Tag: mobile marketing

Singular sat down with Patrick Witham, Director of User Acquisition at Postmates, to get a few of his tips on analytics-driven marketing in the on-demand and ecommerce vertical. Thus far in 2017, Witham and his team have aggressively scaled Postmates’ marketing efforts while achieving dramatic cost savings on new user acquisition.      

Spending & Cost Management

Postmates is a double-sided marketplace and manages user acquisition with separate portals for fleet drivers and for consumers. These portals help Postmates grow both sides of the market and maintain a state of equilibrium between supply and demand.

User Targeting

Test aggressively on Facebook in terms of your demographic. Once you have identified it, you can start optimizing your spend to make it more efficient. Postmates has a well-defined view of what our customers look like. Many live in high-density urban areas, which makes targeting easier but also requires more granularity. In verticals like gaming, you can think of a country as a geo. You don’t have that luxury with on-demand, which forces you to get a lot more specific. 

We’ve been very successful in large urban areas. Of course, moving forward we are considering smaller cities (there are only so many cities like New York or Los Angeles).

Data Enrichment 

Having clean data is imperative — which is achieved through consistent naming conventions for campaigns and ad-groups that make sense for your business.

Testing

Postmates relentlessly tests creative and targeting tactics. At any given time, we’re running at least a few dozen experiments to test out hypotheses the team has come up with. A piece of advice is to make sure you set up learning experiments properly. When you enter a new market that you don’t necessarily know, you should test as many hypotheses as possible. However, a lot of companies do not take the time to set a proper control group or make sure they achieve statistical significance on these experiments.

Always test new channels and be at the forefront, otherwise you’ll get left behind. Of course, there is a tradeoff between going deep into a few channels and testing everything with a shotgun approach. We set 20% of our time (including BD, relationship management, media buying, experimentation) to new partners that we think could be promising.

Singular has been instrumental in helping us better understand our strategy and help us be more efficient. Getting out of Excel with our reporting and into an automated platform was magic.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Over the past couple weeks, I have had the good fortune of traveling around the world with Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv and International GM Dayton Keane. The purpose of our trip was to take our merger and unified marketing analytics platform story out to the marketers at many of our clients and prospects.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to outline some observations from the more than 40 external meetings we’ve held in the past three weeks. Because so many of the themes in those discussions with marketers were consistent across clients and prospects, they appear to provide a sort of microcosm of marketer thinking on how marketing analytics can serve as a critical engine for app business growth.

Common Themes

1. Focus on Maximizing ROI

I’ve discussed this digital marketing trend in a variety of online venues before – that the app business has experienced an incredible sea change over the past couple of years. Specifically, we’ve transitioned from being an industry primarily focused on vanity install accounts to one where the overarching goal across app publishers is to maximize revenue and ROI. As a company whose raison d’etre is ROI analytics and data-driven decision-making, Singular has been both predicting and enabling this trend, and we are gratified to see how much the focus on ROI is transforming app marketing strategies and plans.

2. Passion for Customer Knowledge

Data-driven marketing relies, first and foremost, on the deepest possible understanding of the user, their customer experience, and what motivates them to transact. As we discussed the broad range of capabilities of our unified platform, Gadi, Dayton and I were delighted to hear the number of very detailed questions we were fielding. A big driver of this thorough client scrutiny is the desire for more and richer insights. But part also seems to be a reaction to companies in our space that talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. One of the reasons why I was so excited about merging with Singular is this company’s focus on straight talk. That we actually develop each robust data and analytics capability before we start talking about it. For us, specific data questions are great because it allows us to point out differences between what we are able to do and what others can only promise.

3. Desire for Media Diversification

It’s no secret that a large percentage of app install and re-engagement media dollars go to just a few companies. The data show that just a handful of media companies dominate with many marketing campaigns. While this is a long-term trend, clients tell us that they are working hard to keep their digital marketing investments diversified across many partners. Part of the reason for this is because media costs on some large platforms have been climbing. But part also seems to be rooted in a desire to hedge bets. Marketers need to be sure that they are getting the most bang for their buck. That they have alternative places to focus dollars as the performance metrics of individual partners and programs waxes and wanes.

