Tag: mobile analytics

Massive Competition – Massive Marketing ROI Challenges

eCommerce App Rankings

Without further ado, here are 35 tips for more effectively marketing m-commerce apps to drive maximum marketing ROI.

TIPS 1-6: APP MARKETING PLANNING

1. Codify the App Business Objectives

There is a slang term among digital marketers – GMOOT. It’s short for “give me one of those,” a phrase many have heard when new shiny objects have appeared in the digital space. The most common GMOOOT? When your boss runs into your office with the revelation that a competitor has launched something shiny, and demands that you create the same sort of shiny object immediately.

GMOOT makes people pursue actions that are reactive rather than strategic. That can be a significant hindrance when it comes time to measure the marketing ROI of your app marketing efforts. By codifying a business objective BEFORE you begin working on app marketing plans, you go a long way toward ensuring that GMOOT doesn’t result in a lot of wasted, non strategic effort.

One example here would be if the purpose of your app is primarily as a companion experience versus a transactional one, such as with an airline passenger app. In such a case, it would be important to remind the team of this BEFORE your organization spent a great deal on acquisition under the assumption that those investments would drive profitable ticket sales.

2. Spell Out the Real Value Proposition

You developed your app to be something unique, powerful and different. Before you go any further in crafting your marketing campaign for it, make sure you write down exactly what makes your app so special and different. Here are a few questions that may help you get that process focused:

If you already have an e-commerce site, catalog, retail outlets or another means of buying from you: Identify what is different about the buying experience of your app that helps to ensure that it will grow your business.

Is it all about new buying occasions, or reaching and connecting with the next generation of customers, or a new way to showcase your offerings?

Whatever your app’s value proposition is, that’s a key part of what makes it an asset to your brand and business. Assess the advantages (and disadvantages) that your app offers over competing app experiences. This assessment may help you define what you emphasize in your marketing messages and materials.

3. Distill Your Elevator Pitch

Think succinct, clear, intriguing and inspiring. Something that really sets your brand apart. Boil your story down to its essence. Spend some time here, as this statement will form the backbone of all your future communications.

4. Carefully Research Your Target Audience

Even before work began on your app, your team chose (or should have chosen) a target audience for your app. That’s because understanding both the value the app offers…and to whom that value is most relevant…should have been key drivers in its development.

As you plan your marketing efforts and set your marketing ROI goals, it’s important to align all marketing strategy and tactics to attracting that desirable target audience. It should guide your digital marketing messaging, app store page content, creative, media programs and more. Also, carefully communicate your target to all your media partners so they can plan and optimize quickly and easily.

5. Recognize  m-Commerce App Marketing is a Marathon

When people think of app marketing, their minds usually go to the hype tactics that gaming companies use to get their offerings to the top of the App Store and Google Play popularity lists. For an m-commerce app to be successful, it needs to get downloaded by a critical mass of customers AND used with a reasonable frequency to generate strong revenue/marketing ROI per customer. Doing that calls for an entirely different set of strategies and tactics than for game or utility app marketing.

For m-commerce, one needs to focus first on how many quality users you are attracting, versus focusing solely on raw install numbers. That’s because success in m-commerce metrics like revenue and marketing ROI comes from optimizing toward those objectives, not simply maximizing your total installed base.

It’s also important to understand how the app rankings work. Recognizing that rank matters less for m-commerce apps than games, learn more about the inputs that drive app ranking so that you focus your effort in the most productive places.

6. Take a Data-Driven Approach to App Marketing

The vast majority of downloads and usage go to the apps in the top few slots of the rankings. We’ve repeatedly seen in our clients’ metrics and data that one of the big differences between leaders and also-rans is their interest and investment in the entire buyer journey, not just the install. Here are a couple of ways that brands make that investment:

Measurement and Attribution: Make sure you have the data to evaluate your various marketing partners on their ability to drive quality users and engagements for your marketing campaigns. When you and your brand take the time to fully measure marketing — including uncovering rich marketing roi insights, you take an important leap into driving maximum value from the marketing channel.

In-App Engagement: Also ensure that you are tracking all the critical customer actions (“events”) that take place in your apps so you can optimize your customer experience over time and identify customer trends and characteristics that yield better return/marketing ROI.

TIPS 7-9: ADVERTISING AND MARKETING SPEND DECISIONS

7. Right-Size Your Acquisition Spend

You need to balance your marketing investment between acquisition goals and post-install metric KPIs to drive maximum total return on investment.

As recently as a year ago, many of our clients were spending 90-100% of their budgets on acquisition. But that has changed as better measurement and analytics have shown that downloads and installs are only the first steps in a longer customer engagement process. Post-install sales are what really drive marketing ROI.

8. Apportion Your Budget Against 3-4 Critical Tasks

Our marketing analytic data have shown that there are four significant hurdles that brands must clear with each user for them to become a high-value customer:

• Go to the app store and download the app
• Launch and engage with the app
• Make a purchase
• Make subsequent purchases

Not all your customers will require four distinct efforts to convert and become regular buyers, but it can be useful to think about the challenge of establishing a regular customer in the context of these four tasks.

9. Include a Website in Your Planning

Your app needs a web presence beyond its store pages to thrive. If your app is an extension of an online commerce business, create content specifically about your app and develop a destination on your site to feature it. If your business is a standalone app business, invest in an attractive web presence to tell your story and attract new users. And festoon those presences with links to your download pages.

TIPS 10-17: APP STORE IDEAS AND SOCIAL MARKETING

10. Tell Your App Story in Very Human Terms

In your marketing messages, “speak” directly to the prospective downloader and explain why the app can help them/is worth downloading. Avoid silicon speak and focus instead on words and claims that will be most relevant to your target audience. How will the app improve THEIR daily experience?

