highest user LTV in the world. As a result, the cost of media is the highest globally at $2.8 per gaming install in Japan and $3 in Korea. This pushed total gaming UA spend in Japan to surpass $800 million in 2019, while Korea attracted budgets totalling roughly $700 million. 

Because hardcore games are extremely popular in these markets, 25% of non-organic installs in gaming are in this genre. It is therefore no wonder that total gaming spend in Japan and Korea is so high given that it costs nearly $10 to acquire a hardcore gamer in these countries. 

North America: UA gaming spend in North America is a distant second in total spend but we forecast it will grow faster — specifically, 135% from $5.3 billion in 2019 to $12.4 billion in 2022.

The region’s large user base and its high cost of media (about $2.2 per gaming install thanks to high user LTV) qualify the market as tier 1 for game developers across the globe (unlike China, Japan and Korea where localization is a significant challenge; if it weren’t for this challenge, spend figures would have been much higher in these markets).

Within genres, casual gaming installs dominate the US market with over half of non-organic installs. At more than $1.5, the cost to acquire a casual gamer in the US is the highest in the world.

Although the cost of acquiring hardcore gamers in the US was high at about $5 in 2019, only 7% of non-organic installs in the country belong to this genre. The US is also the world’s largest social casino market, where CPIs surpass $4, thereby attracting significant spend.  

EMEA: This fragmented market will enjoy a significant 156% growth in gaming app install ad spend from $3.7 billion in 2019 to $9.5 billion in 2022.

In Western Europe, the UK and Germany lead the way with hundreds of millions of non-organic gaming installs and a CPI of about $1.4. Total gaming UA budgets in 2019 hit $560 million in the UK and $530 million in Germany.  

Russia is the largest market in EMEA with almost 500 million non-organic gaming installs in 2019, but the cost of media in the market is low at about $0.45 per installs. As a result, overall spend on gaming UA in 2019 was just $220 million.

Latin America: The region as a whole, and particularly Brazil, has seen significant growth in the last couple of years, reaching massive scale. However, the cost of gaming installs in LATAM is extremely low (around $0.25 per gaming install), making total spend relatively small. Nonetheless, its anticipated growth will top all other regions — from $300 million in 2019 to $800 million in 2022 or 165% higher.

Rise in App Install Ad Spend in Gaming Explained 

Mobile gaming is exploding, but so is the competition. According to App Annie, consumer spend in mobile games (smartphone and tablet) surged to more than $80 billion in 2019, and is expected to surpass $100 billion in 2020. 

Billions of users now have a mobile device to play on within reach. The rise in access and usage has driven gaming apps to grow their user base, putting heavy pressure on marketers to meet demand. 

But with hundreds of thousands of gaming apps to compete with, discovery is a massive challenge, leaving marketers no other choice but to invest in UA to draw attention to their game. As a result, more than 57% of installs among gaming apps with a minimal marketing budget are non-organic. 

Data-driven to the core. Gaming app marketers have to fight for every install while increasing their UA budgets to generate growth. But they must also drive profitability. With better data-driven tools, skilled data analysts, and proven strategies, game marketers — more than in any other vertical — can confidently invest in marketing and drive return on ad spend.  

This confidence also allows marketers to focus more on the ads themselves. They can direct resources toward creative and toward different ad placements and then arrive at the best strategy to acquire quality users, at scale and for the optimal price. 

Organic growth has taken a hit. It’s very difficult to reach new users through generic keywords when they are often overused in app stores and when new games are launched on a daily basis across all genres. With endless options to choose from, the capacity of any game beyond the top charts to find its way to a user’s device is slim to none.

Growth on both ends of the genre spectrum. Hardcore games (e.g. strategy, role playing)  are becoming more popular because of advances in device power and hardware that can support them, leading to deeper and longer sessions. As a result, they attract no less than 76% of consumer spend in Gaming, according to App Annie. 

Because of the high user LTV in hardcore games, the cost of media is high which is why it accounts for the majority of overall gaming app install ad spend (about 37% of global budgets vs. 32% in casual games).

On the other end of the spectrum are Hyper Casual games. These easy-to-develop and easy-to-play games rely on ads to drive revenue, and are attracting millions of users, many of whom did not previously play games. 

Because the margins of these games are low, they rely on scale and must therefore employ aggressive UA strategies. Having said that, the cost to acquire a hyper casual user is relatively low, which means the impact on overall spend in gaming is smaller than with hardcore games.

Rise of in-app ads, especially rewarded video. The smarter use of ads in the game flow and the fact that only about 5% of players monetize via in-app purchases have made ad revenue a significant revenue stream. 

According to a recent IDC report, in-app ad revenue is growing more than four times faster than in-app purchases (26% per year compared to IAP’s and paid mobile games’ 6.2% growth). Improved monetization means more money in the bank which can then be channeled toward increases in UA budgets.

Mobile gaming game-changers?

Technological advances could have their own seismic effects on mobile gaming in the next few years.

5G is coming. Sure, there are significant hiccups along the way and it’s far from ubiquitous, but once the networks are up and users have adopted 5G phones, mobile gaming will be transformed. Game industry experts can’t predict exactly what effect 5G will have on gaming, but they do anticipate that it will be a disrupter along the lines of Spotify and Netflix and move the gaming vertical past free-to-play into subscription monetization models. 

5G will, of course, deliver richer content and faster delivery, and enable more social (group) gaming. Moreover, hardcore games and others with sophisticated content will be more portable, with a “play anywhere” capacity and a surge in diverse content that will appeal to a broad range of players.

Cloud gaming is also coming. With 5G, cloud gaming on mobile is also expected to herald a new era in gaming. When video games are coupled with the power of the cloud, the data processing that underpins gameplay will occur on remote servers, rather than on the devices (consoles or gaming PCs) themselves. With cloud gaming, any user with a device that has access to the internet will be able to connect and jump right into a game. 

Methodology

Note: The predictive modeling applied in this forecast took place prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus. It is still too early to determine the effect it will have on spend in the face of such economic uncertainty. As of March 15, 2020 we did not notice any significant change in mobile gaming ad spend this year compared to previous years. We will revisit the model later to determine whether an update is in order.

Our model is primarily based on AppsFlyer’s own data, which included over 30 billion non-organic installs, $48 billion in ad spend, and 72k apps in the 2017-2019 sample. 

We also used other parameters, such as 3rd party mobile attribution market share data, cost per install prediction per region, number of apps in the app stores, and the number of installs.

The entire set was divided into the following two categories: the attribution market share of non-organic installs (excluding Firebase and Facebook analytics for apps) and the non-attributed market (marketing-driven installs that were not measured through a mobile attribution provider). Note that this division was not shown in the report above, but was a factor in the overall methodology.

 * App install ad spend is the amount of money invested in direct response advertising campaigns that are aimed at driving users to the app stores to download an app. It is a subset of overall mobile ad spend, which comprises mainly of and includes mainly search, brand and video display budgets aimed at driving non-organic app installs.

Sources used:

https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/resources/the-state-of-mobile-internet-connectivity-report-2019/

https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/app-annie-2017-2022-forecast/

https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/state-of-mobile-2020-infographic/

https://forecasts-na1.emarketer.com/5ab41471a2835e0fe88f6068/5a384357e0cb1d0dd489d35e 

https://forecasts-na1.emarketer.com/5a4e4662d8690c0c28d1f233/58a32412bad7b702a0802ec2 

https://www.appannie.com/en/go/state-of-mobile-2019/ 

The post Gaming Apps to Spend $48.5 Billion on User Acquisition by 2022 appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Many companies are going remote-first these days and encouraging working from home as precautionary measures due to the global pandemic of the Coronavirus. Companies are now finding themselves transitioning from their traditional working environments to those that are more enclosed, but does that mean that it should affect your marketing efficiency and campaigns? 

At AppsFlyer, work-from-home practices are a normal and integral part of our daily business operations which due to COVID-19 are now extending company-wide. This has been possible with the help of innovative tools that we have implemented in our daily work-flow to support mobility and remote working, including our own services.

We want to ensure that you are always updated even while we transition to working remotely.

As an AppsFlyer customer, you can utilize these tools to maintain the efficiency of your marketing campaigns.

Live Alerts:

Live Alerts actively monitors your KPIs and notifies you when a significant change has been detected. It is fully configurable, allowing you to easily send the right message to the right people over various communications channels (e.g. email, Slack, and the AppsFlyer mobile app) all in real-time.

With Live Alerts, you can monitor and modify a wide range of attribution and Protect360 KPIs as you go. This will allow your team to remain in the driver’s seat and stay on top of their campaigns while communicating efficiently when an important event occurs. 

Follow this simple configuration guide to get started with Live Alerts!

Validation Rules:

As more people move to remote working, apps will become an even more integral and imperative part of our daily lives, and as a result, the use of these apps will increase drastically. Validation Rules can help marketing teams continually operate their campaigns at scale.

Setup is easy and simple, granting marketers the option to enforce campaign targeting with a set of rules that correlate with their KPIs. 

Additionally, Validation Rules can be updated in real-time, allowing the user full control. Installs that did not meet the outlined standards by the advertiser will not be attributed and shared with the integrated networks in real-time for full transparency.

Follow these simple steps and set-up your Validation Rules now.

Custom Dashboards:

Now more than ever, alignment and synchronization are key. With Custom Dashboards you can stay-on-top of your teams’ performance without having to dive into multiple dashboards.  

Every team and its team members can now access the relevant data they need in order to stay aligned and perform their tasks more efficiently.

Custom Dashboards are easy to set-up and are fully customizable allowing each team to create their own dashboard from scratch,  for example: A geo-specific dashboard for a local country team or a media source-specific dashboard for user acquisition managers.

The AppsFlyer Mobile App:

If all that wasn’t enough, we have an additional tool for you while working remotely. Our mobile app. With the AppsFlyer mobile app, you can easily monitor your marketing campaigns directly from your phone with options to filter by-date and media source for additional granularity and insights.

Furthermore, we’ve taken an extra step to allow you easy access to core AppsFlyer features such as attribution data and analytics providing you with visibility to share key insights with your team ensuring that everyone remains informed immediately.

Our app also supports Live Alerts so if there’s an event that needs to be taken care of, our app will notify you about it.

AppsFlyer’s mobile app is available on both Android and iOS.

Now that you have become acquainted with AppsFlyer’s productivity tools: Live Alerts, Validation Rules, Custom Dashboards and our mobile app we encourage you to use them as your work from home and stay connected. Our support team is readily available and happy to answer any questions that you may have. Stay safe and productive!

The post AppsFlyer Tools to Boost Your Productivity While Working Remotely appeared first on AppsFlyer.

We are forging ahead with our promise to solve one of the biggest challenges every marketer faces: the need for an accurate, complete, and actionable cost reporting solution. As the leader in mobile attribution, we know how important it is to rely both on your attribution data, as well as your cost data to accurately measure your ROI and meet your optimization goals. Keeping to our promise, we are ecstatic to release five new and exciting March updates to AppsFlyer’s cost reporting solution.

1. See your retargeting ad spend in Cohort Reports

AppsFlyer’s Cohort Reports provide marketers with a sophisticated tool that enables them the flexibility and granularity they need to tease out the right insights and make strategic performance decisions on existing and future campaigns.

Now marketers can see their retargeting spend side-by-side with the rest of their ad spend centralized in one dashboard, with the added value from cohort reporting. This new functionality is supported for Facebook, Adikteev, Jampp, and will soon include support for Google and Criteo.

