Pizza Hut digital leader Baron Concors talks mobile strategy, best practices

mobilepaymentstoday.com

To understand how mobile is impacting the retail experience one just needs to observe the cash register checkout line. No longer are shoppers grabbing magazines to peruse while waiting. They’ve got the smartphone in hand and are busy doing everything from checking messaging and social network apps to price checking one last time before the purchase transaction.
That’s why, says Baron Concors, the "focus on mobile is a focus on customer." Pizza Hut's global chief digital officer, who formerly served as CIO at Yum! Brands, believes it means retailers must turn their mindset to becoming students of human behavior.
"Humans are conditioned to pull out the phone… and now preoccupied with mobile," he said, adding the checkout line is now one of consumers having "mobile blindness."
Concors shared his insight on the state of mobile during Networld Media Group's CONNECT Mobile Innovation Summit last week in Chicago. His keynote session was nearly standing room only and his presentation provided insight on mobile strategy and why Pizza Hut jumped out early with mobile technology and tools.
The main reason, he explained, is that today’s consumers want it.
"There are rapidly changing expectations, consumers want it easy, right now," he said, adding that experience is wanted from paying to dealing with customer service.

"Consumers have become conditioned to this level of service," he added, noting "there has never been an easier time to be a customer and never been a harder time to be a business."
The goal for retailers and restaurants is to become as nimble as possible and act like a start-up in regard to deploying mobile tools, he said.
"It’s about better, cheaper, faster, easier," he said, noting that consumers are also dealing with app fatigue, which for the retail segment, is a big challenge.
"Only diehard, loyalties of the brand are now downloading apps," he said.
So a good first goal is to engage with those who are using the app.
"Focus on this," he said, in a "conversational" approach. "Let your priorities be driven by data and insight. Look at the facts," he added.
During the concluding question-and-answer segment, Concors noted 50 percent of Pizza Hut’s sales are digital at this point, and 70 percent of that 50 percent are mobile device generated.
"The data shows us everything we look at is mobile and it is all we think about," he said.
In addition to engaging app users, the second focus is on attracting new app consumers and retaining them, he advised.
"You need to focus on both [mobile web and mobile app] users," he added.

8 Hurdles Startups Face in the Way Of Mobile App Development

iamwire.com/


Mobile app development has become the most crucial task, which has a direct impact on setting up of different companies as a startup, and also regarding their marketing and popularity. Of course, nobody wants an insipid and monotonous app which is identical to other apps in the market. Here I am going to present the voyage mobile app developer goes through.
In the current scenario, as a technical or nontechnical startup founder, if you are thinking about developing a mobile application think again! According to a report from WMC forum, just in October 2012, there were 43813 new apps launched in iOS app store alone i.e. 1400 new apps per day. Can you imagine where those numbers could reach if you include Android app store as well in 2016? But many of them were completely fiasco. Developing a mobile app is a herculean task. Even to reach the app store you have to cross so many hurdles.
Here are some unfeasible challenges faced by mobile app developer as a startup founder.

1. App Discovery

The fundamental aim of developing an app is to make life simple, productive and pleasant. Keeping it in mind, creating an app which gets noticed is a grueling task. There are a way more good apps than there are successful ones, and that’s because many of the good ones don’t get investment. App discovery is extremely concerned with who are your users, what type of service they are expecting, their financial background and many others factors. Make sure while choosing developer team, it must be chosen gingerly.

2. Development Approaches

Of course, the world isn’t small so the field of mobile app development. There are numerous development approaches i.e. Hybrid mobile app development (combination of native app & web app) Cross platform native app (app can be available for two or more platform like iOS, Android and even JavaScript, HTML5 etc) Platform specific native app (made for particularly one platform).
Deciding development approach will decide framework & mock-ups, UI & UX and many other imperative entities that mobile app is made of.  So user interaction is a total concern with choosing right development approach.

3. Investment Required

Once you have decided the development approach, to develop your app in real,  it requires ample amount of money (to hire the developers in case of you don’t belong to programming background). There is no one-time investment as after completion of development, to bring a new variety of features and for Iteration, adequate amount of money is necessary.

