ayeT-Studios secures public funds “Niedrigschwellige Innovationsförderung”

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ayeT-Studios is happy to announce that it managed to secure public funds in a project application send to the NBank. Title of the project application was:

“Further enhancement of the mobile marketing platform from ayeT-Studios”

We are happy that our application was selected among many others worth supporting and we thank the whole NBank team for supporting us along the application process. The goal of the project is to further enhance the offerwall and the adjacent platform functionalities with a focus on user-based ad serving.

Where are the funds coming from?

The project is funded and supported by the European Fonds For Regional Development (EFRE) and by Stronger Developed Region (SER) by the state Lower Saxony.

Project content

ayeT-Studios was founded in 2014 and has since developed from an app publisher to an advertising platform with the aim of efficiently and programmatically connecting advertisers and publishers.

In early 2018, the ayeT-Studios publisher platform was introduced to offer publishers (app publishers) an advertising-based opportunity to monetize their apps. The first advertising format at that time was the Offerwall. In the following 12 to 18 months, the platform was primarily developed horizontally. In addition to the existing Offerwall, the advertising formats Rewarded Video, Video and Interstitials were added.

The exchange with customers since the beginning of 2018 showed that the individual advertising formats often lacked the technical and functional depth to either fully meet the requirements of the publishers or to keep up with the performance of some market-leading competitors.

Performance comparisons among advertising platforms are often carried out by publishers using KPIs like earnings per click (EPC) or effective cost per million (eCPM). That way publishers can measure the efficiency of monetizing their own inventory (traffic). The goal of the publisher is to sell every impression or click as good as possible. The goal of the advertiser, however, is to buy every user as profitably as possible.

Finding the most efficient solution to this optimization problem is task of the advertising network in order to be attractive for advertisers and publishers.

As part of the application for Niedrigschwellige Innovationsförderung, several work packages were defined to solve this optimization problem. These work packages can be roughly divided into the following main groups:

  • Ad Serving
  • Fraud Prevention
  • New Publisher Features
  • New Advertiser Features

In addition to expanding the functionality for publishers and advertisers (new publisher and advertiser features), the avoidance of inefficiencies, which generally have a negative impact on performance metrics for advertisers and publishers, should be mentioned. Inefficiencies can be avoided in particular if fraud is minimized. For this, a user-based serving of ads is essential.

The contact with customers as well as the analysis of the strongest competitors within the past 12 to 18 months have shown that further vertical development of the platform is the next logical step for ayeT-Studios. The main focus should be to improve the most used advertising format of ayeT-Studios, the Offerwall, as well as working on the expansion of the associated platform functionalities.

 

App Monetization

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China’s “Singles’ Day” Goes Mobile

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What “Black Friday” is for the American market, is called “Singles’ Day” in China. Singles’ Day, originally created for single people by Chinese students in the nineties, has become the biggest online and offline shopping day in the country. Alibaba capitalised on this day and racked up an astounding US$ 25.3 billion (RMB 168.2 billion) through Alipay. This implies an increase in the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by 39% compared to 2016.

Through Alipay, the mobile and online payment system of Alibaba, 90% of the GMV was generated on mobile devices. This shows an increase in mobile sales by about 8% from last year’s 82%. Over the last years, mobile purchases have been increased more and more.

 

The growth of mobile purchases during Singles Day in China (©Alibaba/ayeT-Studios)

Not only are the percentages of mobile purchases ordinary, but the amount of payment transactions is at its peak with 1.48 billion per day, and 256,000 transactions per second as well.
Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba Group says that “more than $25bn of GMV in one day is not just a sales figure. It represents the aspiration for quality consumption of the Chinese consumers, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail.”
This year during the Singles’ Day, there were 60,000 international brands available to Chinese consumers, consumers from 225 countries and regions have completed transactions. There were 167 merchants generating more than RMB100 million in sales, 17 merchants surpassed RMB500 million (US$75.4 million) in sales, and 6 merchants surpassed RMB1 billion (US$150.9 million) in sales.
From these numbers it is only a matter of time until Singles’ Day will be a worldwide shopping event.

How to do App Marketing

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To attract the attention of potential users for your app or mobile game, you have to market it. In this article, we will introduce you to effective app marketing strategies and explain them thoroughly.

Ways to Market Your App or Mobile Game

To get started, we collected a few strategies – both free and paid – in this overview:

Free Options Paid Options
  • App Store Optimization
  • Social Media & Landing Pages
  • App Review & Promotion Sites
  • Blogs
  • Media Kit & Press
  • Ad Networks
    • Incent / Non-Incent Campaigns
    • Various Combinations of Ad Formats & Bidding Types
  • Influencer Marketing

Overview of effective free and paid app marketing strategies © ayeT-Studios

For more detailed insight on these methods, read our article about the basics of effective app promotion.

Special Options to Market an Android or iOS App

Besides the general strategies, we want to introduce you to some strategies that specifically apply to both Android and iOS apps.

Android App Marketing

Connect your marketing campaign with Google Adwords! This online advertising tool by Google lets you promote products via various ad formats, displayed on different channels. You can promote Android apps with it, too.