Starting this month, users can calculate the true ROI for retargeting campaigns, not only the user acquisition performance.

With the new unified view in the cohort dashboard, both user acquisition and remarketing managers can get an accurate breakdown of their ad spend and campaign performance data for both newly acquired users as well as existing users, all in one unified view.

2. Adding 18 (!) new cost reporting API partners

Marketers can now view their cost data in AppsFlyer thanks to built-in API integration with the following ad networks: Vungle, Digital Turbine, Applike, Smadex, Adikteev, Unity Ads, ironSource, ironSource Aura, Fyber, Lifestreet, Appreciate, Adjoe, Influence Mobile, Jampp, AdGate Media, Personal.ly, Chartboost, and Beeswax.

In order to accurately optimize campaign ROI, marketers need a wider view of their ad spend from various networks. Now, we are adding even more partners to our existing list, who are fully integrated into AppsFlyer’s cost reporting solution with the most granular breakdowns and cost data available for each network.

Marketers can benefit from their attribution data that is matched with their ad spend data, all in one place. Furthermore, API integrations provide a more reliable source for accurate spend data.

Looking to add a specific integrated partner? Contact your Customer Success Manager or the Customer Engagement Team at hello@appsflyer.com for more information.

3. See cost by site ID in AppsFlyer aggregate reports

Today, marketers optimize their campaigns at the publisher level. However, an even more granular capability to provide cost data is on the Site ID level. That’s why we are happy to provide our users with cost by site ID. Now, marketers can make cost-reporting decisions on the publisher level and even identify a low performing publisher within an ad network and take actions accordingly.

This will be supported for the following partners: AppLovin, TapJoy, and soon to be supported for Liftoff. Pivoting cost data by site ID is available for aggregate level reporting such as: the Overview Dashboard, Cohort Dashboard, and Pivot Report.

4. Delete cost reporting accounts connected to AppsFlyer

Looking to delete one or more connected cost accounts directly from AppsFlyer? Now you can!

As of today, advertisers can remove cost integration accounts from the following networks: Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikToK, Pinterest, MyTarget (Mail.ru), and Verizon Media (Yahoo Gemini).

This is an all-in effort to transform the AppsFlyer platform and cost integration management into a seamless, self-service offering. Users can now keep their managed accounts clean, ensuring that only the most relevant accounts are connected and users can reconnect the right account when needed.

Delete connected accounts directly from AppsFlyer

5. Support for Apple Search Ads multiple API certificates

In order to collect cost, clicks, and impression data from Apple Search Ads, users need to provide their API certificates. Some advertisers separate their Apple Search Ads setup with different accounts per region or team. This means that advertisers could only see the cost data associated with one account.

However, team members can now add multiple certificates to allow spend collection from their various Apple Search Ads accounts. This new capability now enables full spend reporting for Apple Search Ads across all relevant accounts.

AppsFlyer advertisers already enjoy an added layer of granularity for their cost data from Apple Search Ads. Available at the ad group level and geo- dimension, users can already see cost data tied to each keyword and optimize accordingly.

At AppsFlyer, we believe that every performance marketer should be able to have complete and accurate cost data side-by-side with their trusted attribution data. That’s why we are constantly seeking ways to improve our products and commitment to our customers. Stay tuned for more exciting updates.

The post 5 exciting updates to help you zero in on your true ROI appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The rapid spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is sending shock waves across the globe as we all try to adapt to a new reality. 

Businesses are scrambling to understand what they are facing, and what actions they need to take to keep going amid a [likely] global recession.

What will 2020 look like for mobile apps and what will be the impact of the pandemic on their marketing budgets? With so many unknown factors arising from this unprecedented global event, it’s too soon to answer this accurately.

These are challenging times, filled with uncertainty. At AppsFlyer, we hope to empower app marketers and the market with data insights: globally, and in affected areas including China, Italy, South Korea, Spain and Germany. We also have some initial insights on the US and the UK. These numbers will be updated regularly.

The data sample included 4 billion organic installs and 1.8 billion non-organic installs from the past two months.

Organic installs are rising but UA budgets still largely unchanged 

As of March 15, 2020, we can say that, on a global and aggregated level, there has been no significant change in the number of non-organic installs (NOI). As you can see in the chart below, the total number of NOIs is relatively flat, similar to the trend we saw over the same time frame in 2019 (we pulled all our data from last year to check if there are any seasonal trends). 

However, an entirely different story is unfolding with organic installs. Unlike last year when the curve was more or less flat between mid-February and mid-March, we see an increase in organic install activity starting mid-February, and climbing since then by almost 15%. 

A category breakdown shows that change is driven by non-gaming apps. Among gaming apps, we are seeing similar install trends as compared to 2019, although in the past week there has been an increase of 7% in NOI (last year there was a slight drop).

Non-gaming categories experiencing a massive rise in organic installs over the past couple of weeks include: Communication (+150%), Utilities (+110% and +27% in NOI), Finance (+40%), Health & Fitness (+30%), and News (+30% since week 1, and +20% NOI rise since week 6). This increase is not seasonal as last year the numbers were much flatter.

This rise can be attributed to the dramatic increase in the number of people staying at and working from home, turning to their mobile phones to pass the time (Gaming), connect to other people (Social, Communication), work out (Health & Fitness), obtain information (News), work (Business), and manage their bank accounts and investments and make virtual payments (Finance).

What could impact media buying and profitability in such an environment? 

As the situation evolves, change is inevitable, but it seems there has not yet been a global shift in marketing budgets. After all, marketing usually reacts to pure consumer behavior (as demonstrated in organic activity), and only then adjusts strategy accordingly. With app usage rapidly changing in many countries, we expect marketing to follow suit and increase budgets in the short-term.

Another point that’s important to address involves Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). The cost part of the equation may very well drop in some verticals, with many companies across the board (beyond apps) expected to reduce spend. As a result, the level of auction competition will decrease, leading to a drop in the cost of media. This could be an opportunity for apps seeking to drive demand. 

On the other side of the ROAS equation is lifetime value, or the revenue generated by app users. In the short-term, we don’t expect much change. In fact, there might be an increase in app revenue as people are spending much less at restaurants, theaters, shops, and of course travel, potentially freeing up money for virtual spending. 

But in the longer-term, a potential economic recession could affect many households, decrease overall consumer spend, and lower user lifetime value for marketers.

China and Italy show impact of the virus in different waves of the outbreak

The spread of COVID-19 is obviously impacting app behavior and marketing budgets in specific countries and verticals. A few good examples are China, where it seems the spread has been contained, and Italy which is in the midst of a severe outbreak. Let’s take a deeper look at the numbers.

China was dealing with the Coronavirus outbreak starting in mid-January until the middle of February, after which it appears that it has been able to contain local spread and flatten the curve. The impact can be seen in the chart below:

Overall, we can see an increase in organic and non-organic installs at the onset of the outbreak, and a drop after the outbreak was contained. Last year, there was a drop following the Chinese New Year, but at a much higher rate. This time around, the number of installs remained fairly high throughout the time period examined.

On a category level, we can see that gaming, social, and education apps all experienced a significant increase followed by a drop as the situation improved. 

Italy experienced a massive rise in cases starting mid-February, and is now dealing with a significant outbreak. It appears that only in the last couple of weeks Italians have really started to change their lifestyle and stay at home.

As a result, we are seeing an increase of installs since February 23, with non-organic installs rising by 34% in the past week compared to the week of Feb 16-22, and organic installs increasing by 39%. 

A further category breakdown shows that many verticals are experiencing a sharp rise in the number of organic installs in the last 2-3 weeks. From Mar 8-14 to Feb 16-22: Communication (+191%), Social (+171%), News (+116%), Business (+103%), Education (+70%), Entertainment (+62%), Health & Fitness (+55%), Food & Drink (+49%), and Gaming (+41%).

According to our data, marketers in some categories are rapidly reacting to the situation to meet demand, and are increasing their campaign activity to generate a rise in non-organic installs. This trend is led by News apps (+189%), Health & Fitness (+107%), Music (+93%), and Shopping (+30%).

It is no surprise that categories taking a hit from COVID-19 included Travel (-69% organic, -62% non-organic) and Maps & Navigation (-61% organic, -63% non-organic).

Like Italy, the outbreak in South Korea started around mid-February, but thankfully it appears the country is now starting to flatten its curve.  

Install data in the country shows organic installs spiked starting February 20, just as the number of cases escalated. Marketers in the region reacted quickly, as the number of NOIs increased as well, but later dropped, unlike organic installs which continue to rise. 

There was a massive rise in gaming installs during this time — both organic and non-organic — as well as a climb in organic activity in Entertainment and Social apps. Shopping and Food & Drink also experienced an increase across install types. 

The next wave: Spain, Germany, UK, and US

With the spread of the Coronavirus escalating in other countries, we have yet, as of March 15, to experience spikes in overall installs in the way that we’ve seen in China (1st wave), and Italy and Korea (2nd wave). 

But it appears that people in these countries are now moving towards social distancing, staying at, and working from home. As the outbreak continues, the significant increase we’ve seen in the first two waves is likely to materialize in these markets as well.  

So far, there are early signals of this trend:

Spain has seen a surge in the number of cases in the last 7-10 days, as the overall market reaction remains relatively minor compared to last year. Over the same time frame in 2019, installs dropped slightly while this year we are starting to see the overall numbers gradually rise. 

On a category level, we’ve seen the following: 

• Organic installs of Communication apps surged by 40% over the past three weeks, with the biggest jump in the past week
• Organic Gaming installs rose by almost 20% while NOIs were up 13% (contrary to last year where we saw a 12% drop in the number of installs)
• Organic Entertainment installs have jumped 22% in the last two weeks 
• Organic installs of Social apps increased by 35% in the past month

In Germany, where numbers are also rising, there is a similar app usage trend as in Spain — a small increase in the current period as compared to a relatively smaller decrease the previous year. 

• On a category level, we’ve seen the following: 
• Organic Finance installs jumped by 38% in the last 2 weeks while NOI climbed 69%
• Organic Communication installs increased 25% in the past two weeks while NOI remained unchanged
• Organic news installs jumped 40% in the past month
• Organic Social installs increased by 15% in the past two weeks, double the increase rate of last year; NOI remained unchanged

In the UK, the country has recently started to put more focus on social distancing. As a result, we are still seeing the same trend this year as last year, but we believe this will change going forward. 

On a category level, we’ve seen the following: 

• Organic Communication installs rose by 50% in the past week
• Organic Finance installs were up 22% in the past month – three times higher than last year
• Organic Shopping installs increased by 21% over the last 3 weeks 

In the US, there was a 10% increase in organic app installs in the past week.

On a category level, we’ve seen the following: 

• Organic Finance installs have more than tripled in the past two weeks as Americans scramble to handle their money amid the stock market drop; indeed most gains were made among investment apps
• Organic Entertainment increased 15% in the past week alone, four times more relative to last year’s rise
• Organic News installs climbed 15% in the past week, while marketing doubled down with a 30% jump
• Organic Communication installs increased 35% in the past week
• Shopping installs in the US increased by almost 10% in the past week, while last year there was a slight drop over the same period. 

To Sum Up

We all hope that the Coronavirus crisis will end soon and that we’ll be able to recover quickly. 

In the meantime, we’re hoping that this information will help marketers to make wiser decisions with their strategies and budgets. 

Along with the many challenges, which cannot be overstated, there could be great opportunities for apps in a number of verticals, as consumers explore using their mobile phones and apps differently to adapt to a new reality.

