One of the topics, that has been permeating this podcast over the years, is mobile app growth. And in general - year after year, conference after conference, countless webinars, white papers, and podcasts have been dedicated to this topic.

And it’s all for a good reason - if your app’s user base doesn’t grow you can not build a sustainable app business and because the app landscape has been changing you always needs to be in the know of what works now and what doesn’t.

And this is exactly what we’re going to cover on this episode with Gilad.

• Gilad's background

"I think that from the get-go apps optimization was always pretty big on app growth. And when you're thinking about app optimization, you think about how users might find the app. The app optimization, I think it became much more sophisticated in the past few years, where you have the ability to impact users with so many different gateways to the app.

So it's no longer five screenshots you're telling the story and that's it, like you used to have.  Now you have 35 different gateways in the App Store on the, on iOS and 50 different gateways on custom product pages on Android."

" I think that AI  is a massive improvement and advancement. And that's something that will impact the world for now and onwards. But I think that the ability to be data-driven and seeing what works and what doesn't work, which means at the end of the day, there are users. You're trying to bridge your message to the user and getting them to a very positive experience about whatever you're trying to sell.  

I think that being data-driven and understanding which customers to approach with which type of messaging that will resonate with them and will get them to one step closer to the action that you want them to take. That's the key element that is with all of the tech technology advancements and with all of the new tools that are available and all of the better programs of TikTok and Meta and Google."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Ok, a bit of a mental gymnastics - imaging you’re holding a smartphone in your hand and you’ve just purchased it. You’ve unpacked it, turned on and now browsing through its default apps and checking out its features. You’re consciously taking mental notes on features that tick off boxes for you - that is the rational part. Right, but don’t you notice that holding that phone in your hand makes you feel good?

We, human beings, are driven by emotions, even on occasions when you feel like you are strictly rational, your decisions are still influenced by your emotions.

Now, this episode stands out the rest, because with the exception of the episode with Joe Schaeppi, CEO of Solsten, where we talked about the psychology of app user acquisition, we haven’t touched emotions in app marketing.

But we’re going to change it now today by having Naksha and talking about driving app engagement with empathy.

• Naksha''s background

"Yeah, I think that's a very, very good point, especially now in the digital age that we were talking about how technology brings brands more closely. I guess that would be the best way to say it. I think,  at this point, consumers have endless options and it's very important to create genuine connection, to build a difference, to be a differentiator from all of the brand offerings. So ultimately, when we think about brands, brands sell, experience or sell, sell, sell you those feelings that then you can empathize with."

"I think from a business perspective, sympathy is what you will have the whole time. You're trying to keep it in mind, and the empathy will be something that you will connect to every now and then."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Today, of all business models the subscription model is the one that rules the world of mobile apps. Long gone the times when you hear the word subscription in a conversation about mobile apps you could only think of apps for content streaming or online media. Today subscription apps are everywhere.

On this episode, Léa will share with you best practices for subscription apps monetization. She will cover things like product-market fit, language-market fit, framing the prices, and more.

• Léa's background

"So, you know, it's not enough to have an amazing idea and an amazing product. You also need enough people that think this is a great idea and a great product. So you need enough of the market as well for it to work. So those are the three things that I think are very much like minimal at least that you really need to start getting some level of product market fit and start building traction. And then there's how you measure that, which is some decent activation and engagement metric, you know, around activation and maybe retention. And if your product have some sort of habituation into it, you can also look at things like stickiness."

"In a way before subscription app, one of the best way to get new customer was a referral. It was the word of mouth. You trust a lot more when a brand or a product, when it's endorsed by someone you trust. The exact same principle applied to subscription app."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

We passed the Equinox a couple of weeks ago - the spring is here and, in kind of celebrating spirit, I want us to take a look back at 2023, a bird-view on the app industry via the one and only State of Mobile report from Data.ai.

The app industry is on scale of millions of apps used by billions of people, apps permeate the entire world economy. By now, you just can’t find an industry that hasn’t been influenced by mobile.

Competition is high, new technologies emerge and from time to time we all need to take a step back and take a holistic view on the industry to check out on the trends and understand how well we fit into this picture.