11. Invest the Time to Deliver Effective App Store Pages

Your app store page is like a shop window – a key driver for purchase/download. Make sure you spend enough time making it as strong as you possibly can. Use Google AdWords tools (make sure you first set the Keyword Tool to Mobile) to identify the most popular search terms in your category. Include exciting and appealing screen shots. And consider video – more and more app developers are creating and including video content in their pages to bring the features and benefits to life.

12. Optimize Your App Store Pages Over Time

As you learn more about customers, what they like, how they use your app, etc., make changes to your download pages to clarify communication and enhance appeal. Make sure, for example, that if you give the app a facelift, that you update your screenshots with the most appealing images possible.

13. Claim and Establish Your Social Media Pages

With the amount of time people spend in environments like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, it would be crazy not to create and leverage social accounts specifically for your app. It may make sense to establish these pages long before your launch to begin to build buzz for your offering.

For brick and mortar companies, leverage your pre-existing brand pages to hype the app to your follower/believers.

14. Tap Your Team’s Networks

You’d be amazed at how many people can be reached in social media if everyone on your team gets behind publicizing an app. Ask your team to promote the app on their personal brand presences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Snapchat, Pinterest and more!

15. Consider Specialty Store Apps

While Google Play and the Apple App Store are the largest libraries of available apps, it may also make sense to feature the Android version of your app in other specialty app stores if there are ones that are appropriate to your offering. While all iPhone apps must be installed from the App Store, Android allows apps to be downloaded from other locations online. Do some searches for specialty stores that attract your target audience or are relevant to your category.

16. STRONGLY Encourage User Reviews

Use your in-app and CRM experiences to request reviews from users. More and more positive reviews can significantly improve your download rate over time.

Target notifications to your most loyal users at moments when they are likely to be excited about the app and anxious to evangelize.

17. Monitor User Feedback

Customer comments and reviews provide an amazing set of in-market information that can help you refine your message and improve your offering. Make sure you monitor the stores, social media presences and leverage social listening tools to keep abreast of what your users are saying about your app.

TIPS 18-20: LEVERAGING THE PRESS

18. Craft a Great Press Kit and Pitch

Online, print and even television outlets can be very helpful to promote your app if you have a good story to tell. Start by thinking about the kinds of media that are popular with your target. Include both traditional media and popular blogs in this evaluation. Create a press kit containing the core information about your app, and include some great high-resolution screenshots. Provide promo codes so journalists can install and use the app easily. Personalize your pitch to each leading media outlet based on the kinds of stories that they cover.

Where possible, present your app as an extension of a recent story idea or topic that the journalist has covered. Above all, make it easy for them to try and then write about your app.

19. Spread the Word About the Press You Get

When you succeed in driving coverage of your app, use your web presences/social media/etc. to publicize a link to the coverage. Journalists and bloggers live and die by the traffic their stories attract. Make it worth the person’s while to have covered you.

20. Reach Out to App Review Sites for Coverage

The more people that have been exposed to your app and message, the greater your potential audience. The effectiveness of this strategy will ultimately relate to the innovativeness of your app. Many sites are focused primarily on games, though you can find quite a few that cover interesting m-commerce apps, especially those with unique buying experiences.

TIPS 21-25: CHOOSING MEDIA PROGRAMS AND PARTNERS

21. Remember that All Installs are Not the Same

If you think that most people who install an app do so because they wanted the app, you may have another think coming. A substantial portion of app installs is paid for on a CPI (cost per install) basis, meaning that media vendors are incentivized to get as many people to download the offering as they can, regardless of the actual level of interest “in the app itself.”

CPI tends to have a very poor correlation with average revenue per user, but strong media vendors can attract great users with that model. It just depends, and that’s why having an attribution platform from the outset of your app launch is so important. By ensuring you have the attribution data from the outset, you can compare your vendors based on their ability to generate revenue, marketing ROI and long-term engagement.

Also, you can work with your winning vendors to improve CPI campaign metrics based upon downstream customer activity.

22. Unlock the Power of Social Media Advertising

Social media consistently proves itself to be highly effective at driving quality customers for e-commerce businesses. Test a variety of paid advertising approaches across the leading social platforms to determine which work well for your brand.

23. Optimize to the Metric that Matters – Marketing ROI

Getting downloads and installs is great, but what’s most important to an e-commerce app is attracting paying customers. While individuals need to download your app to transact on it, download counts alone may not be the best way to compare the results delivered by different media vendors. Instead, focus on their ability to deliver people who transact, or who take actions like putting items into their carts that demonstrate a likelihood to transact in the future.

24. Be Aware of Incentivized Downloads

Incentivized downloads refer to situations where people are rewarded to download an app they may or may not have an interest in. Often, the person is given some virtual good, like gold in a game, in exchange for downloading. As you can imagine, the percentage of people who use an app that they downloaded because of an incentive tends to be rather low, though it varies considerably.

Reputable vendors can deliver great potential customers this way, but this segment of the media business also contains some bottom feeders. Again, the key to using CPI vendors effectively is having data that enables you to understand the value of the installs they bring you.

In short, there are no hard and fast rules about CPI and user quality, only correlations.

25. Insist on 3rd-Party Attribution/Reporting

Third-party reporting reduces or eliminates the likelihood of double-counting of marketing results, thereby saving you time and money. Third-party reporting creates peace of mind among all parties.

There are at least two other benefits here as well.

Third parties usually have extensive sets of existing partnerships with media vendors, so there won’t be a need to install an APK every time you test a new vendor.

The best measurement companies also provide enhanced, enterprise-grade security for your data.

Independent third-party reporting for downloads and re-engagements helps ensure a level playing field for all media vendors and apples-to-apples performance comparisons.