There are two campaign types you can choose from:

Universal App Campaign

This option enables you to promote Android apps via different ad formats and on several networks available by Google. Text and visual elements are taken from your app’s app store page (one more reason for ASO).

This campaign type is based on a CPI bidding system, meaning you can choose how much you are willing to pay for users installing or opening your Android app. This way, you can promote your Android app and increase your marketing budget if the results are satisfying.

Mobile App Installs Campaign

With such campaigns you only target one network to generate app installs. Depending on the specific campaign model, you can choose between CPA, CPV, and CPI as your bidding option to promote your Android app.

There are three different campaign models, each of them targeting another network:

  • Display network app installs campaigns (text or image app install ads)
  • Search network app installs campaigns (text app installs ads on)
  • TrueView for app installs campaigns (video ads on YouTube)

According to your Android app promotion strategy and your target audience, you can select the campaign type that best fits your needs. With Google’s bidding system, you can adjust it to your current marketing budget. Click here for more information about mobile app installs campaigns with Google AdWords.

iOS App Marketing

Apple offers two options for your app marketing:

Search Ads

With Search Ads, iOS app developers are able to place their app on top of search results. Since more than half of app downloads are generated through search in the App Store, this is one great opportunity to promote your iOS app more effectively.

With its self-service dashboard, creating a Search Ad campaign is very easy. There is no minimum spend for it and costs only incur when users tap the ad. Apple has set a bidding system for this feature, which makes it possible to set a price according to your current budget.

In combination with ASO, you can take advantage of your app’s information (e.g. description) and graphics (e.g. screenshots) through “Search Match”. This feature takes metadata of the app from the App Store for your iOS app marketing. You can also either use keyword recommendations made by Apple or select keywords on your own, just like Google AdWords. It is not possible to change the ad creative, this data will only be taken from your metadata.

Furthermore, relevance is more important than bidding regarding apps being displayed via Search Ads. Here, Apple again shows that it prefers high-quality to monetization. Hence, when you’ve already done a great job with your ASO, you can draw on it.

Check out Apple’s website for more detailed information.

Apple’s Editorial Choice

This is no direct promotion tool for app developers but it may attract them to create the best app possible. Apple’s editors choose great iOS apps continually that are displayed in these special sections of the App Store – so Apple will promote your iOS app.

Next to its appearance, features and quality, your app can also get the chance to be placed by lowering its price for a limited time. So, consider offering a discount from time to time.

Rewarded vs. Non-Incent App Marketing

If you want use app Marketing to push the quantity of installs for an app, there are different ways to do so. You can buy installs and choose between incentivized and non-incentivized types, meaning:

  • Users will either receive a reward for installing your application (incentivized) or
  • they will download your app out of true interest and without being rewarded (non-incentivized).

Both types have different advantages and disadvantages.

Incentivized

In general, you can choose between two app promotion strategies when driving incentivized installs for your app. One of them is based on the amount of installs generated in a certain time whereas the other one considers the loyalty of your users.

Advantages and Disadvantages

As mentioned before, one advantage is the number of installs you can generate in a small period of time and the resulting boost of rank. Another important factor you should keep in mind is the cost for each kind of install:

The CPI (=cost per install) for incentivized installs is way cheaper than that of an app promotion strategy only based on non-incentivized ones. The downside of incentivized installs is that users might download and install your app only for the reward, resulting in less user engagement, lower lifetime value and smaller retention rates.

Non-Incentivized

The advantage on one side is the disadvantage on the other: Since users won’t receive a reward for installing your app, you have higher costs in order to generate the same amount of installs of an an incentivized campaign. If you’ve just started your app business, this could take a big chunk of your marketing budget.

Conclusion

Now, the most important question needs to be asked: Which type of install is suitable for your app promotion strategy?
Can you choose a method where you only deal with the benefits and leave the drawbacks behind?

  • Take advantage of both of them. The mixture of rewarded and non-incent installs helps your app marketing strategy gather pace up and your app will climb up the charts.

App Marketing Campaigns

The main goal of app marketing is to acquire new users but there are various ways to advertise an app. These not only differ due according to the ad format, but also according to who is carrying the risk – the publisher or the advertiser?

Install Campaigns

With this app marketing campaign type the advertiser pays the publisher for every generated install (CPI). The install can be rewarded for the user or be of non-incentivized nature. If the advertiser wants the campaign to be incentivized, he/she can expect the download rates to be very high. Users install the app in order to get the reward.

For the publisher, incentivized installs are quite interesting, because they only want to deliver installs and do not care about what happens after the installation. For marketers, non-incentivized installs are more promising because a targeted group of users downloaded the app of their own interest. This results in higher retention rates and consequently a higher revenue for the developer of the app.

So, the difference between rewarded and non-rewarded installs also underlines the shifting of the carried risk between marketer and publisher. Rewarded installs pose a low risk for publishers but a high risk for the advertiser. Non-incent installs imply a high risk for the publisher, (as it is not clear what percentage of his/her audience will install the advertised app) and low risk for the publisher.

