Business of Apps Podcast

This week, we are pleased to offer an exclusive bonus episode. As you know, we organize the App Promotion Summit several times a year to bring together app marketing, growth, product, CRM, and revenue executives. These events feature panels where industry professionals share their experiences and insights on emerging trends that significantly impact the sector.

During this year’s App Promotion Summit San Francisco, we convened a panel dedicated to innovative user acquisition strategies that are poised to shape the app industry moving forward.

It was hosted by Kevin Kinnison, Client Partner Lead at Adjust and the panelists were:

In this episode, we delve into the evolving landscape of digital advertising, where privacy and precision intersect. Our guest, Gaylord Zach, Head of Mobile Product at Verve, brings his expertise to the forefront, exploring how the advertising industry can adapt to a privacy-first world without sacrificing effectiveness. With regulations like GDPR and Apple’s ATT reshaping the ad tech ecosystem, Gaylord unpacks the challenges advertisers face today, from diminished data signals to the rising importance of trust and transparency.

Throughout the discussion, we learn how Verve is pioneering solutions like ATOM, their anonymized targeting technology, which identifies user cohorts while safeguarding individual privacy. Gaylord also shares insights into leveraging AI at the edge and integrating Google’s Privacy Sandbox to redefine audience targeting. Tune in to discover how advertisers and publishers can thrive in this new era of privacy-conscious innovation while maintaining meaningful connections with their audiences.

"For publishers aiming to monetize effectively, it’s crucial to represent their inventory accurately so advertisers can confidently invest in ad placements. Advertisers need to target the right audience, personalize messages, and present them with the best possible creatives. This helps create a good match between the ad campaign and the user. Finally, advertisers must measure campaign success and attribute performance to the relevant placements."

"Our technology, known as ATOM—short for "Anonymized Targeting on Mobile"—enables us to identify relevant user cohorts and create audience segments directly on the user's device. This approach allows us to deliver personalized ads without relying on third-party data, thus preserving user privacy. "

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

For every mobile app out there there was this moment when somebody in its team was making a decision about the app’s pricing. Coding an app isn’t easy, designing an app is not easy either but when it comes to deciding how much money you’re going to charge for an app, it is more complicated then one would think. Charging for an app copy, in-app purchase or app subscription are all not easy things to crack.

Now ask yourself - what if I want to go international with my app? How should I price my app in UK, France, Sweden, Japan, on Mars? Ok - the last one isn’t your worry, yet. Jokes aside, international app pricing can be really complicated and that’s why we have today Jacob to explain how it works.

• Jacob's background

"Yeah, I think the most common one is just relying on Apple and Google. So Apple and Google in App Store Connect and Play Store have give you default price recommendations or price localization. So you input your price for the country, your base data of your largest in, and then they suggest, OK, what should your price be in these other countries?

And I think people often get confused about what Apple and Google are actually saying here. We look at these prices and we think, okay, Apple and Google know best, but really what all they're doing is saying, on the taxes and fees in those other markets, this is the price that would get you the same amount of revenue or equalized revenue across those regions. But they're not actually optimizing and maximizing for conversions in those local markets."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

This episode will a bit usual. Previously, we covered a broad spectrum of app marketing topics that are on all people’s minds - user acquisition, app retention, app monetization, app subscriptions and so forth. Today, we’re going to touch on something that unfortunately isn’t appreciated as much as it should be.

If you ever watched the 2020’s movie The Social Dilemma, that explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, you would remember that addiction was in the heart of the issue that the movie explored.

Well, in today’s episode we’ll be talking about how to build apps that engage with people on a big scale and yet - they don’t lead to forming an addiction. To that end, we have Yves (ИВ) to talk about his app WeWard as a great example.

• Yves background

"Create a habit to people is very complicated, but when you create a habit. It's very difficult also to remove. Some people say that it's more difficult to remove a bad habit than creating a good habit. So to create a good habit, you have to use the classic tricks that the brain likes. And the brain, if you read some cognitive science book, you will understand that every brain is working the same."