4. Need for Simplified Reporting and Workflows

Many UA teams will tell you that too much of their time is spent with manual data assembly — cutting and pasting data from multiple platforms in order to provide a macro view of their businesses. As companies place more and more pressure for ROI on these teams, it’s clear that time-savings are an important goal for most brand leaders. Given this, it’s great to be able to tell people about how we bring together data from all platforms and partners in a single place.

5. Passion for New Knowledge

App marketers are never satisfied with the level of knowledge they have into their businesses. They want insights that no one has ever seen or considered before. Answering that need is a big part of what Singular excels at. By uniting spend, performance and revenue insights and making them available for granular analysis – all the way down to the user level – we enable people to get unprecedented visibility into their businesses.

6. Growing Appreciation for the Power of Creative Optimization

As marketers explore every avenue to grow ROI for their marketing investments, a growing number want to do a deep dive into “what works” from a creative perspective.

Insights by Region

The five themes outlined above were evident wherever we went. But we also saw some market-by-market trends that I thought I would share as well.

Europe and the Middle East

We heard from so many leading brands in this region that they are even more focused on driving maximum return for every dollar spent on marketing. In the past 18 months or so, there have been a number of app mergers and acquisitions in the EU, particularly in retail/commerce, and the associated consolidation is creating a demand for more sophisticated, data-driven marketing – both before and after the install.

On the gaming side, we are seeing strong investment from a broad range of companies, as this vertical continues to deliver the lion’s share of the engagement and profit in the app sector. We’re also seeing more post-install spending from the gaming companies as they work to coax every IAP dollar they can. It’s about getting the golden geese to lay more eggs via well-orchestrated and optimized customer journeys.

I’ve always been impressed with how much gaming companies know about their customers. This vertical has been the most aggressive and innovative in the space. We love being a valued part of the means through which they do that data-driven decision-making.

East/Southeast Asia

This massive region is a fascinating mix of fully developed as well as fast-emerging markets. What so exciting here is that developed markets continue to show strong marketing investment levels, while fast-changing markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and others show remarkable growth trends as smartphone penetration climbs and market size expands.

The already developed markets in the region have long been major sources of installs and revenue for global brands. As marketers in those regions are tasked with delivering against even more aggressive ROI and other metrics, we’re seeing growing demand for advanced analytics capabilities. It’s a natural progression and a very welcome one for Singular. That’s true across business sectors, from casual gaming to retail, utilities, commerce, and on-demand businesses.

Retail continues to be an exciting area in the region. The biggest app players are massively increasing investment, driving all companies in the sector to spend more carefully based on data-driven business and marketing analytics insights.

India

A couple of years ago, some members of our marketing analytics sales team got on a plane to India to see if there was some good potential marketing analytics business there. What they found was arguably the most dynamic and fast-growing app market in the world. There was a wild rush for HUGE install counts and big money pouring into the ad networks to drive them.

These days, the song is a little different, though it’s still a bull market. There continues to be a great deal of investment activity in the market, making the need for great marketing analytics even more apparent. But instead of racking up colossal install counts, many of the brands have shifted their primary focus to monetizing users after the install. Installs still matter, of course, but marketers are also laser-focused on driving revenue, whether their business is gaming, retail, on-demand services, or any of dozens of other vertical we serve. By leveraging data-driven insights from marketing analytics, smart marketers continue to win every day.

North America

App install spending continues to climb at double digit rates, but re-engagement spend for post-install marketing objectives is skyrocketing. In addition, typical marketing mixes are rapidly evolving. On the install side, interest in video is booming as more companies evaluate, test and implement video programs, especially in the gaming space. Video is such a natural in gaming and adoption continues to grow across our client and prospect bases.

In retail, aggressive moves by both brick-and-mortar leaders and pure play internet businesses are creating a profoundly competitive space. Apps are playing both a critical role in driving mcommerce revenue metrics and in enabling additional purchases — both in stores and via multi-channel marketing. Companies are hiring data scientists and marketing analysts to uncover business-changer insights to power current and future growth. Investment in marketing automation continues to grow at an impressive clip. Marketers tell us that they must deliver higher and higher performance for every marketing effort across all channels.

