The Rules of Mobile Attraction: Why Apple and Google Are Drawn to Become More Similar

Two households, both alike in dignity…

In the current raging game of phones, it has until now been rather easy for everyone to pick a side between Apple and Google, depending on design, philosophical affinities, love of customizability or simply need for monetization.

The distinction is particularly striking when it comes to app store regulations, where the permissive Google Play faces a stringent Apple AppStore. This split has a large part of its roots in the way both companies and their respective stores handle their mobile ecosystem: Apple keeps an iron grasp on its App Store developer policy, while Google applies more lenient rules in order to foster the Play Store’s diversity and reach.

This state of things between the two California giants has at least one merit: when picking a platform, you know what you are in for.

However, recent news on both sides brings a rather striking shade of grey over this great divide.

On Apple’s side:

Recent reports show that the Cupertino firm has altered the App Store Top Chart ranking algorithm, putting more emphasis on user ratings and engagement (such as time spent, day 2 opens, ongoing opens etc.). This moves the App Store closer to the Google Play ranking model, where the uninstall rate is allegedly as important as the number and velocity of downloads. Other observers report that Apple is experimenting with changing the interval with which the ranks are updated from every 15 minutes to every 3 hours.

These changes make it trickier to execute burst campaigns on iOS, and therefore more advantageous to acquire engaged and loyal users.

On Google’s side:

The Mountain View firm recently changed its developer policy, becoming much more stringent on several points:

• Developers must now use Google Play’s in-app billing system for the purchase of virtual goods or currencies instead of third-party payment solutions. This will in particular impact third-party enablers (e.g. for carrier billing).
• Google extended its restriction in the abusive use of keywords from description only to title and metadata as well (we suppose it was the case before, but they now added it explicitly).
• The biggest blow, however, goes to developers making changes to the user’s device outside of their own app, such as placing new icons, shortcuts, bookmarks or sending system-level push notifications redirecting to other apps. These tactics are often used to drive downloads for third-party apps and thereby add an extra layer of monetization for developers.

Summing up: tightening control over the payment system, app store marketing assets, or what can be done or shown at the operating system level … rings a bell?

Rules of attraction

Like in any relationship (love or hate – take your pick), you end up improving yourself by learning from the other and eventually becoming more similar.

Apple, by switching its top rank mechanism onto engagement indicators, shows it’s addressing the App Store’s discoverability issue and embracing the trend for a more qualitative and regulated user acquisition market where quality matters as much – if not more – as quantity.

Google, by tightening the grip on its developer and publisher ecosystem, shows it intends to regain control over its own turf, especially in the battle for monetization, where it has recently been catching up on its nemesis. And, as it has learnt from the latter, levying taxes and rooting out local chieftains still remains the best way to go.

It’s unlikely that Apple will loosen their developer guidelines any time soon, or that Google will start implementing stringent ex-ante control over submitted apps. We can however see that both firms are trying to foster healthy mobile app ecosystems while maintaining a balance between quality and user experience on one side, and their need to tap more deeply into the growing pie of mobile revenue on the other.

Fascinating times!

Guest Post: Monetizing Freemium Apps

In-app purchases and display advertising are often perceived as two competing business models for freemium apps. However, if implemented the right way, they can be used in conjunction with each other. How should you manage the balance between them in order to optimize your  in-app monetization strategy? Eric Seufert offers his insights.

Looking at the Top Grossing charts on iOS, the commercial potential of freemium can’t be denied: with no initial fee for download, apps with large enough user bases – and primarily games – can generate millions of dollars per day through microtransactions. But microtransactions (otherwise known as in-app purchases, or IAPs) are not the only means a freemium app can avail itself of to monetize; freemium apps can also generate revenue through display advertising.

Display advertising generally takes one of the following forms:

• Banner ads at either the bottom or the top of an app that rotate at a particular speed. These advertisement placements are similar to those found on the web and pay out at similarly modest CPMs.
• Video ads that launch a mobile device’s video player. These ads usually yield higher CPMs (or CPCs) but only do so upon completion or near-completion of the video, meaning the user must completely disengage from the source app for the duration of the media.
• Interstitial ads that dominate the screen of the device. This ad type generally advertises another app, and, upon click, users are taken to the platform app store, where they can download the target app being advertised.