"If you want to launch an app, I would suggest try to focus on the main benefit of the app, try to run the most simple version of the app. Remove every aspect, like the streak was not part of the app when we launched it, the gamification was very little. The concept was giving reward to people for working, so it was just a step counter and you earn one coin every 1,000 steps.

Today the app is well more developed with social environment gamification but at the beginning we just need to verify the concept and you can have thousand and hundred of thousand of users with a very simple concept, you just need like to simplify as much as possible, because this is where you will have the ability to test more quickly and to improve your app and to test and learn the most faster."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

A busy life of an app marketer is full of problems, you don’t need me to tell you this. But here is the special one that you may stumble upon. How can you do both at the same time - truly care about your app users needs, making their life easier and meet your financial bottom line?

I’m really glad if you already know the answer or you never encounter this dichotomy. Great - kudos to you. But if you do, on this episode we will help you to resolve it.

• Yeva's background

"So let's take the first step - identify feelings. There is a ton of ways to do that, from just asking questions to doing user research to forming your own hypothesis. Let's take, for example, forming your own hypothesis. Let's say you have a drop in conversion rate on the email step on the web funnel. So the user has went through the questions or the screens, and then they have to input their email.

What might the user be feeling at the moment? What would you feel at the moment? Maybe a bit anxious, maybe unsure if the website won't send you a ton of spam messages over the next day or week. Maybe you would be scared about your data being leaked or given to some third parties. So you kind of form those hypotheses on what the user might be feeling. And this is the first step."

"So we've tried utilizing this framework for most of our products and we have never had an unsuccessful test in this regard. But of course you have to understand that it depends on the area, on the product, on the offering that you have to your users. So I would not say that this approach is a silver bullet that helps everyone."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

One of the most important skills in life is the ability to zoom out and take a holistic view on a problem. This approach is really instrumental in marketing as well. If you are an app marketer and your job is to drive growth, you should always take a broader look at where your potential or existing app users spend their time online.

On today’s web, there are many online communities where app users go to dig for information, seek an advice or to share one. But there is only one of a kind that we’ll be talking about today - Reddit and to do so we have Sherwin.

• Sherwin's background

"So when you think about mobile app users, Reddit is a place where we as an organization, as a company, as a platform, are sitting on 18 plus years of conversations across different types of mobile apps.

And it's at different stages of the journey where app users either try to discover, learn how to use and maximize the different apps and then eventually make recommendations on how other folks in their communities can also enjoy the benefits of like the apps that they're using.

So for app users, they trust Reddit because they know that these communities have genuine discussions about the apps that they care about."

"First, being in advertising, I want to talk about it from a media perspective, that a lot of brands can really leverage the power of community to build their brand and build very authentic and genuine relationships with the customers that they want to serve. There are lot of different ways here at Reddit, having community at the core, that enables brands to engage meaningfully in the space and the internet that no other platform is able to provide.

The second one is acquiring customers. And I think this is a journey on its own, because acquiring customers really pushes brands to focus on the core value propositions that they want to share."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

OK, this time my setting the stage begins with a disclaimer - the cookies we’ll be talking about on this episode have nothing to do with the ones you love on your dessert. The Oreo cookies future is just fine, it’s not going to disappear anytime soon:-)

No, today I have Ishan to talk about what happens in mobile marketing with the third-party cookies, small pieces of data for digital tracking that disappear from the scene and yet mobile app marketers still need to somehow stay efficient and drive traffic to mobile apps.

• Ishan's background

"You have to give more value than you used to gain trust, because right now everyone has so many options, from where they're spending their time to where they're spending their money. You're not a single monopoly in the market as a business. So you have to show value for a lot lesser cost than before. And with that value, you generate trust. And once you have that trust is only when you can."

"So one of the tested strategies, which have worked, is you advertise for a broader lead magnet or value which you're trying to deliver. For instance, if I am specifically solving a problem of stock market investments and I'm a stockbroking platform, I would still sell something like a retirement calculator to advertise on Instagram where now advertising is a little less personal because I don't have a lot of cookies to specifically target to my customer base or my ideal customers. So I would be targeting to a broader customer base with values which would be appealing to a lot more of users."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

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