Featured: How Leading Marketers Are Using Big Data to Boost
Conversions & Profitability
With millions of mobile options in app stores, competition
for attention is higher than ever. That's why it's so critical for marketers to
engage key audiences to ensure the longevity and visibility of their apps.
Mobile has moved in leaps and bounds over the past year to
make an attempt to catch up with other online marketing techniques.
Mobile app marketing success used to be measured by the
number of clicks on an advertising source. Then the focus moved to how many
people installed the app. Now the industry is starting to realize that
engagement and retaining valuable users is key to marketing success.
Mobile marketers are looking beyond the install to get the
best value out of their user base.
Retargeting Techniques
So how do we deal with this changing landscape? The two key
approaches are retargeting and reengagement, which entice a user who has shown
interest back into an app.
Retargeting is when specific, individual users are targeted
online or through mobile. In the mobile world, a list of device identifiers is
provided to the network, and the network then serves the ad once the device is
identified. It's a good way to trigger a one-to-one interaction between a
consumer and a brand that is highly personalized and specific.
When users install an app and use it for the first time,
they become active users. If they stop using the app for a period of time, they
can be retargeted with a marketing campaign.
The network is then able to display the ad to the list of
devices, enticing the user back into the app. The user then needs to be
reattributed to the new advertising source for driving the user back to the
app.
Reengagement Options
Reengagement is identifying someone who has downloaded an
app, and then enticing them to return to the app, or use it more frequently.
Reengagement uses various tools to reengage users who are inactive, and the
best tools for driving reengagement are typically deep-linking, push
notifications and in-app and online ads.
Things work differently in the world of apps in a few
crucial ways. For starters, there are no cookies — no easy way for apps to
follow a user into other apps or even out onto the Internet with personalized
offers. Instead there is a more binary distinction. In order to do retargeting
on mobile, a device and identifier is needed, whereas reengagement does not
need any unique identifier as it principally targets a group of users rather
than a specific one.
Evidence suggests that reengagement can draw huge benefits
with minimal investment. Trademob, which developed the first mobile retargeting
platform focused entirely on apps late last year, has already demonstrated up
to 300 percent higher in-app conversions, and up to 95 percent lower costs for
acquiring quality users through their retargeting campaigns.
Deep-Linking
Deep-linking in the app world is when a user is taken to a
specific app or place within an app. Crucially, deep-linking is only possible
if it is specifically supported by the app, making it a function that must be
planned before coding.
Many publishers and ad platforms have not executed
deep-linking well. When a mobile device encounters a deep-link triggered by a
user click, it asks the already-installed apps if they recognize the deep-link.
Non-recognition would result in the customer receiving a
white page error and consequently leaving the site. Therefore, a fallback where
the user would be redirected to the App Store and invited to install the app is
needed. There is no common accepted way to do this so companies like adjust or
deeplink.me have come up with sophisticated workarounds.
Push Notifications
Push-notifications are simple, text-based messages that pop
up on the device and have to be opted-in for by users. The message can ask
users why they have been inactive, suggest they come back, prompt them to make
a purchase or make offers such as discounts on new items. The goal of push
notifications is to attract attention without annoying the user.
From Attribution to Reattribution
Attribution, which is the art of connecting an install to
its source, is a critical component of determining the return-on-investment of
any marketing campaign. If you cannot attribute user actions to a specific
campaign or creative, you cannot track their behavior to understand whether a
marketing campaign reengaged any existing users.
In the web world, assigning proper attribution is simple. A
user clicks on an advertisement at CNET for a new MacBook laptop, for example.
The ad sends the user to BestBuy. The user buys the MacBook. BestBuy knows that
user came via a CNET ad and not via an ad on Gizmodo. Attribution is generally
achieved in the web world through construction of unique page URLs that reflect
the origin of the visitor, or through cookies.
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