Given that freemium apps generally convert at a very low rate – usually less than 5% of total users directly contribute revenues through in-app purchases – placing advertising in an app may seem like an uncontroversial, complementary revenue stream which can be drawn upon to supplement low conversion rates.

But, like most decisions in freemium, the ads vs. in-app purchases calculus is not so straightforward: the innate strategy of the freemium model is to provide the latitude for a small, enthusiastic minority of users to engage with the app to the greatest extent possible, and ads – by their very nature – are antithetical to engagement.

Additionally, ad revenues scale linearly with engagement, and the underlying goal of freemium is to achieve long-tail monetization with the most engaged users. For extremely viral apps, linear monetization isn’t a problem, but for apps that require large-scale, strategic user acquisition campaigns for the development of a user base, the revenue delivered by ads may not cover initial marketing expenditure on a per-user basis.

This isn’t to say that ads don’t have a place in freemium; advertising can be used to great effect in freemium apps in generating revenue. But ads cannot be placed in an app haphazardly. Ads should be considered a secondary form of monetization and implemented so as to augment the revenue delivered by IAPs without negating the potential for the app to monetize through microtransactions.

Prudently implementing ads, then, requires an analytics infrastructure capable of informing such a decision. Some developers use non-conversion by a certain date – say, three days – as a rough proxy; that is, when a user hasn’t converted by day three, they are shown ads. Such an approach isn’t necessarily invalid, but it likely leaves money on the table by applying one conversion threshold across the entire user base.

Averages in freemium are meaningless; applying the average time to conversion to the entire user base in deciding when to show ads neglects the fact that users in freemium products may fall across a broad range of diverse behaviorial profiles. Ads should be displayed in a freemium product when a developer can be sure that they won’t cannibalize in-app purchases for the individual user, not the average user.

And some ads don’t cannibalize in-app purchases at all; in fact, video ads in some apps actually enhance engagement, increasing perceived investment on the part of the user and potentially improving the likelihood that a user may eventually convert. Ads that are deeply integrated into the content of the app can also potentially benefit from the same effect. Of course, the opposite is also true – certain ads can alienate users and increase the odds of churn.

Like everything in freemium, the decision to display ads in an app should be made against the backdrop of the idiosyncratic behavior of the individual user. Ads and IAPs in freemium can exist in perfect symbiosis, but optimizing total revenue requires insight and automation. Applying broad monetization strategies in freemium – whether it be related to ads or in-app purchases — not only recklessly disregards the significance of outliers, but it undermines the basic tenets of the business model.

Eric Seufert is a quantitative marketer who blogs frequently at ufert.se about mobile app monetization and user acquisition. His upcoming book about the freemium business model, Freemium Economics, will be published by Morgan Kaufmann in early 2014.

iOS 7: the other MAC announcement

A couple of days after the big WWDC announcement, iOS7 seems to have left very few people indifferent. Whether it’s the apparent lack of innovation or the fact that the new operating system seems to be a jolly mash up of the whole industry, a lot has been said and written about the new design and functionalities of Apple’s latest iOS vintage. Comments and reactions are often critical (however usually justified), a few are actually good, and some are also, by Internet tradition, funny.

Now, beyond the mere product announcement, mobile developers, advertisers and marketers need to ask themselves how the new iOS will impact the way they work, especially in the field of attribution tracking.
Everyone has in mind the slow deprecation and agony of the UDID, which started with iOS 5 in August 2011 and ended last May with Apple definitely rejecting all apps using this method of identification.

Many developers have since then resorted to the other available device ID, the MAC address.

This is where iOS 7 comes in.

The new operating system, due to be available for the general public in the fall, was already released in beta version for developers and the pre-release notes include a small paragraph at the end:

Click to enlarge

“In iOS 7 and later, if you ask for the MAC address of an iOS device, the system returns the value 02:00:00:00:00:00. If you need to identify the device, use the identifierForVendor property of UIDevice instead. (Apps that need an identifier for their own advertising purposes should consider using the advertisingIdentifier property of ASIdentifierManager instead).”

