Honing Your Mobile Marketing APPtitude

Today we’re featuring an excerpt from the Skai Mobile App Advertising Trends Report. Download the full report for an in-depth analysis of the key metrics and trends across Consumer, eCommerce, and Gaming apps including breakdowns by country and operating systems.

The Year of Mobile. The End of the Internet (as we know it). Claims about the ascendancy of smartphones have been ubiquitous for years, but amid all these sensationalist headlines, the mobile channel has been steadily figuring out its own identity and securing its place in the digital ecosystem.

Consumers already spend more time on mobile than on desktop. Much of that time is spent on mobile apps, to the tune of 9X more time spent than on the mobile web. Increasingly, being “in” mobile as a marketing channel means working with, and through, mobile apps.

As a result, getting consumers to discover, download, install and re-engage with your mobile app has never been more important than today – and more challenging, with 86% of mobile apps installed and used only once before being deleted.

Growth and increased competition are the reality of the mobile channel; app advertising spend, CPM, and CPC are all increasing over time, and the steady decrease in click-through rate demonstrates the greater competition for mobile app ad views and interactions. Meanwhile, click to install ratios increased dramatically over the year, allowing overall cost per install (CPI) to remain relatively stable.

Key Marketer Imperatives

Marketers should continue to increase spend while the trend toward steady CPIs continues, as long as you are able to maintain ROI above critical thresholds. Furthermore, ensure you are measuring post-install conversions and other in-app actions, measuring across all key performance indicators and understanding user lifetime value (LTV).

Click to install rates increasing likely signals better targeting both on the publisher side and the advertiser side and such targeting will be critical for advertisers to continue to enjoy stable CPIs as competition continues to heat up.

Continue to hone your targeting to get as granular as possible and to ensure you are segmenting your custom audiences well, like “VIP depositors over the last 60 days” while leveraging expanded reach through Lookalike audiences. With lookalikes, it’s critical to use a strategy of nesting targeted and excluded lookalike audiences by similarity thresholds, so that there are no overlapping lookalike audiences and they are as granular as possible.

Advertisers should target separately by OS, Android versus iOS, to optimize toward differences in CPC, CPI, CTR and install rates on the two platforms.

Target your campaigns separately at a minimum by language, breaking US out from other English-speaking countries. Better yet, target each country separately to ensure you are maximizing your bids and budget most effectively in the face of country-level differences.

With all of these factors in play, it is important to understand the trends and use them to help guide user acquisition and retention and ensure that you are effectively optimizing campaigns and getting the most out of budgets. Download your copy of Skai most recent report to view all the relevant data for mobile marketers and this growing channel.