TIPS 26-28: DOWNLOAD, INSTALL AND BUYING EXPERIENCE

26. Make Registration Easy

Most m-commerce apps have a registration process, either when you first install or when the user transacts. Mobile retail tends to lose more people during this process than PC-based retail because data entry is more difficult on a phone. Take proactive steps to make registration and transacting as easy as possible.

Consider registration via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then, be sure and offer to remember the person’s details for subsequent transactions. That will reduce friction for future purchases.

27. Create a CRM Program for Your App Users

Don’t overlook any opportunity to communicate with people who download your app. An opt-in email program helps you deliver targeted communications to your install base – messages that can drive them to launch and transact.

28. Deliver Push Notifications

Being able to deliver push communications to apps helps remind the user of why they downloaded the app in the first place and keeps it more top of mind. It also offers the opportunity to deliver important product news to those who might not opt-in for emails.

Custom or personalized push notices can also be a powerful tool to drive individuals to take specific actions. A marketing automation platform can make a tremendous level of personalization possible here.

TIPS 29-35: LEVERAGE VIRAL DISTRIBUTION AND WORD OF MOUTH

29. Bake Virality into Your App Experience

Your customer base can be an outstanding means through which to spread the word about your app on social. Baking in social media features in the experience can dramatically increase the potential audience of your app. Other features like the ability to create and share wish lists and message other users can be incredibly helpful here.

30. Brick and Mortar Retailers: Unlock the Power of Your Real-World Touch Points

Brick and mortar stores have tremendous potential awareness and marketing advantages when it comes to publicizing apps. Consider adding references to your app on receipts, signage, roto circulars, catalogs, website, estore, bags and anywhere else that offers a little real estate for a “download the app” message.

In some organizations, it can be a challenge to unleash these touch points because of logistical issues. But remember how free email platforms Yahoo and

Hotmail brought themselves to preeminence? By appending little “get an account” messages to all the emails emanating from their platforms. Using receipts and the like for driving your app business relies on the same principle.

Remember also that apps can enhance retail experiences, so the benefits can and should go both ways. By incorporating features like store maps, product scanning and an easy way to collect and use coupons, the retail experience can be enhanced.

31. Cross-Promote Your App

If your business already has an app, look at the user base as a natural set of people to attract with your new app. Cross-promotion is free and very powerful.

32. Create a Referral Program

Friends and family of m-commerce app users are more likely than the average person to appreciate the same app. By creating a referral program, you can leverage those networks while rewarding loyalists for evangelism. Just make sure you reward behavior related specifically to a core KPI. For instance, rewarding users for recruiting people who make a purchase versus a referral program that rewards a download/install is far more likely to drive meaningful revenue growth.

33. Leverage Retargeting to Close Sales

As we discussed in the budgeting section, your job is far from over when a customer installs an app. To create long-term customer relationships, you need to constantly think of ways to engage app users and bring them back to your app. Retargeting advertising can be extremely effective here.

It’s also great for incenting lapsed users or converting those with demonstrated product interests.

34 Analyze and Speak Directly to Your High-Value Users to Define

We all know that more personal messages tend to drive better results than mass blasts. That’s why it’s so important for you to collect rich customer purchase information – so that you can deliver precise, personalized messages at the perfect moment to drive maximum sales.

To get this kind of customer insight, you will need to leverage both a robust mobile app measurement solution and a mobile-first data management platform to collect, manage, enhance, segment and export customer audiences and data. Get more information on these topics in the Singular website resources section.

35. Use App Customer Data  for Cross-Device Marketing

Apps represent the majority of connected consumer time, but they are by no means the only places people spend their time. By collecting in-app customer data and using it as the foundation for customer profiles in a mobile-first DMP, you can define and export audiences. Your audiences can also provide critical insights for look-alike targeting, which can help you acquire more high-quality customers to your app.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Mobile app marketers need access to increasingly granular data to accurately measure app ROI — which inevitably requires processing huge volumes of data on the fly. This can dramatically slow down database query times, creating bottlenecks for marketers and preventing them from optimizing as quickly and as often as they’d like to. Call it the Catch-22 of modern-day mobile marketing: an ever-increasing need for speed amid an ever-increasing flood of data.

At Singular, the issue came to the fore ahead of our latest analytics offering for marketers, Publisher ROI. Publisher ROI allows marketers to quickly expose a breakdown of an ad network’s inventory by publisher and determine the individual sites and apps driving the best performance.

Early testing of the feature showed that customer queries for publisher-level data required an enormous increase in computing power — to the tune of 50-100X the data normally being ingested and processed for queries in Singular. As we saw query times spike during testing, it became clear that we had hit a major startup milestone: We had outgrown our database technologies.

In order to launch our latest innovation, and continue offering mobile app marketers fast and flexible access to increasingly granular marketing data, we would need to introduce a new data pipeline and datastore — one that was capable of enabling ad-hoc queries on a billion rows with sub-second performance.

In this post, we’ll describe how we rebuilt certain components of our database technologies and dramatically increased the speed of our customers’ queries — in some cases by a factor of 150X.

But before we dive into how we accelerated our customers’ queries, it’s worth giving some background on the evolving needs of mobile app marketers, and the sheer size of the data challenges we face in providing them with an analytics platform as flexible as Singular.

From the early days of Singular, we kept a close eye on the kinds of queries our customers were running in Singular. We tried to spot patterns in order to build systems that anticipated the dimensions a marketer might use in their queries. But we quickly found that there was a huge diversity in the reports and queries customers were running, with countless combinations of different dimensions and metrics.