Action Campaigns

Action campaigns offer a reward to the user, as there is always an objective the user has to fulfill. This mobile campaign type allows the advertisers to spend budget only if the user has fulfilled a specific action in their app. Like that, he/she gets to know the product a bit better and might continue to use it. Although the risk for the advertiser is the same as with incentivized install campaigns, the audience of the publisher might only take the action to get the reward.

Mobile Video Campaigns

From a marketing point of view, videos as advertisements are very unique because it is so versatile to monetize and to calculate the bid. What advertisers should know first: a study showed, that 71% of mobile game players think that video ads are the preferred way to “pay” for an app.

When using video ads, marketers can also choose to reward users or to leave it non-incentivized. The possibility to choose the right bid-type is what makes it special.

The three main bid-types are Cost Per Install (CPI), Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per View (CPV).

Here, the model cost per install is used in the same way as in the install campaign. CPI video ads can be both rewarded and non-incentivized: the advertiser pays the publisher for delivered installs. The CPC bid-type only pays the user when he/she interacts with the ad and gets directed to a landing of a mobile browser or the page of an app store. As the action of clicking implies less work for the user than installing an app, the reward is a bit smaller. This can also mean that the user interacting with the video is generally interested in the product. The same applies to non-rewarded video ads. With this mobile campaign type, the publisher carries the risk and the advertiser only pays when a user interacts with the ad.

Non-Incent Video Ads

In terms of incent video ads, you have various options of implementing them in your app marketing strategy. You can either:

  • place them in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google or some video-focused ad networks,
  • place them before, within or after a video on YouTube,
  • include them on your app’s website or landing page or
  • create videos for your app store page.

With all these methods, you are able to give more detailed insight into the functions and benefits of your app. If you create a professional and compelling video, it might just convince users of downloading your app!

Rewarded Video Ads

A rewarded video is short video clip, on average 15 to 30 seconds long, that is non-skippable and designed for in-app environments. It offers users a reward in return for watching the video, though the download itself is the user’s choice. Thereby, it represents a mixture of incent and non-incent advertising.

That is not the only feature of rewarded videos: they also provide huge advantages for both the user and the advertiser and benefit them alike! On the user’s side, they interact with this ad format by choice since rewarded videos are fully opt-in. Users only have to watch the video if they want to receive the reward. Hence, this format doesn’t disrupt the user experience but increases user engagement with the advertisement. On the developer’s side, this last point is very important: higher engagement rates also mean increasing revenue and higher viewability rates for advertisers. This interplay of both sides allows advertisers to monetize their app through advertisements without disturbing the experience for the user.

There are many more campaign types you can use to market your app, click here for more information.

App Marketing Costs and Budget

Knowing how to calculate your budget is crucial when wanting to conduct successful app marketing. First, you should select your key performance indicators (KPI) upon what you would like to achieve with your app. Following, we are going to present to you some of the most common calculations that you can use to calculate your budget for your user acquisition strategy.

Cost Per Install

The cost per install (CPI) measures the app marketing costs for ads that trigger an installation of your app. CPI varies a lot according to the ad formats you use. If you are using non-incent banner ads, you will most likely pay more for each install than when buying downloads via an incentivized offerwall. If you use an incentivized offerwall you can calculate very precisely how many installs you will get for a certain amount of money.

Cost per install - User Acquisition

Cost Per Acquisition

This simple yet interesting formula helps you calculate app marketing costs because you can measure very clearly how effective your marketing efforts are. It is not limited to a specific model like CPI or CPAU.

For the mobile advertising industry, this pricing type is more commonly used for setting actions like completing a tutorial, reaching a certain level, registering an account or subscribing a newsletter.

Cost Per Active User

The cost per active user measures the app marketing costs for reaching users that will use your app actively. Every company needs to define for themselves what ‘active’ means. In this case, you might also hear the term ‘retention rate’.

calculation of the cost per active user

Average Revenue Per User

The average revenue per user is the amount of revenue each of your active customers (on average) contributes in a specific period of time.

calculation of the avereage revenue per user

There are many more KPIs to optimize your app marketing strategy. Click here to get the full overview.

App Marketing Solutions

In this section of the article, we want to introduce and explain app marketing solutions that we developed for our customers.

Programmatic Buying

With Real Time Bidding (RTB), you can buy ad spaces like mobile banners, interstitials, and mobile video in real time via OpenRTB protocol.

The OpenRTB compliant ayeT-Studios DSP is the most versatile programmatic and managed supply source for precise and targeted buying of inventory. Our demand side platform comes with integrated programmatic and managed supply sources from thousands of publishers.

IAB Ad Unit Standards

Since our services fully support the IAB standards, ayeT-Studios can guarantee access to premium, brand-safe inventory across all supply sources. Since we are compatible with HTML5, Vast and VPAID 2.0, you can take full control of your media buying and maximize flexibility of where your ads can be served.

Data Driven Optimization

Rely on our data-driven approach and proprietary optimization algorithms to improve your advertising outcomes. Our algorithms will optimize your campaigns based on massive amounts of historic data, new data processed on a daily basis and a combination of multiple data points in order to make informed predictions, on which users will most likely show the highest interest for your ad and consequently result in a conversion.