In other words, apps will no longer be able to retrieve the device’s MAC address in order to identify a user for advertising purposes. That’s what the IDFA (Identifier For Advertising) is for. Contrary to the UDID and the MAC Address, the IDFA can be deactivated or reset by the user. This means in practice that from iOS 7 onwards, hard device identifiers will completely stop serving for advertising and tracking purposes.

UPDATE: on June 7, AppsFire co-founder Yann Lechelle announced the deprecation of the openUDID, the open-source replacement to the UDID that he and the app discovery company started in September 2011 and which was rapidly adopted as a tracking standard across the industry. AppsFire says the advertisingIdentifier “works well” and  advises developers to turn to the IDFA before Apple officially requires and enforces it.

So, what’s left? Developers and marketers sure need to learn to love and use Cupertino’s “soft” proprietary device identifier.
However, in the current state of things, fingerprinting solutions, such as HasOffers’s, remain the only Apple-compliant method able to identify all sources of traffic, including mobile web.

What do you think of Apple’s latest move? Will it change anything for you? Let us know!

AppLift funding: What this means to us

On Sunday, we announced a series A funding round of $13 million (€10 million) by Dutch venture capital and growth equity fund Prime Ventures.

In the wake of this announcement, we were blessed with extensive media coverage by major industry publications: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Inside Mobile Apps, PocketGamer.biz and TheNextWeb, to name just a few of them.

You’ll find most of the details around the funding announcement in the press coverage. However, we thought we’d chip in our own 2 cents and tell you what matters most to us.

First of all, we’d like to thank all our partners who, along with our fantastic team, made this success possible.

Next, the main takeaway from the announcement is that we’re going to use this funding to further invest in our mobile games marketing platform. We’ll roll up our sleeves and work even harder to provide better user acquisition and monetization services to all our existing and future partners, all around the world.

Finally, you might have read a mention of how fast the deal with Prime Ventures went through (in under 5 weeks). We’d like to take this opportunity to stress how symbolic this is of our business culture. In one of the fastest-growing (and most exciting) markets of all time, AppLift’s success more than ever hinges on speed: fast decisions, fast execution, fast delivery.

And we’ll continue to do just that.

Let’s keep shipping 😉

Your AppLift Team

 

New eBook: 5 Steps to Successfully Market Your Free-to-Play Mobile Game

It’s no secret that in the past couple of years, Free-to-Play has asserted itself as the main and most successful revenue model for mobile games.

With hits making industry headlines every other day and publishers breaking revenue records one after the other, it’s safe to say:

Free-to-Play is here to stay.

In our new eBook, 5 Steps to Successfully Market Your Free-to-Play Mobile Game, we’ve pulled together our experience and expertise in mobile games marketing to help you tackle the challenges that come with publishing and advertising a free game.

Here are our 5 Steps to Marketing your Mobile Game and make the best of all the distribution channels out there:

Within the app stores:

1. Master App Store Marketing

Outside of the app stores:

2. Go For a Wise Mix of Traffic Sources
3. Plan your Launch
4. Get Ready for the Long Haul
5. Track Beyond the Install

We hope you enjoy the read!

As always, don’t hesitate to drop us any questions or suggestions at blog@applift.com.

Best,

Your AppLift Team

App Store Marketing: Stick Out and Go for the Close

Hello and welcome to the first part of our series on the user lifecycle!

User Acquisition is certainly the hottest and most debated issue in the mobile marketing space right now. With almost 800,000 apps on the Apple AppStore, and as many on Google Play, discoverability in particular remains a major issue for app publishers.

However, app stores remain the main way to be discovered on mobile and to make the most out of them, you need to understand how they work.

There are two major steps to optimizing user acquisition marketing: discoverability and conversion.

Discoverability is about getting as many people as possible to get to your app’s landing page and can be achieved and optimized outside as well as within the app stores. (We’ll focus on the latter). Conversion relates to the percentage of people who, having viewed your landing page, decide to go ahead and download your app (click-to-download).