The post The Coronavirus Impact on App Installs and Marketing Budgets appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can be showcased on the Play Store by wrapping it in an Android App using Trusted Web Activity (TWA). With AppsFlyer support for Trusted Web Activity based apps, measuring attribution data becomes possible and you can start benefiting from data you can trust.

Measuring Trusted Web Activity based apps provides visibility into users interactions allowing you to map their actions and take the right decisions based on advanced analytics. 

All the rich data and functionalities that you are familiar with from the native apps world are available and can be identified by an AppsFlyer unique identifier per device – per app that will be associated with every event.

Imagine the consolidated data of your customers at your fingertips

Now, when you have all the attribution data related to your Trusted Web Activity based app available, you will be able to:

• Transform data into actionable insights – discover new patterns and opportunities, helping you make the most informed decisions to support maximum growth. 
• Take personalisation to the next phase – optimize campaigns and maximize the impact of each customer touchpoint, delivering the best customer experience possible. 
• Ensure the highest levels of fraud protection – protect your business from the threat of mobile ad fraud at every level of the conversion flow with enterprise-grade protection, fueled by the world’s largest attribution database.

Delivering app-like experiences for your users

Trusted Web Activity allows installing similar user experiences as native apps and opening them in full screen. This way Trusted Web Activity based apps users will not be exposed to the website address and will remain unaware of the different code behind the scenes.

When it comes to attribution, technologies such as deep linking and deferred deep linking still play a key role in providing a personalized experience by having the user land on the specific link they originally searched for, whether the mobile application was previously installed or not. OneLink, for example, can route users to the optimal destination – landing page, app store, contextual in-app experience –  ensuring a smooth experience and an end to broken links.

Mobile marketing powered by data

Rich data on engagement rates and in-app events will help you analyze and optimize your campaigns performance. 

Our mission is to provide your business accurate data so you can extract actionable insights based on the full journey of your customers leading to significant outcomes. AppsFlyer support for Trusted Web Activity based apps is here to enhance your mobile journey and open up new opportunities.

To learn more about PWA and TWA, please check out this link.

The post Trusted Web Activity Based Apps Just Got a Boost with Attribution Data appeared first on AppsFlyer.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Warren Buffet

It’s amazing how much can change in a relatively short time. Fifteen years ago, when Warren Buffet made the quoted observation, it may have indeed taken five minutes for a company to ruin its reputation; digital has changed that. Just as it takes less time to shop for clothing and food, it takes little time to become annoyed and frustrated by friction points in our digital buying journeys, especially during challenging times like today. And while it may have taken five minutes to ruin a brand’s reputation back in 2005, today, it can take five seconds, and often less, to tarnish a brand. 

Digital marketers and app developers are well aware of how quickly a prospect or customer can bounce during a journey. Marketers and UX developers know that they walk a tightrope when they design customer journeys. They labor diligently to analyze and measure data with the aim of continuously optimizing journeys and customer experience, thus ensuring that a brand’s cachet is bolstered.

Deep Linking and Your Reputation

The mobile channel has become key to any digital marketing organization, and the use of deep linking has become an integral tool in the quiver of app developers and marketers seeking to acquire and grow their install base. 

Why are deep links so powerful? Because they help marketers move prospects from point A to point B in a seamless way, optimizing user experience. The same link directs users of any platform, OS, or channel along “a path of no resistance” that if done right — for example, by using contextual data — can be optimized for users. Now that’s powerful, right? After all, the less resistance and friction, the more likely you’ll be able to maintain and enhance your brand’s reputation. 

AppsFlyer has offered OneLink, a robust deep linking solution, since 2014, and thousands of customers benefit from it each day. Today, we announced a new feature enabling digital organizations to configure branded links. This feature makes OneLink even more powerful because it strengthens brand prestige and eliminates a potential friction point for customers.

Drive trust and brand equity

Why You Should Brand Your Deep Links

What’s the difference between a branded deep link and a “regular” deep link? If you use a non-branded deep link, the domain will typically include the deep link provider’s branding, e.g, yourbrand.onelink.me. A branded OneLink does everything that a non-branded one does, including support for Universal Links and App Links… but it displays your brand name in the domain without a deep linking vendor’s name. 

So, back to Buffet’s warning, a branded OneLink helps elevate your brand because it:

• Delivers brand consistency – URLs should echo and emphasize your brand name; just as important, a link that does not include your brand name can impact brand equity negatively.
• Promotes the brand – One of the biggest benefits of branded links is that your brand, not a generic or potentially suspicious link, marks your campaign.
• Fosters trust – Users are more likely to click on branded links (e.g., in SMS, social media, etc.), while email validation systems are more likely to consider emails containing branded links as valid promotion emails.

Ultimately trust and brand awareness further one of the main goals of deep links: removing friction and pain from the user experience. In other words, when users “come across”  branded links, their path to their, and hopefully your, end destination just got shorter. 

So no matter why you use deep links, whether it’s to grow your install base, retain existing customers by re-engaging, onboard with ease, or the countless other deep linking use cases, OneLink’s branded links just made your life and your users’ lives better. 

What would Warren say?

If you care about your brand and want to maintain trust in the eyes of your customers and prospects, try OneLink Branded Links today and compare their performance to your non-branded links. 

To learn more about OneLink, head to our marketer and developer guides. And if you’re a customer that wants to implement Branded Links, talk to your CSM today.

The post Announcing Branded Links: Ensuring Customer Trust and Brand Consistency appeared first on AppsFlyer.

We’re excited to announce that the 10th Edition of The AppsFlyer Performance Index — AKA Edition X or IndeX — is almost out! On March 31st, we will release the complete rankings.

When Edition I was released in Q3 of 2015, it was hard to imagine that 5 years later we would publish Edition X, and that this mini-brand within the AppsFlyer brand would have such an impact on the industry. 

So there’s no better time to say: thank you all for the vote of confidence. 

To illustrate just how much has changed, take a look at the rankings from Edition I, for gaming and non-gaming apps across iOS and Android (look for the icons, it’s the original design). For those who were around back then, it’s quite a sight (click on the image to zoom in):

A quick glance tells the story: The media landscape in mobile advertising has drastically changed in 5 years, as consolidation reshaped the space.  

Since Edition I, the Google-Facebook duopoly has significantly increased its install market share as both giants grew taller and taller. Google, in particular, got off to a relatively slow start, but has since ramped up its presence on mobile. 

We can see that many logos are no longer present, while other big players like TikTok Ads, Apple Search Ads, Snap, and Liftoff have emerged. 

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 60% of media sources that appeared in Edition I, will not be in X
• 75% of media sources that will be in Edition X, did not appear in I

The shift from quantity to quality in media is exemplified in two sweeping trends:

1. A distinct clampdown on fraud and reduced tolerance to any sign of polluted data
2. A shift in budget allocations to media partners with robust in-house technology that can crunch data and drive return

Fast Forward 5 Years: Edition X Marks Google’s Takeover

Edition X is a worthy ending to an explosive decade for mobile apps. It was during the 2010s when apps became our go-to source for content, games, and services. By the end of the decade, App Annie reported app downloads reached 204 billion in 2019.

However, with millions of apps in the stores, developers have been increasingly reliant on marketing to drive installs. 

Indeed, almost 60% of downloads of apps with marketing spend in 2019 were driven by app install campaigns — up 15% compared to 2018 and almost 30% since 2017. 

Translating this to money, app install ad spend in 2019 totaled a staggering $57.8 billion, according to our recent report. 

Ultimately, when marketing plays such a central role in the success of mobile apps, so does the Index. 

Mark your calendars for March 31st

…And get the complete rankings of Edition X including:

1. 252 rankings including 20 new categories (e.g. finance, entertainment, and gaming sub genres)
2. Retargeting Index rankings by region
3. Growth insights on Google, Facebook, Apple Search Ads, Snap, ironSource, AppLovin, Unity Ads and others
4. Key insights and actionable takeaways 

The post AppsFlyer Performance Index: Ahead of Edition X, a Look Back at Edition I appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Millions of app installs are processed daily by AppsFlyer. Each install provides a plethora of measurable data points, from timestamps to device sensor indicators, together this provides visual insight to each install and its quality.

Unfortunately, many installs traveling through our ecosystem are fraudulent. Now more than ever – fraud protection is a fundamental necessity to the mobile industry, second only to attribution in measurement.

The low scale challenge

As fraud protection methods evolve, so do fraud operations. With new technology emerging, and new loopholes identified and exploited by fraudsters. New challenges arise daily forcing new identification methods to follow. 

Many fraudulent installs can be identified by install authentication methods, or through their association with fraudulent cluster patterns. However, smaller fraud cases can sometimes fall under the radar, as low volume sites exploit their small sample size.

Identifying fraud on an individual install level is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. This is not merely a classification issue, as time would prove that we are required to provide a reason behind our classification. This forces us to consistently seek the ideal classifier. 

A classifier that learns specific parameters, but also the rules to making an informed decision, and logic for blocking a specific install.  An install-level classifier that overcomes the challenges of identifying fraud on low-scale, smaller sites, while still maintaining the ability to accurately block fraud in real-time with a minimal false-positive rate.

As we looked for the ideal classifier we came across Bayesian networks.

Bayesian networks are essentially a probabilistic model measuring dependencies between variables via a directed acyclic graph.

Directed acyclic graph

This identification method calculates the probability to view a specific set of install parameters. Essentially, modeling dependencies between pairs of variables and identifying which of those pairs are dependent on one another, and which are not.

Bayesian networks are best used for analyzing events that occurred and predicting the probability of possible known contributing causes. 

For example, a Bayesian network could represent the probabilistic relationships between a disease and its symptoms. Once specific symptoms are presented, a Bayesian network can be used to calculate the probability of various diseases.

How does it work?

We use a variant over the Chi-Square test, to test conditional dependence between variables. Assuming that all variables are dependent means that our calculation is correct but intractable.
The network enables us to find combinations of two or more fields. These fields  contain very low to non-existent potential of actually occurring.

Some combinations may be trivial, like a new device model with an old OS, but covering each case manually is hard to carry out and maintain at scale. 

Bayesian networks specifically help when examining a combination of several parameters. While each pair might seem legitimate when examined individually, it is  the combination of all variables put together which is not statistically possible.

For the sake of this example let’s consider having 50 different variables, each with 10 options – this would yield 10^50 possible combinations of values.

If all variables were independent all we would have to do is learn each of them separately, leaving us with 500 possibilities – very easy to compute. However, not all of them are independent.

To calculate this accurately, we must first identify which specific variables are independent and which are co-dependent. This identification will create a Bayesian network, which allows us to accurately compute install probability across many different variables.

We essentially calculate the probability of an install to be fraudulent. However, this probability must be significant in order to pass AppsFlyer’s strict threshold and to be blocked, as we aim to avoid false positives.

With this advanced model already in use across our ecosystem we manage to identify over a million fraudulent installs a day, about 50% of these installs would have otherwise gone undetected and unidentified by previous rule sets. These additional installs save millions of dollars for AppsFlyer’s customers.

By utilizing Bayesian networks and constantly adding new features and methods to our fraud detection capabilities, we are now more equipped to take on current and future fraud challenges, as we move forward with our efforts to fight mobile ad fraud.

The post Install-Level Fraud Detection with Bayesian Networks appeared first on AppsFlyer.

App developers today typically use more than one monetization strategy to meet their business goals; one of which is revenue coming from in-app advertising. Some app developers choose to use the valuable app real-estate to capitalize on views or clicks from ads shown within their app, and thereby generate another source of revenue for their business.

