Marketers: Tell Mobile App Developers What You Need

I recently attended one of San Francisco's top mobile industry conferences. While these events tend to be extremely important in terms of socializing, I always feel that contentwise there's so much more attendees could learn and discover in regard to mobile app marketing.
Today's young and eager app developers are arriving prepared with intelligent questions, but they seem to leave these events scratching their heads after receiving 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 of providing 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're hearing from app developers during daily discussions and industry conferences.

Q: When tracking post-install user behavior, what are the most common parameters to track and measure?
A: When post-install events first became available, advertisers were tracking 10 different events, including tutorial completions, Facebook activity, reaching a certain level in a game or section in the app, etc. Soon after, they came to realize that tracking too much was less effective. Now they're focused on three main events:

• unique paying users within the first week;
• total return on investment (nonunique) within the first 30 days; and
• second day of retention (for free apps).

Q: What are the benchmarks for these popular behavioral patterns? How do you know if the campaign is performing well?
A: Taptica pulls these benchmarks from its past campaign results. Based on those, I believe the following are a few of the best indicators of campaign impact and progress:

• The average number of unique paying users should be 3 percent to 5 percent.
• ROI should be 30 percent to 40 percent. Taptica has 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. However, 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.

Q: What clickthrough rates (CTRs) can I expect from banner ads (320x50), full-screen/interstitial Ads (320x480/320x200) and native ads?
A: Here's what I think are the average CTRs:

• banner ad: 0.5 percent
• full-screen ad: 3 percent to 5 percent
• native ad: 4 percent to 8 percent.

Q: How often do I need to send out new creative?
A: While there are ads that can work for weeks and months, apps should typically send out a new message at least twice a month.

Q: Is there a difference between the quality of a user being generated from a native ad versus a full-screen ad?
A: My statistics show that the quality of a user who downloads the app after being exposed to a native ad is 35 percent better than a user generated from a full-screen ad.

Q: When running a retargeting campaign, what can be expected in terms of returning users to my service?
A: I find that, on average, between 10 percent and 30 percent. Conducting a retargeting and deep-linking campaign usually gets the advertiser closer to 30 percent re-engaged users.

Hopefully this advice and feedback gets developers and other mobile app marketers pointed in the right direction when launching their next marketing campaigns.

Sigal Bareket is co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Taptica, a global performance-based demand-side platform serving brands and digital agencies. Sigal can be reached at sigal.b@taptica.com.