Think about it in terms of rows in a table. Say you advertise on an ad network that runs your ads on 100 different publishers. You might check the overall ROI of the network — with Singular, that’s just one line of data. To then expose a breakdown of each individual publisher’s performance in order to segment high-performing from under-performing publishers, you would need to render 100 rows of data. Now say you’re running 4 multi-country campaigns and you want to see if certain publishers are performing particularly well in certain Geos — now you’re looking at 400 rows. Want to a break out data by iOS and Android? — that’s 800 rows.

This kind of complexity led to our first conclusion about the database architecture that could support our needs. Because usage of Singular is so diverse, with countless combinations of query dimensions, we needed to support ad-hoc queries, or queries that cannot be determined prior to the moment they are issued. As most data engineers know, databases that are truly optimized for ad-hoc querying are usually not good at updating data after it is ingested. We therefore needed to ingest data into our database in its final form.

Data Ingestion at Singular

At Singular, we run around 10,000 marketing data collection tasks a day. Each collection task is responsible for collecting data for a specific customer from one of its third-party marketing vendors from a window of 1-30 days back. Our ingestion pipeline is distinctive in the volume of data each task collects (granular Facebook stats for 30 days is huge) and because we collect data from vendors who tend to update data retroactively on a regular basis, which requires Singular to constantly swap out old statistics with newly updated data.

Our ingestion pipeline previously loaded data into MySQL and kept running various ingestion logic by querying the data and using updates. After the data was available, the queries triggered by our dashboard and API would hit MySQL as well.

This has been working well for us — that is, until we introduced publisher-level collection and querying. With the large increase in data volume, loading to MySQL became slower, creating bottlenecks in our pipeline. In addition, running analytics queries on this volume of data was simply too slow.

Designing a New Ingestion Pipeline

To support an infinite number of tasks, with an ever-growing size of ingested data, we aimed to build a pipeline that was horizontally scalable (unlike MySQL). The choice of Amazon Simple Storage Service or “S3” to support these dependencies was obvious. We had already been using S3 for backing up our data before inserting it into MySQL. Plus it is horizontally scalable, requires zero ops and offers fast download/upload speed when working within Amazon Web Services.

Thus, our new ingestion architecture relies on S3 with only the metadata stored in MySQL. Instead of querying and updating MySQL, each component of our pipeline receives an S3 file as input and passes on another S3 file containing the data it received together with the new information the component produces.

The end of our pipeline sends the data to an S3 bucket, containing the most up-to-date statistics per customer, marketing source and date. This enables running data collection tasks in parallel, and makes this bucket the source of truth for our system.

Towards a New Datastore

With our data in its final form, ready to be queried in S3, our choice of datastore was super flexible. We had previously built a small abstraction layer between our API and MySQL, which could be adapted to support any query language or schema. Thus, in evaluating new databases, we knew beforehand that the decision wasn’t final, as switching costs were so low. In the end, we selected Druid, an open-source data store developed for the exact need of aggregate queries over marketing analytics data.

Once implemented, we were thrilled with the results: With Druid, queries that once 60 seconds took 1-2 seconds, while queries that once took 30 seconds took less than a second. In certain cases, we saw improvements in database query times as high as 150X compared to the old system.

All these developments bring us to earlier this year, when we began switching on Publisher-Level ROI for select customers in a closed beta test of the feature. The beta would serve as the ultimate stress test for our new architecture.

Granularity & Speed for the Win

As a refresher on Publisher-Level ROI and why it’s so groundbreaking, here’s a little industry background. Ad networks typically purchase inventory consisting of ad slots in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sites and apps. These sites and apps, known individually as “publishers”, are where marketers’ ads run.

In recent years, mobile app marketers have demanded more visibility into publisher-level performance in order to identify pockets of their most valuable traffic. Networks have responded by providing Publisher IDs in the performance data they expose to marketers. Marketers, in turn, use these Publisher or Site IDs to optimize, increasing spend in high-performing publishers and decreasing spend or “blacklisting” under-performers.

Historically, however, publisher optimization across multiple networks has been an arduous and error-prone process, requiring marketers to toggle between multiple dashboards and manually update unwieldy Excel files. The process is particularly painful for marketers who wish to analyze the performance of publishers not merely by click-through rates or raw install count but rather by the actual quality of those users, as measured by ROI.

Singular automates the process of collecting all your marketing data under one roof, before cleaning and combining the data with revenue and events retrieved from tracking links in order to expose app ROI and other full-funnel business metrics.

But, as we’ve shown here, once ingested, enriched and combined, making publisher-level data fast and flexible is a whole ‘nother beast. Which is precisely why we invested so heavily in our new pipeline and datastore. Mobile app marketers need both granularity and speed — and we’re proud to say that the results speak for themselves.

As we’ve rolled out Publisher-Level ROI to our beta test customers who are now running on our new Druid-based system, customers have reported lightning-fast load times, even with the massive increase in data volume.

And the performance improvements aren’t limited to publisher-level querying. With Singular, similarly data-intensive querying — to expose Campaign, Country, Creative and User-Level performance — is now faster than ever thanks to these advancements in our new database technologies.

This is the first post in a series of articles about Return on Investment (ROI) in mobile marketing. Each post in Singular’s Mobile ROI Series will dive into a different level of mobile ROI data — from User-Level to Country-Level to Publisher-Level ROI — and show how mobile marketers are using different facets of their ROI data to increase performance.

These days, many mobile marketers are investing in app remarketing — the practice of creating high-performing user segments and customizing marketing campaigns to these users in order to drive incremental app engagement and revenue. Remarketing is increasingly viewed as a critical source of mobile ROI. For our clients who use the attribution toolset, remarketing’s share of paid events has increased more than 18X in the past two years.