Return on ad spend (ROAS), an important KPI for app developers, reflects a campaign’s marketing performance via the app’s monetization strategy and can be extremely important when trying to analyze the revenue at the user-level.

Why?
Today, most app developers are left with an “estimated” calculation on which users are generating the best ROAS for their business. Since ROAS is a major KPI for most advertisers, having an estimated calculation just won’t cut it.

Providing user-level revenue data allows app developers to better understand which user-acquisition source is generating the most revenue down the line for their business.

User-level data will allow AppsFlyer to accurately tie back ad revenue from those users coming from a certain user acquisition campaign. Once this is done, the app owner can better understand which users are most valuable to them and where exactly they were initially acquired. These highly-valuable users (or ‘ad whales’) hold the key to performance efficiency, and come to carry a lot of weight for gamers out there or any other apps generating an important source of revenue from in-app ads.

A while back we announced the user-level ad revenue API integration with a list of partners: ironSource, MoPub, Max by Applovin, and Appodeal and the list keeps growing. We are more than excited to announce yet another partner – Tapdaq, starting this month.

Considering that there is a rise in mobile app developers who are increasingly generating revenue from in-app advertising, the task to measure accurate ROAS, calculate true ROI and understand exactly which user is most valuable, has become critical for advanced optimization.

AppsFlyer’s Ad Revenue Attribution: New Capabilities

As part of AppsFlyer’s ad revenue attribution product, we now offer our customers the ability to export raw ad revenue data! 

This allows app developers to accurately see their top performance and tie back to the users who are generating revenue as mentioned above. Other than understanding their top-performing user acquisition sources, they can build robust predictive revenue models with granular raw data at their fingertips.

Furthermore, they can locate important trends in user behavior, optimize their ad formats, ad timing and model predictive LTV.

But that’s not all. There are more benefits to having user-level ad revenue data. By being able to export the revenue data from AppsFlyer, together with the attribution data, app developers have unprecedented insight into exactly which users generated a specific amount of revenue for them at a much more granular dimension, as well.

What can you do with this granular analysis?
Well, predictive models, for one. Sophisticated app developers (let’s say for a hyper-casual app) are craving the ability to go one step further and build predictive models (eCPM models and eCPC models) to truly understand how to maximize their ROAS and optimize the true LTV of their users and future users. Predictive modeling leverages historical data in order to make accurate predictions. The more data you have, the more accurate your model will be. 

To better understand the importance of analyzing user-level ad revenue data, let’s take a gaming example where the user acquisition team understands that their best performing users (those who result in the most views or actions from app ads), come from Snap and engage strongly with video content.

The monetization manager now has the ability to optimize the monetization strategy according to the channel through which this user was acquired.

Looking at raw ad revenue data, the monetization manager can see that users acquired through Snap, generate more revenue from video ads compared to interstitials. As a result, a decision can be made to show users acquired through Snap a video ad as their first ad impression.

Attributed user-level ad revenue data, unlock a whole new level of monetization optimization strategies and collaboration between both UA and monetization managers.

To get started, our customers can head over to the data export page or via the Raw Pull API today!

Important: To enable user-level ad revenue API for a supported mediation network, you must disable the ad revenue APIs of the monetization networks that it mediates.

Providing our customers with advanced data management means that we commit to cover a wide range of data and go further with data granularity. We know how advanced our customers are when it comes to data management and optimization and so, we are out to accomplish the technology necessary to provide them with the top capabilities in the market. 

To keep reading about this topic in AppsFlyer’s Gaming Guide, and stay tuned for more updates coming soon…

The post Perform Advanced Measurement by Exporting Attributed Raw User-Level Ad Revenue appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The world as we know it has changed and it’s anybody’s guess how the situation will shape up in the months and years to come. As we’re wading into uncharted territory and trying to process the implications the global pandemic has on our lives, many, if not all of us, are asking, “How will I get through this?” 

Brands are asking themselves the same question. Many of them are not strangers to crisis management, but nothing could have prepared them for a global pandemic of this magnitude. They now have to rewrite their playbooks and evolve their strategies in real-time in order to stay relevant to their users.

Source: AppsFlyer survey.

A recent survey we ran shows that the majority of marketers are using this time to evaluate their spending and make adjustments to their marketing strategies.

But times of uncertainty also provide clarity. While companies are re-assessing their user acquisition budgets, we’re seeing a lot of companies now putting more focus on retention and brand awareness instead.

Companies who were quick to respond shifted their main business focus in order to stay relevant and retain their users. For example, ridesharing companies repurposing their platforms for food and medicine delivery to answer growing demand.

Brands can really make a difference in how they’re perceived by their users and open new possibilities for growth by adapting to the ‘new normal’.

Here are five marketing must-dos you can implement to successfully navigate your brand during this challenging period:

1. Communicate proactively: shift your messaging to what is truly important to your users and approach them with empathy and understanding.

Brands are communicating more these days but there’s a fine line between being heard and creating unwanted noise. As our lives transition to digital at an even faster pace and we’re restricted to working from home, we find ourselves craving more information and increasingly feel the need to stay connected. This is a major challenge for brands as they need to update their messaging and content at a rapid pace and adjust it to their global audiences as the situation evolves.

So what can you do? Start by leveraging existing touchpoints through owned media and let your users know how you are coping with the situation by updating your app and website with relevant content. Offer help, guidance, and show empathy. Share vital information about how the pandemic is affecting your business so that users are not left wondering about the actions you are taking.

     How brands are communicating with their users during the pandemic

2. Lean on data you can trust: analyze and respond to the emerging trends in user behavior.

The ongoing pandemic has forced millions of people around the world to adapt to a new reality and change their day-to-day routines. As a result, people use their phones for multiple activities and are exploring new apps. The impact of the pandemic is also being reflected in how users interact with apps – they spend more time on social apps and consume more news while almost completely abandoning sports and travel apps.

Advertisers need to think on their feet in order to maintain marketing efficiency. Now, is the time to apply the full force of your attribution data and uncover where your marketing excels and make sure that your ad spend is generating the highest ROI.
Make sure to rely on marketing data at your disposal. For example, use segmentation tools to create cohort reports showing how specific segments of your users behave over time and create highly-targeted retargeting campaigns by utilizing raw data.

Pre and post COVID-19 trends show an increase in installs, both organic and non-organic

3. Focus on retention: reinforce your relationship with existing users through relevant and meaningful experiences. 

User retention is on every marketer’s mind these days. Acquisition of new customers is very challenging for most businesses under normal circumstances, let alone during a pandemic. 

Brands need to plan for sustainable growth in the post-corona era and their most reliable way to get there is by investing in their existing users.

Acquiring new users costs 5 to 10 times more (!) than selling to a current user, and current users spend 67% more on average than those who are new to your app.

Understandably, customer retention is influenced by the customer experience, and there are many things that brands can do to improve it – e.g.,  offering free shipping and no-cost trials, extending return policies, providing cheer-up promotions, delivering within 24 hours, etc.

What is certain is that the fundamentals that should inform any approach marketers take must start with a genuine understanding of how users think and feel during this period.

People will remember how they were treated during these times, and it’s completely in the marketer’s hands to determine the outcome of that.

 Reaching users of all ages and interests. Brands spread awareness and offer help through their platforms.

4. Build an effective remarketing strategy: utilize all your user attributes and additional data points to create granular segments and reach users in the right way.

Since you started reading this article, not much has changed. There are still millions of people sitting at home with more time to spare, ready and able to receive your messaging. But in order to get their attention, you need to engage in relevant and meaningful conversations with your users.

To successfully achieve more precise messaging for each segment group of users, you should segment specific audiences with as much granularity as possible, incorporating more detail from their user-attributes and engagement behavior. Why is this critical? Put simply, our data shows that being able to retarget with precision can almost double retention rates (figure below), and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Segmenting audiences to retarget with granularity requires that your arsenal includes tools that build different segments based on actual usage and granular event-attributes. These tools should be robust enough to leverage integrations across the stack while providing simplicity that enables one person to manage a full campaign.

Shopping companies have been quick to adopt retargeting in their marketing mix and the results speak for themselves.

5. Double down on engagement: retain users by creating seamless cross-platform experiences.

The digital experience you provide is more important than it’s ever been – both now and once all this is over. As brands shift more of their activity to digital to meet growing demand, the number of communication channels with users and the frequency they’re being used also grows. So channels funneling to apps — such as email, web, social, and SMS — all play a crucial part in the user journey and just as critical is the need to ensure a smooth transition between all digital channels and apps. 

To avoid friction, be more supportive of user needs by streamlining user experience. For example: include deep links to ease the flow to your apps, especially to change orders and process refunds. This will enable users to self-serve and get what they need faster and more conveniently, no matter where their journey begins. 

How brands can utilize mobile web banners and push notifications to provide their users more visibility into their purchases.

Conclusion: don’t stop marketing.

This is a period of radical change. Many businesses are pausing or pulling back marketing and advertising expenditures due to the crisis. While this is understandable, marketers should look at the present moment as an opportunity and think long-term. Businesses need to take a creative approach, provide value to their clients and keep their messaging consistent in order to come out strong from this crisis. 

At AppsFlyer, we want to help marketers to achieve these goals. We are continually working on providing more insights and value to our clients through our platform; we’ll be releasing new features soon, so stay tuned and most importantly, stay safe!

The post Five Mobile Marketing Must-Dos to Effectively Navigate Times of Uncertainty appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The world is currently dealing with an unprecedented reality, as employees and businesses alike are facing significant economic uncertainty. The coronavirus has already hit the global market hard – especially in some industries and regions more than others – and a recession is likely ahead.

What does the future hold for marketing in such circumstances? While many other industries have seen revenue drops, the same may not necessarily be true for apps. 

AppsFlyer has been keeping up with coronavirus marketing trends as they occur and we’ve seen that there are many opportunities for mobile apps. In fact, many app verticals have seen a surge in usage and significant revenue uplift in the last few weeks as people are at home and turn to apps for social and practical use. 

To better understand how to manage marketing budgets during uncertainty, and potential, of the times, we sat down with three experts from leading apps across regions and verticals to get their take:

Manav Sethi is the Group Chief Marketing Officer from Eros International, one of the leading global companies in the Indian entertainment industry with over 26M paying users and 180M registered users. 

Shay Ze’ev Yosifon is the VP of Marketing at Beach Bum, one of the top card and board gaming companies with leading evergreen games like Lord of the Board and Spades Royale. 

Stephanie Pierce is the Head of Growth Marketing at Quicken, maker of America’s best-selling personal finance software, and newly released Simplifi by Quicken, a personal finance app. 

Read on for more! 

Marketing spend

AppsFlyer: How do you see the marketing spend going forward? In the short term, many verticals are seeing increased usage in app activity as people stay at home. On the other hand, as the recession is looming and people are losing their jobs, consumer LTV can drop, which can obviously impact spend in the long-term. How do you see this on your end?

Shay Ze’ev Yosifon: It’s an interesting question. I think that in the short term, we’re seeing two contradicting trends. On one hand, we’re seeing the supply grow as people spend more time with their devices consuming content. On the other hand, in some verticals, there is a drop in demand where, in others, a lot more competition. 

When looking at Entertainment and more specifically, at Gaming, there’s definitely a lot of competition. All the big players are moving very aggressively. So, the competition overall has not gone away completely. Since some players understand that it is an opportunity, we’re going to see an increase in competition for that screen time.

