February 6, 2015
Sigal Bareket is cofounder and co-CEO of Taptica
Recently, I attended one of San Francisco’s top mobile industry conferences. While these events tend to be extremely important in terms of socializing, content wise, I always feel that there is so much more attendees could learn and discover in regards to mobile application marketing.
Today’s young and eager app developers are arriving prepared with intelligent questions, but we seem to leave them scratching their heads after providing vague answers. My least favorite and the most common refrain at these events seems to be, “Well, it depends on the app …” We, the mobile marketing experts, need to do a better job and provide them with actionable advice.
To help app developers with their marketing-related issues, below are detailed and informative answers to some of the most common questions we are hear from during daily discussions and industry conferences.
When tracking post-install user behavior, what are the most common parameters to track and measure?
When post-install events first became available, advertisers were tracking ten different events, including tutorial completions, Facebook activity, reaching a certain level in a game or section in the app. Soon after, they came to realize that tracking too much is less effective and are now focused on three main events:
• Unique paying users within the first week
• Total ROI (non-unique) within the first 30 days
• Second day of retention (for free apps)
What are the benchmarks for these popular behavioral patterns? How do you know if the campaign is performing well?
Following are a few of the best indicators of campaign impact and progress:
• The average number of unique paying users should be three to five percent.
• ROI should be 30 percent to 40 percent. We have seen travel apps that can recoup 60 percent of the money spent on new user acquisition within the first month while other categories can wait up to eight months to full spend recoupment, but as mentioned the average is 30 percent to 40 percent within 30 days.
• Second day of retention: 50 percent for social apps and 30 percent for all other apps.
Click-through rates (CTR): What can I expect from banner ads (320x50), full screen/interstitial ads (320x480/320x200) and native ads?
Average CTRs:
• Banner ad: 0.5 percent
• Full screen ad: 3 percent-5 percent
• Native ad – 4 percent-8 percent
Creative renewal: How often do I need to send out new creative?
While there are ads that can work for weeks and month, apps should typically send out a new message at least twice a month.
Is there a difference between the quality of a user being generated from a native ad versus a full screen ad?
Statistics show that the quality of a user that downloads the app after being exposed to a native ad is 35 percent better than a user generated from a full screen ad.
When running a retargeting campaign, what can be expected in terms of returning users to my service?
On average, between 10 percent and 30 percent. Conducting a re-targeting plus deep-linking campaign usually gets the advertiser closer to 30 percent re-engaged users .
HOPEFULLY, THIS ADVICE and feedback get developers and other mobile app marketers pointed in the right direction when launching their next marketing campaign.
Sigal Bareket is San Francisco-based cofounder and co-CEO of Taptica, a global performance-based demand-side platform. Reach her at sigal.b@taptica.com.
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