• Lexi Sydow's background

"We saw 257 billion app downloads in 2023 alone, which is a roughly flat year on year. And that's sort of what we'd expect to see given more maturity in the market. These are completely net new installs. And it equates to about almost  half a million downloads every minute is what that equates to you globally"

"$171 billion being spent across iOS, Google Play and third party Android stores in China. So the top five markets are China at $52 billion being spent alone. That actually is down 10% year on year. Number two is the U S, up $45 billion, and that's up 6%. Japan at 18 billion is our number three kind of market on mobile, up a modest 1%. "

"And in 2023, we saw $64 billion annually being spent in the non game sector, and that has grown roughly 6.5 X from 2016, where it was only $10.3 billion. So just a huge growth in like the last seven or eight years there. " 

Business Of Apps – connecting the app industry since 2012

It’s 2024 and we are all suppose to talk about Generative AI 24/7 but remember what was at the center of attention for so many app marketers before the ChatGPT arrival? Right - TikTok and marketing your apps on TikTok. Well, the platform, despite a number of looming threats for it to be banned, most notably in the US, is there and thriving.

Today, I have Inna to share her best practices for doing app marketing on TikTok.

This episode is sponsored by Perform[cb], leading outcome-based marketing company. Perform[kb] targets marketers' ideal audience and promotes brands with AI-powered, high-value placements on a pay for performance model. Get in touch with their user acquisition team today!

• Inna's background

"So I would say, first of all, before I start to answer the question, you need to understand that there is still a difference between TikTok and other social media. Because Tiktok is not like a regular social media. You don't go to TikTok to check TikTok. You go to TikTok to have fun, to entertain, to educate yourself. So that's why TikTok, this is like the world leading entertainment platform for short videos. And this is all about the community. So that's why to be the part of this community is to collaborate with those guys, with the Creators."

"From my point of view, there is still a difference when it comes to influencers and creators, because influencers they like influence and creators they create. So and this is actually a difference because when we began working with creators on TikTok, we wanted to adjust our experience of working with influencers on Instagram, and we were focusing on, for example, on those guys who have like some number of followers or something like this. But then we understood that TikTok it's like it's not really matter how many followers you have, since your content is entertaining. So that's why we were thinking maybe, like, the number of followers is not really important. Maybe we need to focus on those guys who can create something that our audience will pay their attention to."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

This week we have another bonus episode for you, this time it’s the recording of our recent webinar with Colin Contreary, Head of Content at Embrace, app performance analytics platform.

Right now we use and rely on so many apps in our daily life, we don’t even register when you use all those apps - it’s just how you connect with your family, do your banking, getting around in a city, shop for a variety of things and so on. When all those apps do work we are happy, when they crash they drive us nuts.

This episode is sponsored by Perform[cb], leading outcome-based marketing company. Perform[kb] targets marketers' ideal audience and promotes brands with AI-powered, high-value placements on a pay for performance model. Get in touch with their user acquisition team today!

✅  Identifying pain points

"And so once they were started using Embrace, when they got user complaints, they were able to immediately look up the full user experience and see what exactly the issue was."

"They're able to put out a hotfix for deep linking issues and hotfixes if they surface new crash patterns, which understandably happen when you have such a surge in interest during that big event. And so the end result of being able to immediately dive into those user experiences is that they were able to maintain 99.99% crash free rating, which is already incredible outside of a big event like Black Friday."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Every change in the app ecosystem, especially when it comes to tools and solutions introduced by Apple or Google, goes through a cycle - first you get a mix reaction, some people are thrilled, some are shaking their heads and rolling up their eyes, then they learn to adapt to this change - you can complain as much as you want but you aren’t in a position to cancel it, you need to adjust your workflow to move forward.

So back in 2018, Apple released the SKAdNetwork and ever since it became a hot topic for endless discussions on conferences, chats on Reddit, as well as internal discussions in app marketing agencies, app development teams and so on.

Today, we have Pablo to update you with what you need to know about SKAN 4.0 this year.

This episode is sponsored by Perform[cb], leading outcome-based marketing company. Perform[kb] targets marketers' ideal audience and promotes brands with AI-powered, high-value placements on a pay for performance model. Get in touch with their user acquisition team today!