Parting Thoughts

Going around the world is always exhilarating and exhausting. But this inaugural trip to tell our unified company story was a fantastic opportunity to both listen to the market and solve the biggest problems that app marketers face. It’s grown my already strong passion for helping solve client business issues and opportunities.

I thank everyone that met with us. And my wonderful colleagues Gadi and Dayton, who made the trip doubly exciting and rewarding.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

At Singular, our goal is to help grow the app industry by participating in key mobile strategy discussions wherever they occur. Last week Singular attended AppBoy’s Long-Term Relationship Conference, where mobile marketing strategy and product leaders gathered to discuss the future of mobile marketing and user communication. The event focused on today’s rapidly evolving mobile app marketing stack and featured talks with innovators at companies like Lyft, Ibotta, OkCupid and Wallapop (all Singular customers!). Here are top mobile marketing strategy takeaways from the event:

1. An inflection point for “buy vs. build”

OkCupid historically built most of its mobile app analytics services in-house. Yet things have changed in recent years as the team has started to hook more third-party services into their mobile app marketing stack. “For most our history we felt we were ahead of the curve, but many of these components have rapidly advanced over the years,” said Mike Cirello, Software Architect at OkCupid, who mentioned mParticle, Looker, Amplitude, and AppBoy as some third-party tools used by his team. Cirello’s sentiment echoed that of several speakers who reported that their mobile app marketing teams are using more third-party vendors to achieve efficiency gains in areas like data management, data processing, product experimentation and customer support.

For Lyft, the decision to build or buy components of its mobile app marketing stack largely comes down to speed. As Milan Thakor, Lyft’s Passenger Engagement Lead, said:

“We need to know [the third party] moves really quickly and will build faster than us, and that their vision is aligned with ours.”

2. The danger of disconnected data feeds

In recent years there’s been an exponential increase in the number of mobile marketing data feeds inside organizations, said Michael Katz, Founder of mParticle. Marketers, meanwhile, have quickly learned that siloed data can lead to poor user experiences. For instance, if mobile app customer data is not connected to marketing automation, a user who submits a complaint because of an incorrect order might still get emailed with new deals prior to the complaint being resolved. Or an iOS or Android app user visiting a city might receive location-specific offers in that city even after they’ve departed. It’s clear how those two experiences could frustrate app users. To avoid such messaging mishaps, companies must ensure that their marketing tools effectively communicate with their customer data.

3. Optimizing for downstream events

Bait and switch ads might drive high iOS and Android app ad click rates, but they don’t pay off in the long run, said Rich Donahue, Ibotta’s SVP of Marketing. Instead, Ibotta optimizes its ads and messaging for downstream events, including testing 97 different onboarding flows in its Android or iOS app. In addition, Ibotta runs cross-channel messaging tests that leverage interconnected analytics systems — for instance, tests to determine how paid ads affect the open rates of emails and push notifications.

The Wallapop business, a mobile marketplace for secondhand goods, is similarly focused on optimizing its user acquisition and re-engagement for key actions in its app. Users of Wallapop who haven’t opened a conversation with a seller in the first 7 days after registration are much more likely to drop off, said Nicolás Herrero, Wallapop’s Lead Data Scientist. Such mobile app strategy findings have led to Wallapop building campaigns around custom events and triggering messages if a user hasn’t performed a certain action within a given period of time.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

The goal of any successful User Acquisition Manager is to spend smarter, faster, and more wisely than their competition. To get there, User Acquisition Managers need to have substantial experience in pulling app data and generating advanced Excel reports. They need high attention to detail and exude expert analytical skills with the ability to make data-driven app user acquisition decisions. Not to mention, they should have proven experience in testing and optimization, lifetime value modeling, budget forecasting, and budget management.

So, it is clearly an understatement to say that Mobile User Acquisition Managers have to work in a world with a lot of moving parts. A world that comes with many questions for consideration before even taking a single step.

In this series, we have gathered some of the most important questions and considerations that App User Acquisition Managers ask themselves daily. All with a mind to shed light on how you can keep ahead of your competitors and deliver against your core app KPIs.

Where and How is User Acquisition Data Collected?