When segmenting users for the purpose of remarketing, tracking how much you pay for each user and the touchpoints that drive them into your app is as important as tracking how much users spend in your app. Yet all too often, marketers rely solely on user revenue and post-install events when deciding on user groups to remarket to and how much to spend on driving their future actions.

Here we’ll show why targeting existing users based solely on the revenue or events they complete in your app may actually be hurting your remarketing efforts, and how you can leverage User-Level ROI data to drive more profitable remarketing campaigns.

Mobile ROI for High-Revenue User Audiences

For remarketing, mobile marketers often create user segments based on the revenue, events and device-level information recorded in their app. One segment might include users who completed a sign-up; another might include users who browsed a certain type of product page. These segments are used to customize remarketing messaging and media programs, including push notifications, email and retargeting on ad networks.

One of the most common pieces of information used for remarketing is revenue — the total amount of money a user has spent, or is expected to spend, in your app. Marketers will often segment users who have spent above a certain amount and shift budget to remarket to their most “valuable” users.

However, doing so without factoring in the cost of acquiring and re-engaging users can actually yield negative ROI. Marketers must factor in the cost of each user touchpoint — otherwise they risk remarketing to users who cost more than they generate in revenue.

As the table below shows, just because a mobile app user generates comparatively high revenue doesn’t mean they deliver positive mobile marketing ROI.

In this example, User 1 spends more in the app, but costs 6 times as much to attract. Based on these figures, User 2 is actually more profitable — a fact that would go unnoticed by marketers who aren’t tracking user-level cost.

We work with a client in Asia who witnessed such results. When they optimized their mobile app marketing programs to users that drove the most revenue, they actually overlooked many of their best customers from a profitability perspective.

Instead of user revenue, mobile marketers should focus on user-level mobile ROI (user revenue divided by user cost) when segmenting users for remarketing. Where ROI is greater than 100%, spending on the user yields incremental profit.

With this approach, you might observe that users who cost a lot to acquire will often also cost a lot to re-engage. Remove these users from remarketing campaigns in favor of remarketing to users who may spend less initially but who will be cheaper to re-engage and, as a result, more profitable in the long run.

The Problem with Optimizing on Cost

Remember that the reverse can also be true, that users who cost more to acquire can actually turn out to be your most profitable mobile app users. Consider two different mobile app users whose costs and revenue are outlined below:

This is a fairly common mobile marketing circumstance. For example, users of mobile apps that are attracted by low-cost incentivized media are often less lucrative from an ROI perspective. Remarketing to such individuals can spike your app installs but produce less profit.

If you focus your remarketing efforts solely on users that cost little to acquire, you may optimize to programs that actually hurt your rate of return. Again, considering both cost and revenue will yield better results for your business.

By accounting for the cost to acquire and re-engage users through mobile advertising and other tactics, marketers can segment users who drive the most revenue at the lowest cost. In turn, mobile marketers won’t get stuck blindly remarketing to app users who actually cost a boatload and are less profitable to re-engage. Marketers would do well to remember this important insight for their campaigns.

Find out how the world’s best marketers, including Lyft, Yelp, Zynga, Walmart and Postmates, use Singular to expose deep ROI insights to increase marketing performance at Singular.net.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

A big part of my role here at Singular is helping to articulate how our unique approach to data management creates tremendous incremental value for app analytics and marketing — value that marketers cannot get from any other company.

For those who are unfamiliar with our methodology for collecting and processing iOS and Android data for app analytics, let me outline the four components of our approach:

• Extraction: How we capture all of the relevant marketing data from each client’s many partners and platforms, and bring it to their respective instances of our unified app analytics platform.
• Enrichment: How we collaborate with clients to ensure that, even if their partners haven’t in the past been able to deliver data at the level of granularity they need for ROI and other analysis, we can use unique tagging rules and business processes to make it possible going forward.
• Combining: How Singular standardizes taxonomy and matches Android and iOS marketing effectiveness with user experience app data across partners and platforms to deliver ROI and other business insights at any level of granularity.,
• Loading: Our proprietary process for importing the data to our analytics database and making it available through advanced, flexible reporting and customizable dashboards. Thus allowing for quick and easy analysis of actionable insights.

I’ve told this four-part data management and enrichment story to dozens of enterprise app developer and app publisher marketing teams, and the discussions nearly always go the same. We move quickly through the app data extraction, enrichment and loading components; these are telegraphic concepts that can be understood in the context of app analytics without a lot of explanation. But combining? That takes a few minutes longer.

Why? Fundamentally, it’s about something that gets very little discussion in the industry — the need to get mobile app data organized, united and segmented right in order to get insight out of it.

Combining Mobile App Analytics Data

Brand leaders must work with a variety of partners and platforms to deliver marketing campaigns and grow their Android and iOS app businesses. Because it’s expensive and complicated to work with so many end points to attract and engage users, marketers are clamoring for better tools that streamline management, app analytics, and reporting.

Mobile application marketers must have a way to combine data from all these sources in a single platform to fully understand their businesses and users. Specifically, they must:

• Measure the app marketing ROI for all their media investments, at any level of granularity
• Determine how to optimize their marketing campaigns and other programs so they can attract and engage more iOS and Android app users and deliver optimized data-driven marketing

It’s challenging to construct metaphorical “pipes” to route data from all sources into your analytic tool. But “pipes” aren’t enough. You also need to ensure that the mobile app data flowing through those pipes is combined with data from other sources. In ways that make sense and offer marketers the sort of insights and granularity that they need.

For data to be correctly combined, you need to:

• Collect the same data on both the network “side” (spend) and the tracker “side” (cost/revenue)
• Create consistency in organization between upper funnel and lower funnel data

The challenge is that no two sources organize and categorize data in the same way. Across the hundreds of networks available to marketers, there is no standard set of dimensions or naming conventions. This makes it difficult for marketers to identify true ROI with granularity, and to compare performance side-by-side.

