All About Mobile App Remarketing

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By Jim Nichols VP-Marketing, Apsalar

STRATEGIC

REMARKETINGMOBILE APP

Remarketing is the fastest growing arena of mobile app marketing. On our platform, for example, the volume of remarketing activity has increased more than 800% in the past year. While that growth is off of a small base, the figure demonstrates the growing appeal of this marketing strategy and the tactics that underlie it.

This paper is designed to:

• Identify the underlying forces contributing to this important trend

• Outline the remarketing opportunity for mobile app marketers

• Present a framework for strategic remarketing planning and execution

We hope you find it a valuable tool to help you craft the right remarketing strategy for your brand.

2Copyright © 2016 All rights reserved worldwide. | www.apsalar.com

STRATEGIC FORCES DRIVING REMARKETING GROWTH

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As an industry, we are moving from a focus on an event – the install – to one in which the user is at the center of everything we do. Now, this may sound elementary, but it’s a critical distinction. Our world has been transformed – and rightly so – to one in which a user’s holistic relationship with a brand is central.

As marketers, we certainly still care about installs, but we’re also increasingly focused on subsequent app launches and the actions people take. On the purchases that they make, and on how they continue to use and transact in an app over time. The most vivid way that we see this trend at Apsalar is in how people use our platform to understand their businesses.

We measure interest by what metrics they study. How much time they spend studying them. And all that has changed a lot. Now most marketers have revenue or return on ad spend KPIs first and foremost. And we’ve learned that great install figures and don’t necessarily mean great revenue.

What matters to today’s marketer is user quality and controlling user decay. And it’s changing the face of app marketing. There’s lots of evidence that our interest in the whole customer is increasing. We see it in the massive number of job openings for marketing data analysts, especially app marketing data analysts. We see it in the big increase in time that our clients are spending doing analysis. And in how many more in-app event types they are trying to measure.

Average time spent in our platform by a user has increased by about 42 percent in the past year. This despite a variety of improvements that have actually made it easier and faster to use. Another mea-sure of greater user involvement is that our clients are, on average measuring 30% more different types of in-app actions. This speaks to a deeper commitment to understanding the specifics of what actions users are taking in apps.

In toto, we are seeing a sea change in how users are thinking about this industry – from one cen-tered on a particular action to one where the whole customer is the focus.

Copyright © 2016 All rights reserved worldwide. | www.apsalar.com

THE REMARKETING OPPORTUNITY FOR MOBILE APP MARKETERSRemarketing is growing because of a convergence of factors that have created a “perfect storm.”

First, the dynamics of the industry are such that the profitability of app businesses can be significantly enhanced if users can be persuaded to take more in-app actions. We all know that large numbers of installers fail to become regular app users. A big part of the reason for this is the massive number of available apps. Here are a few use cases to underscore the overall observation here.


• Many one-time app users never launch again.

• Others may use an app multiple times but fail to make a purchase.

• One time buyers may, for a variety of reasons, never make another purchase.

Often, the reasons for lack of deeper or more enduring engagement relate specifically to failure to stay top of mind. People forget apps, or may exit an app with the intention of returning but forget to. Or they may need a little incentive to pull the trigger on a purchase. Whatever the reason, advertising has been demonstrated to be an effective reminder and motivator.

More advertising options also contribute to the perfect storm. New ad formats and venues are a factor, as is the ability to define targeting parameters for more segmented and customized marketing.

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Remarketing share of total paid events climbing fastRemarketing Share of Total Events - APSALAR CLIENTS

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Increased app marketing spend is also a factor. Simply put, brands have more resources to invest in tactics other than remarketing.

The ability to measure is also a factor here. Apsalar was one of the first movers in true re-engagement tracking that could specifically associate a user action to the media that drove it. Our approaches have now been adopted broadly.

Apsalar launched a remarketing audience product in 2015, because clients were looking for ways to easily segment users and deliver more targeted retargeting messages to users. Apsalar Audiences enables you to create high-performing audiences and deliver customized creative to them through your choice of media partners. You can analyze your audience OR actually deliver an audience of device advertising IDs to whichever retargeter you prefer. For example, identifying all the people who had registered, or put an item in a shopping cart.

All of these factors have contributed to rapid growth for remarketing. Across our clients we are seeing very fast growth, and remarketing’s share of total paid events has grown 300% in 3 quarters.


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Let’s take a minute to talk about their retargeting objectives. What are you trying to DO with their retargeting? What is the business issue you are trying to solve? Well, to answer that, we divided user behavior into five buckets.

Think of users as falling into one of five states.

Payers Users Lapsed Triers Uninstaller

5 Stages of User Engagment

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A FRAMEWORK FOR STRATEGIC REMARKETING PLANNING AND EXECUTION

Going from left to right, we start with purchasers or payers. These are people that have transacted in the app.

Next over is users, people who engage with the app on some sort of ongoing basis but don’t buy.

Group three is lapsed users, who engaged with the app several times in the past, but haven’t used it in N number of days.