In particular, all technical data points, such as the device model, operating system, location, and time, will be intelligently weighted, thereby enabling precise addressing of target audiences and informed decisions to buy inventory on a real time basis.

Fraud Prevention

We prevent your ad spend from possible fraud with the help of proprietary technology, strong partners, and a dedicated team.

We combine automated real-time data analysis and hands-on examination of accumulated historical data by our experts to identify abnormalities and fight publisher fraud. That way, we provide the highest level of security for your media buying. Additionally, you can monitor your performance and data in real-time with our dashboard.

In detail, we fight fraud by:

  • Measuring performance discrepancies
  • Using third party ad tracking
  • Detecting non-human traffic (NHT)
  • Monitoring statistical indicators
  • Built-in proprietary technology to:
    • Analyse abnormal user behavior
    • Measure unexpected CTR/CR ratios
    • Detect abnormalities in traffic quality in real-time
    • Examine suspicious performance distribution

ayeT-Studios Dashboard

With our self-serving dashboard, we can provide our customers with full control over their media buying and marketing outcomes. You just have to setup a campaign by choosing a campaign type like install campaigns, engagement campaigns, banner ads or mobile video. If you want to target a specific audience, you can set granular data like targeting location, language, device, OS type and more. To guarantee a fully transparent campaign performance, we cooperate with third party tracking providers Appsflyer, Tune, Adjust or Kochava. Furthermore, with our dashboard, you can react to real-time reports fast and optimize across all supply channels.

To sum up all the advantages of our dashboard:

  • Self-serve capabilities
  • Real-time reporting
  • Buy from ad exchanges and premium publishers
  • Manage and optimize all your ad campaigns with ease
  • Optimize across all supply sources
  • Precise targeting
  • Integrated third party tracking
  • Multiple bid types available

How to Market Your App Effectively

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If you’ve developed and published an app in the app stores, you’ve probably realized that you need to market your app in order to be succesful. In this blogpost, we will give an overview of how you can market your app the right way.

Where Should You Market Your Mobile App?

At first you have to make up your mind about which platform your app is published on and which service you want to use to market it?

iOS vs. Android

If you developed your app for both Android and iOS, on which platform should you start to market your app?

Keep in mind that iOS app marketing is more expensive than Android app marketing. Additionally, consider that iOS users are willing to spend more money for apps than Android users.

On the other hand, you need to be sure that only 12,5% of all smartphones operate with iOS whereas Android stands for more than 80% of the market share.

Which Services Should You Use to Market Your App?

There are quite a few service providers that can help you get off to the right start. In order for you to spend your money wisely, you should first consider where you need professional help the most.

User Acquisition Through Ad Networks

In order to push your app in the app store you can consider buying downloads of your app. There are two ways of doing that: Non-incentive and incentive.
Ad networks make sure that the product being advertised and the publishing site fit together, adding authenticity to the advertisement.

Building Your Own Brand

To make your app well known among potential users, you need to build your own brand for the app.
You can do that by creating an informative website that tells users what the app can do, why they should use it and how they can use it.
Of course, you should also include a link to the app store and your contact information.
This leads to another important step: Create your own social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.
The benefits of them can be found here.

How Should You Market Your Mobile App?

Before planning your app marketing campaign, you need to set up your budget. To calculate your budget, you have to know different operating numbers.

Two very important key figures are the Cost per Active User (CPAU) and the Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). With these numbers you know what it costs to acquire a user and the user’s worth for your app.

Paid App Marketing

When first starting your app you can’t be sure about your apps key metrics:

  • What is your average retention rate?
  • How much will an active user really cost you?
  • And how much money will he generate on average in his lifespan?

There are two ways of paid app marketing: the incentive app marketing and the non-incentive app marketing. Even though these two ways of market your app are
very different, both can be used at the same time.

We are recognized as a top Paid Media & Pay Per Click Company on DesignRush.

Incentive App Marketing

If you make use of the incentive app marketing, you will reward users for downloading and opening your app. Typical rewards could be giveaways, discount codes or upgrades on the game.

Incentive app marketing is an affordable way for new app providers to advertise, even if you have a small budget. You can even set a budget for a specific period of time and when the funds have been used up, the campaign stops and you will be notified.
Incentive app marketing is a tool to reach a great amount of potential users. Nevertheless, it is crucial to know that many users might only install the app to receive the award and delete it shortly after.

Therefore, the retention rate will be much lower compared to non-incentivized app marketing campaigns. This is a crucial piece of important information for calculating your budget.

Non-Incentive App Marketing

When a user decides to download an app out of interest, it is called non-incentive app marketing. Typical tools of non-incentive app marketing are banner advertisement, app reviews, social media marketing, influencer marketing or even offline marketing.

Non-incentive app marketing reaches an exact group of users that are already interested in your kind of app.

Compared to incentive app marketing, the amount of users being reached is relatively small, but the users are more likely to continue using your app, hence the retention rate will be higher compared to incentive app marketing.

In order to reach high-quality users and a huge group of users, a mixture of both incentive and non-incentive app marketing is the key.

More on this topic can be found in this article.

Social Media App Marketing

If you want to acquire a broad and high quality audience, you can contact an influencer on the social media. The influencer takes the role of a testimonial, who actively promotes your app on his/her various social media channels.

