The Fiksu Blog

March Indexes Remain Steady as Fiksu Records 100 Billionth User Action

Viki Zabala — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:47:53 +0000

It’s been a memorable day for Fiksu, as we reached another notable milestone! As of April 30, 2013 – two years since our launch – the Fiksu Mobile App Marketing Platform has recorded its one hundred billionth app user action and has driven more than one billion app downloads. This data is critical to our ability to drive real-time mobile ad campaign optimization and deliver the high-performance marketing results that leading brands demand. It’s also the foundation of the Fiksu Indexes and our insights into the complex app marketing landscape.

In analyzing this month’s Index data, we found that the volume of daily downloads of the top 200 free iPhone apps and mobile app marketing costs remained steady in March – extending from February’s calm and consistent, yet valuable landscape.

We saw the Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index increase by five percent, or seven cents, to $1.36, from February’s $1.29.

The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index dipped four percent, to 5.02 million daily downloads in March from February’s 5.20 million. Notably, this represents a 12 percent year-over-year increase from March 2012.

March’s “new normal” was good news for mobile app marketers. Inventory has increased but costs have held steady, reflecting a maturity in the overall quality of apps and their ability to engage users.

Beginning of the End for UDIDs

Despite the last few months of relative stability, marketers should always be prepared for the ebbs and flows within the app ecosystem. In fact, today is a notable day in that Apple’s recent announcement goes into effect: apps that access UDIDs will no longer be approved for the App Store. While apps that are already approved can continue to access the UDIDs for the time being, the majority of that traffic is shifting to the Advertising Identifier. The change comes as no surprise to app publishers who follow the industry, but it's still a significant step in the ongoing evolution of app marketing.

We've also seen Apple evolving its stance on apps used to promote other apps, and there have been some indications that the MAC address -- which has similar privacy concerns to the UDID, but has received much less attention -- could be the next tracking option to face Apple's scrutiny. We can expect the impact of these and other factors to start revealing themselves in next month’s April Index data and beyond.

Thanks to all the publications for covering our March Indexes: AppNewser, FierceMobileContent, GoMo News, Inside Mobile Apps, Mobile Marketing Magazine, Mobile Marketing Watch and PocketGamer.

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Fiksu Indexes

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Mobile app marketing Fiksu Indexes Cost per Loyal User Index Fiksu App Store Competitive Index UDID Mobile Marketing Watch Mobile Marketing Magazine gomo news FierceMobileContent Inside Mobile Apps PocketGamer AppNewser

New eBook: 5 Essential Tips for App Marketing on Facebook

Viki Zabala — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:42:26 +0000

As we announced in February, Fiksu has integrated with Facebook to provide our clients with integrated access to Facebook’s mobile app install ads. These app-specific ads and their ability to reach specific audiences present a tremendous opportunity for app marketers to cost-effectively build their loyal user base.

As we've been running campaigns for our customers, we've learned some valuable lessons about how to get the most out of this new marketing channel. Now some of those lessons are available in an ebook: 5 Essential Tips for App Marketing on Facebook.

Read the ebook to learn how to:

Market your mobile app more effectively using Facebook
Achieve the best ROI when using Facebook mobile app install ads
Leverage Facebook’s immense audience and data

App Downloads and Marketing Costs Drop in February

Viki Zabala — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:12:09 +0000

Though heightened user activity and app discovery continued well beyond the 2012 holidays and into the new year, our latest Indexes reveal that the pace tapered off as we entered February, giving way to a calmer, steadier month.

In February, our Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index showed a continued downward slope, decreasing to $1.29, down 17 percent, or 27 cents, from January’s $1.56. February presented a relative bargain period for mobile marketers who held back on holiday advertising, preferring instead to spread out their spending across several months to maximize impact.

Meanwhile, the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index illustrated a decrease of 13 percent, or 810,000 downloads each day, to 5.20 million daily downloads, from January’s 6.01 million.

On the heels of a record-shattering holiday season, where marketers saw surging app marketing costs, February presented a more consistent, normalized, and valuable landscape for mobile app marketers. In the absence of major events or device launches during the month, our February Indexes provided early indications of what we can expect the “new normal” to be for marketers this year. That’s until the next big splash event, of course, which will most likely drive up acquisition and competition costs.