4. Device Compatibility

Our world is seemingly teeming with high-tech mobile brands. Challenges you might face are inevitable i.e. screen resolution, OS requirements, RAM and other factors and whether your app works on a smartphone or specific tablet or phablet. The main issue is choosing OS (either Android or iOS). For different OS you have to go for different SDK (software development kit), UI & UX, framework & Mock-ups and different iteration processes. Your app should run on a latest available version of particular OS as well as on an older version of similar OS. The empirical solution is to develop an app for each different platform available if you have enough investment. My personal opinion in the case of selection of OS goes for iOS, though both OS have their pros and cons.

5. Performance vs. Battery

Parameters such as an app design, UI, user interaction are important, but the main factors you should not forget are Performance & battery consumption. If you can develop a good performing, bug-free app which runs on minimum power, this challenge can be overcome. Developer team has to be specific about choosing right development tool (such as SDK) and be precise about device specifications as well.

6. Competition

Once you developed an app, you need to launch it into the app market, where as I mentioned before the gargantuan figure of apps are launched every day. As a startup, the biggest challenge is to stand out from the rest while creating an app. Even popular apps and games developers are struggling hard to make their mark.

7. ASO

ASO stands for App Store Optimization, is a process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in the search result. Just like SEO (search engine optimization for articles, images, and video content) is for websites, ASO works for mobile apps. Better your ASO, the more likely your app will reach thousands of devices. This is a most fastidious challenge that people have forgotten about. It also includes an imperative component of ‘App store rating’ & ‘App store ranking’.

8. Marketing & Promoting

Last but not least, as a startup, you should have precise knowledge about marketing and empirical way of promoting your app.  It includes PR & media plan, social & viral marketing & internationalization of app which mean the development of an app that enables easy localization for targeted audience, regions, and language.  You can put an app on the market in a weird but attractive manner that attracts consumers. There are several challenges that you will face: a crowded market, the same service provider as you, investment for promoting an app and others. To simplify marketing for you there are numerous tools like AppTamin, AppScend, MobileDevHQ, and Some other you should know about.
There are many other challenges like debugging, beta testing, prototype simulation & distribution of app to make it available in different languages. An auspicious app is about 90% marketing and 10% development (yeah you read it right 90%) but that does not mean development isn’t important.   
As a startup, developing a mobile app can be grueling yet fantastic at the same time.  Before you process for development it will be a great precaution to take a look in the market,and decide the factors that affected most during that particular period of time. Search for apps that are similar to yours read about them, whether they succeeded or failed. The combination of marketing, perfect time of the revealing product, development of most interactive app (quality product) & great development team can lead you to the doors of success.

People making content for virtual reality like Google and Facebook. But they like HTC even more.

recode.net

Almost half of VR developers are building content for HTC.

If you’re building an app for a mobile phone, you have two options: iOS or Android.

If you’re building an app for virtual reality, though, you have a lot more options and a lot less clarity over which platforms will stick around for the long haul. The industry is new enough that a lot of big companies are still jockeying to become Apple's equivalent in the world of VR.

Not surprisingly, Facebook’s Oculus and Google’s VR products like Cardboard and Daydream are popular platforms for industry developers. But they aren't the most popular. That (unofficial) title goes to HTC, which recently launched its new high-end headset, the HTC Vive.

According to a new survey from the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (the same people who put on the popular Game Developers Conference each year), more than 48 percent of VR developers are building VR content for HTC compared to 43 percent for Oculus and less than 30 percent for Google Cardboard.

You may have noticed that these numbers add up to well over 100 percent. That’s because many developers are building on multiple platforms, which is the key reason why this data — while a good sign for HTC — doesn’t mean a whole lot right now. Just like how most mobile app developers build for both iOS and Android, VR developers are hedging their bets by building for multiple headsets. In fact, only 22 percent of those surveyed said their next VR title would be exclusive to any given platform.