Collecting Complete and Consistent Data

Media networks, push notification platforms, and other toolsets for mobile app marketing organize data so that it can be examined at some level of detail. Whether that be at the app, source, publisher, operating system (OS), campaign, creative execution, or keyword level. However, since not all platforms provide every data dimension, marketers need a partner who will:

• Work with each network to make that data available. Every day, we are working with networks to provide consistent levels of granularity so we can provide ROI at the level marketers need in order to make the most effective campaign optimizations
• Pull data from various text-based fields and customize to create conventions that complete missing data. Without proper naming conventions, it becomes impossible to identify every detail of the campaign for every source
• Use heuristic rules to complete missing data. With proprietary technology, we identify each part of the various text-based fields to auto-complete the missing data not provided by the source as a default. For example, in many cases networks do not provide country level data, but it is important for the customer to see performance by country when determining market expansion. We are able to extract this information in other ways to complete the missing information in the report
• Use custom rules to identify dimensions of data specific to your business. No two businesses are alike. Each has its own app names and nomenclature for distinct aspects of its business. We work with our customers to identify those specific business terms in order to accurately reflect this data in the reporting dashboard

Creating Consistency in Data Organization

Once the data is collected from each network and data provider, it then needs to be standardized. The structures used by media partners and trackers for reporting cost, revenue, and other information vary. Therefore matching to a consistent convention can be a challenge.

By understanding the data provided through each integration, and aligning it to Singular’s standardized data structure and taxonomy, we ensure that we can match all ad performance datasets — like clicks, installs, purchases — to the marketing investments that drove them.

In fact, we work with more than 1,000 partners to codify and adapt to the way that they parse and deliver data to our platform and our clients.

 

Summary: It’s About a Lot More Than the Pipes

Lots of companies are working on ways of building the mobile data “pipes.” They are feverishly trying to build out the infrastructure to get app performance, marketing results, and media investment information from multiple sources and synthesize it into a single app analytics platform. At Singular, we’ve been doing that for years, and understand all too well why companies often talk about what a struggle this can be.

But even when other analytic solutions eventually reach the stage when they can mimic our mobile app data intake infrastructure, they still won’t be able to match what we do. That’s because we focus just as much attention on what goes through the pipes as in the infrastructure itself. By ensuring that all of the different data sets are organized, combinable, and connectable to other data sets, at the appropriate levels of granularity, we ensure that marketers can squeeze all of the insights from their data.

Find out how the world’s best marketers, including Lyft, Yelp, Zynga, Walmart and Postmates, use Singular to expose deep ROI insights to increase marketing performance at Singular.net.

Many mobile-minded marketers are now looking to their mobile analytics as a tool to drive extraordinary business growth. On the PC side of digital, where many marketers get their start, marketers have long used their mobile analytics to sharpen marketing targets and deliver custom marketing efforts that highlight what consumers will want next. Across many industries, marketers have leveraged granular user insights and have seen firsthand how data-driven marketing can accelerate brand growth.

Historically, data is harder to collect on mobile apps. Tracking cookies, the workhorses of the PC web, is very problematic on mobile, especially with Apple devices and apps.

But the data problems have diminished. If you are looking for ways to unlock value from your mobile analytics, consider starting with these four tips:

Focus on first-party data first

First-party data is information collected by you about your site visitors and app users. These user signals reveal insights about specific brand relationships. Third-party data is information you buy.

It’s rarely about your brand specifically; rather it tends to be more general. First-party data is harder to collect than just writing a check. But it’s free, and if you employ good data security practices, only you get to unlock those insights. Free, unique and highly-relevant data is a hard combination to beat.

It’s easy to see why first-party is best. Imagine you are the mobile marketing lead for a French champagne that costs $125. You could buy access to a third-party, data-based audience of “champagne buyers.” This could be rich people or people who entertain a lot. Or, you could analyze your buyers and learn what makes them passionate about your brand. Which approach do you think would yield better sales results?

Model your prospecting efforts on your best customers

Any business has a mix of site/mobile app users and customers. At one end of the spectrum are those who visit your site or download your app, have a look around and leave. At the other end are your best customers, the people who buy again and again. Which user type would you want to persuade?

We worked with a travel brand that changed its user data targeting specs from a broad target modeled on a general user group – all the people who visited their site – to one that focused on people who purchased five or more hotel stays per year. The brand delivered a set of “heavy buyer” device advertising IDs to its media partners and asked them to find and target people who behaved like its heaviest buyers. While this tighter targeting spec meant higher media costs, revenue grew significantly because it connected with more qualified customers.

Proactively drive users to take the next step in the buying process

Focus your attention on converting more of your new installers and visitors into first purchasers. Most brands have a massive drop off between the number of people who visit their sites or download their apps, and those who visit and buy.

Use cohort analysis and other marketing analytics to segment your users into different stages of the buying funnel, and devise specific marketing efforts for each group. Then, define a segment of users who have only launched the app once and give them reasons to come back. Target them specifically with an announcement that you are now showing a new fall collection, for example, or give them 20% off if they buy today. Across clients, we’ve seen new user programs more than double the percentage of new users who eventually make a purchase.

Other user groups also warrant outreach: Use retargeting ads to get cart abandoners to return and buy. Retargeting ads show you the last item you considered, and often provide extra incentives. They can double, triple and even quadruple purchase rates.

These are just two examples. Analyze where you lose groups of people in your conversion funnel and develop targeted campaigns to inspire them.

Love your golden geese

Driving incremental purchases from regular buyers costs a tiny fraction of what it takes to persuade first-time buyers. Segment your best buyers and invest in emails, push messages and ads that reflect their interests.