• Pablo's background

"I have seen so many people reducing is investment in terms of user acquisition budgeting or just pausing completely the use acquisition on iOS devices because they didn't know how SKAN worked, right? So that's definitely something I don't recommend. Because if you proved that those users were working for you before, meaning that they were converting into revenue, then why not still acquiring  iOS  users, right?"

"I have been using Generative AI in a few ways. The easiest answer would be it's helpful for Conversion Volume Mapping, right? But my experience says it's not there or it's not at a level I would expect yet."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

We live the world of smart things - smart homes, smart cars (and I don’t mean the Smart car brand from Mercedes, in general - fleets of electric vehicles from Tesla, Rivian, Polstar and so on that are full of high tech that makes them smart). The list wouldn’t be complete if I wouldn’t mention, right - smartphones and apps.

Before late 2022 we thought we saw it all and than ChatGPT happened - boom! People who didn’t follow AI research and development (meaning the majority of population) were shocked by what it was capable of doing and quite frankly they haven’t seen what it can do for science and medicine yet, mostly the focus has been on generation of text for marketing, online publication and so on.

In this episode, we have Günay to talk about AI potential for mobile advertising and app marketing.

• Günay Aliyeva's background

"And it's going to get just easier for image and video makers to perform better and to get better results and put their focus on something more strategic and something where we actually do need human input. You don't need actually a human  to sit and click so many times to create them. So it's it's just much easier for UA managers to do their job and perform better if they have all of those tools in hand."

"There's always a need for a human who will direct it in the right direction and know how to implement the outcomes or what kind of data needs to be input to get what kind of results."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

Science tells us that 80% of information we perceive every second we’re awake is visual. We make sense of this world around us by processing lots and lots of images and some of those images are mobile ads.

Now, there are ads you just want to go away and never come back, some make you smile and some actually give you an incentive to try a new app or grab a specific app you’ve been looking for.

In this episode, we’re going to talk to Jessica about how to pull this pretty tough feat - ramp up ad creatives production to boost your app growth.

• Jessica Gotti's background

"Being able to leverage the creatives correctly and at scale has become mandatory for successful marketing strategies. Especially in today's marketing landscape, where we have to face so many limitations and challenges, creatives can help mitigating them. Let's think about the limitation in targeting brought by new Data Privacy Regulations, ATT’s policy. It's not us anymore actively targeting the audience we are after, but it's the creative that is finding the right audience for us, the one that resonates the best with our message."

"Yeah, it's indeed fundamental having a clear creative exploration and testing framework to make everything work smoothly and facilitate collaboration among many stakeholders. So we came up with a seven step flow, which run on a weekly basis."

"Success didn’t come right away. Getting to the first winning concept took much exploration and testing, almost 3 months […]. The new team had to learn about Paired and understand our audience, we had to set up and refine our framework multiple times"

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012

User experience. This term has become so widespread and significant for business because we all use so many products and services and if you think about it - your interaction with those products and services can make your day or ruin it.

Our smartphones and mobile apps have become our life companions and chances are your first thought in a morning can be about your experience with a mobile game the previous evening or watching something cool on Netflix or chatting with ChatGPT-4 on the OpenAI app and going philosophical about something. And if those apps worked flawlessly you had a great user experience, if they were buggy - you know what it feels like.

In this episode, Eric will tell about common technical issues apps have, the evolution of users’ expectations for app experiences over the years, unique challenges for mobile product and engineering teams, and more.

• Eric Futoran's background

"One of our customers actually got threatened recently. A voice-to-chat app, which has millions of users got threatened recently that their app would be pulled by Google because they were below or above the threshold that you would see in the Google Play console. We help with all those things, and then we help you prioritize."

"And then they're throwing an alert which is really reactive. It's too late on mobile, your users are gone. And then because the release cycles, you're waiting a week, two weeks to a month.

And then you're trying to get an approval cycle from Apple or Google, which is getting faster. That's not perfect. But you're still waiting. And like, even a week is too long for a lot of these issues, even the smaller ones that you seemingly don't think that are a big issue, but they can pile and so the pain is getting all these pieces to work together, but also getting your teams to talk a common language."

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012