Longer term, yes, a recession always hits everyone’s pockets, but I do think that people still need entertainment. Some might say that it’s a form of escapism. It’s a way to forget your troubles for a while. 

Therefore, I don’t think [corona] is going to necessarily have a very big impact [on revenue for certain verticals especially]. I think it can, but we also need to adjust our approach accordingly. It’s how we handle our customers and how we retain them and how we make sure they’re entertained even though they’re not paying users.

I do think that it’s only a midterm drop in revenues and that, longer term, we’ll see that coming back up.

[AF: Beach Bum Games belong to the Casual Gaming vertical, the latest session and revenue trends for which are highlighted in the graph below]

Click here to view our regularly updated report

Stephanie Pierce: I was in the digital media space during the last recession back in 2008/2009, where we did see a decrease in ad spending across some of the clients I was working on, agency side. But this is completely different, which makes it hard to draw too many similarities.  The fact that we don’t know how long everyone will be in this situation makes it very hard to predict much, if anything. 

From my perspective, media spend predictions in the short term will vary drastically by industry. Obviously, Travel has been hit really hard, which is sad, but not shocking. [Many retailers] in the United States have had to close their brick-and-mortar businesses and so, I think that it could go either way. Maybe they will take marketing dollars that normally support their brick-and-mortar stores and put more towards online.

However, in the [Fin]tech space, at least for a company like Quicken, we’re a little bit more resilient, as our products, both Quicken and our new mobile-first product, Simplifi by Quicken,  are extremely helpful for people right now. There is no better time to get on top of your personal finances, plus many people have extra time to do so.

I think this is just so different from any type of recession in the recent past, which makes it very hard to know what it will be like in six months or a year, etc.

Manav Sethi: Unlike in the past, this is possibly the first time where internet and mobile-led internet is available at scale. That has never happened in the history of the human race.

What you’re saying is absolutely right: there is an uptake in consumption, downloads, monetization, and revenues in categories like Shopping and Video. So short-term, I think that there are [significant growth trends for two main] categories, which are low-price entertainment and utilities. 

If you look at eCommerce, there is a new category called Essentials, because we know that the constraints are not only from the availability of the SKU spread, but also from a distribution POV. Meanwhile, people are still using shampoos, soaps, basic detergents, groceries, consumables, etc. That is still continuing to happen, and there continues to be a need. So I think in the short term, such SKUs and categories will continue to grow.

From a long term standpoint, I think it depends on how long this period will be. As it happens in every downturn, people start to look inwards. As a marketer, it is incumbent to look at the emerging segmentations and categories which possibly either never existed before or where you didn’t focus many resources. In this new normal, their entire demand has shifted because consumer patterns have shifted as people start to conserve more cash. On the other side of this, consumption will come back to normal, though it will take time, perhaps as late as Q2 or 3.

Also, this is possibly the first time where [all our] behaviors, psychology, interactions with others, and interactions with our surroundings are going through such a shift. So a lot of new trends, new patterns, and new categories, which never possibly existed at scale, are going to emerge on the other side. From a marketing standpoint, because of this, we will need to take a balanced approach between being defensive as well as offensive.

[AF: Eros International belong to the Streaming Entertainment vertical, the latest session and revenue trends for which are highlighted in the graph below]

Click here to view our regularly updated report

Number of media sources

AF: In terms of the number of media sources that you use, are you decreasing or increasing the amount, or will you keep it the same?

Shay: I think it’s pretty much the same, but we’re always looking for opportunities. Right now, I don’t think it’s necessarily to reach out to new sources, but if you were planning on expanding, then now is a good (and maybe cheap) time to do so.

We’re expanding our portfolio according to the opportunities that we find. Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of allocating budgets according to where you see growth potential.

Stephanie: I would say it’s fairly business as usual, but we are trying some new channels to evolve with the changing times. The big players in the space, regardless of these times, remain important for scale.

Manav: I think the channel mix and layering is going through a complete change. For example, realize that, at least in India, we are not getting print paper at all, as well as that India is not a significant smartphone population (300M+ against 1.3B people). So people are going to read in PDF on their screen, but they’re not gonna invest, recall, or focus on the ads on their screen.

[As for mobile specifically], absolutely yes. I mean, who would have thought that Gaming would acquire such scale in these times, because people have disposable time and are at their homes where they have access to Wi-Fi. So I would want to go back and realign that equation across more networks. And I’d also want to reallocate from inefficient publishers, or apps, which are witnessing incremental uptake.

[AF: The AppsFlyer Performance Index is one of the best resources for evaluating media source quality across regions, verticals, and subcategories. Click the image below to access the full report of Edition 10]

Marketing methods

AF: What about changes in terms of the methods that marketers are using? Are you going to also look more at retargeting or maybe use more your own channels like social, cross-promotions, things that are cheaper?

Shay: I mean, 2020 is the year of retargeting anyway, and more and more mediation platforms offer easier ways of cross-promotion. So I think, anyways, that 2020 was a year of moving away a little bit from user acquisition [towards retargeting], and the current situation might accelerate that growth.

That being said, you can find good opportunities in all marketing channels and you shouldn’t necessarily push one over another. Now is a good time (for some verticals) to expand on all marketing fronts and see where we get the most value.

Stephanie: Yeah, the marketing plan and tactics that we had originally set for 2020 have changed a little bit. Peoples’ lives and their media consumption behaviors have changed drastically in the last four weeks, meaning video consumption has gone up a lot because people are stuck at home. We all need to adjust for [these changes in consumer behavior] and so we’re making those adjustments on our side, whether investing in specific channels or trying new ones.

AF: By using user acquisition or re-engagement?

Stephanie: A little bit of both. Simplifi by Quicken just launched in January, so it’s a fairly new product of ours and we’re definitely in that growth phase still. Therefore, a lot of what we’re doing is obviously UA-focused.

Manav: Sure. We both know that the cost of acquiring a new consumer is a lot more than retaining one. So, the focus has to be inverted now on retention, on your loyalty cohorts, on all those cohorts which are due for lapsing, especially in these times when audiences on networks are shrinking (think the auto and luxury industries mentioned earlier).

How are you bringing them back? Are you extending them more of the same buck you weren’t earlier? It goes without saying that retention remains the mainstay in such times, right, but there are also certain opportunities which these times present.

The immediate point I’m saying is that we should be looking at the complete value chain around [your users’] basic consumption and see which cohort lends you the most opportunity.

This is largely for the categories where consumption has stopped or reduced significantly (non-essentials), like eCommerce and entertainment. You see that there is a humongous uptake because, again, the cheapest form of entertainment is where it is happening on mobile and the internet.

Additionally, with both incrementally increasing user time on social and the tools that social platforms provide to connect and disseminate information, brands have started to use social as a push medium. We have seen brand awareness videos for education apps on platforms like TikTok and social responsibility videos on ErosNow.

Revenue

AF: If you look at your revenue streams, for either your app or in general, are you seeing a decrease in IAPs? If that’s the case, will or do you expect increases in IAA to compensate?

Shay: At the end of the day, IAAs and IAPs have a very close relationship because IAAs come mostly from other advertisers. If everyone is spending less because their revenue drops, then your chance of making that money on IAA won’t necessarily pick that up.

Manav: From a SVOD standpoint, we have seen double digit growth in paying users.

Media costs

AF: What do you think is going to happen with media costs? On the one hand, as you said, if you look at things overall, are you going to see a drop in ad spend across the board? Many different industries are suffering. On the other hand, you also said that there is increased competition for screen time, especially among mobile apps as people are staying at home.

Do you see media cost potentially going down or up in either the short term or long term?

Shay: In terms of media costs now and for the short term, I think they’re going to stay lower than they were. If we saw a big drop, they might have a very slight increase but not something substantial. As we start rolling out from this, we’re going to see a bigger increase in cost. However, midterm, it’s still going to stay lower than it’s been.

Stephanie: Where’s my crystal ball? I think that’s really hard. [On the one hand], we could have some industries divest their spend because they don’t physically have a business anymore. But also, you have others that are pumping more into digital, which obviously includes mobile, to capture that [current] user behavior.

So, it could end up being net zero change. I think it also depends on the type of media, your product, and who you are competing against in any given space.

Manav: Yeah. So I think, short term, CPIs and CPAs are gonna be nuanced in terms of certain categories. Let’s say we have a portal or an app which was doing reviews of new car launches, versus travel/OTA and hospitality apps, they’re surely going to get ahead. Essentially, advertisers will go to places which have audiences… but also audiences have moved in these times.

Second, from the brand standpoint, remember that not everybody is in the luxury position of continuing to spend. People are looking towards the same capital, which was ready to be deployed exclusively for marketing, to reallocate to various other functions within the organization.

Third, in the midterm, specifically in these higher consumption verticals, CPIs and CPAs will continue to be the same, if not decrease. On the other side of it, when the new normal comes in, I think, they are going to start to emerge back. However, nothing is going to stay the same for long because, as history has told us, consumer behavior also shifts, and quickly. 

Finally, do understand that we all are dealing with something and the nature of these phenomena is such that we don’t know the outcome of that on the other  side. This is why we don’t know for how long and to what extent it will impact.

[AF: Given the projected changes in media costs, the image below illustrates how costs vary between ad formats]

LTV predictions

AF: Okay, so it’s still a little bit premature to think about the long term and how recession will impact consumer spend. However, when we build a prediction model, is this something that you think should be changed [to reflect the situation]? Are you changing your prediction model in times of uncertainty? Are you more conservative maybe?

Shay: One of the things about prediction models is that most of them are built on historic data. I don’t think there has been a recession since the app industry was mature enough. I think it’s more difficult to predict how a recession will affect LTV, but it’s definitely going to require everyone [to be a little more conservative] – not just apps.

Stephanie: Not necessarily, not for us. We’re only in month five or so [of our app]. For the time being, no, that’s not something that we’ll be doing for our business.

Manav: For entertainment apps, LTV is also a function of new content/shows released on the platform. Given that all shoots are held up and new content is a challenge for many, I believe new cohorts will definitely emerge. However, this will largely depend, post recovery, as to the availability of capital and new content.

Product development

AF: Do you think now is a good time to release new titles or features, new significant updates?

Shay: Definitely. Since your user base is at home and they’re playing more, you’re going to get more data more quickly. It’s definitely smart to give more content to your users now. People are looking for something new. They’re looking for their next chase.

However, try not to be cynical about it. I wouldn’t necessarily monetize on their pain right now. Try giving them something as a trust sort of activity.

AF: Is it also the time now to spend a lot on UA for such a launch?

Shay: I think so because you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck. Also, during a soft launch, it’s all about data, right? So now it’s going to be cheaper and quicker to get that data. It’s exactly what a new game needs.

Stephanie: Is it something that’s going to provide value or boost engagement for your product? Of course that should be done. We should never stop improving our products and releasing new features, but if it’s a fundamental change in your business model, I would take a step back and think about that a little harder. I think it’s dependent on your industry and the type of feature it is.

Manav: Absolutely yes, ZOOM is a classic example. Keep your eyes and ears on new emerging cohorts leading segmentation and keep adding new features to build incremental consumption and loyalty.

Corona-related features, updates, or offers

AF: In the past few weeks, have you done or released anything innovative – perhaps a unique campaign, a creative, an offer – that has been driven by the Coronavirus pandemic?

Stephanie: Yes, we have been able to offer discounts for our new customers in the thought of helping people get everything organized and provide some peace of mind for understanding their finances completely.