For example, I often buy clothing from an app that completely gets my fashion preferences. It uses my past purchases and buying patterns to anticipate what will interest me, and times messages to my “moments of weakness.” It knows when I need – and don’t need – discounts. Every season, it barrages me with microtargeted ads. I click and grow its business, all while enriching my data file.

PC web marketers have done all of this for years. Mobile marketing professionals can now replicate these approaches using their first-party data. As more brands look to mobile apps for growth, marketing with first-party insights can mean the difference between making your number and missing by a mile.

Thanks to Forbes Communications Council for publishing this first.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

 

Mobile app uninstall rates are a big concern for lots of marketers. They can do serious harm to any app business. When you first detect high uninstall rates, it’s important to quickly diagnose your problem and take proactive steps to address the key challenges. Only in this way can you capitalize on app marketing opportunities and improve your retention metrics. Diagnosing the root causes of a high uninstall rate is actually straightforward – if you have the right data.

A Data-Driven Approach

Currently, the Google Play dashboard offers an overall figure for app uninstall rates across all channels, vendors, campaigns, etc. This number lets you see if the overall uninstall rate across your marketing programs is above the level for which you have planned. General measures like an overall uninstall rate are best at helping you determine if you have product problems. A bad, or slow, or heavy or buggy product will drive uninstalls regardless of acquisition channel.

But real uninstall analysis requires a lot more granularity. Which is why Singular offers Uninstall Attribution as a core metric in our platform.

We’ve incorporated app uninstall attribution into our solution to help mobile app marketers understand the relative quality of users driven by different mobile app marketing programs and install sources. Using uninstall attribution analytics, marketers can make smarter decisions in a variety of use cases:

• Campaign Testing and Decisions: By measuring the uninstall rates driven by different campaigns, they can determine the best advertising approaches for driving long-term users.
• Regional Allocations: By understanding the user retention rates in different markets, brands can make wiser decisions on where to spend expansion dollars.
• Cohort Comparisons: By comparing the relative app uninstall rates of different user segments, they can make smarter decisions about future acquisition and remarketing campaigns.
• Vendor Allocation: By comparing uninstall rates of different vendors, they can collaborate with these partners to drive install quality improvements and focus marketing investments on best performing programs.

Once you have access to uninstall measurement, it’s important to understand how to use it, and how to interpret the data in order to quickly identify issues.

Uninstall Analytics: Symptoms and Diagnosis

Let’s examine how we can use these more granular measures from Singular uninstall attribution to assess the root cause of high uninstall rates.

We’ll do this based upon example scenarios. We’ll first identify an example finding you might spot in your data, and then discuss its probable meaning.

Observation: High Uninstall Rates for Organic Installs
Diagnosis: Product or Messaging Issues

When you see high app uninstall rates for organic iOS and Android installs, that often means you have a product issue. With an organic install, there are no levers in play beyond what you promise the mobile app will do and what the app actually does. Messaging can drive high uninstalls if you overpromise or if your Google Play or App Store page is unclear about actual app experience. But the more likely issue is that people try your product and simply don’t like it. The most common reasons why people abandon/uninstall mobile apps relate to product performance.

When an app won’t launch, or launch quickly, or crashes frequently, or functions slowly, or offers bad UI/UX, data show that people quickly lose interest. In 2014, App Dynamics did a survey of Android and iOS app users in the US and UK. The data revealed that two thirds of consumers say their expectations of app performance were increasing, and that almost 9 in 10 had uninstalled an app because of poor performance. A Compuware study showed that crashes and slow app performance were the most frequently cited experience issues.

The same survey of mobile app users in the US, UK, France, Germany and India showed that one or two bad experiences can be major contributing factors to a user’s decision to uninstall an app.
Another common place where apps fall short is in UI/UE. Here are a few of the product characteristics that tend to correlate with high app abandons and uninstall rates.

• Unusual UI/UE, especially when clickable content is not clearly delineated from other text.
• Inconsistency, when a certain action is described in different words, or when navigation changes on different screens
• Absence of default values, meaning no pull-down menus, especially during registration
• User “dump”, or when an app simply drops the user into the experience without some sort of introduction or tutorial
• Screen size issues, when an app is optimized to only one screen size instead of adapting to the specifics of each device
• Small click targets, and fat fingers don’t mix
• Too many features leading to user confusion, especially during early trial and use launches
• Complex Registration, such as including too many questions that seem irrelevant to the core functionality of a mobile app. Or requiring sign-up via social profile, or not including sign-up via social profile option

The important thing here, whether you are a product leader or an app marketing person, is to find out exactly why people are uninstalling. What are the product or UI issues, specifically? One powerful way to get at those answers is to conduct a survey of recent uninstallers. While you might think that the response rates for uninstallers would be near nil, I think you’ll be surprised.

People want to help if they think you are listening.

2) Observation: Installs From One Vendor are Well Above Average
Diagnosis: Mobile App Marketing Publisher or Traffic Quality Issues

Small differences in uninstall rates across media sources are normal. You’ll find that these rates are constantly fluctuating in small ways over time, as may the ranking of vendors by uninstall rates.

But a vendor showing very high uninstall rates relative to others warrants your attention.

Most networks and sources are anxious to deliver the highest quality Android and iOS users for your investments. After all, that’s how they will get renewals/more of your budget. You’ll find that the vast majority of vendors welcome the opportunity to understand uninstall data and take steps to make things better.

Uninstall rates are a great place to collaborate with a vendor. Sometimes, these high rates are driven by a single publisher or class of publishers. Other times, the mix of ad formats may require adjustment. Or, in some cases, high uninstalls can be a sign of low quality inventory or even fraud.