Thanks to all the publications for covering our February Indexes: AppNewser, Cult of Mac, iClarified, i2Mag, FierceMobileContent, MobileMarketingWatch, TechJournal, The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

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Fiksu Indexes

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Cost per Loyal User Index App Store Competitive INdex AppNewser Cult of Mac iClarified i2Mag FierceMobileContent MobileMarketingWatch TechJournal The Next Web VentureBeat.

Connecting With Consumers—The Mobile App Marketing Opportunity

Craig Palli — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:52:11 +0000

This post originally appeared on Chief Marketer.

The mobile revolution isn’t coming—it’s already happened. If the early bird gets the worm, then those with early-adopter advantage will be quick to disrupt, steal market share and monetize mobile.

Many brands have already invested to bolster their mobile presence. Coca-Cola invested $10M in Spotify and Starbucks $25M in Square. Aetna bought iTriage, and Nordstrom and Priceline acquired Hautelook and Kayak respectively.

There’s no time to waste. Mobile apps are already part of our cultural fabric, the go-to source for news and entertainment replacing radio, TV, and the “traditional” Web. In fact, 82% of smartphone users say they couldn’t go a day without their apps, according to Apigee.

Mobile apps must become central to your business strategy—they need to be more than just a “hey, we’ve-got-one” check box in your marketing plan. Put simply, without a strategic, organizational commitment to mobile marketing, brands risk losing competitive edge.

“With more than 360 billion downloads between 2008-2017, apps cannot be ignored as an important channel to reaching customers,” says Josh Martin, director, apps research at Strategy Analytics. “Big brands have recognized this trend and have begun making apps an essential component of their strategy. As the market continues to evolve so must the marketing, capability and functionality of apps to continue to drive downloads and user engagement.”

Sizing the potential

Researchers project enormous revenue growth from mobile apps and advertising. In fact, businesses like Groupon, Zillow, and Yelp that started on the Web are already driving more revenue from mobile. Facebook has more mobile than desktop users. Pandora reports 75% of listener hours via mobile. And it’s not just digital businesses—Walgreens, for example, reports 40% of all digital prescriptions come through mobile.

The mobile app marketing opportunity

Apps are a lifestyle mainstay. Ahead of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, five of the top 10 apps in the Apple’s App Store were election-specific or news-related. During Hurricane Sandy, news and weather apps skyrocketed. Right now, two of the top 10 apps are NCAA tournament-focused.

Brand marketers are rapidly realizing that mobile apps provide an incredible canvas because the connection they build is fundamentally different than other channels. Mobile delivers richness and reach—plus targeting and pervasiveness—at a significantly lower cost.

Two household names, Coke and Disney, recognized this early on. Tom Daly, Coca-Cola group director of mobile and search, told me recently: “Establishing a ‘mobile community’ within The Coca-Cola Company represented an opportunity to focus the best marketing minds within the system to collaborate and create best-in-class mobile marketing programs, share and learn best practices, and evolve our strategic approach to mobile. This approach plays an important role in accelerating the pace at which are can capture the value of mobile.”

Similarly, Disney is leveraging hundreds of apps spanning multiple lines of business to globally promote brand engagement. Case in point: Disney’s Where’s My Valentine app reached No. 1 in games in 69 countries, No. 1 overall in six countries, and is in the top 10 overall in almost 100 countries.

So it costs a lot of money, right?

Not so. Mobile app marketing is actually cheaper than other marketing options. According to the Fiksu Index, the average cost to acquire a loyal user (someone who opens an app 3 times) ranges from $1.20 to $1.50. That’s equivalent to the cost of a Google AdWord click, which drives a one-time Web page visit, compared to a downloaded and repeatedly used app on your customer’s device.

It’s this incredible cost-efficiency, combined with the size, immediacy, reach, and targeting of mobile app marketing, that makes it so attractive to brand marketers.

Profit from opportunism

Opportunity lies in leveraging technology advancements or timely cultural or news-driven events.