AF: It’s probably not too easy now to come up with copy. You don’t want to come across as exploiting the situation, right?

Stephanie: Exactly and we’re not. This is normally a busy time of year for a lot of types of financial services, as people like to get their finances in order at the beginning of the year – kind of aligns with the tax season, although that has been extended in the US for a couple more months.

So yeah, we don’t want to take advantage of the situation. I’ve been very fortunate to be at a company with a leadership team that is so wonderful and respectful of people’s changing lives and having to adjust to this. Not everyone was made to work from home 24/7.

So for us, it’s more of wanting to be there for our customers and helping them through this time of uncertainty.

Manav: Yeah, so we have made changes across all three strategy lines we spoke about before.  

On the retention side, we have started to go back to the consumer more often and [send relevant re-engagement messaging]. From that standpoint, there is a lot more that we are doing, and we have seen healthy matrices and uptake [from these efforts].

On the creative side, in earlier times, we were able to take a slapstick, humorous, funny, satirical approach. Today, it is a lot more empathy-led. Today, it is a lot more emotions-led. Today, it is also a lot more awareness-led of launching new shows, new platforms, new base layers, which never existed before. For example, if you have 10,000 movies on your platform, you might have been too busy earlier launching new movies to notice many old movies which even consumers didn’t know existed. Now, you may be discovering [them] and working off that.

Therefore, I suspect that a lot more predictive analysis, which goes into bringing out more [previously existing] content is coming.

From the channel mix side, we have been one of the organizations which has always put more belief in digital as a mainstream media, which is why the largest chunk of our marketing money has always gone to digital. That’s why we have relocated all those category spends, as I discussed earlier.

Lastly, from a pricing plan POV, we have extended the duration for the same dollar spend. 

[AF: The image below shows one of the creatives for a corona-specific promotion from Eros Now]

Ad engagement

AF: Are you seeing CTR improving in your ads, perhaps more than usual? Is this kind of message resonating at this time? Are they thinking a lot about this or is it concerning to them or something else?

Stephanie: Yeah, we are, and it’s a little bit of both. Two or three weeks ago, I think people were more distraught as they adjusted to their new normal of self-isolation and social distancing.

Now that we are a few weeks in and, at least here in the States, more or less know that this is going to be going on for a while, I feel that people are a little bit more calm in terms of understanding what tomorrow brings.

Final thoughts

AF: Any last words of wisdom for app marketers who are now thinking about planning for the month of May?

Shay: I think this is the best time to be flexible in budget allocation and optimization. Keep true to what you usually do, but don’t forget that the state of the world changes every week, and even every couple days; new things happen. Now it’s about one’s ability to react quickly rather than have a plan for the next month or two.

Stephanie: For me, I think it’s understanding what’s going on in the market. I’ve been trying to stay up to date on marketing and advertising trends so I have a better perspective and how that compares to my own performance.

The other important thing is to really be flexible and agile in what you’re doing, and realize that we will most likely have to pivot multiple times in the next few months.

Manav: First, as I said before, don’t cut spend. Just be smart about it and allocate your budgets where there’s an opportunity.

 Also, keep your eyes and ears open for the new segments and cohorts forming which might not have existed or emerged earlier.

For example, if you look at all the eCommerce companies right now, they are shouting through the roof on essentials. So while there’s a new normal, there’s also a new essential. A sulfur-free shampoo may be essential for you, whereas another guy may not have access to a normal shampoo.

But do remember that both cohorts have their own scale. So from a marketer standpoint, now, you need to go back and say, “Okay, maybe I was not focusing on a normal shampoo because it was not my margin driver, but today, because people don’t have access to that normal shampoo in an offline channel or their grocery store, they’re going to look to the Amazons of the world to order that normal shampoo as well.”

And certainly, if your catalog or your merchandising plan did not include promoting a normal shampoo at front, it will now, probably also seeing humongous orders.

Basically, you have to reassess customer priorities, relocate the budgets, switch your brand positioning within the same scheme spread, possibly look at emerging new product activities, and, of course, redefine the value.

The post App Marketing In Times of Uncertainty – The Experts’ Take appeared first on AppsFlyer.

COVID-19’s profound far-reaching impact has been rippling across every industry, with individual businesses responding to its effects in their own way. At present, marketers and brands should engage with and nurture users and audiences while all stakeholders are in collective isolation, in order to let them know they are still there for them. 

Given this new situation, how can marketers optimize their outreach?  They’ll need to consider three main questions:

• What should your interactions with customers look like during this time?
• What customer engagement initiatives are prudent to take in order to support the community and keep your business afloat?
• How should you reassess customer engagement during this time?

1. Deep focus on the customer

While we know there’s no fixed roadmap for responding to COVID-19, the first point of departure should always be the customer. 

Communicate with empathy and compassion to all stakeholders—that includes your clients, staff and your local communities. Think about the critical information they will want to know about your business: How does the current situation impact the customer? What is the company doing to address this?

And get to the point—everyone’s inboxes are now flooded with messages about COVID-19, so it’s best to narrow-focus on the customer’s specific connection with your brand. Talk about policy changes that might potentially affect them. For those with a physical presence or offer delivery services, outline the sanitary measures that have been taken. Your customers may have dramatically different priorities during this time, so remember to take this into account.

1.1 Open, Transparent and Regular Updates

Make sure you’re transparent about the processes you’ve taken to ensure customer and your team’s safety—more than ever before. 

For example, when describing hygiene measures taken across your supply chain, vagueness is not recommended. Be specific about what you’ve done.

In addition, talk about what measures you’ve taken, if any, to help your local communities. Develop a regular cadence of (relevant) customer communications, as news around COVID-19 is moving fast, and information can fall outdated quickly. Finally, be quick about communicating with customers when there are new developments that might affect them.

1.2 Strike the right tone

As this is a sensitive time for a majority of stakeholders, brands should avoid coming across as trying to take advantage. Your first instinct should not be to market or stay ahead of your competitors—focus rather on just reaching out and showing that you care. That can also mean an audit of your schedule of communications to ensure that all messaging and tonal choices are appropriate for the current climate. 

While some levity is acceptable—especially when showing care and support—your company’s typical tone may not be appropriate for COVID-19-related updates. If your brand is typically irreverent and quirky, slightly modulate that when talking specifics about how you’re addressing the crisis. This can mean involving a senior-level spokesperson such as the CEO to personally communicate high-level messages. Again, think of your customers first, and how you can empathetically address their needs and anxieties during this time.

1.3 Equip yourself and your team with the right messaging and tools 

Staff worried about job security during this time will also need regular, transparent and open communication about their ongoing role within the company. 

Addressing these anxieties can go a long way to shoring up employee morale, and lead to more satisfying customer experiences and interactions in general. Ensure your people—particularly front-line and customer-facing employees—are also equipped with the right tools and messaging while interfacing with clients and partners during this unique time. Send out reminders and train your team on best practices in customer communications, particularly in response to customer complaints and needs.

1.4 Two-way communication

Customer interactions with a brand during times of crisis can have an emotional and lasting impact on brand loyalty. 

Listen to what your customers are saying to you on social media, across your various platforms and from your front-line staff. Their feedback can help you adjust your value proposition, messaging and customer experience in a way that helps meet their needs while conveying the appropriate level of care and concern for their health and well-being, and also offering brands a better sense of how to help their customers through this crisis. This feedback might also offer a window into how your customers can help you to manage your way through this crisis while building long-term resilience.

1.5 Ensure relevant messages reach the right audiences

During the COVID-19 pandemic, app marketers should be acutely sensitive to the daily barrage of marketing communications that their customers are now being exposed to, from family, peers and friends, as well as the brands and personalities they follow. It may even become necessary to segment your user base, reserving the most important notices to all customers, while limiting certain messages to more engaged audiences. 

AppsFlyer users can better engage with their  customers through solutions such as the Audiences feature, which allow you to accurately and granularly segment your users to engage in more meaningful and relevant conversations. With AppsFlyer Audiences, users can visualize the size and overlap of their segments in real-time before going live. They can then separate casual and occasional users from their most loyal customers and customize  the right segment with the right message.

2. Customer engagement initiatives

As the number of communications channels have narrowed somewhat, now may be the time to get creative in how you engage customers. Deploying the right customer engagement initiatives during this time can also help with business continuity. Here are a few options:

• Your most loyal customers certainly don’t want to lose their favorite business. Give them the option to support you by offering gift cards that can be redeemed at a later date. Social tech ventures such Chope and Save have expanded on this concept, helping local businesses stay afloat by listing gift cards on their site. Businesses may also wish to offer points, special discounts and loyalty programs for your biggest supporters during this time. You might have to prioritize your most loyal customers, whom you can reward with value-added services. 

• Brands who can afford to can also donate a percentage of their revenue or even offer donations in kind to organizations fighting COVID-19. In Singapore, ride-sharing company Gojek launched a “GoHeroes” campaign, partnering with hospitals to offer their staff ride vouchers to show solidarity. 

• Some have even chosen to temporarily change the scope of their business. For example, Malaysia’s mTouche, which provides mobile value-added services to operators across the region, has begun marketing and distributing medical equipment instead.

• Another popular initiative is to offer free or discounted shipping and returns, with brands taking strategies to remain profitable while ensuring their customers’ purchases arrive quickly and safely. Keep both customers and drivers safe by minimizing interactions as much as possible. Delivery companies like foodpanda have instituted options such as offering contactless drop-offs, as well as safer ways of making payments. Some companies, such as Thailand’s ShaRe, have even cut commission fees altogether, helping merchants as well.

2.1 Measuring engagement impact through AppsFlyer

Throughout all this, brands still need to ensure their messages and initiatives are resonating with users. As app marketers reach out to users across a number of channels (push, advertising, email, social media), it’s necessary to connect all the dots in order to properly measure and optimize your cross-channel customer engagement wherever possible. Solutions such as AppsFlyer’s People-Based Attribution can make these connections, while measuring the impact that engagement has had on various channels, calculating the real value delivered by the media source that successfully re-engaged an app user. 

AppsFlyer’s In-App Events API can also bridge in-app and out-of-app touch points through server-to-server integration, matching and merging AppsFlyer attribution data with individual customers. This helps you better understand user needs and behaviors during the COVID-19 crisis, and decide on how to engage effectively and with authenticity. 

 3. Conclusion: Continuous reassessment

Marketers don’t operate in a vacuum, so you and your colleagues should work closely to coordinate a full range of internal functions (human resources, supply chain, operations sales etc.) as part of a wider COVID-19 response task force. This way, you can perform situational assessments and develop a cohesive action plan. We recommend appointing a member of your marketing and communications team to take the lead on setting guidelines for internal and external communications across all platforms. Continuously reassess the effectiveness of your campaigns through your task force or existing processes. 

The situation remains fluid, however, so communicate quickly when things change. Make sure the right messages go out to the right users and measure the impact of their outreach efforts to identify areas where they can do better.

While times may be difficult, businesses can still make the most of the situation. Engage closely with customers, and take this opportunity to experiment with initiatives while measuring their impact. Successful customer engagement will involve transparency, openness and authenticity while incorporating robust feedback and internal communication—always remember to work closely with colleagues, and continuously reassess the impact of this situation as needed. 

Interested in reading more about how to navigate times of uncertainty? Read our related articles! 

• Five Mobile Marketing Must-Dos to Effectively Navigate Times of Uncertainty
• App Marketing In Times of Uncertainty – The Experts’ Take

The post Customer Engagement during a Time of Crisis – a Southeast Asian perspective appeared first on AppsFlyer.