In this article we’ll look into App Store Optimization (ASO): free ways to get your mobile game discovered and downloaded. We’ll make a distinction between Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Play Store when necessary.

In the end, ASO is simply about two things: sticking out and going for the close!

Here’s how.

Mobile World Congress 2013: the Top 3 Take-Aways for the Mobile Games Industry

Yet another vintage of MWC comes to an end. After nearly a week of action packed, whirlwind days of mobile enthusiasm from: meetings, holding down the fort at the exhibitor booth, every excuse under the sun to attend a networking event or party, we are going to trim away the conference madness to extract the key points for attending MWC, for the mobile apps industry and more specifically, mobile gaming.

Below are our three most relevant takeaways, when looking back on the entire show.  This is merely our editorial pick, so feel free to share your thoughts with us by commenting or dropping the team an email.

1. The Shadow of the Giants

For several years now, Apple has been conspicuous by their absence at the Mobile World Congress. Officially, at least, as Apple’s presence is not without reminding us of Voldemort’s in the Harry Potter series: the powerful and scary overlord whose name shall not be spoken. The latter was nevertheless on the lips of many, as a strong proportion of the app economy’s turnover remains on iOS, and developers as well as app promotion services have learned to deal with Cuppertino’s taste for sudden new rules coming right out of the blue.

After a much buzzed-about presence in 2012 with a behemoth stand, a slide, an Android pin collection frenzy as well as the distribution of actual ice-cream sandwiches, Google surprisingly decided to go completely boothless this year. This is partly due to the fact that Android has secured its position as second operating system (the race being as of now for the 3rd slot), trumping iOS in terms of volumes and closing in dangerously upon the gap in revenues as well. Also, Android was naturally present on most of the handsets showcased by the manufacturers.

2. App Planet: Rise of the App Economy

As was the case in the 2012 edition, the growing app economy received a significant highlight at MWC by securing an entire show space of its own, the app planet pavilion, separated with a footbridge, from the rest of the conference, distinguishing itself from the telcos, equipment companies and other hardware manufacturers.

 Proof of the heavy demand for visibility in this area of the fair, there were a couple companies exhibiting there which had little (in my view) to do with the mobile app industry as such.

Another sign of the vitality of the app business, Russian search giant Yandex announcing the launch of Yandex.Store, a custom app store on Android, with already 50,000 titles available. The store can come pre-installed on devices (under a white label format), but consumers can also download it directly from the web.

This general attractiveness bodes extremely well for the mobile app industry in general and mobile gaming in particular. Gartner expects revenues from app stores to soar by 62%, up to $25 billion this year.

While the attention of the media at MWC has traditionally mostly been on the hardware announcements, we can expect more and more focus on the app economy in the coming years.

3. Firefox OS: The First Web-Based Mobile Operating System

One of the major product announcements this year was the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox OS. This comes in addition to the Firefox browser and marketplace, already available on Android. This new operating system is built entirely on html 5 (on top of Linux) and works as a web-curation tool: there is no such thing as native code. In fact, the whole operating system is based on open-web standards (html 5, css 3, javascript etc.)

One cool feature available is search, as a query will display not only apps that are already present on the phone, but also any relevant app available on the web. For instance, if your search is “James Bond”, Firefox OS will return all the web apps with 007-related content: Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Netflix etc.

As of now, 18 carriers and 3 device manufacturers have already partnered up with Mozilla to install and distribute the operating system, and more have been announced.

So, what about mobile games?

Upon interviewing them, the Mozilla crew assured us that they would provide the development tools and framework to ensure that Firefox OS will be able to compete with other platforms in the mobile gaming space. Also, the partnerships with operators will enable carrier billing instead of credit card payment, which is likely to facilitate market penetration in developing countries.

For those of you who didn’t get the chance to catch up with AppLift in Barcelona, the next event we’ll be attending is the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, from March 25 to 29. We’ll be exhibiting in Booth 217 with the HitFox Group, the parent company of AppLift (yet another foxy company…). If you’d like to set up a meeting during the show, drop us a line at events@applift.com.

To stay tuned on mobile games marketing insights, sign up for our general newsletter!

See you soon!