For example, Walgreens leapt on Apple’s Passbook and catapulted its app into the top 10 on September 9, 2012, driving more than one million downloads. ABC’s Oscars app reached No. 12, securing more than 100,000 downloads. Similarly, Coke and Samsung had great success with Olympics apps last year.

Bottom line: your audiences are already on mobile, and it’s where they prefer to engage. Brands must go big with mobile app marketing in 2013, or play catch-up.

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About Fiksu

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Mobile app marketing Mobile apps Coca-Cola Starbucks Nordstrom Kayak Josh Martin Strategy Analytics Groupon Zillow Yelp Disney Apple Samsung

The End of the UDID: What You Should Do About It

Craig Palli — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:08:35 +0000

Last week, Apple announced that starting May 1, the App Store will no longer accept new apps or app updates that access UDIDs and that advertisers should use the Advertising Identifier instead. The announcement is concise and straightforward:

This is the final chapter in an ongoing transition away from UDIDs, and app marketers who have been following best-practice guidelines should be able to navigate the change without too much disruption.

No surprise

The announcement by Apple wasn’t a complete surprise: during the iOS 5 Beta 6 in August 2011, they indicated that usage of the unique device identifier (UDID) for ad tracking wasn’t going to be around forever. Its replacement is the newer Advertising Identifier, which was introduced in iOS 6 and is often referred to as the Identifier for Advertisers or IDFA. Unlike UDIDs, it was designed for advertising use from the start. It gives users greater ability to control what publishers and advertisers know about their app use, and avoids many of the privacy concerns that hampered the UDID.

Welcome clarity

For some app developers and ad networks, the shift may create some short-term headaches as they scramble to hit the May 1st deadline. However, for most of the industry the announcement provides welcome clarity on App Store policy, eliminating confusion about which Apple ID to use for tracking advertising results.

In my view, this policy shift by Apple will pave the way for the industry to coalesce around the Advertising Identifier as the industry tracking standard for iOS. Given the strategic nature of the Apple App Store - 20 billion downloads in 2012 alone and over 800,000 apps - the shift to the Advertising Identifier is likely to occur rapidly.

Advertisers may also face inventory volume challenges as the transition takes place: until ad networks, publishers, and advertisers have all implemented support for the new system, some traffic won’t be accessible through the Advertising Identifier. It’s worth noting that digital fingerprinting provides a useful way to bridge this gap, if needed.

Get your updates in

Our recommendation for any developers using the UDID is to concentrate on getting a minimally viable update prepared and submitted for approval as soon as you can - one that includes as many tracking technologies as possible. You do not need to remove UDID support immediately -- Apple doesn’t say they’ll be removing apps that use it from the store, just that they won’t be approving any more.

At the bare minimum, your next app update should include both UDID and the Advertising Identifier, backed by a plan to incorporate additional technologies as soon as you can. In a perfect world you should incorporate all the major tracking options now, as well as make any needed updates to support the other part of Apple’s announcement: the requirement that all apps support the Retina display and the 4-inch display on the iPhone 5.

Smooth transition

Getting this update in before the 5/1 deadline (preferably at least 2-3 weeks before) will buy you the time to make more comprehensive changes without a looming deadline, as well as maintaining your access to as many advertising opportunities as possible.

Fiksu offers the first and only platform in the industry that supports the Advertising Identifier, UDID, digital fingerprinting, HTML5 cookies, the Facebook Identifier, and MAC address tracking, along with the ability to turn any of those methods off remotely - without re-submitting to the App Store. This means that not only do we provide the traffic volume our clients demand and extremely accurate, in-depth tracking and reporting - we also let our clients stay on top of industry changes like this one.

Finally, Fiksu’s Glenn Kiladis, VP and GM of FreeMyApps, will be speaking on the state of ad tracking at GDC later this week. If you’re at the show, be sure to check out How Mobile Ad Tracking Impacts App Marketing Results at 12:30 on Wednesday, in room 302, South Hall.