At AppsFlyer, we understand and share the challenges marketers are facing today as it relates to their new day-to-day work environments, shifts in budget allocations and remote work dynamics.
This is why today, we are happy to roll out a set of new features that will make the usage of the AppsFlyer’s platform more remote-work-friendly, productive and effective.

1. Measure the impact of COVID-19 on your app

COVID-19 is pushing companies to move at an unprecedented speed. As a marketer, that means you are required to continuously report on the COVID-19 impact. With our new COVID-19 Custom Dashboard template, keeping track of the specific performance KPIs important to your business during COVID-19 is as easy as 1-2-3!:
1. Use the simple drag-and-drop interface to reorganize the template
2. Customize the template with additional KPIs
3. Export to a PDF report and share with stakeholders!

2. AppsFlyer Anywhere

We’ve all been there. You aren’t in front of your computer when something urgent pops up. You need to access your marketing performance data, but sitting down with your laptop when you are trying to juggle kids playtime, homeschool, meals and laundry isn’t an option.

With AppsFlyer, you can stay in the know wherever you are. Monitor campaign performance 24/7 with unlimited, configurable Live Alerts — sent straight to your AppsFlyer mobile app.

3. Side-by-Side Data Comparisons

Need to compare app usage versus a different period? We got you covered!
Our new activity data comparison toggle helps you uncover the impact COVID-19 has on your app compared with the previous day, week, month or quarter.

4. Monitor your account activity

Account admin? With our new monitoring tools, you can get instantly notified about changes and actions taken in your account. These reports include real-time, downloadable log reports and email notifications about critical campaign configuration changes made on your account.

5. Exclude Existing Users from Your Remarketing Campaigns

Given the situation and how tight marketing budgets are becoming, marketers are looking for ways to optimize their spend and make more with less. One of the most effective ways to achieve that is by improving user acquisition targeting.

By excluding their historical user base from their UA campaigns, our customers can avoid targeting existing, unprofitable users and by that, improve their CPIs, conversion rates and the entire UA cycle.

Exclusion lists can be applied both manually by leveraging AppsFlyer’s raw data and reports, and also automatically using Audiences. 

6. Measure the true impact of your retargeting campaigns

In a period during which every dollar counts, the million dollar question is whether the paid-for users who generated revenue would have done so organically, which basically means for free.

Today, we are excited to share the beta release of a brand new incrementality dashboard that will help answer that question and justify spend. With this new dashboard you can now:

• Discover your TRUE retargeting ROAS
• Measure the % of organic traffic cannibalization
• Optimize your audience targeting
• Find the best network for your audience
  
  

Want to learn more about this set of new features and how your team can use them to power through these uncertain times? Talk to your Success Manager or schedule your AppsFlyer Demo today.

The post Announcing 6 New Features to Tackle the Massive Challenges of the ‘New Normal’ appeared first on AppsFlyer.

The reality of the recent COVID-19 pandemic is that we’re continuing to learn how industries are being impacted. For instance, the app marketing industry is anticipating a shift from an install-based to action-based user interaction for apps.

But within this uncertainty is the constant of raw data in marketing, which can offer app marketers a significant edge, save on costs, and help them build resilience far into the future. 

Raw data, in essence, is information (app Installs, In-App Events, Uninstalls, Media Sources, Geo, Device type, etc.) that can be exported, analyzed and stored, and in the hands of an experienced marketer it can help to supercharge a brand’s campaign and marketing performance.

Why use raw data? 

Raw data helps marketers dive deeper and get to the heart of whether their content and marketing efforts are actually working. 

This is particularly relevant in a post-COVID-19 world, where raw data can help marketers better gauge how to optimize and adapt to this new marketing landscape, as we start to see a shift in how consumers are interacting with marketing efforts—specifically advertising content. 

Efficiency and productivity

Raw data can also help marketers get more bang for their budget. Solutions such as AppsFlyer’s Push API can help marketers optimize their traffic in real-time. Identifying critical metrics is key to delivering more ROI as well as boosting the lifetime value of your marketing efforts.

Marketers need to be efficient, targeting their efforts at what is generating the most ROI, especially now. Push API’s filtering and targeting capabilities enable better efficiency and productivity by giving advertisers more control over which data is being sent to them, reducing the amount of ‘noise’ (irrelevant traffic and events) and making it easier for advertiser BI teams to process that data.

Control

Advertisers can define a specific endpoint for organic data and another for non-organic data—one for in-app events and another for retargeting. Configuring multiple endpoints provides advertisers the ability to organize their data in the way they want to while controlling inbound data more efficiently

Using Raw Data To Design Effective Campaigns

Raw data reports brim with valuable insights. While there are a myriad possible uses, we’ve outlined a few common potential applications below:

• User Identification – One of the greatest hurdles in designing an effective campaign is determining the correct target audience. Raw data can help marketers more accurately analyze changing user bases via device ID or customer user ID, so they can target their content with greater accuracy and efficiency. User identification data is an excellent tool for marketers to hone in on the target audience and ensure their campaign is being targeted toward the correct user base. 
• Understanding User Behavior – Raw data, with the help of timestamps, can help marketers better understand user interactions, and get more granular visibility in tracking the customer journey. User interaction data makes all the difference in the creation of a solid marketing strategy that helps generate the expected ROI.
• Improving UX for higher growth – A better understanding of the user base and user interaction through raw data can also help app marketers improve their user experience (UX). For example, knowing each single step of the journey can help Shopping and Travel apps optimize time to first purchase or retargeting users.
• Performance-based billing: Raw data reports provide a clear and accurate picture of ROI, allowing for performance-based billing to clients for campaigns. This cost-effective billing model isn’t new in the industry, as more and more agency/client relationships are moving towards performance-based pricing, where agencies/marketers are billed based on achieving certain client advertising and/or marketing goals.
• User segmentation: you can use geolocation and device-type data to create specific user segmentation. This type of segmentation is useful during COVID-19, when you’re concerned with targeting users in certain geographies or more engaged audiences.
• Identify Potential Fraud: Although there’s still no hard data on the extent of fraud on mobile, the challenge is still significant and will only increase as mobile budgets continue to rise. There are many ways to identify and fight potential fraud in mobile marketing. Assuming you’re dealing with a savvy fraudster who can create a different identifier for the same device, you’ll be able to use the raw data to fish out suspicious patterns. For example, you’ll be able to pinpoint how many installs or unique identifiers are from the same IP, illogical time stamps (every second, every 5 seconds etc.), or the presence of many identifiers for advertisers (IDFAs) for a single identifier for a vendor (IDFV).

Ultimately, brands will need to measure the effectiveness of their optimization efforts. Attribution and analytics partners such as AppsFlyer offer extensive measurement solutions that affords advertisers a bird’s eye view across a number of channels, while also offering more detailed deep dives wherever necessary. Having this continuous feedback mechanism for their use of raw data should allow marketers to make more informed decisions over the long run.

How to access raw data

Raw data should be easily accessible to all marketers. On the AppsFlyer platform, accessing a raw data report is simply downloading a CSV file (spreadsheet) of your data automatically synced to external BI systems. A secure database of information with continuous updates on performance feedback is not only a cost-effective method to chart the evolving topography of advertising, but it’s also a great way to customize reports.

Safety & Analysis: Why store raw data now and how to do it? 

While it can be convenient to have continuous access to raw data, losing your connection to your attribution provider may cause your data to be lost. Marketers therefore prefer the option of storing their data to prevent loss and allow for retrieval for later analysis.

1. Better management: Making the most of storage and BI infrastructure 
2. Accessible repository: Having real-time access to raw data 

Storing raw data can be complicated, particularly when you need to make sure user privacy protections are not infringed upon while maintaining your data security. Businesses have a fiduciary duty to safeguard their user’s data and ensure that it does not go to a third party. 

AppsFlyer’s toolset (Data Locker) allows users to store every data point sent to AppsFlyer, including organic data, full attribution and engagement data, session data, click data. All of this mobile attribution and marketing data is stored on a secure storage locker hosted on Amazon S3, allowing users to back up their AppsFlyer data to the Amazon Cloud. Advertisers can also maintain their own data retention policy when the data is stored by them

Building resilience

Our external environment is teeming with data that can be used to serve any number of objectives. Yet the potential of raw data to allow marketers to draw any number of actionable insights has been made even more compelling during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the focus has turned towards squeezing more value out of every dollar. Now may be an ideal time to learn how to correctly wield this tool.

But what’s perhaps more important is the significance of using raw data in the long term. As demand recovers and budgets begin to stabilize, raw data should give marketers and brands an extra toolset to optimize campaigns far into the future.

Raw data Solutions

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to raw data, and different measures are called for depending on business needs and budget. And because everyone should have access to their own data, AppsFlyer offers solutions that allow businesses to export raw data for feeding into their BI platforms or for them to use it any way they see fit.

• Push API V2.0 Push API sends attribution event messages in real-time to your server-side endpoints. Doing so enables you to follow user journeys via multiple environments and touch points.
• Pull API is a raw data service by AppsFlyer that allows for downloading CSV reports using uniform resource identifiers (URIs). To set up the Pull API feature, all a user has to do is send the URI to AppsFlyer by pasting it in the browser address bar, or by using scripts. Data Export Tab functionality can also allow you to easily download CSV reports from your dashboard.
• Data Locker stores every single data point sent to AppsFlyer; including organic data, full attribution and engagement data, session data, click data and more. In a way, it’s the ultimate mobile marketing data sync. While credible mobile attribution and engagement data is incredibly powerful, mobile data is too often stuck in the dashboards of each individual provider. Data Locker from AppsFlyer provides 24/7 access to all of the user’s mobile attribution and marketing data via a secure storage locker hosted on Amazon S3. The full scope of your AppsFlyer data is synced to the Data Locker, so the user can focus on insights and marketing optimization.

Interested in reading more about how to navigate your marketing in times of uncertainty? Read our other articles! 

1. Customer Engagement during a Time of Crisis – a Southeast Asian perspective

2. Five Mobile Marketing Must-Dos to Effectively Navigate Times of Uncertainty

3. The Coronavirus Impact on App Installs and Marketing Budgets (updated by-weekly)

4. App Marketing In Times of Uncertainty – The Experts’ Take

The post Charting Raw Data’s Potential to Navigate Rough Waters in the Market appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Mobile gaming marketers live and breathe measurement – eCPI, ARPU, DAU, and so many other three-to-five-letter acronyms.

However, not all metrics are created equal. 

Given the variety of KPIs to choose from, only careful selection of the right combination leads to the meaningful insights used to drive important marketing decisions. 

To point you in the right direction, we’ve covered 16 metrics spanning the entire user journey.

It’s part of our new practical cheat sheet for gaming app measurement, which covers 

• • • KPIs to measure (detailed ahead in this blog!)
    • Which and how many in-app events to configure
    • Selecting media sources to run with
    • Creative variations
    • Recommended segments

  ↓ Download full cheat sheet for Gaming apps ↓

   

• Acquisition metrics

  The first hurdle of mobile marketing is to drive installs. With over 5 million apps worldwide, it’s safe to say every dollar counts. Gaming is a particularly driving force of the app economy, with 35% of non-organic installs coming from this vertical in 2019.