Mobilbranche.de Interview with Tim Koschella, AppLift Co-Founder and Managing Director

On the side of the gaming conference and trade fair Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg (meet us there!), AppLift co-founder and managing director Tim Koschella was interviewed by mobilbranche.de, a German website dedicated to mobile industry news. We thought the interview offered a good summary of AppLift’s vision and positioning in the mobile gaming space. For those of you who are lucky enough to speak German ;), you can find the original article here. Otherwise, no worries, here’s a translation:

«Game publishers are highly professional and extremely number-driven about the allocation of their mobile-marketing budgets. For companies in the mobile gaming space, achieving this level of specialization is essential for survival. Those who don’t understand this will sooner or later disappear from the map. »

So says Tim Koschella, co-founder of Berlin startup company HitFox. On the occasion of the opening day of the Casual Connect gaming fair in Hamburg, we talked about the mobile gaming market, which the HitFox group started embracing intensively last summer. In August 2012 indeed, the Berlin startup launched AppLift, the world’s first affiliate network for mobile games. In an exclusive interview, Tim Koschella explains how the company faired during its first six months: the team’s headcount is now up to 25 and the company is active all over the world. Big players such as BigFish, Kabam, Gameloft and King.com have already partnered up with AppLift.

mobilbranche.de: Tim, six months ago, the HitFox Group launched AppLift, the world’s first affiliate network 100% dedicated to mobile games. How has it been so far?

Tim Koschella: The first months went much better than we originally planned. On the account of the enormous growth of the mobile gaming market, we set out with high expectations and goals, which we nevertheless managed to exceed. At launch already, we had partnered up with big mobile players such as BigFish, Kabam, Gameloft and King.com and were able to drive traffic for them. Through the HitFox Group web affiliation company (ad2games.com), we already had quite a few customers in the browser and client-based gaming space, but for the mobile clients we had to start from scratch. On the affiliate side we are now working with several hundred partners, from small niche players to big media houses such as ProsiebenGames or RTL.

mobilbranche.de: In which markets are you active today?

Tim Koschella: In the beginning our focus was set on Germany, France, the UK and the US. However, today we make up to 40% of our business in other regions of the world such as Asia, Latin America as well as South and Eastern Europe.

mobilbranche.de: Why did it take you so little time to roll out on all continents? Was it planned from the start?

Tim Koschella: Well, we knew that mobile affiliation was a very global business. We had already gathered historical data from our web affiliation company, from which we could derive our own expectations. However, we were the first to be surprised by how fast our international growth happened. There are two factors which helped us a great deal there:  first, the international presence of our parent company HitFox Group, with outposts in Seoul, San Francisco and Paris. Secondly, we’ve always made sure to put emphasis on gathering an international team, with now 25 people and 12 nationalities present. This way we quickly managed to set foot in exotic markets such as Brazil, Russia, Turkey or South Korea.

mobilbranche.de: Do the mobile publishers who are specialised in gaming also have offers in other categories, such as media, productivity or travel?

Tim Koschella: For many app publishers, mobile is just a fraction of their business; despite the speed at which this market grows, it still makes for a small portion of their revenue. For our clients, it’s the opposite: mobile accounts for 50% to 100% of their turnover. They make up to several hundred million dollars per year just through in-app purchases and in-app advertising. For instance, Kabam, who started as a Facebook core game publisher, recently announced that out of their $180 million 2012 annual revenue, over $100 million came from mobile games. Consequently, our clients are highly professional and extremely number-driven about the allocation of their mobile marketing budgets. Although there are of course “mobile natives” in categories such as Travel, Media and Productivity, who are very professional, in the mobile gaming market, achieving this level of specialization is essential for your survival. Those who don’t understand this will sooner or later disappear from the map.

mobilbranche.de: Established players are also increasingly working with mobile game publishers. Which pros and cons do you see in focusing solely on them?

