Yesterday, Apps World North America in San Francisco came to a close. Today, we are looking at the top AdColony highlights.
Assessing the Future of Paid Mobile User Acquisition
Tuesday morning, our very own Bryan Buskas was on a panel with representatives from Dolby, Personagraph, GSN, Storm8, and Jumpstart. Early on in the session, panelists were asked how to best address the rising cost of acquiring quality users. While David Lord from Jumpstart was an advocate of more traditional media channels to increase the “word of mouth coefficient,” and drive more organic installs, Beth Kindig of Personagraph stressed the importance of finding and targeting high quality users:
“Out of all of your users, there are only so many that are performing high value activities. And if you look at your session activity events, there are only so many that are completing those goals. Out of your entire user base, that’s probably only about 10%. You want to know that 10% very, very well and replicate them, go and find them.”
Of course, before you can find more high quality users, they must first be identified, which is where post-install event data comes in to enable look-alike targeting.
Trends, Growth, and Survival Tactics from the Trenches
In the afternoon of the first day at Apps World North America, Bryan Buskas led a panel on app install marketing strategy that was accompanied by representatives from Ibotta, Skout, and Intuit. Bryan opened by asking the panelists how they compete for users in a market saturated by big brands and popular games.
For Skout, it all comes down to testing, with Mike Chisholm noting that, “it’s a lot of testing, a lot of searching, trying to find those channels where we can scale and where we can get good traffic.”
Meanwhile, Hamilton Bolduc of Ibotta stressed the important of telling a content-driven story at the right moment:
“It’s really about visibility and content and finding the right moments. . . And for us it’s how do we find those relevant moments when somebody’s in the app store. How do we tell a compelling story?
You know, we’re working with AdColony, and you guys have been great partner. It helps us tell that content-based story so that the user understands the value prop, and we’re finding a higher quality user knowing that we’re probably going to lose in the numbers game in terms of just daily downloads.”
Fireside Chat with 8tracks
On Wednesday afternoon, our very own Nikao Yang sat down with Stephen Valenta of 8tracks to discuss monetization strategy. The 8tracks app features user-curated content under the premise that, “other people can choose music for you better than an algorithm can.”
With a handful of mobile streaming apps already on the market, it has been important for 8tracks to carve a niche in the market while carefully balancing monetization with user experience. While other similar apps rely on audio-only advertising, Valenta notes that the revenue balance simply wasn’t there, and that they prefer native, instant-feed video:
“We love native in-feed video. It’s a great ad unit, and is nonintrusive to the app.”
Nonintrusive is definitely part of the 8tracks mantra, as Valenta also noted that they won’t show an ad to a new user for the first 24 hours, as they understand it takes users a while to get a feel for what the app offers. As 8tracks continues to develop a more robust content feed for its users and streamlines that initial user experience, it will be interesting to see how both their monetization strategy and user base will evolve.
Life at the AdColony Booth
When AdColony wasn’t at a panel at Apps World North America, we were most often found at our booth, which was located adjacent to the Developer World stage. AdColonists from several offices were present for the event, turning the space into mix of a family reunion, field office, and a monetization & UA information hub. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth!
Join the Conversation
What were your favorite moments from #AppsWorldNA? Tweet your thoughts to @AdColony. For the latest AdColony mobile news and updates, follow @AdColony on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or connect on Linkedin.
- Rewarding to Engage: New Mobile User Survey Results Now Available - March 28, 2018
- Mobile Monday: Mixed Reality Promotion, Seriously Connected Fans, & FCC Acceleration - March 26, 2018
- Mobile Monday: GDC 2018 - March 19, 2018