The benefit of this kind of marketing is that the influencer’s followers have a high amount of trust in their idol. They trust the influencer when he/she recommends an app and are therefore more likely to download the app as soon as possible. Possible influencers are YouTubers, Bloggers or Instagram-Stars.

Of course, you should also create your own social media channels, for example on Facebook or Twitter, and make sure that you spread the word about you app. Like this, you do not have to invest much time to start social media app marketing.

What Are the Best Ways to Market an App?

There are plenty of ways to market your app. What kind of app marketing you choose depends on your app, your company and the market you operate in.

It is always a good idea not to focus too much on only one way of app marketing, but instead to combine different tools to reach as many potential users as possible.

Furthermore, it is important to develop an app marketing strategy that is authentic.

Of course, your budget always plays a big role as well. Hence, you should always compare the CPAU for every channel to check if the chosen channel is worthwhile and necessary for your campaign. Likewise, it is important that the costs are lower than your CLTV.

If you want your app to be successful in the crowded market, you will need a great app marketing strategy. AyeT-Studios can you help you to plan such a campaign customized for your specific app and your needs.

The Most Common Mobile Campaign Types

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Wherever you go, mobile follows! Since the daily screen time is shifting more and more in the direction of mobile devices, advertisers and marketers need to spend their marketing budget on campaigns especially for mobile devices. In the following post, we want to give you a general overview of the types of mobile campaigns.

User Acquisition

User acquisition is an important factor for app marketers and developers. There are are various ways how to advertise an app and to calculate the budget for different campaigns.

Install Campaigns (CPI)

Install campaigns are the easiest to understand: The advertiser pays the publisher for every install generated (Cost Per Install / CPI). In general, the install result in a rewarded for the user or be non-incentivized. Should the advertiser want the campaign to be incentivized, he/she can expect the download rates to be very high because users mostly install the app in order to get a reward. For the publisher, incentivized installs are quite interesting, because they only want to deliver installs and do not care what happens after the install. For marketers, non-incentivized installs are more interesting because a (probably) targeted group of users downloaded the app following their own interest. This implies a higher retention rate and thus more revenue for the developer of the app. To conclude, the difference between rewarded and non-incentivized installs reaches as far as the shifting of risk with regard to marketer and publisher. Rewarded installs equate to a low risk for the publisher but high risk for the advertiser. Non-incent installs equate to a high risk for the publisher, (as it is not clear what percentage of his/her audience will install the advertised app) and low risk for the publisher.

Action Campaigns (CPA)

Action campaigns are always rewarded for the user, as there is an objective, which has to be fulfilled. The reward could be an extra life for a game or virtual currency for a reward app. This type of mobile campaign allows the advertisers to spend budget only if the user completed a specific action in their app. This leads to the user getting to know the product a bit better, increasingthe chances for continued use. As with the incentivized install campaigns, there is a risk for the advertiser: the audience of the publisher might only take the specified action to get the reward. However, as there is a specific action to be fulfilled and the user gets to know the app better, the retention rate is mostly higher than with standard CPI.

Mobile Video

Videos are THE ad format to meet the needs of app developers and users equally. What makes them so unique and efficient for both parties?

From a marketing point of view, videos as advertisements are very unique because it is so versatile to monetize and to calculate the bid. What advertisers should know first: a study showed, that 71% of mobile game players think that video ads are the preferred way to “pay” for an app.
When using video ads, marketers can also choose to reward users or to leave it non-incentivized. The possibility to choose the right bid-type is what makes it special.

The three main bid-types are Cost Per Install (CPI), Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per View (CPV). Cost Per Install is used in the same way as in the “Install Campaign”. CPI video ads can be both, rewarded and non-incentivized: the advertisers pay the publisher for installs delivered. The CPC bid-type only rewards the user when he/she interacts with an add and gets directed to a landing of a mobile browser or the page of an app store. As the action of clicking means less work for the user than installing an app, the reward is mostly a bit smaller. However, this can also imply that the user interacting with the video is generally interested in the product. Non-rewarded video ads behave similarly. With this mobile campaign type, the publisher carries the risk and the advertiser only pays when a user is interacting with the ad.

Display Ad Campaigns

Display ads like banners and interstitials are the oldest advertising formats on mobile devices and have their roots in real life advertising. The bid type is CPM (Cost Per Mille) and non-incentivized for the users. Hence, the advertiser pays the publisher for every 1000 times the ad is displayed in his/her app or website. The better the targeting is, the higher the CPM will be.

Lead Generation Campaigns

To get in contact with an audience and to reach out to users’ personal devices is very important for brands and companies. To generate these leads, there are two main campaign types: sign up-campaigns and purchase campaigns. To get more detailed information, click here.

Sign Up Campaigns

Sign up campaigns are used to subscribe user to the newsletter of an advertiser or let them create an account on their website. This means the growth of the customer base and turning them into loyal, returning customers. The bid type for this mobile campaign type is Cost Per Lead (CPL) as the publisher gets paid for every subscription or other lead the advertiser chooses. So, like with install campaigns, the publishers carries most of the risk, as he need to generate leads in order to get payed. The campaigns can be rewarded or non-incentivized.

