There’s still no magic pill that ties advertising to outcomes. Take Lyft, which can connect metrics to spend in display and search, but has trouble measuring across channels. But because it has difficulty uniting data around brand marketing, referral programs or brand ambassador outreach, its marketing strategy is largely built around user acquisition (UA), said […]
“You can never go home again” doesn’t apply to the home screen. Most smartphone users – 98%, according to mobile attribution provider TUNE – have reinstalled an app that they previously deleted. Forty percent of users delete and reinstall apps on a regular basis. But most app marketers don’t differentiate between first-time downloads and re-downloads, mainly because […]
Influencer marketing often gets lumped in with vapid Kardashian nonsense, PewDiePie antics and top-of-the-funnel fluff. But there’s no reason sponsored videos can’t be a data-driven user acquisition (UA) channel for performance-minded marketers. User acquisition is about knowing where your audience is, wherever that may be, and being willing to experiment, said Danika Wilkinson, community manager […]
Airfare and hotel prediction app Hopper is different from other travel booking services. When you download Hopper, the app tells you not to buy anything. And that’s because Hopper acquires users at the top of the funnel. “We’re looking for people who are just browsing on social, people who aren’t necessarily looking for a flight […]
Uber’s rider-focused ad spend has increased twentyfold in the last year and a half. “The onus that puts on us to be really clever in our targeting and thoughtful is incredibly high,” said Kellyn Kenny, Uber’s VP of marketing, speaking at Tune’s Postback conference in Seattle on Thursday. Although user acquisition is still a top […]
Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]
Episode, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling app, is choosing a road to revenue centered on the user experience first. Monetization is delicately balanced with the demands of UX for the interactive app, which allows users to immerse themselves in fictional narratives. “But there is a lot of revenue to be made if we can get people engaged,” […]
The mobile ad industry is a fragmented mess of ad networks. Singapore-based mobile game publisher IGG (I Got Games), which has about 17 million monthly active users globally and spends multiple millions on performance-based user acquisition (UA) every month, works with 100 different networks at any given time. “It’s labor-intensive,” said Mark Zhang, IGG’s SVP […]
Developers like Lucktastic, a F2P sweepstakes app, play a seemingly never-ending game of balancing quality vs. scale when acquiring users. Increasingly, they’re turning to mobile video and playable ads to find users who stick around after the install. “In a category like ours, you need scale to succeed, but we also really have to care […]
Away from the dancing robots, Power Rangers-themed VR experiences, self-driving race cars and the buzzing of drones, deals do get done at Mobile World Congress. That’s why French location-based dating app Happn came to Barcelona for the show. “We’re here to have discussions, to gather insights, to see what our competitors are doing, to find […]
App publishers expect their inventory to fetch a pretty penny during the holiday season as marketers furiously funnel their remaining budget into hardcore user-acquisition efforts. “There’s an enormous amount of volatility during Q4, more than anything because of a desire to get up the charts,” said James Peng, head of mobile and social acquisition at […]
Apple and Google own the app economy – and that makes distribution and discovery pretty tricky for the average app developer. “These companies … are monopolizing this ecosystem,” said Chris Cunningham, newly minted CRO of beacon and proximity data aggregation company Unacast, speaking at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketplace event on Monday in New York […]
Buenos Aires-based game studio Etermax is a rare creature in the app development world. “We don’t focus on user acquisition,” said CEO and founder Maximo Cavazzani. It’s quite a statement considering that Etermax is the developer responsible for quiz app Trivia Crack, which was the most downloaded app in the App Store in late 2014. […]
Travel is a tricky category. It’s generally one of the top things people want to spend their money on – but it’s also not something most people get to do on a regular basis, said Sam Shank, CEO and co-founder of last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight. “In theory, people can use an app like GrubHub to […]
Competition in the various app stores is fierce, and app publishers like Indonesia-based gaming developer Alegrium are feeling the burn. Contending for traffic volume with big developers and brand advertisers, tracking the quality of users by channel and coping with ever-increasing cost-per-install (CPI) rates are what keep Alegrium CMO and GREE vet Jennifer Lin up […]
Getting freemium users to become paid users is a nuanced process that varies from person to person. Users on the brink of turning their free trial into a paid subscription need only a little nudge. Others, admittedly a much smaller number of people, will quickly pay for subscriptions. But neither group is the ideal target. […]
There’s more to mobile than just meeting a KPI. That’s the idea behind a new self-serve analytics tool launched Thursday by mobile user acquisition platform Taptica that aims to help advertisers dig a little deeper into what their mobile users are up to. “Last year was all about KPI – our advertisers were focused on defining […]
Halloween 2014 might be dead and buried, but the Zombify app is still alive and well. Zombify is just one of the many “-ify” apps created by developer Apptly, the publisher behind Wolfify, Santify, Vampify, Fatify, Oldify and a host of other face-morphing apps that allow you to apply animated effects to selfies and the […]
If your KPI is LTV, then you need to pay attention to more than just CPA. And now in English: If an advertiser is looking to acquire users with high lifetime value, quantity without quality is money down the drain. “Advertisers are willing to pay high prices to retain good users – it’s actually amazing […]
Jiffy Lube CMO Jeffrey Lack admits the company had no more than a standard digital strategy back in 2011. “Our digital presence was basically isolated to a national website, a mobile site and a very small pay-per-click program,” Lack said. And as a national oil change chain with thousands of franchisees, that wasn’t doing the trick, […]
This year started out a bit rocky for Tune (née HasOffers), but the app attribution company seems to be moving on with Monday’s acquisition of MobileDevHQ. The purchase is part of Tune’s bid to build out its user acquisition attribution capabilities. The move comes a little more than a month after the company’s rebrand from […]
You don’t have to be good at math to know that if you only get $3 back on a $4 investment, then there’s something painfully wrong with whatever you’re doing. No one’s more aware of that than game app developers, some of whom spend thousands of dollars on user acquisition daily — though the truly […]