Tim Koschella: A data-driven approach as well as elaborate campaign optimization is at the heart of our business. From the insights we gain, we understand the gaming market down to the slightest detail. For our clients the objective is seldom classic marketing concepts such as brand notoriety or reach. What matters is the ROI, and that’s precisely where our value added is. Our advertizers only pay for what they get: qualitative installs. Campaigns are optimized over time, following engagement and monetization goals, in order to maximise our clients’ return. Most of the time we get comprehensive data from them, which in turn enables us to optimize the traffic sources. What matters here is how much the users that we generate spend in the game (monetization), how often and how long they play (engagement), and whether or not they invite their friends to play over the social networks (virality).

On the traffic side we work with classic app affiliates, as well as with game-specialized affiliates. Both benefit from the wide portfolio of (mostly Free-2-Play) games across our network. This way, if an affiliate has a website or an app that speaks to a “casual” target audience, we can suggest game offers such as Diamond Dash or Candy Crush Saga. Alternatively, affiliates specialized in “core gamers” can monetize their traffic through trade card games or strategy games such as Lords & Knights or Immortalis.

mobilbranche.de: How big is the overlap between older customers of the HitFox Group and AppLift? That is, how strong is the transition from browser games to mobile games?

Tim Koschella: There is an overlap, however it’s not as big as one could think from the outside. Our most important clients are native mobile game publishers, followed by publishers who became successful in the social gaming space (eg on Facebook) and are now moving to mobile. Then finally we have classic browser- and client-based publishers, who are often making their first attempt at publishing on iOS or Android. However, we haven’t seen many of the latter manage to land a big title, but that could well change in 2013.

mobilbranche.de: Do you only target the big spenders, or can independent developers also afford your services?

Tim Koschella: No, we work with indie devs as well as with bigger publishers. That’s actually one of the main differences between us and other platforms: we don’t require a minimum budget. We value small developers and publishers because we know how important they are for a functional gaming ecosystem. In case they don’t have any budget for user acquisition, we help them monetize their user base and offer them to use the proceeds to acquire new users at a favorable price. Many of our affiliates don’t want to advertise for the same games that are already displayed all over the market.  Some are looking for small and simple but creative games to offer to their target audience.

mobilbranche.de: In app marketing today, most of the business is done on a CPI (Cost Per Install) basis. How far are you from shifting to a method of payment, which would take the whole Customer Lifetime Cycle into account?

Tim Koschella: The reality is that most people in the market still use an accounting method based on clicks. That’s surprising when you think how easy it is to generate a click on a mobile device compared to the web. You just need to place the ad banner in a smart way, and, woops, every user suddenly clicks on it and it’s then easy bucks. That’s neither fair nor right. For that reason more and more advertisers rely on a Cost-Per-Install method of payment. However, CPI also has its problems: what’s the benefit of getting 100,000 new installs when only 100 users play my game actively and spend money in it? I’d rather get 1,000 new users for 500 active players. For this reason, a CLV-based payment makes sense. However, at the same time the game publisher shifts the risk of having published a bad game onto the affiliate, which can also be an issue. Therefore we chose a double approach: we run offers on a CPI basis, but we adjust it to the advertizer’s CLV goals all along the campaign, so that interests on both sides are respected. Affiliates with good traffic are rewarded with higher payouts, and those with lower-quality traffic get less per install.

mobilbranche.de: Thanks a lot for the interview, Tim!

User Lifecycle: Why the Big Picture Matters

The fast growth of the freemium model over the past couple of years has made it obvious that mobile game developers and publishers need to draw a thick line between user acquisition and monetization.  Getting people to download your app is merely the first step. What follows is the need to engage, retain and finally convert those people into paying users. In other words, from player to payer. This distinction requires you to think ahead and plan the various steps that will lead to the efficient monetization of your user base. We can think of this series of steps as AVREM:

Acquisition – Virality – Retention – Engagement – Monetization.

Even though each of these steps requires distinct attention and uses specific metrics, they also impact each other and result in important trade-offs which you’ll need to address. For instance, if your monetization strategy is too aggressive, then it comes at the expense of retention as your users become annoyed by repetitive push notifications and intrusive ads or get stuck in their game experience by disruptive in-app purchase items.