Which is to say that while HTC is the popular pick right now, and worth keeping in mind when deciding which headset to buy for the holidays, but don’t count out Google, Facebook or Sony just yet.

Facebook Is Letting Brands Build Slideshow Ads Right From Their Mobile Phones

adage.com
Upgrades Tools for Ads on-the-Go
On Facebook, slideshow ads are getting easier to build for mobile marketers.
On Tuesday, the social network launched tools for creating these moving-image ads, including the ability for marketers to create them right from their mobile Facebook pages. Slideshows are basically video ads, but use still images to string together a story.
Facebook launched slideshow ads last year, but the company just upgraded them with the creation tool directly from the mobile app. New features allow advertisers to add text and music. There's also a way to automatically convert a video into a slideshow.
"Mobile creation of advertising is a trend we see continuing," said Graham Mudd, ad product marketing lead at Facebook.
Facebook is just one of a number of platforms making it so marketers control campaigns on-the-go, mostly through apps. Of Facebook's more than 3 million advertisers, 40% have built ads on mobile devices, the company said. Also, 85% of marketers are using mobile devices to manage their Facebook business pages.
As for slideshow ads, those are mostly meant for small business and international advertisers, Mr. Mudd said.
"The thinking here is that there are quite a few markets in which video doesn't work well," Mr. Mudd said, meaning the communication networks and devices handle lower data speeds.
The slideshows use five times less data, according to Facebook.
Marketers like Corinna Graham, manager of content marketing and social media at the Boston Museum of Science, are crafting more and more campaigns on mobile devices.
"I boost posts from my phone all the time," Ms. Graham said. "And any content we're building on Facebook I assume people will be seeing it on mobile."
The museum's Facebook traffic is 72% mobile. The Museum of Science has played around with slideshow posts already, among other newer formats like 360 video.
Slideshows can generate 5,000 to 8,000 views by just using $15 to promote them, Ms. Graham said.
The format has been embraced by some international advertisers because they are multimedia that can play on slower networks, Mr. Mudd said.
"We've found that more than 50% of advertisers who use slideshow for the first time have never done video advertising," Mr. Mudd said. "This makes it easier to use for advertisers that don't have video assets."
The brands can use their own images and draw from Facebook's stock photo library to build the slideshows. A Spanish fabrics company called Brava said that consumers who viewed its slideshow ads were 35% more likely to buy its products than people who had not seen them, according to Facebook's announcement of the new slideshow tools.
Slideshows are becoming a familiar format on Facebook. They start automatically like videos posted by users. The slideshows typically play with the sound off, which is why marketers and publishers are using text in these posts.
"Text is a powerful way to drive engagement and attention from consumers," Mr. Mudd said.

Cashing In on Mobility: Real Money in Advertising, Content

nojitter.com

While most UC&C vendors have stumbled through the money-losing boondoggle of mobilizing UC, a few have caught on to where the real money is to be made.
Those of us who work in enterprise networking are imbued with practicality. We make things work, we organize complex implementations, we have backup and recovery plans, we test them (well, sometimes), we optimize our configurations -- we get the job done. So, when UC&C came along, we naturally focused on developing reliable ways of extending those marvelous capabilities to mobile devices.
In so doing, we used the mobile network's data capability as an out-of-band signaling channel that would scoot business calls from the mobile network, through the UC or IP-PBX platform, and on to their destinations with a jim-dandy mobile app. However, nobody used the apps, none of the vendors made any money, and we all moved on.
Worst Case Comes Calling
The consumer mobile business follows a completely different, and what has turned out to be, a far more lucrative model. The focus there is on discovering either useful things for helping people accomplish practical tasks and keep in touch or totally goofy things people use to entertain themselves (Pokemon Go, anyone?). The best part is, you can get almost any of these apps without risk because the vendors are giving them away for free.
This model brought to fruition the mobile operators' dreaded worst-case scenario: As the use case changed from voice calling convenience to text-, data-, and GPS-driven environments, the mobile network would become the dumb pipe for someone else's highly profitable service. Of course that is exactly what has happened, and along the way consumer electronics has launched into the new millennium and we've seen delivery of services and capabilities that I for one would never have imagined possible (not to mention the making of countless creative geeks into multi-millionaires).
Of course calling these services "free" is a misnomer; these new-generation tech companies have found a way to monetize the value of exposure in our consumer-driven economy. In a nutshell, the new mobile entrepreneurs borrowed a script from broadcast TV. Give people great entertainment (I'm talking Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and Carol Burnett, not "Naked and Afraid") for free, but make them sit through about eight minutes of advertising during a 30-minute program. Survival in a mass market environment required exposure, so advertisers underwrote the entire broadcast TV enterprise, which fortunately included a great news division.