Purchase Campaigns

It’s another possibilty to let the user make a purchase directly on the site of the publisher. The bid type is Cost Per Order/Cost Per Sale (CPO/CPS). Advertisers can use this campaign type to bring attention to a certain product or to deliver on sales targets. This type of campaign may also be rewarded, for example with a discount or special sale. All in all, the publisher has the risk as he/she only gets paid when the user actually makes a purchase. For the advertiser, this campaign type is interesting because it is very easy to calculate the revenue of this mobile campaign type.

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing on mobile devices is crucial when trying to achieve brand awareness. As mobile devices dominate our daily lives, they are the perfect hotbed to make your brand famous. Brand marketing on mobile devices is mostly done with the help of display campaigns like banners, interstitials and mobile videos. Social media is also an important factor to generate brand awareness. The ad-formats for brand marketing were mentioned in the previous article. These are banners, videos and intersitials. As the advertiser wants to drive awareness for a brand in general and not a product, these ads are mostly non-incentivized. For the advertiser, it can be enough if the audience just recognizes the brand’s existence.

Retargeting

A very interesting field of mobile marketing is retargeting, because the target users are based on previous actions they made on the internet. If a user was on a website or previously saw a certain offer, his/her device will be marked with the help of a cookie. The advertiser can then show his advertisements to the user on other websites via an ad exchange. Oftentimes, retargeting is used when a customer has seen a product or an app, but did not buy/install it. It is mostly combined with less expensive ad formats (like banner ads) to significantly increase the conversions. It has been shown that creatives implemented with a call-to-action (CTA) are even more successful in converting visitors of a website to customers.

With the help of ayeT-Studios, you can choose from all different campaign types to generate users, leads, purchases or even brand awareness. Try it for free!

 

 

 

 

Why You Should Use Rewarded Videos!

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Rewarded Videos are THE ad format to meet the needs of app developers and users equally. What makes them so unique and efficient from both points of view?

Let’s find out!

What Is Special About Rewarded Videos?

A rewarded video is a short video clip, on average 15 to 30 seconds long, which is designed for in-app environments and of non-skippable nature. It offers users a reward in return for watching the video, although the download itself is the user’s choice. Thereby, it represents a mixture of incent and non-incent advertising.

That’s not the only feature of rewarded videos: they also provide huge advantages for both the user and the advertiser! On the user’s side, interaction with this ad format is by choice since rewarded videos are fully opt-in. Users only have to watch videos if they want to receive rewards. Hence, this format doesn’t disrupt the user experience but increases user engagement with the advertisement. On the developer’s side, the previous point is very important: higher engagement rates also cause increasing revenue and higher viewability rates for advertisers. This interplay of both sides allows advertisers to monetize their app with advertisements and without disturbing the experience for the user.

That’s the theory behind the advantages of rewarded videos. Let’s see, if users actually interact with rewarded videos and don’t feel disturbed by them.

How are Users Reacting to Rewarded Videos?

Last year, the study “In-Game Advertising the Right Way: Monetize, Retain, Engage” disclosed how rewarded videos can help developers monetize their app and drive up user engagement. For that, over 2,000 mobile game developers and players were surveyed. In the following, we want to summarize the findings of this study.

  1. Players said, oftentimes they choose rewarded videos to pay for an item within the game like virtual currency, boosters or game lifes.
  2. Users prefer rewarded videos instead of fullscreen-pictures, banners and interstitial videos.
  3. Almost 80% of all players are willing to engage with rewarded videos in return for a reward: 18% said always, 44% said sometimes and 16% said rarely. Only 22% chose never as their answer.
  4. Just one of 10 app developers saw their retention drop: on average, it increased by 39% and decreased by 9%.
  5. With retention, the amount of revenue increased for many developers simultaneously. 52% of developers regard rewarded video ads as the biggest source of revenue in comparison to other advertising formats.
  6. For 86% of all developers, rewarded videos did not have any negative effect on in-app purchases. On average, 14% of users spent less, 16% spent more and the remaining 70% paid the same as before.

Best Practices for Rewarded Videos

Finally, we want to give you a few tips for using rewarded video ads to their full potential and to your full advantage.

Placement and Frequency

Place your ad where it is directly visible for the user! It should strike his/her attention so that he/she won’t oversee it. In addition, it is advisable to display a rewarded video from time to time but not too often. The keyword we’re looking for is “Frequency Capping”: the user should not assume that the ads will be displayed in every session or after every level. Instead, it should be something special for him/her if it shows up randomly in the game. By that, he/she will understand the value of the rewards he/she receives and be more willing to buy them later on. Thereby, rewarded videos are supposed to increase in-app purchases. However, the value of the video rewards shouldn’t exceed that of the in-app purchases. For that reason, ensuring that every user sees a limited amount of rewarded videos is also a part of frequency capping.

