Business of Apps Podcast

Running app marketing campaigns, marketers have several goals - I’m sure you know them better than the fingers of your hand.

So, it is to find new users for the app, convince them to install the app and…what’s new next? Right - make sure they are engaged with the app and do with it what you expect them to, thinks like placing orders, signing up, subscribe and so on.

In this episode, we want to talk about app engagement and to share with you what actually works, we have Tommy.

• Tommy's background

"Not necessarily a change in behavior as much as it is a change in accessibility as to how users interface with loyalty programs today.

We'll take an example of a partner like ours, which is Fetch. So Fetch rewards is the largest shopping and rewards platform in all of the U S today. They have something like 12 to 14 million weekly active users. So it's just an enormous app. And historically they focused on CPG partnerships. So if you want to box a general mills cereal, you can go to your local store, grab that cereal, take a snapshot of the receipt and you can earn some Fetch points in exchange for that behavior. \

Now, what we did when we talked to Fetch was we made them aware of the fact that likely the majority of the users were also gamers. When we think about gaming tendencies in the US, I think over 60 % of all smartphones have a game on them and over 43 % of all time spent on the smartphone in the US is spent playing mobile games."

"I think we're squarely of the belief that consent is consent in our space. And we as a business pride ourselves on the fact that we will never collect any privacy or any data on someone who doesn't consent to us collecting that data. It's related to what they might be doing on their smartphone or their preferences or whatever the case may be. So when you enter our experience for the first time, you're hit with a number of prompts that essentially ask for your consent.

Users are not obligated to say yes to any of these prompts, but if they do, it enhances our ability to personalize their experience. Personalization, obviously for a platform like ours, and in general for any platform, is I think rather key to success."

Think about it - every single day hundreds of millions of people around the world use mobile apps to do something. From checking a weather forecast to booking their next trip, buying something, or less pleasant things like, for instance, paying their taxes. Every app developer wants to keep her or his app users happy.

But in real life, your idea of the best experience for your app users doesn’t always match with what they think the best one should look like. So how do you fix that? That’s a good question and today Jennifer will share her experience of doing that.

• Jennifer's background

"Yeah, as you said, it's a balance. We are experts in coffee. So that's our greatest asset and the most important piece that we want to communicate about that product. But then there are industry standards for things that people are accustomed to doing. So we are not trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to, for example, purchasing processes or presenting the most convenient ways of paying because that's already set as a standard."

"As you may know, we have lots of variety in coffees and we're always trying to push the boundaries of exploring new tastes and of allowing people to enjoy coffee from very differentiated parts of the world. So the amount of products that we have sometimes could be intimidating for some people because they may be just starting to understand the world of coffee."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Your phone has become an extension of your brain. You store a ton of information on it, you use it to get through your day or to plan something in advance. You’re working on it, you are spending your leisure time with it.

Every once in a while, when your existing 80-100 iOS apps (this is how much apps we have on our phones these days) aren’t enough and you need a new one, you go to the App Store. When you launch a search query there, the first search result you can see is on a blue background - this is an Apple Search ad.

Whether you’ve been driving traffic to your iOS app with Apple Search Ads or you never used this paid advertising platform before, today Simon will tell you how to use it efficiently.

• Simon's background

"So for those who not familiar, today there are actually four different types of inventories in Apple search ads. The one, I think most people are familiar with and the one you were mentioning in your intro, is search results campaigns, which is basically being able to put an ad at the very top of a search result page and based on what potential customer has just searched for.

But there's three more that Apple has released over the years. The second one is a search tab. So it's another ad that you can see, before people start typing in the search tab. And it's basically a game of trying to catch the attention and play on other signals to kind of convert there.

A third one would be the product page, so if people scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at the You Might Also Like section, there will also be an ad in there. But I think the final placement, the final inventory, is the one that gets the most hype these days. It's the Today tab."

"It may be called a discovery campaign, but the campaign part trumps the discovery part. And in other words, at first, the campaign is going to find keywords that fit the criteria you've set. But once it's found those keywords, unless you give it different instructions, it's going to stay focused on those. It's basically the principle of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We found something that's working."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Ok. A quick recap of the app marketing industry history. There was a time, circa 2008 - 2016, when all marketers were going out of their way to acquire as much installs for their apps as possible. Pretty much everyone was playing that game. Then came the moment when marketers realized that if they don’t retain their users as they acquire them, they can not build a sustainable app business. Right, it’s no brainer for you now but back than it took time for people to shift their mentality.

Ever since we’ve been hearing about mobile app users churn and how to deal with it, LTV (I’m sure you know it stands for Live Time Value) became a really important metric.

But if I ask you today “What is TTV?” No, I don’t mean Twitch TV. Ok, today Jeremiah will help us to expand your marketing vocabulary.

• Jeremiah's background

"The reason why that's so important is we capture them right at that moment that's the most pivotal for them. They can sign up and they can send a notification free of charge to the service member, to their family members about the opportunity to use Sandbox to write letters while they are there. So because of that, can sort of insert ourselves into a process that already happens, which helps us optimize that. And the real value is that supporter gets to see those weekly updates."

"The way we primarily measure this is TTV  (time to value). We really did a lot of testing early last year and how do we optimize for first purchase, which we would consider time to value. And how do we do that in the least amount of time? And really that's kind of by optimizing the onboarding process, getting all the information that we need for somebody before they ever even sign up for the app."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

This is one of our special episodes, when we share either one of our webinars or in-person panels from the App Promotion Summit.

This time we have a webinar with the fascinating topic on the table - running a successful privacy-first mobile campaign. Experts from DataSeat, Kachava, and Wavemaker discuss the challenges of privacy-first mobile advertising, including overcoming attribution hurdles such as privacy thresholds, crowd anonymity, and delayed postback data.