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App Industry Commentary

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UDID Advertising Identifier ad tracking industry news Apple App Store

First look results: Facebook mobile ads showing promise for app marketers

Viki Zabala — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:03:42 +0000

Since we announced that Fiksu officially supports Facebook mobile app installs, we've been dying to put the new integration to the test and see how this new channel performs relative to other ad networks. We've gotten results from a few different client apps so far, and wanted to share some of them.

Click through rates are twice as high as what we see when testing on typical networks
Conversion rates are significantly higher than many other sources
Loyalty and user retention are higher than a typical network
CPI ranges are highly variable, but for the apps we've tested are within a reasonable range relative to costs seen on other networks

We should say clearly that these are preliminary results and can’t be guaranteed for every app. We're just beginning the in-depth optimization that really makes a Fiksu campaign work, so we expect to improve on the results we're seeing so far. Overall we're confident that for many apps, Facebook is going to become an important component of a comprehensive marketing plan.

Go get your likes

One audience segment that predictably works well is people who already 'like' you. By targeting a campaign at users who had already connected with their brand on Facebook, one of our clients was able to see a CPI that was less than half of their next-best-performing segment - and a third of their typical CPI on traditional ad networks.

While it's not surprising that users who've already made a connection to your brand are easier to win over, it's an important audience for you to go after. Big brands are learning that they can't just assume that a customer on their mailing list will like them on Facebook, or that a Facebook fan will download their app. There's an element of winning the customer over on each of these channels. So, it's good news that it's cheaper than other venues - because it's the first place you should start building your app user base.

Want more tips?

We're holding a free webinar this Thursday titled App Marketing on Facebook: Using Social Media to Drive Mobile App Installs. We'll have more examples from our clients, best practices for app marketing on Facebook, and some suggested strategies. Sign up here.

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Mobile App Marketing

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Facebook performance data

Facebook’s Facelift: What It Means for Mobile Advertisers

Viki Zabala — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:50:21 +0000

During yesterday’s highly anticipated news conference, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s plans to give its news feed a facelift – transforming it into a “personalized newspaper,” in which users can browse streams of current photos, events, music-related content and posts from brands and public figures – in the same way they would read the sports or life section of a paper. You can check out this Wall Street Journal story by Evelyn Rusli for more details and a video of Zuckerberg’s unveil.

“There really is a place in the world for a personalized newspaper," he said during the press conference. “How we're all sharing is changing.”

We couldn’t agree more. Facebook's news feed enhancements are profoundly interesting on many levels and signal the social network's mobile maturation on several fronts. First, the additions of photo and music feeds are the most natural extension of the news feeds. As Fiksu’s Micah Adler points out in this USA Today article by Jon Swartz, the improved feeds reflect elements of some of the most popular apps already in the App Store, including Path and Spotify, which allow people to share photos and music-based experiences with friends. In this regard, Facebook is unifying the best of mobile and social in a singular experience.

AdAge’s Cotton Delo shares some of her perspectives on five immediate take-aways for advertisers in her piece Facebook News Feed Redesign Gives Marketers What They've Pined For: Bigger Ads. And yesterday’s announcement certainly spells many exciting changes for mobile-oriented brand advertisers as well. Over the past several weeks, Facebook has been making significant enhancements to its suite of mobile advertising products including Mobile App Install Ads and Power Editor. Those advancements have significantly improved mobile ad measurement and targeting through Facebook. But nothing matters more than context and, over the past few years, we've seen the increasing importance of native advertising to agencies and brands. Immersing consumers without interruption allows marketers to build a connection and customer loyalty. While "likes" are a simple measurement of positive sentiment, additional interactions through contextual targeting will inevitably increase buyer interest.

Facebook’s enhanced feeds create rich contextual advertising opportunities and serve as a perfect complement to Facebook's unprecedented targeting and measurement capabilities. As a prominent buyer of mobile media, Fiksu is incredibly optimistic about the opportunities afforded by changes to Facebook feeds and we plan to invest significantly in related ad units on behalf of our brand clients, providing them with an extremely efficient and targeted use of their media budgets.