Singular’s customer acquisition marketers are collecting data daily from across their marketing channels through their dashboards from 5–6 different formats (API integrations, FTPs, S3s, web dashboards, email, excel). Multiple formats are leveraged because media providers and platforms use different approaches for making your user acquisition cost and ad performance available to clients.

With so many moving parts there is a lot of room for error in mobile app user acquisition measurement. This can include a network not entering a spend cap and running through monthly budgets in a day. Or an app developer accidentally updating the SDK and suddenly causing app user acquisition campaigns to no longer pass back information.

Additionally, many User Acquisition Managers are relying on “copy and paste” of install and spend data into massive Google Docs and manually creating pivot tables of their KPIs broken down by app, OS, Network. To protect against app data reporting errors like this, consider monitoring all your user acquisition marketing campaigns across all your sources often. This will help prevent errors, blowing through budgets, ruining tests, or simply failing to adjust bids competitively.

• How often do you collect user acquisition data from each network?
• What sources and channels do you collect data from?
• How many hours do you spend in Excel manipulating user acquisition campaign data?
• How many user acquisition campaigns are you running on each network at any given time?
• How often are your making optimizations on each network?

The average marketer using Singular is spending on 16+ networks at any given time and testing at least 2 new networks each month.
Your user engagement occurs across dozens of different networks everyday across Facebook, Twitter, Tapjoy, Chartboost, and hundreds of others (see the best performing networks by ROI), so you should be too. Leveraging a dispersed user acquisition strategy is not only to be everywhere your customers are but to ensure maximum reach across your segments as each network addresses a different audience.

• How many networks do you currently advertise on?
• How often are you testing new mobile user acquisition networks?
• How are you ensuring marketing data integrity?

Singular’s proprietary mobile marketing technology auto-detects dozens of discrepancies every day for each customer as a result of integration errors, network updates, false manual inputs, and failed data combining.

When collecting and analyzing data manually from multiple sources, mistakes and mismatched data are inevitable. This is in addition to the hours of daily work it takes to manually manipulate Excel sheets and auditing data. User Acquisition Managers are only human after all.

If you are relying on cost-tracking links, for example, there are many downfalls. For one, it is an extremely manual requirement to update the tracking link every time a change is made to the campaign — which can be as often as daily. Another downfall to cost-tracking links is the networks tend to report different cost information (and potentially lower cost data) due to install postback drop-off.

Without connecting to your direct source of cost, you are likely not receiving your true data. Adding insult to injury, the data is typically passed from a lookback window of up to 30 days. This in itself is not a problem, but if the app data is altered after that window, either because of an update made by the network or the account manager, for example, the data you are receiving may not be retroactively updated.

• How are you QAing user acquisition data for anomalies, human error, and mismatched or missing data?
• How often do you find errors in your user acquisition data?
• Does your data retroactively reflect updates past 30 days?

Singular’s Thoughts on User Acquisition

As a User Acquisition Manager, it’s crucial that you are collecting all data from all sources in all formats, checking for accuracy and completeness. All while analyzing regularly for trends, quality assurance, and scale. This is not an easy feat, and with more apps, more networks, and more spend reported in different formats you inevitably need more supporting resources from marketing, engineering, and business intelligence; especially without a reliable tool for unifying data, ensuring data integrity, and automating workflow.

During our next post we will discuss mobile customer acquisition considerations as it relates to acting on this data, including testing, analysis, optimization, and strategy. In the meantime, please comment below with additional questions you need to address as a successful user acquisition Manager.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

It wasn’t that long ago that virtually all travel transactions went through brick-and-mortar agents. But now travel dollars are increasingly being spent via digital, especially on mobile. According to the latest figures from eMarketer, 63% of digital travel ad spend goes to mobile, and that share is climbing rapidly.