They also dive into optimization strategies, the future of mobile ad attribution and measurement, and the adoption of SCAD Network among publishers and advertisers. The conversation concludes with insights into the potential of re-engagement tracking and upcoming innovations in privacy-compliant user acquisition.

• Apple, privacy and the switch to AdAttributionKit;

• Mark Menery from Dataseat (part of Verve)

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Today, all businesses, brands and marketers are focused on mobile. It is no brainer - people spend two - three hours a day on mobile devices, so much of the action is there.

And yet - we still use laptops and desktop computers. Ask yourself - why would Apple introduce the macOS Sequoia iPhone mirroring app if desktop computers weren’t still relevant? We do work on our favorite MacBooks and iMacs, watch movies, plan our next vacation and so forth. It is just, for a few years since the iPhone was introduced, mobile was sucking out all the oxygen in the ad space.

So, if you are an app marketer, for you the answer is clear - you need to work with both mobile and desktop ad spaces to grow your app’s user base and generate revenue. Web-to-App advertising is what we’ll be talking about with Anastasiia today.

• Anastasiia's background

"When we talk about customized user journey for apps, we are talking mainly about Web2App funnel. It could be based on a funnel with the questions completely based on the web or about the funnel that consists only one landing page and then push you to the store to download the app."

"I think the best thing is that you don't need to deal with opt -in rates. You're just skipping that part because this is considering web campaigns and web experience. The limitations about iOS 14 are not working here. And you just have all the information you can get based on clicks."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

I think for all of us this experience is familiar. We download a new app we’ve been looking for to fulfill specific needs and for some time the experience is great. Then your needs may evolve and now you need a new version of the app to cover it. If your updated requirements for the app are more or less in line with what other people need, and if the developer closely monitor these needs, soon you’ll get the updated version.

Of course, the opposite is as likely - you may never get an update for the app, you can’t wait anymore and you go and download a similar app from other company. So, the question - how do app developers’ team can keep their users happy? On the other hand, how do you make sure that over time your app stays intuitive for its users?

Well, today we have Paul to talk about how their team handles these hard questions for their app Documents.

• Paul's background

"So this is a very interesting question because we can look at it from different perspectives. So, I think there are two components, major components in this area. The first one, you should definitely reflect current needs of your users all the time, addressing their requests, addressing their issues, addressing new technologies that emerge all the time. But at the same time, you need to look forward  to create something that people and users might not think about right now."

"We are using multiple things here. So first of all, we don't do dramatic changes that touch every single piece of the product. So we break it down into kind of components, use cases. So for example, we might redesign or create a new hypothesis, for example, an audio editing that we have inside the app. And we launch it."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

The field of app marketing is full of jargon. Just from the top of my head a few acronyms for you - ASO, CPI, CPA, LTV, FBI (sorry the last one was obviously a joke). Here is another one - MMM, which stands for Marketing Mix Modeling. Do you know what it is?

Well, in this episode Gary will explain it for you, showing how it works and why it’s important for you to use it in your app business.

• Gary's background

"MMM is a methodology used to measure and analyze the impact of various marketing activities on your conversions. Now, where the sort of the confusion comes in is that it sounds quite familiar to the industry standard of last touch attribution. But to truly grasp marketing mixed modeling or MMM, it's important to distinguish it from last touch attribution."

"The biggest challenge is probably just old mindset. We've been in this industry for many years and last touch attribution is the standard form of measurement and it's been around for 12, 13 years or so. So quite often companies are testing MMM but they don't want to believe the data because they've maybe built lifetime value models of their last touch attribution."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

How many languages do you know? Would you like learn a new one? Science unequivocally says that it is good for your brain to learn new languages. You will thank us when you’ll be in your 70s or 80s :-) The thing is that on top of immediate benefits, it will help you to keep your brain healthy down the road.

Now, today AI is on the path to impact our lives on so many levels. Learning new languages is one of them and today Steve will tell us about how AI allowed his company to transform their Memrise app dramatically.

• Steve's background

"Well, I will tell you that we are probably still working on overcoming the biggest challenge that has been brought to us by all of this amazing technology. And that is unbelievable freedom, right? We now, because of what we've deployed, have given people the freedom to learn the words that matter to them, not the words that we decide in any given course."

"The first axis I alluded to earlier, is heretofore in school or in any course that you might take or in any of the other apps, you learn words in a certain order. Right? You're just marching everybody through the first 100, 200, 500, 1 ,000 words in the same order because you're marching everybody in lockstep to be able to interact with certain content and certain tasks.

But we don't have to do that. We have fully atomized dictionaries because no matter what words you know, we can start to run you into other experiences. And so that's the first level of personalization is let you decide why you want to learn a language."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Do you like the holiday season? Yes - it is a hypothetical question, we all do. Why do we love this time of the year? Because this is the time when we all buy something nice, right? We download shopping apps and go ahead and pick up something we desperately need.

Ok - it’s all great but if you are a retailer and you launch app user acquisition campaigns during the holiday season, there is very important insight for you in this episode - so listen carefully.

• Thomas's background

"And we, we surveyed more than 60 million app installs. So of the number of apps that were installed during that period, we looked at 60 million new ones that were added to your device and we were very interested in understanding what happens after that peak shopping season."

" First of all, the way you onboard people is really, really important. I mean that idea of a welcome kit. So they download your app, right then and there you have their attention. What you do next is really important. So that onboarding experience, that welcome experience is really key. And what you're trying to do is two things. You're trying to get to know these people that are downloaded your app. And you're doing it in a way that's showing them with a little bit of information here and here, you can provide a more curated or personalized and relevant experience for them over there."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012