Value and Immediate Utility

The reward, which a user receives for watching the ad, should be helpful and beneficial for the game flow. This can be the respective virtual currency of the game, an additional life or useful power-ups. Additionally, the user should be able to utilize his reward immediately, e.g. to complete a nearly lost game level successfully. Like that, he could revive his avatar or get additional moves, in a game like Candy Crush. Thus, they also have the opportunity to reach a new personal high score through rewarded videos.

All in all, rewarded videos are a great format to engage users and to ensure they won’t leave your app if they are stuck at a specific point!

Pay Per Engagement

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There are many possible pricing models you can choose from to pay for mobile advertising campaigns. Since we already talked about CPI, in this article, we will address another common pricing model: Pay per Engagement.

What is Pay per Engagement?

Generally, there is no clear definition for this campaign type. Though traditionally, it is oftentimes viewed as a combination of two pricing models: CPA (Cost Per Action) and CPC (Cost Per Click). In this context, the term “engagement” signifies any interaction of the user with the displayed ad. At that, possible engagements range from closing the ad to stopping it from playing a video. Therefore, most advertisers define a specific action within the app as the engagement they want to pay for, for example clicking the ad.

The trigger for this campaign idea is the theory that the hardest advertising task is to gain the attention of a (potential) user or customer. Nowadays, cost per engagement is synonymously used with CPA: You set an action or engagement goal for the user upon which completion you have to pay the publisher.

How to Calculate Your Pay per Engagement

To calculate how much you have to pay for users to fulfill a specific action in your app, use this formula:

Calculation of cost per engagement

In detail, your total advertising spend is the amount of money you spent on ads that are supposed to trigger certain engagements. Then, you have to divide this value by the total number of engagements and interactions with specific content you measure at the end of your campaign. These interactions can vary from clicking on or expanding an ad or liking and sharing content.

The Best Ad Format for Engagement Campaigns

Advertisers who want to acquire high quality users should combine engagement campaigns with offerwalls. An offerwall is a display of various app advertisements that give users rewards in return for a specific action. For many developers, this action is simply downloading the app – although that often leads to low-quality users.

However, engagement campaigns encourage users to try the offered app by only rewarding those, who e.g. reach level 2 in the game. Like that, it is easier for users to find an app they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise in the app stores. Besides, engagement campaigns are very cost effective: you only pay for the users who actually fulfill the demanded action. Imagine: you create an offerwall campaign on a CPE basis and set the action on reaching level 5 of your game. Admittedly, you will see lots of users who install the app since it offers a reward – but you don’t have to pay for all of them! Only for those who actually interact with your app long enough to reach level 5.

For this reason, an offerwall and pay per engagement complement each other perfectly: the offerwall brings many users to the app but is lacking in quality, while CPE provides less but high-quality users.

Pay per Engagement Campaigns at ayeT-Studios

App based engagement campaigns are a special ad format offer by ayeT-Studios. Different to CPI, advertisers don’t pay for the install but for the actual engagement time of the user. Therefore, the users get a reward when they engage continuously with your app, which increases engagement significantly. We call this Rewarded Engagement Time.

Your advantages: You don’t need any third-party tracking due to our own tracking technology. Additionally, the maximum bid you set determines how long a user will be rewarded for engaging with the app. Furthermore, we will refund any remaining budget to your campaign, if a user doesn’t deplete it within 30 days.

 

What is Pay Per Install?

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There are many possible pricing models you can choose to pay for mobile advertising campaigns. In this article, we will explain a very common pricing model: pay per install, also known as CPI.

The pay per install model is a common pricing model for mobile marketing and advertising campaigns. It is also well-known under the term cost per install and the abbreviation CPI.

Cost-per-install is one of the many metrics, by which people measure their advertising budget. The advertiser only pays the ad network once the app is installed instead of just the advert being viewed (known as the CPM, or cost-per-mille, model). The difficulty is that ad networks have to address the right audience and place the ad in environments where conversion rates are high.

Generally, CPI campaigns belong to the world of mobile marketing as they are unique for mobile apps. In detail, app developers or specifically advertisers can place ads across various types of media to popularize their app. The goal is to convince consumers of installing the application they are advertising. At this, the advertiser only has to pay a set rate when a user actually installs the app.

How can I Calculate the Costs for a Campaign?

The general formula for calculating your pay per install is quite easy to apply. You divide your overall ad spend by the number of times your app was installed because of that campaign.

Cost per install - User Acquisition

Since an install of the app is more valuable than a simple impression, the costs are consequently higher. Sometimes about $3, although that depends on the platform (iOS/Android), the kind of app and the type of advert (e.g. interstitials, banners etc.).

Which CPI Campaign Types are Available?

Install campaigns can be realised through the bid type CPI and we generally distinguish between incent and non-incent campaigns.

Incent Install Campaigns

With the incent version, users get a reward for the download of an app and the advertiser only pays for the completed install.

Incent install campaigns are preferably realised through offerwalls. An offerwall is a mobile ad format which displays different apps and offers users a reward in return for downloading the app.

Non-Incent Install Campaigns

Here, you create a banner ad, for example from the creatives of the app, and place it within other apps for users to see. At that, the user won’t get a reward for installing the app – they rather decide to try it out of curiosity.

Although this campaign type leads to less installs, they are of high-quality since the user interacts more frequently with the app. However, non-incent campaigns are often more expensive than incent campaigns and you have to plan a bigger budget.