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App Industry Commentary

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Facebook Mobile Marketing News

From MWC: App Downloads Climb in January, While Mobile Marketing Costs Dip

Viki Zabala — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:20:53 +0000

News from this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where we just released our January Indexes, which revealed increased mobile app download volumes, but a decline in user acquisition costs. The new data reflects the continued impact of all the new tablets and smartphones activated during the holidays, illustrating a steadier and more cost-effective landscape for mobile advertisers.

Historically, the new year is an attractive and cost-efficient time for app marketers to acquire new loyal users. We saw no exception in January, with the Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index dropping 11 cents to $1.56, from December’s $1.67. But savvy marketers who held back on December’s mobile advertising spending in order to find a January bargain may have been disappointed that the drop was not nearly as dramatic as in January 2012, when costs plunged nearly 40% from December.

Meanwhile, the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index continued climbing, reaching 6.01 million daily downloads in January, up 13 percent from December’s 5.32 million. With record device activations on Christmas Day 2012, user activity and app discovery soared in the days and weeks following the holiday – and this carried well into 2013.

The January Indexes are early indicators of the “mainstreaming of mobile advertising,” with marketers placing a focus on value over volume as they strategically plan for the year ahead – spreading their budgets to maximize impact. For 2013, we expect brands to not only allocate more dedicated spending to mobile advertising, but to also get even savvier about aligning seasonal spending to the ebbs and flows of user acquisition costs.

Thanks to all the publications for covering our January Indexes: AppNewser, Inside Mobile Apps, MediaPost, and Mobile Entertainment.

Potential change in Apple policies on HTML5 cookies highlights the need to support multiple tracking technologies

Craig Palli — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:39:33 +0000

Interesting news being reported by TechCrunch today: according to an article by Sarah Perez, Apple is now rejecting apps that are using HTML5 cookie tracking from the App Store. While this may come as a surprise to some, the good news is that over time, the marketplace has developed multiple solutions to mobile ad tracking on iOS.

The confusing ecosystem for marketing attribution in iOS has long been a challenge for app marketers. Back in August of 2011, when Apple first announced that they were deprecating UDIDs, there was considerable concern among marketers. How would they track their marketing results? In the short term, multiple options emerged and gained prominence, including MAC address, digital fingerprinting, HTML5 cookies, Facebook's newly introduced tracking method, and more. In addition, UDIDs remained the dominant tracking choice for many marketers, although the transition to Apple's preferred Advertising Identifier is now well underway.

There are many trade-offs among these options, including accuracy, privacy concerns, user experience, and acceptance by consumers, ad networks, developers, and Apple. At Fiksu, our long-term recommendation has been that the best approach is to support multiple types of marketing attribution – and that is in fact what our SDK provides. There are three essential reasons for this:

Future-proofing. Flexibility to use multiple types of tracking lets you adapt to changing market conditions, whether they come as new guidelines from Apple, changing consumer preferences, or new sources or advertising inventory, essentially future-proofing your app marketing strategy. In fact, the Fiksu SDK can simply and remotely disable most tracking methods that our clients choose to move away from.
Broadest reach. Different mobile traffic sources use different tracking technologies, and there's no way to know which sources will perform best for your app marketing needs until you try them. Accessing all the best sources requires supporting multiple tracking systems. And Fiksu's Platform provides the ability to track and report and all of our clients' campaigns, including those they run independently, such as email, QR codes, social, and more.
Optimal performance. By supporting the maximum number of traffic sources, marketers are assured of always being able to work with the sources that drive he most effective cost per loyal user.

The picture isn't settled

It is important to note that there is no evidence – yet – that this is a unilateral action by Apple. Fiksu is aware of a couple of instances of very popular apps that have been rejected by Apple because of HTML5 cookie tracking. On the other hand, we're aware of at least 10 apps that use HTML5 tracking being approved by Apple in the last month, including a couple in the last few days, so it doesn't seem to be a comprehensive rejection – or if it is, it's very new.

So the situation remains unclear. While there have been some rejections, HTML 5 tracking remains a viable and well-functioning form of marketing attribution for many app developers – one that closely mimics the long-established desktop standard for 1^st party cookies. The key for app marketers is to support HTML5 tracking along with all other forms of attribution in case there are additional changes in the ecosystem.