 The Big Picture

Therefore, when marketing your app it’s essential you take a holistic approach to the user lifecycle in order to secure a successful monetization strategy. Here’s a quick and simple overview of the different phases of the lifecycle as well as some examples of typical KPI’s to monitor in order to get a better view of the big picture:

At AppLift, we’re committed to share our insights on mobile game marketing, and in the next weeks we’ll be posting a series of articles on how to optimize each of these items throughout the user lifecycle. We’ll be looking at best practices, we’ll dive into the relevant metrics, and we’ll help you address the arising trade-offs.

Here’s a peek:

1. User Acquisition: the first one which comes to mind. How many users download your app, what are your traffic sources (organic, inbound marketing, paid traffic etc.) and how much you pay for them (Cost Per Acquisition or CPA). We’ll give you tips on how to optimize your app store marketing (among other things).
2. Virality: is a happy by-product of Engagement and positively impacts User Acquisition. For instance, encourage and incentivize your users to leave positive AppStore reviews, and share your app on social media channels. The major KPI to measure virality is the K-factor (average number of invites sent by each user multiplied by their conversion rate).
3. Retention: how many days your users keep on using your app after they’ve opened it for the first time. With the freemium model, users have no inherent incentive to keep using your game. Typical KPI’s include Day 1, Day 7 and Day 30 retention.
4. Engagement: how often your users open your app during the day and how long they stay engaged (how many daily sessions per Daily Active User (DAU) and average time per session).
5. Monetization: your end goal the very reason you’re in the game. The success of your monetization strategy will largely depend on your capacity to engage and retain users once you’ve acquired them. Most monetization strategies involve either the display of ad offers (banners, interstitials etc.), in-app purchase items (level unlock, purchase of  virtual currencies etc.) or a mix of both.
   The most important KPI’s for monetization are: percentage of paying users, Lifetime Value (LTV), Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU). Monitoring these metrics is paramount because it will in turn enable you to know at which price you can buy traffic in order to get a positive return on investment (ROI).

Stay tuned for the first article in our series on the user lifecycle!

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or ask us directly!

Locked In: Why AppStore Marketing Has Just Gotten Tougher

AppStore marketing is a challenging sport.

In our last article we highlighted the importance of having all your AppStore visual assets ready as early as possible. This requisite has just been made all the more stringent by Apple who announced that, as of January 10 2013, screenshots will be locked once the app has been approved. This change in policy seems justified by their efforts to thwart a common scamming tactic employed by fake apps, which resides in swapping out approved screenshots with new ones stolen from popular iOS titles, in order to lure users in.

This new rule means that, from now on, it will require a full update to modify an app’s screenshots, as was already the case with the icon, title and keywords. For now, the description can still be changed at any time, without the need for review.

This seems like a very drastic measure in an otherwise laudable attempt to protect customers from scam, especially since no warning was given, and severely penalizes the vast majority of legitimate publishers who used this flexibility to test their marketing assets. It’s a big hurdle to all content-heavy apps in particular, which often relied on this feature to reflect and market their changing content.

A more amenable solution would have been to create a specific, lighter review process for  meta-data (marketing assets) or simply to let users report scams after approval.

For app developers and marketers, the main consequences are:

• Screenshots must be spot-on by the time your game goes into review. Actually, they should be when you submit the app, as you never know how long it will take for Apple to start the process. Therefore you need to reorganize your marketing plan in order to get everything finished in time.
• Screenshots become more a part of the product itself and less of a flexible marketing variable for A/B testing. Pay attention to their consistency with the rest of your product marketing.
• With the release of iOS 6, screenshots have become the main visual asset for AppStore optimization and user acquisition marketing (especially the first one, which appears in search). The fact that they need to be finalized by the time of the submission means that the marketing and tech teams should work closer together than ever before, in order to sync up for the app’s release and update calendar. Of course, you can submit a marketing update without any significant changes to the app’s binary, but given the time it might take for the approval to go through, you’d rather do it in one shot.

• If you do go for a marketing-only update (note that you still need to submit a binary), take this opportunity to revamp all your other assets (icon, title, keywords).

Good luck to all app devs, publishers and marketers out there!

PS: if you’ve got any specific question, or if you would like to suggest us a topic for a future post, please drop us a line at blog-at-applift.com!