  One key to coming out on top is knowing the effectiveness of your ad spend in order to reduce it per user and improve ROI. That’s where the following KPIs come into play:

   

  Effective Cost Per Mille (eCPM)

  Definition:

  The revenue generated per 1,000 impressions

  To calculate eCPM, divide the total earnings from advertising by the total number of impressions and multiply by 1,000.

  eCPM = (Total Ad Revenue / Total Impressions) * 1,000

   

  Why it matters:

  eCPM offers a basic approach to evaluating the value of your traffic and determining your CPM. Cost Per Mille is the rate a given advertiser is willing to pay for 1,000 impressions, while eCPM is the publisher earnings per 1,000 impressions.

   

  Cost Per Install (CPI)

  Definition:

  The cost of generating one new install

  Why it matters:

  CPI is affected by many variables, such as geography, platform, and device, and is used to determine the price of acquiring a new user.

  Install Per Mille (IPM)

  Definition:

  The number of installs generated for every 1,000 impressions. IPM is calculated by dividing total installs by total impressions and multiplying by 1,000.

  IPM = (Total Installs / Total Impressions) * 1,000

   

  Why it matters:

  IPM helps evaluate the performance of a campaign. The higher the IPM, the more effective it is. A low IPM may indicate low user engagement with a given creative, which means you should try and optimize targeting or change the creative itself (read more about IPM and conversion rate optimization.)

   

  Organic Conversion Rate

  Definition:

  The percentage of conversions driven by non-paid channels, such as organic search, social media, press, etc.

  Why it matters: 

  Organic Conversion Rate informs your non-paid distribution power and highlights opportunities to drive new users to your app without spending on UA.

   

  K-Factor

  Definition:

  K-Factor tells you how many organic users you get as the result of a paid UA campaign.

  For example: If a game has an option for a multiplayer experience, and a user invited three friends to join who subsequently installed the app, you just earned three new ‘free’ users.

  K = number of invites sent by each user / conversion rate of each invite

   

  Why it matters: 

  A high K-Factor indicates the virality of your app and enables you to reduce your average UA spend per user. If, for example, you paid $3 for one install, and that one install triggered two additional organic installs, you actually paid $1 dollar for those three installs (read more about organic multipliers). 

   

  Usage and engagement metrics

  Retention rate, DAU, and churn help highlight the way in which users interact with your app – how often they are using it, for how long, and over what period of time. These metrics indicate whether or not you are bringing the right users and help identify problems with poor segmentation, specific level difficulty, and functionality.

  By benchmarking and observing these metrics long term, you will be able to boost your segmentation and monetization strategies, as well as build a loyal user base that keeps returning to your app. 

   

  Retention Rate

  Definition:

  The percentage of players that return to your app during a defined period of time after the initial install (typically measured at 1, 3, 7, 14, and 30 days).

  Why it matters: 

  Retention rate is a key indicator of your app’s performance over time. A high rate demonstrates your game provides value to users generating repeat usage. It is the basis of monetization and a key factor in prediction models. 

  Retention is another key factor in evaluating the quality of your users. It helps you create UA strategies and plan budget distribution between the different media sources you work with.  

  Let’s say you have two media sources, A and B. On day 14 of a campaign, you notice that users coming from A have a 15% retention rate while users from B only have a 10% retention rate. Being a savvy mobile marketer, you immediately put more budget into A and tone down spend on B. After all, a higher retention rate signals better users and more revenue over time!

  If users coming from Media Source A have a 15% retention rate on Day 14, and users coming from Media Source B have a 10% retention rate on the same day, it is preferable to shift more budget toward media source A. That way, you will gain higher quality users that will play your game for a longer period of time and generate more revenue.

   

   

  Churn/Uninstall Rate

  Definition:

  The rate at which users uninstall your app within a set number of days following an install.

  Why it matters: 

  Games suffer from the highest uninstall rates in the mobile app industry. Analyzing this KPI allows you to drill down into factors that may have led to app deletion – for example, poor segmentation or game difficulty at different levels. It also helps you to calculate your losses for acquiring those users but failing to retain them. 

  A high uninstall rate after a specific level or promotion may indicate that something is broken in the game flow.

   

  Daily Active Users (DAU)

  Definition:

  The number of unique users who use the app at least once per day (e.g. A single unique user who launches the game 3 times a day is counted as 1 daily active user).

  Why it matters: 

  DAU shows the proportion of the number of users who have installed the game and play it every day. It helps evaluate the game’s potential if you increase engagement and retention. 

  Cohorting DAU can also help evaluate the success of a specific new feature within the game or a feature showcasing your game in an app store.

   

  Monthly Active Users (MAU)

  Definition:

  The number of unique users who engage with the app over the course of 30 days (e.g. A user who engages with the game on five different days within 30 days counts as 1 monthly active user).

  Why it matters: 

  MAU Indicates the size of your user base and gives a wider perspective about this base than DAU. Besides helping with user base growth evaluation, MAU is used to calculate an important quality KPI, stickiness.

   

  Stickiness

  Definition:

  The number of days users visit your app within 30 days. Stickiness can be calculated by dividing DAU by MAU and multiplying by 30.

  Stickiness = (DAU / MAU) * 30

   

  Why it matters: 

  Stickiness indicates how addictive your game is and how relevant it is for users. High stickiness shows high interest in your game and makes users visit it more frequently.

   

  Monetization metrics

  You’ve targeted the right users, identified problematic areas in the app flow and figured out how to acquire users for less. Time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast… 

  Maximizing revenue is the key to longevity in an industry plagued by some of the highest uninstall rates around. Did you know that after three months, non-organic Gaming users are still not at the break-even point? The 100% mark often takes 6, and even 9, months to reach, depending on the Gaming app.

  Let’s dig into the KPIs that will help you stay ROI-positive. 

   

  Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

  Definition:

  ARPU is calculated by dividing the total revenue generated by the total number of users for a given cohort over a given time frame (e.g. Day 30 ARPU is the average revenue generated by a user within 30 days of an install).

  Average Revenue Per User is a basic KPI that’s used to monitor user value over a specific period of time, evaluate quality, and determine performance at various levels of a game. 

  ARPU = Total Revenue / Total Number of Users in Cohort

   

  Why it matters: 

  ARPU is used to evaluate player value and plan UA budgets. ARPU includes all revenue-generating events in the app, such as purchases, ads, subscriptions, and paid-for apps.

   

  Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)

  Definition:

  Average Revenue Per Paying User only measures players who made a purchase in the game. Accordingly, the formula is the total revenue divided by the total number of users who generated revenue.

  ARPPU = Total Revenue / Total Number of Revenue-Generating Users

   

  Why it matters: 

  ARPPU is used to evaluate the efficiency of existing in-app purchase (IAP) events and the success of new IAP events introduced to the game flow, as well as the effect of other events on IAP revenue (e.g. the option to see an ad rather than pay).

   

  Lifetime Value (LTV)

  Definition:

  Lifetime Value is the revenue a user generates over the course of the entire time they play a game. It’s calculated by taking the number of days of engagement and multiplying it by average spend per day.

  LTV = Number of Days of Engagement * Average Spend Per Day

   

  Why it matters: 

  LTV (together with ARPU) helps evaluate the total revenue, or value, of a game or user and is the strongest indication of how much can be spent on UA to meet the condition LTV > Cost.

   

  Time to First Purchase

  Definition:

  The time it takes a user to make their first in-app purchase after installing a game.

  Why it matters: 

  Time to first purchase helps plan IAP placements and timing during the game flow, and informs if and when to mix in-app advertising (IAA) as another to improve performance. When planning IAP placements and timing, the marketer decides when and where in the game the purchasing option appears. In some cases, adding another monetization model (i.e. in-game ads) will improve performance..

   

  Share of Paying Users

  Definition:

  The percentage of installers who ended up making an in-app purchase within a given time frame since the install.

  Why it matters: 

  This is an indication of quality users driven from media sources, as well as a way to measure the performance of your monetization model.

   

  Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

  Definition:

  Return on Ad Spend is the metric of profitability. It is calculated as the money spent on marketing divided by the revenue generated by users in a given time frame (e.g. A Day 7 ROAS of 50% means that a player generated revenue that was 50% of the money spent to acquire that user).

  ROAS = Total Marketing Spend / User-Generated Revenue in Given Time Frame

   

  Why it matters: 

  As a measure of profit, ROAS is the most important metric on which UA managers are judged.

  For better or for worse, Gaming marketers today have no choice but to spend large budgets on UA. By constantly comparing their income to ROAS, they can better evaluate the performance of their campaigns and the quality of users they acquire.  

   

  Measuring success

  While many KPIs are available for measurement, these 16 are essential for analyzing the full lifecycle of your Gaming app. 

  That said, each marketer is likely to have different needs: you may need to measure more, or less, depending on the sub-category you are in and the nature of the app itself. 

  Just keep in mind two things: 

  • • 1. Installs are only the tip of the iceberg. To be successful, you must look below the surface. 
      2. Don’t over-complicate it. Less is more when it comes to measuring data over time and across user segments.

  Rather than taking our word for it, take a look at the data holistically. Is it telling a story? Are you able to identify trends? With every action, your users are signaling to you what to measure. This should be your best indication of what’s important now and what will matter tomorrow. 

  Enter your details below to access the Practical Cheat Sheet to Gaming App Measurement:

   

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Mobile app user acquisition is becoming increasingly challenging. As the mobile ecosystem continues to grow, marketers are faced with the daunting task of manually managing multiple platforms and dashboards to keep up with the increasing number of user acquisition channels.

In fact, marketers often handle an average of 10-15 ad networks simultaneously, resulting in hundreds of subsets and thousands of manual actions they need to take in order to maintain their campaigns. That’s a hugely time consuming and inefficient activity. 

But above all, their ability to monitor performance, make correct bids, and take actions in real-time is very limited. It ends up hurting their ability to successfully scale their activity and maximize ROAS.

Enter Campaign Management Platforms

Campaign management platforms address these challenges head-on by simplifying the process of multi-channel UA management.

With the help of campaign management platforms, marketers can save time and perform data-driven decisions at scale by automating repetitive workflows and centralizing all of their marketing data in a single place. 

To give our customers the ability to utilize these features in the most efficient way possible, we’ve integrated with the industry-leading platforms operating in this space: Bidalgo, Algolift, Bidshake, and Appsumer.

Leveraging AppsFlyer’s Attribution Data

With the integration in place, marketers can leverage AppsFlyer’s attribution data directly within their platform of choice, and by that, enabling end-to-end automation of UA processes.

“The integration with AppsFlyer has enabled us to process even more data, and deliver it earlier, empowering UA teams using Appsumer to make decisions faster,” says Clement Boutignon, Head of Product at Appsumer.

Getting Started

Enabling Campaign Management Integrations is easy, head over to the partner configuration page in the AF platform, and toggle on the access to the desired platform.

Once enabled, aggregated data will be sent to the partner you chose.

“Using the Campaign Management Integration, we were able to give marketers total access to a wider array of data and insights across all the core channels that AppsFlyer supports and leverage our AI-powered creative and media insights.” says Niv Yemini, CTO at Bidalgo.

Enabling an Open, Flexible Ecosystem

With AppsFlyer’s attribution data as the foundation of the advertiser’s marketing tech stack, advertisers can drive innovation through a connected ecosystem of technology partners.

This is just the first step towards a bigger vision: enabling a truly open ecosystem where advertisers will have the flexibility to choose from a variety of solutions while leveraging AppsFlyer’s accurate attribution data.

For more information, please reach out to your CSM or schedule your AppsFlyer demo today.

The post Announcing Campaign Management Integrations to Streamline Marketing Workflows appeared first on AppsFlyer.