Letting a network know that you are seeing relatively higher rates of uninstalls from them helps alert them to the issue so that they can adjust the dials on your campaign for better results.

3) Observation: Campaign/Creative Showing Above Average Uninstalls
Diagnosis: Likely a Messaging, Offer or Aesthetic Issue

As we all know, different ads and campaigns pull differently, just like Google Play and App Store pages do. When a campaign or creative is driving high uninstall rates, it’s time to adjust your mix to favor better performers, or make revisions to those ads that boost your quality install yield.

Remember, though, that you should focus on optimizing to your KPIs, not (just) uninstall rates. One campaign could, for example, yield fewer but very high-quality users. Generally, though a high uninstall rate will also yield low ROI.

4) Observation: High Uninstall Rate for Incentivized Downloads
Diagnosis: Time to Calculate Cost per Quality Install

Incentivized app downloads, ion which media partners reward users for downloading/installing the app, have been around for a long time. If you are unfamiliar, incentivized app downloads use a digital reward – like free game gold or free WI-FI service for an hour – as an incentive to get you to download an app.

Most marketers expect that incentivized app downloads will yield higher uninstall rates. After all, the user’s motivation is different. But what matters is how much higher. Let’s take an example. If incentivized components of your plans are yielding a CPI that is half the price of installs via other methods, and the uninstalls are only 20% higher, then incentivized may represent a good value.

It’s all about calculating a cost per quality or persistent user.

What’s critical here are user-level ROI analytics so that you can correctly measure the profitability of users attracted by different means.

5) Observation: High Uninstall Rates in Some Markets
Diagnosis: Messaging or Language Issues, Device Capacity Issues

Sometimes the data show big disparities in uninstall rates by country or region. The causes we most often see for this include communication issues like no or poor localization of content, poor app performance because of connection quality and speed, and the fact that in some countries – especially in developing markets like India and China, devices have small memories so users must constantly uninstall mobile apps in order to make room for other apps.

Addressing localization issues is relatively straightforward, though it requires time and resources. Network and connection issues are very difficult to mitigate without a major redesign of the app to be lighter on less taxing on processors. The mobile apps device space issue is simply a fact of life in some markets, and you need to be cognizant of it as you examine your uninstall rates.

It also may point to an opportunity for remarketing to uninstallers to get them to reinstall when the need for the app resurfaces. Using Singular Remarketing Audiences, for example, you can define an audience of recent uninstallers and use your vendor(s) or choice to specifically market to them.

Conclusions

High uninstall rates can be worrying. But taking a measured approach to quickly understanding and addressing your uninstall issues can yield big benefits quickly.

Considering uninstall rates should be part of your efforts to optimize performance to your core KPIs. The key is to have the information that pinpoints the problem areas on your business, and then a concrete plan of action.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

 

Every mobile app experiences at least some app uninstalls from users. And for mobile app marketers, a high rate of uninstalls can be among the most frustrating and challenging business metrics. After all the effort to attract users, having them uninstall can feel extremely disappointing.

At Singular, one of the questions we have been asked most often when we implemented our app uninstall attribution measurement is…
Are app uninstalls lost forever?

Our research shows…absolutely not! In fact, proactive and customized remarketing initiatives can drive conversion rates that are even higher than for your other install programs – if you take a personalized approach and have the facility to specifically communicate with app uninstallers.

But first things first.

Why People Uninstall Apps

Other posts on this blog discuss the reasons why people perform app uninstalls. But a capsule summary of the reasons why people uninstall apps includes:

• Unmet User Expectations: When an app fails to live up to its hype, users question its value and necessity in their lives
• App Performance Issues: When operation of an app is clunky, whether because of bugs or high CPU demands, users become frustrated
• Onerous User Requirements: When registration is tedious, time consuming, or otherwise challenging, people may uninstall without even getting to their first real app experiences
• Better Apps Available: When users become aware of competing apps that deliver better performance or utility, you can expect a big chunk of them to abandon your app
• App Experience Completed: When a user finishes an app like a game, or no longer has need for its core utility, the app is far more likely to be removed from a device.
• Need to Free Up Space on the Device: When Android users reach the maximum amount of stored content for their devices, they need to remove apps in order to make room for others. This is a particularly common circumstance for users in the developing world

Since there is a broad set of reasons why people uninstall apps from an iPhone or Android device, the extent to which a particular uninstaller will be challenging to win back is going to vary.

Understanding the Reasons Why YOUR USERS Uninstall Apps

To create a strategy and action plan for app uninstalls and user win-backs, you need to first understand why people uninstalled an app from their device in the first place.

With Singular, you can define an audience of app uninstallers and work with your media or research partners to reach out to these specific anonymized individuals for their feedback.

Delivering surveys to iPhone and Android app uninstallers can provide valuable insights to help you devise an uninstall marketing action plan – one that can both reduce future uninstalls and potentially win back uninstallers.

Data-Driven Reinstall Efforts for iOS and/or Android Uninstallers

Equipped with research information, you can formulate highly targeted marketing efforts to address the app uninstalls challenges and encourage former users to reinstall.

As mentioned above, Singular offers the opportunity to define an audience of Android and/or iOS uninstallers and deliver it to your automation platform or media partners for personalized marketing messages and offers.

What Pros Say

A series of interviews we conducted with industry pros revealed that reinstall programs against recent iOS and Android app uninstallers frequently delivers conversion metrics that are well above average versus greenfield install programs.

But these folks also emphasized that in the absence of proactive remarketing programs, uninstallers don’t return to install an app in large numbers. This use case is definitely an example for which proactive marketing investment yields strong dividends.

Note: This blog post on app uninstalls was published first on the Apsalar blog, prior to Apsalar’s merger with Singular. Learn more about our united company at Singular.net.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.