I spend a lot of time identifying best practices to help travel companies get more out of mobile investments. There are many ways the travel industry can get more by doing more on mobile. Building a good transaction site and mobile app are only the first steps in what must be an ongoing commitment to mobile innovation. Here are seven musts for your travel app marketing strategy in 2017:

1. “Mobile-ize” search engine optimization (SEO) strategy

Most searches take place on mobile devices. Google takes mobile experiences very seriously as it sets site rank. There are many things brands can do to improve their mobile SEO. I’m not an SEO expert, but I have been able to drive big increases in natural search traffic for companies with four simple principles:

• Use responsive web pages. Responsive sites optimize the layout of web content to the screen size of the browser. Assets are vertically arranged for smartphone screens, for example
• Stick to one concept per page. Search engines reward expertise. Define a particular topic for each page on your site and devote all content to that topic. Don’t try to make a page “expert” about multiple topics. Focused pages are better on mobile screens because the content is clearer and more scannable
• Identify and use the topic language. For each topic, use Google’s AdWords “Keyword Planner” to identify the terms that are relevant to a particular topic. Google offers this tool to help people plan paid search, but it works great for SEO too. For example, input the term “crown moulding” and you back a list of 699 terms, 61 of which are quite popular. By finding natural ways to include some of the most popular terms in your page content, you’ll boost your mobile (and PC web) rankings. Don’t stuff in terms that don’t flow naturally, but use them when you can to grow your page relevance and expertise
• Include thorough text/simple graphics. Search engines like text and lightweight pages. Designers like pictures and cool pages. By eliminating heavy applets and graphics files, you improve mobile viewing experiences. Then be succinct but thorough in your text

2. Deliver personalized experiences

Travel brands increase user satisfaction and brand affinity when they personalize user experiences. The key is ensuring that you collect necessary information and build user profiles. With Marriott’s mobile app, for example, users record amenity preferences like extra towels and pillow firmness. That data can be retained to personalize future stays.

3. Enable location-based services and information

A 2014 Ipsos study commissioned by Google showed that 88% of users make local searches on smartphones, while 61% want mobile search results customized to their immediate location.

Location-specific offers, driving directions and maps, and localized search results all play a role here.

For example, if a person searches “Olive Garden” on mobile, chances are excellent that they are looking for a local restaurant. The brand can win more sales when it ensures that its local stores are in the mobile search results. The quickest way to do this is to buy search terms including location, i.e. “Olive Garden Birmingham AL.” Over the long run, you can boost your local SEO by claiming each location in Google and Bing, and then driving citations and ratings from users.

4. Help users avoid lines

Mobile check-in helps hotels, airlines and car services improve guest satisfaction. The Center for Generational Kinetics conducted a study that found that 40% of millennials prefer purely online customer service, supporting the overall trend that they prefer self-service experiences offered via mobile instead of in person.

During a recent trip, I had a four-day hotel experience during which I checked in, checked out, made requests and ordered room service, all via mobile and without speaking to anyone. It was simply an experiment for me, but self-service is the preferred way of doing business for many.

5. Offer local insight and options

Innovative travel companies now replicate concierge services through their mobile apps. Hotel and airline apps sometimes offer local area guides and activity booking tools. These tools make trips richer and boost loyalty among users. For example, my team and I recently stayed in a hotel in Philadelphia. We arrived after 10 p.m. and wanted a good nearby restaurant that was serving at that hour. After a few clicks, we had a reservation and walking directions.

6. Anticipate chronic traveler needs

It can be a real joy when a travel company anticipates a traveler need during a trip and offers an unexpected solution, even when that need doesn’t relate directly to their services. For example, Starwood’s mobile app offers driving directions from airports to hotels in local languages. That means no awkward five minutes of hand signals with a cab driver in Phuket. Just show the driver your screen and you are on the way.

7. Leverage social media

Nearly 80% of total social media time now takes place on mobile, according to comScore. Social media is a great way to stay connected with users. Travel firms can solicit and showcase user ratings, images and other content. Selfies taken in Las Vegas night clubs, for example, have significantly helped increase their luster and popularity. That’s been so important to the city because as gambling revenue has declined, such clubs have become critical to business success.

Final Thought

Travel and tourism companies embraced digital faster than other industries. They understood the need to bring utility to everything they do in this critical business arena. Now they must continue to innovate. By thinking carefully about how mobile experiences differ from those in other mediums, business leaders can capitalize on unique business opportunities and drive more growth.

Thanks to Forbes Communications Council for publishing this piece first.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.