CPI Campaigns at ayeT-Studios

Besides these standard CPI campaigns, we also offer special campaign types for our customers.

High Retention Install Campaigns

When you buy app downloads the user has to keep your app for at least three days before getting a reward. Thereby, your retention rate and consequently your Apple App Store or Google Play Store ranking improves significantly.

Managed Install Campaigns

With our managed campaigns, you get country targeted installs with high volumes within three days. This service includes our media buying experts, who tend to every aspect of your campaign and leverage various traffic sources that match your individual requirements. Additionally, we will optimize your campaign constantly to improve your ad spending.

If you are looking for a burst campaign to place your app at the top of Google’s or Apple’s Store charts, this is the right campaign type for you.

Mobile Lead Generation

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As the importance of mobile devices is growing and growing, the necessity for completely optimized landing pages and creatives is undeniable.

In the following, you will learn about what kind of campaign types you can use to generate leads and the details of taking care of the campaigns.

What is special about the creatives to generate mobile leads:

When thinking about generating mobile leads, you are trying to interact with the users on their personal devices. Here are some tipps on how the creatives should look and behave.

1. Everything on the page should be interactive

As users navigate on mobile devices with their fingers, the content on your page should be interactive. If you have graphical assets on your page, they should all lead the user to a specific destination. Even the background of a picture could lead to a landing page.

2. Do not hide content behind hover events or triggers

Make yourself clear: users do not have a mouse, which makes it different for them to navigate. Mobile device users do not have the option to “hover” over content and engage with it. Mobile users can merely “tap” (the equivalent to a mouse click). As a consequence, do not hide content behind any hovering creatives when designing them for mobile devices.

3. Reduce the amount of form fields for mobile devices

If you plan to generate newsletter subscriptions or to get on any other personal user data, keep in mind how the user fills in the mandatory fields. As it takes a bit longer to fill out forms on mobile devices, you should reduce them to a minimum. You could for example combine the “first name” and the “last name” field to a “full name” field, or leave some fields out like date of birth or company name.

4. Use alternate calls to action

You have to rethink the way your calls to action are set up. An obvious lead for a smartphone could be the initiation of a phone call. However, try to bring a variety of CTAs in your content, like a link to a social media platform. As the screen of mobile devices is smaller than the screen of desktop computers, users have to scroll much more to view it completely. So you have to show the CTA more frequently to generate the same amount of leads.

5. The order of content is more important on mobile devices

On the screen of mobile devices, content can only be viewed vertically. This means you really have to bring it in a very easy-to-understand order.
We suggest the following order:

  • Introduce yourself – Company slogan/logo at the beginning
  • What is the purpose of the content?
  • Why should the user do what you are suggesting?

Conclusion

There are so many things to have in mind when designing a creative for mobile devices. All the suggestions we gave you before are just the tip of the iceberg, and the mobile world is changing constantly with increasing speed. You have to be brave enough to test new ideas, adapt and evolve alongside your mobile customers.

Which campaign types and cost models can you choose from?

Since you now know how a creative for mobile lead generation should appear, we want to introduce to you the campaign and bid types an advertiser can choose from. In general, lead means to achieve three things: a subscription for a newsletter, an account creation and/or a purchases.

Subscription Campaign

Subscription campaigns on mobile devices can be rewarded or non-incentivized. The advertiser can choose from many different possibilities for approaching the user. This could be a banner, an interstitial, a piece of rich media content or many others. In most cases the bid type for subscription campaigns is CPL (Cost per Lead), so the advertiser only pays the publisher if a predefined lead is completed. This reduces the risks for the advertiser as he only pays when a marketing goal is completed, and raises the risks of the publisher because he might have to display the advertisement several times until a user is converted and he gets paid. This results in a higher price than campaigns using cost models like Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per View. You can leverage the traffic of a CPL campaign when incentivizing it. This could be the set-up of an account, an extra life in game, or something else a (potential) customer could benefit from. You can expect to generate more leads when incentivizing the user, but other relevant KPIs like retention rate or Customer Lifetime Value won’t be as high as the KPIs of leads generated by non-incent leads.

Purchase Campaign

The ultimate goal for most companies is to generate purchases. Purchase campaigns and subscription campaigns are very much alike in their appearance. The bid type for this campaign is CPP/CPS (Cost Per Purchase/Cost Per Sale). The advertiser only pays the publisher, if a customer completes a purchase. This campaign type makes it very easy for the advertiser to calculate the revenue. It also tends to be quite expensive because the publisher/marketer has to target very precisely the right audience or display the ad often enough to generate purchases. To make this worth their while, advertisers have to invest a bit more, but they can also incentivize the campaign to drive even more awareness for a specific product or deliver on sales targets. A combination of a subscription campaign and a purchase campaign could be realized, if the advertiser gives a (future) customer a discount for a purchase if he/she subscribes to the newsletter.

With the help of ayeT-Studios, you can be sure to reach the right audience and get many newsletter subscriptions, account set-ups or even purchases. In our dashboard you can choose from incent and non-incent campaigns. Try it for free now!