Digital Ads Where You Live
The Internet took that "pay for eyeballs" model to a new level by increasing the accuracy of targeted messaging by orders of magnitude. An entire science grew up around how best to analyze a person's Web activity to determine what he or she is interested in buying. Compare that to the blunderbuss approach of national advertising on broadcast TV. Marketers recognized the advantage immediately, and started shifting their ad spends from broadcast to digital. Now marketing research firm eMarketer predicts digital ad spending will surpass TV in 2017.
In the U.S. alone, digital ads raked in roughly $60 billion in 2015, a 20.4% increase over the previous year, and mobile-directed advertising increased 66%, the Interactive Advertising Board has found. Meantime, Facebook attributed 84% of its $6.2 billion in quarterly ad revenues to mobile ads; mobile ads represented 11% of ad revenues in 2012, as reported in the Wall Street Journal article, "Tech Sector's Profits Are Fueled by Mobile, Cloud." The same holds true for Google where roughly two-thirds of its $21.5 billion in quarterly ad revenue is tied to mobile ads, as WSJ reported.
While some UC&C vendors use a freemium pricing model for their new social collaboration platforms, the "give away the goods and charge for the eyeballs" idea doesn't fit their traditional business models. However, some are starting to transition to that sort of model.
Cultural Crossover
In mid-2015, AT&T acquired satellite TV provider DirecTV for $49 billion. When you add AT&T's roughly five million U-Verse customers to the DirecTV base, media and communications research firm SNL Kagen estimates that the combined 26 million subscribers makes AT&T the largest pay TV provider in the U.S., beating out Comcast by roughly four million subscribers.
While AT&T is going for content distribution, Verizon is emulating the Google model and leveraging search and Internet advertising. In 2015, Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion, but its big catch was the Yahoo! core business, which it picked up last month for $4.8 billion. Yahoo! boasts one billion visitors a month. That's still relatively small stakes in the $60 billion U.S. digital advertising market, where Google captures 39% of the revenues followed by Facebook with 15%; Yahoo! pulled in 3% of ad revenues last year.
For AT&T and Verizon, pay TV and Internet search are radically new areas of investment. Their mobile businesses are still duking it out over bundled plans, pre- versus post-paid subscribers, and "net new adds," so we will have to see if the more freewheeling spirit of these industries has any impact on the companies' traditional "telephone" cultures.
By far, the most interesting crossover comes from Microsoft and the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn it announced in June. This one is interesting because it sticks closer to Microsoft's enterprise roots, but could potentially put the company in place to cash in on some of that advertising lucre.
The immediate, widely recognized allure is that Microsoft can turn its analytics engines loose on the biggest digital Rolodex in the world, with 450 million users worldwide (128 million of those in the U.S.), it now owns. The best part is that the users do the grunt work of keeping their own profiles up to date. Salespeople routinely do a LinkedIn search on every new prospect, but the ability to see the big picture created by applying analytics would clearly add value.
LinkedIn has been something of a laggard in terms of generating ad revenues, garnering only $454 million, or 0.7% of total ad revenues, in 2015. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can reverse its record in capitalizing on acquisitions and turn that advertising opportunity into something meaningful.
Free Trumps All
The tech economy has transitioned into a new world with the advent of advertising-sponsored services. People can get free email, news/sports/weather, directions, voice and video calls, entertainment, and instant access to virtually any piece of information almost instantaneously from devices in their pockets. In the meantime, the carriers whose services make all of that possible are engaged in a fight to zero -- delivering more and more competitive data plans while investing heavily in their networks to keep even with each other. AT&T and Verizon are now investing to get into the profitable part of that revolution.
If absorbing the business model of new-generation tech businesses is a stretch for carriers, then it's a gargantuan leap for traditional UC&C hardware suppliers. From a strategic standpoint, I look at their efforts to move to software and transition to the cloud as baby steps. I also see the new business model as one of the drivers for enterprise users gravitating toward those same consumer services -- "free is a hard price to beat," and what they're getting is pretty darn good. Fueled by the unbelievably lucrative advertising profits, new-generation tech companies can simply outspend the old-line hardware manufacturers on R&D. (Note that Apple remains a unique exception.)
For years we've tried to divide the tech business between consumer and enterprise, but the consumerization of IT is eating away at that distinction. In the end, it's all about money, and unless our traditional enterprise hardware and network suppliers can figure out how to get into the new value stream, their futures might not extend beyond the door of the wiring closet.