While there's been no official comment from Apple about this situation, there are a couple of reasons Apple might chose to eliminate HTML5 cookie tracking.

1.The user experience of the "flip" – a brief switch to Safari to load the cookie, then back to the app – might not fit with Apple's vision of the iOS experience.

2.Having introduced the Advertising Identifier last fall, Apple could be eager to speed its adoption.

For more on the relative strengths and weakness of the various tracking technologies, read our ebook How Mobile Ad Tracking Impacts App Marketing Results. Fiksu is also offering a webinar on March 7 titled, "App Marketer's Tracking Dilemma: How your ad tracking choices will impact ROI." Learn more or register.

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App Industry Commentary

8 Ways to Make Your Mobile App Stand Out

Viki Zabala — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 05:00:00 +0000

This post -- written by our Craig Palli -- originally appeared on Boston.com.

With more than 1.5 million apps in the Apple and Android app stores, mobile app marketers face the enormous challenge of achieving discoverability, sustained user engagement and, ultimately, monetization. Successfully marketing your app requires more than strategic mobile media buying and compelling, creative advertising. High-performance mobile app marketers have a laser-like focus on targeting and acquiring loyal users – those who take a specific action, such as an in-app purchase or registration. It's these loyal users who become repeat customers, word-of-mouth advocates, and deliver real, ongoing ROI.

The following eight tips for marketing your app are focused on driving more of these loyal users. They're based on more than 70 billion user-based app actions, including launches, registrations, and in-app purchases, as well as real time bidding requests recorded on our platform, and they're proven marketing tactics for putting your app ahead of the competition:

Establish goals for loyal users. Exactly what constitutes a loyal user will vary from app to app – perhaps it's opening the app a certain number of times or completing an in-app purchase or registration – so define that metric before launching any acquisition campaigns. You'll also need to determine your lifetime value per user so you can set cost-per-conversion targets (i.e., determine how much to pay for different traffic volumes to deliver the best possible ROI).
Promote your app across several traffic sources. There are several types of traffic sources for mobile apps: ad networks, real-time bidding exchanges, incentivized download networks, and more. Using just one source – or even one from each general type – gives you too small a universe to be successful. You'd be missing out on valuable opportunities to identify the best sources for large volumes of loyal users. In fact, working with several traffic sources can improve loyal acquisition results by up to five times.
Track post-download activity. As your mobile ad campaigns are running, it’s critical to track users’ post-download activities and tie this data back to its traffic source, ad creative, and other campaign variables. This helps to pinpoint which specific traffic sources and campaigns are driving your most loyal users – not just the most downloads.
Optimize ad campaigns in real-time. By analyzing real-time data, it’s possible to eliminate inefficient ad spending and shift budget to those traffic sources and campaigns that are delivering loyal users.
Employ a campaign optimization solution. Optimizing advertising campaigns based on post-download actions is challenging but there are automated solutions available. Instead of managing a huge matrix of ad networks, costs, creative, downloads, and conversion rates, it's worth investigating a solution that incorporates everything and adjusts your campaign spending on the fly.
Conduct ongoing closed-loop analysis. Continuous analysis of marketing campaign performance, post-download usage and revenue return helps you understand, at a granular level, what's moving the needle. It’s important to dive into these analytics frequently to fine-tune campaign planning and align with marketing objectives.
Conduct a loyal user acquisition test. Not convinced that the concept of marketing specifically to bring in loyal users will produce results? It's easily testable. Assign a portion of your marketing budget to a test that employs the above-recommended strategies. You’ll gain valuable insights into how a loyal user acquisition strategy can directly impact your bottom line.
Benchmark performance against industry averages. The best way to improve your mobile marketing results is to more precisely understand the competitive landscape you're pouring your budget into. By benchmarking how your mobile app marketing stacks up against industry averages, you’ll gain a larger, more accurate picture of the trends impacting your business goals, allowing you to adapt and plan with more agility.

Mobile app marketing shouldn't require guesswork. By deploying these tested strategies and tactics, mobile app marketers can achieve high-performance results that not only drive business objectives, but also acquire large volumes of loyal users.

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About Fiksu

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Mobile app marketing Apple Android Mobile apps