Group four is triers, people in the early stages of their brand relationship that have launched at least once.

And finally, there are uninstallers, people who have tried and then uninstalled. The edges on these buckets are blurry, but you get the basic idea, and using this model will help us with the following.


If we translate those 5 sets of user behaviors to a buying funnel, we get the illustration below.

Further, at different stages of the buying funnel, there are different use cases – different ones are appropriate for different stages of user engagement. To determine the stages that are most appropriate for your business, you need to look at the business and engagement metrics for your brand.

The following grid outlines six of the most common strategic use cases for app marketers. Use this as a foundation to create the custom strategy suited to the specific needs of your business.

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Opportunity Symptom Remarketing Strategy

Need for greater trial, more new users

Need more users App cross marketing. (if you have another app). Target existing users of your other app

Convert one-time or occasional users to regular users

Lots of one-time users

Low user retention rate

Create a segment of one-time or non-retained users that have not uninstalled. Target these users with ads designed to get them to relaunch

Holding onto more of your triers and users

High uninstall rates Create an audience of uninstallers and message product improvements or other reasons to return to the app Create an audience of uninstallers for market research

Drive more engagements from regular users

Want to get more regular users to use the app more often. For example, to increase ad views

Create a segment of retained users. Target these users with ads designed to get them to Incrementally relaunch the app

Convert more users into buyers

Not enough users are transacting

High cart abandon rates

Create a segment of retained users. Target these users with ads designed to get them to incrementally relaunch the app

Drive more purchases from one-time or infrequent buyers

Low LTV

Low purchase frequency

Need to drive incremental revenue

Create a segment of one-time or infrequent buyers and advertise to them with customized messaging

Create a segment of cart abandoners and remind them to finish transacting

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The most popular tactic we are seeing so far is app cross-marketing, when a brand creates an audience of users (or frequent users, or payers) and targets them with advertising for another app. Payers and engagers are the focus here, because these are people that have been shown to be of value to a business. Getting more of their time and attention has good odds of paying out, and the targeting can be done cost- effectively, especially when the app has a large user base.

Second most popular is targeting heavy buyers people who have made more than one transaction. The idea here is to retarget to drive an incremental transaction. And since these people have already demonstrated a willingness to buy using the app, they are great prospects for driving revenue.

Next up is lapsed user and new user reactivation. Here the goal is to get an app top-of-mind with people that had used it in the past, but may have forgotten about it.

Those are the biggest. But we are also hearing and seeing interest in two other use cases. Early lifecycle management, which is about connecting with people in the first hours and days of a consumer engagement, and getting them to use the app on multiple occasions. This often has strong positive effects on lifetime value and in reducing uninstalls and abandons.

Finally, we are fielding inquiries from those who want to target their uninstallers to see if it is possible to lure them back.

All of these tactics involve segmenting users and delivering customized messages. We are also seeing interest in companies trying to improve their lookalike modeling by profiling high value users – like registered users and payers, for those models. It’s early days for this, but intuitively it seems like a great way to use data to improve UA in addition to retention.

Companies with big install bases are the most likely users of retargeting. They have the most potential revenue to gain, and when you have a big install base, your media partner can actually find lots of your users so you can get program scale.

From a category perspective, gaming, retail and travel are the verticals showing the most interest. And when a company has big ticket items for sale, or items with really big profit margins, like IAPs, then retargeting is much easier to make pay out.


Remarketing can be a boon for most app businesses. The key is to measure the potential business impact of the various remarketing objectives available, so that you can choose the tactics that best reflect the best business opportunities for your brand.

Like any marketing plan, your retargeting plan is best served by providing a robust strategic foundation. We hope that this document provides a core framework on which you can build your strategic program.

CONCLUSIONS


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Nichols is VP of Marketing for Apsalar. Jim has 20+ years experience in over 80 different categories, including developing successful positioning and go-to-market plans for more than 40 adtech and martech companies. He joined Apsalar after several years as VP of Marketing for Conversant, where he led various efforts in the successful rebrand of the company from ValueClick, Inc. The rebrand and associated industry attention for the company contributed to the $2.3B sale of Conversant to Alliance Data in December, 2014. He is a prolific writer for digital trades on brand marketing, mobile, video, data, and custom-er profiling. Publications include iMedia Connection, Inside Radio, VentureBeat, ad:tech, ShellyPalmer.com, Jack Myers, and many consumer publications. He holds a B.A. in U.S. History from the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Chicago.

App MediaAttribution andOptimization

Apsalar is the leading mobile app marketing measurement and optimization company that helps app marketers drive maximum return from all their marketing investments. With Apsalar attribution and audiences, app marketers can optimize their media allocation and empower their partners and platforms to deliver customized communications, for better results at every step in the customer journey.

With Apsalar, mobile-first companies get the data, information and insights they need to drive maximum ROI. Apsalar offers powerful and proven solutions that help companies capitalize on many of their biggest app growth opportunities.

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