Measuring Mobile Ads and Apps: What Are You Missing?

adotas.com

An Adotas Q&A with Oren Kaniel, Co-founder and CEO of AppsFlyer explores.
Q: What are the main measurement challenges that mobile marketers face today?
A: Within the last few years, the ability to effectively measure mobile advertising campaigns and marketing activities has come of age, and a number of the challenges that marketers face have been resolved. There’s the cross-device and cross-platform challenge of recognizing users as they move from their desktop to their smartphone to their tablet and maybe even to their TV. There’s also the ROI challenge of being able to track the revenue and complete lifetime value of app users so that marketers can attribute it to specific advertising sources. And then there’s the last-touch attribution challenge, where most attribution providers only credit the last advertising source that a consumer interacted with, leaving marketers in the dark on the impact that other sources might have had in influencing that consumer. That said, the mobile and digital space is obviously always rapidly evolving. And while we’ve developed technology that addresses many of these challenges, there’s always more to do.
Q: What are the primary metrics mobile and app marketers should be measuring?
A: At the end of the day, marketers want to know whether their campaigns had a positive ROI, so that’s probably the most important metric. And of course, the two metrics that go into calculating ROI are also very important: on the one hand you have ad cost, which can be represented as Cost Per Install or Cost Per Acquisition, and on the other hand you have lifetime value (or LTV) or even predicted LTV. Retention is also very important because it gives a good idea of how healthy your app is. Retention can be measured in terms of intervals such as Day 1 Retention, Day 7 Retention, Day 30 Retention, and so on, or it can be calculated as a percentage of your daily users in relation to monthly users (or DAU/MAU). And then there are all sorts of granular, vertical specific post-install events (such as “add to shopping cart” for m-commerce apps or “level cleared” for gaming apps) that must be tied back to the acquisition source in order to paint a clear picture of ROI.
Q: Why do you think many mobile marketers aren’t measuring the ROI of their campaigns?
A: In a lot of cases, they just don’t have the tools to connect in-app data to advertising and marketing data, so they can’t calculate ROI effectively. In other cases they don’t have an accurate sense of how much revenue users are bringing in. But the bottom line is that in this day and age, there’s no longer any excuse for not measuring ROI.
Q: More and more app developers are looking beyond their regional markets in an effort to go global. What advice do you have for taking a local app to a global level?
A: Our first bit of advice is to make sure you truly understand the new market you are breaking into. Get to know the major players in the ecosystem from an advertising and publishing perspective, and of course get to know your target audiences as well. Be sure to localize your app as much as possible by translating it into the local language at the very least and, if possible, updating it for cultural traits as well. Also be sure to update your app store description, marketing campaigns, and maybe even your app icon and screenshots. What works for one region might not necessarily work for another region, so it’s important to get to know local behaviors and preferences and cater to those as much as possible.
Q: What advice do you have for marketers when it comes to choosing which media sources to use in their campaigns?

