Earlier this month, we packed our bags and headed to Berlin, Germany to attend App Promotion Summit, where we spoke to tens growth and app marketing professionals, participated in workshops and listened (carefully!) to lectures and panel discussions held by industry experts.
After learning from the absolute best, we came back to share with you our key takeaways, a.k.a
Top 3 App Promotion Trends of 2019 👑
#1: INCREMENTALITY 📈
To put it shortly, incrementality is the measurement of the additional uplift that advertising spend contributes to conversion rates and growth. This is a powerful tool allowing app marketers to understand the true impact of their paid campaigns.
As the KPIs in digital marketing evolved from CPM measured since the early '90s, through CPC in the 2000s, and CPI/CPA in 2010 onwards, the latest developments in tracking, attribution, and analytics led marketers to dive deeper into their data and measure performance more precisely, creating growth-driven KPIs such as Return on Ad Spend. This raised new concerns regarding the accuracy of the last touch attribution method and a questionable approach focusing on multi-touch. Now, about 30 years since we started, incrementality seems to be the answer. The question is, of course, how do I measure the real value of my ads?
So, incrementality is a way to evaluate whether or not an event that would have happened without a particular interaction, or more simply, what happens if I increase/decrease spends.
To measure the impact of our ads, we should test our ads against a non-exposed control group, and calculate the increase in conversions and revenues,
Gabriela Kozicki from REMERGE gave a great talk at App Promotion Summit on The Age Of Incrementality - It's Finally Here, What Do We Do Now?
#2: AUTOMATION 🤖
So this has been my favorite subject in the past two years. Call me lazy but if I need to repeat the exact same action more than 3 times - I'll look for a way to automate it. 🤓 Of course, automation in digital advertising is so much more than that! The positive factors — efficiency, scale, and low cost — are only a few of the many advantages that automation could bring to marketers.
So what is exactly automation in app promotion? How can growth marketers take advantage of that? What can be automated? And where do buzz words such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning become tangible tools implemented in the day-to-day workflows?
Dr. Michael Milnik and Wolfgang Peters of the free-to-play mobile games publisher, Flaregames held an excellent workshop on this topic, providing in-depth insight and sharing use cases from their own real-life app marketing experience.
Here are some key points:
Having a single source of truth is crucial for machines and human decision making.
Data accuracy = correctness and relevance (e.g. collecting and processing data in near real-time from multiple data points).
Individual channel/partner present some unique capabilities but are lacking others, therefore, we should always combine channel interface with own/3-rd party automation tools.
Budget flexibility is key - fixed monthly/daily budgets per campaign or partner often result in overspending or underspending and lead to unprofitable spend.
Successfully managing hundreds of campaigns across channels is possible thanks to automated processes.
Another great talk on the subject of Automation was given by Popcore's Yury Bolotkin. In his session, Yuri spoke about the scope of responsibilities of today's UA managers and which parts can be automated (hint: almost all of them, at least on a certain level).
Optimization automation - creating simple rules (if... and... then...), optimize sub-sources and ad-sets (change bids and budgets).
Create new campaigns - using existing campaigns combined with templates.
Creative automation - refresh creatives using scripts to fight creative fatigue.
Yuri also shared some numbers that support our belief in automation, or what he calls "Set it and (sort of) forget it" ;)
Pretty impressive, right?!
💡If you got inspired and want to learn how you can execute your own predictive models and automate your UA workflows, Bidshake is here to help!
#3: SOCIAL ADVERTISING
This is not new — mobile marketers have been utilizing social channels to reach their target audience through organic and paid content for years now. But with 3.2 billion social media users worldwide and growing, new emerging platforms (say Tik Tok one more time, I dare you!), and the rise of influencers — this is still a trend worth talking about. And it was talked about. A lot.
The first mention-worthy APS session is Getting The Most From The Snapchat App Install Platform that was held by Snapchat's Senior Account Executive, Jan Müller, who first of all walked us through some snappy stats: 20+ app opens on average by DAUs, 30+ minutes on average time spent daily, and over 3 billion snaps created per day, which all result in over 330M addressable unique users monthly.
Jan also presented their 3 performance advertising products: Snap Ads, Story Ads, and AR Lenses, providing us with some creative ideas on how to use GIFs, Looping, and in-app footage to promote apps on the platform.
We'll be talking more about Snapchat in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!
In the Social App Advertising Power Panel Luke Costley-White from Asana Rebel, Kristoffer Nilsson Kampitsch from Shpock, and Alper Taner, ex Kaia Health and a Mobile Growth Consultant, talked lengthly about what’s working for app promotion on TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and how to optimize and manage campaigns and creatives, and shared tips, tactics, and strategies for success. There were no seats left and the discussion was fast-paced and so fascinating, that it was merely impossible to take notes 😳 but I will happily share a link to this session recording once it's released.
Now I'd like to stretch the Social Advertising title a little and speak about Influencer Marketing.
Luisa Manopelli Moura, Influencer Marketing Lead at Onefootball held a great workshop on the topic Influencer Marketing As A User Acquisition Tool For Apps. With Influencer Marketing being a key part of Onefootball's strategy, Luisa walked us through their team structure and mission — bringing the best users for the best price using influencer marketing. From shout-outs to branding mentions, Luisa described how Onefootball is managing big influencers around the football seasonality and small-medium influencers on long-term campaigns to maintain a presence and described the club collaborations and influencer events.
Finally, Luisa shared advice on how to start your own influencer strategy.
Did you learn some great strategies of your own at App Promotion Summit? What are the exciting ideas informing your own mobile marketing — and how are you implementing them?
Let us know in the comments.