A: The best advice we can give when it comes to choosing media sources is to measure every campaign very closely and pinpoint whichever sources work best. It comes down to marketers’ ability to test, measure and optimize campaigns effectively. Some sources might work well for certain campaigns but underperform for others, so it’s very important to continuously test sources for yourself and analyze the results very closely in order to optimize and scale your activities quickly. We also recommend that marketers break down their campaigns as much as possible, looking at it at the advertising level, publisher level, ad group level, and so on in order to get more specific insights.

Q: What about mobile ad fraud? How big a threat is it, and what can be done to combat it?
A: Fraud is a very real and growing threat to mobile advertising. There is an estimated loss of $1.3 billion annually in mobile fraud (compared to $3.2 billion in desktop fraud), according the IAB. We are still in the relatively nascent stages of the mobile and app advertising sector’s growth, and fraud is a concern that is holding buyers back from jumping in with both feet. As an industry, we have to do better at combating fraud through a combination of better technologies aimed at identifying and fighting it. We also need better agreements from the important players in the ecosystem — from advertisers and agencies to publishers and tech enablers — to collaboratively come up with best practices on how to prevent fraud from happening in the first place. We ourselves have been fighting fraud since 2013, when we started working with several of the industry’s largest advertisers. Our comprehensive fraud solutions utilize the industry’s largest mobile marketing database to deliver the tools and capabilities the modern marketer needs to actively prevent mobile fraud. While the liability of removing fraud from authentic traffic lies on the seller (the network), we believe it is our responsibility as an attribution analytics provider to help in protecting our advertising partners from fraud. In fact, we have removed networks from our platform because we believed they were intentionally delivering fraudulent installs. At the end of the day, everything we do comes back to ROI, and fraud must be deterred because fraudulent users don’t make real money transactions.
Q: Everyone knows last-click attribution model is flawed. What is the best way to make up for this?

A: At AppsFlyer we’ve been trying to move the industry to more of a multi-touch and view-thru attribution model that accounts for every ad source that contributed to a consumer’s decision to download and engage with an app, instead of just the last ad source that they clicked on. This gives advertisers a much more accurate sense of how effective each of their campaign sources is, and it will enable them to conduct more effective campaigns going forward. We launched multi-touch and view-thru attribution nearly a year ago, so the technology is in place. Now it’s just a matter of educating the industry that this is a superior way to measure campaigns. Even though it’s not quite so simplistic, multi-touch attribution is more nuanced and ultimately more accurate, so most marketers have come to embrace it.
Q: With engagement becoming more important than ever, are re-targeting and re-engagement efforts growing?
A: Absolutely. With user acquisition rates climbing and competition for consumer mindshare increasing steadily, more and more app marketers have shifted their focus to include more re-targeting and re-engagement campaigns. These marketers realize the value of qualified prospects and customers. It is much more cost-effective to market to consumers who have already demonstrated interest in your app than to continue casting a wide net in an effort to find more potential users. Re-targeting and re-engagement campaigns are also much easier now, since our clients already have all their data and segments with us and it is very easy for our clients to run re-engagement campaigns with all the major players like Facebook and Google, based on their data. In addition, our clients can use advanced features like Facebook’s “Lookalike” service based on that data.
Q: With marketing becoming more integrated across different channels and platforms, how do you see the measurement space taking shape in the next 3 – 5 years?
A: The marketing and ad space is in a state of extreme flux right now, and it’s important that measurement keeps up with it. For instance, it will be interesting to see how the Internet of Things, VR and other innovations affects marketers over the next few years, as I’m sure both will pose tremendous opportunities but also new challenges. Marketing will also continue to get more personalized and contextual, meaning that measurement tools will have to make sure they can track the effectiveness of increased pinpointed targeting and personalization. And of course, there’s always the unknown. As a provider of measurement tools, we are always making sure we’re ahead of or quickly responding to new technologies and new techniques that emerge. In other words, we want to measure everything that is measurable, in order to provide the primary set of data every marketer needs to have everyday.

Ignore ASO At Your Peril: How To Leverage App Store Optimization To Market Your App

forbes.com

After years of Cinderella stories about app-based startup successes, reality is encroaching.

As USA Today noted recently, there hasn’t been a runaway hit app like Uber or Snapchat for a few years. A glance at App Annie’s list of the top 20 apps from May 2015 to May 2016 shows no new entrants, apart from the occasional game which rises to the top for a few weeks before falling down the rankings. The apps with staying power have arrived and are here for the long haul.

But a change is planned. Apple is planning to launch paid search ads for apps. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, told The Telegraph that the move will help app developers who haven’t been able to get much traction with traditional advertising. 

While it remains to be seen how paid search ads might help developers launch new apps, one tried-and-true method is app store optimization, or ASO.

How I Learned About ASO The Hard Way

There are some 4 million mobile apps in the major app stores. Getting one discovered is one of the biggest challenges facing app publishers today.

I learned this the hard way. In November 2013, my company launched a gay dating and social networking app. My team members and I poured our hearts into this startup only to bring it to the verge of collapse shortly after its release because of a common rookie mistake: We had submitted it to the app store and thought our job was done. It was only a matter of time before we’d be swimming in downloads – or so we thought.

You can guess what happened next: not much.

The situation was dire. We had almost no downloads and our user base was shrinking every day. The app didn’t have any working marketing channels and Facebook had just banned ads related to online dating services. It got to the point where we decided that if we couldn’t find a buyer within six months, we’d pull the plug.

Thankfully, we brought in an expert growth strategist who was quick to explain that we couldn’t rely on Apple to bring in users and had to focus on ASO. 

After years of Cinderella stories about app-based startup successes, reality is encroaching.

As USA Today noted recently, there hasn’t been a runaway hit app like Uber or Snapchat for a few years. A glance at App Annie’s list of the top 20 apps from May 2015 to May 2016 shows no new entrants, apart from the occasional game which rises to the top for a few weeks before falling down the rankings. The apps with staying power have arrived and are here for the long haul.

But a change is planned. Apple is planning to launch paid search ads for apps. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, told The Telegraph that the move will help app developers who haven’t been able to get much traction with traditional advertising. 

While it remains to be seen how paid search ads might help developers launch new apps, one tried-and-true method is app store optimization, or ASO.

How I Learned About ASO The Hard Way

There are some 4 million mobile apps in the major app stores. Getting one discovered is one of the biggest challenges facing app publishers today.

I learned this the hard way. In November 2013, my company launched a gay dating and social networking app. My team members and I poured our hearts into this startup only to bring it to the verge of collapse shortly after its release because of a common rookie mistake: We had submitted it to the app store and thought our job was done. It was only a matter of time before we’d be swimming in downloads – or so we thought.

You can guess what happened next: not much.

The situation was dire. We had almost no downloads and our user base was shrinking every day. The app didn’t have any working marketing channels and Facebook had just banned ads related to online dating services. It got to the point where we decided that if we couldn’t find a buyer within six months, we’d pull the plug.

Thankfully, we brought in an expert growth strategist who was quick to explain that we couldn’t rely on Apple to bring in users and had to focus on ASO. 

ASO Is Only Part Of The Solution

Now, our app ranks No. 1 for the keywords “gay dating.” ASO has helped boost its organic downloads by about 300%. The app is poised to hit a $1 million annual run rate by the end of the year and is on track to pull in $10 million by 2018.

While ASO has undoubtedly played a large part in our app’s turnaround, it wasn’t the only factor. We credit a stellar customer support system which helps drive five-star reviews on the Apple App Store and Google Play. In addition to a Twitter campaign and paid acquisition, we also partnered with a YouTube star to create videos; the first one was viewed more than 400,000 times and led to more than 15,000 downloads, which drove the cost per download to less than $1.    

As our experience illustrates, there are many ways to resuscitate a failing app. But ASO should always be your first go-to solution. Once you’ve established a growing user base, then you can start exploring paid acquisition.

And keep in mind that while ASO is becoming a part of startups’ marketing strategies, the field is evolving. The landscape changes every few months. But, keep up with it and with any luck, you and your app will live happily ever after.