This document summarizes a webinar presented by Kontagent on using mobile metrics to drive monetization. The webinar focused on how mobile app developers can gain insights into user discovery, acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization in order to optimize marketing channels, conduct A/B testing, and improve key metrics like lifetime value and average revenue per user. Speakers from Kontagent demonstrated their platform for collecting user analytics and providing actionable insights to mobile app developers.
2. WHO IS
KONTAGENT?
We are the leading
enterprise user analytics
platform for the social
and mobile Web.
User-Centric Data Accessibility Domain Expertise
Konnect 2
3. SPEAKERS
Josh Williams
President and CSO
Lin Wang
Director of Customer Insights
Konnect 3
16. Questions?
@ Ko n tag ent
Ka l e i d o s cop e b lo g : k s c o p e.kontag ent.co m
Konnec
Konnect
t
Notas do Editor
Using Mobile Metrics to Drive Monetization Building successful, profitable mobile apps. Our expert panel will share best-kept secrets on mobile monetization, including: - Getting your apps to market quickly- Challenges of developing for different platforms- Key metrics of success - Using social hooks to increase engagement kontagent,metrics,mobileapps,monetization
Kontagent is the leading user analytics . We help clients dig deeper into metrics, such as average revenue per user (ARPU), lifetime (LTV) and return on investment (ROI), etc., so that they can better understand and optimize their customer economics. In particular, we give our clients a view into acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization and bubble it up into a dashboard that an entire organization can access. Whether you’re developing on iOS or Android or even Facebook, every business that develops apps and needs to optimize LTV will benefit from our solution.
Lin Wang is director of customer insights at Glu Mobile. Prior to this, Lin worked in customer analytics at Nielsen. Josh Williams is president and chief science officer at Kontagent, where he is responsible for data science and R&D.
The way we look at user behavior is the same.Josh: The way we look at user behavior and what users are doing inside of a games or application is consistent across platforms, whether it’s a social platform like Facebook or Google+ or an app on mobile. We encourage our customers to be data-driven in both design philosophies and operations of their apps, and in how they’re growing their user base.
Josh: In order to do this, look at the behavioral insights—what users are doing inside the game/app. For your customer ROI analysis, pay attention to everything from the cost to acquire customers (CAC) to the specific types of users you’re bringing into an app, and from which source. Look at your customer economics to determine how much it costs to acquire cohorts and how much money you’re making from them over time. This metric is important across platforms. Overall, data-driven development is looking at CAC and marketing attribution—from which channels you’re acquiring new users, which channels are driving the most profitable users and which channels in which you should decrease your spend because they aren’t bringing in high-quality users. Then we look at retention—really what’s going on inside the app. Pay attention to the cohorts of users and how they behave over time. Which events are driving usage? What specifically is causing cohorts to come back over time? (This will give you more chances to monetize them.) Many mobile applications are free or free-to-play (F2P) games so in-app purchases are dominating mobile in the last year when it comes to revenue. This has made the levers that make up retention and monetization has become even more critical, which is very similar to what we saw in social. Lastly, look at monetization—that is, ROI for acquisition campaigns, segmentation of users, determining whether users are coming from paid channels vs. viral vs. organic channels (as well as cross-promotions). How each of these channels performs will help you with your user LTV analysis.
Josh: Mobile app developers want visibility and actionable insights into what’s going on inside your application. Kontagent provides that easily with our user-centric dashboards and easy-to-understand reports that can shared with the entire organization. Everyone from the marketing team to product managers and developers to the executive team can get a sense of overall of the app
Lin: Many of us think of an application as just an app, alone in its own little ecosystem. The way you need to look at it is as a storefront. Consider Amazon and eBay—these are purely shopping destinations so the entire experience isn’t much different than brick-and-mortar stores like Targets, Safeways, etc. The whole idea is to build an experience that helps people make decisions about the things they want to buy, and encourage them to complete the checkout process. If you want to increase conversions, ask yourself how you can create an enjoyable shopping experience where users ultimately want to spend money.
Lin: One of the biggest challenges that most of us have is, how can I make my users want to spend? That is, how can I make money? First, you must find ways to get users to your “store.” With brick-and-mortar stores, you pass out flyers, place weekly ads and rent billboards. Along came the Internet, and you paid for search and online ads. Now we are in the age of the app. With applications, we have three main channels: organic, paid and viral. These are all viable options that you can use to get users into the “store.” That’s the first step: if you don’t get people in the store, you can’t make money. So, for the sake of discovery and acquisition, take advantage of all three channels to drive users into your app.
Josh: There are some challenges that are unique to mobile. In the world of Web and social apps, we’re accustomed to getting complete insight into all user acquisition channels. But, as many mobile, developers know, due to the mechanics of the app stores on iOS—and to some extent, even on Android—it’s rather difficult to get visibility into the various ad networks that you’re using and how the individual campaigns are performing in driving users to your application. Currently the ad network ecosystem is fragmented. This makes it a bit more difficult to drive volume into your application and then be able to track the sources of the users effectively. But, there is an opportunity here. Kontagent can provide you a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that allows you to look at your acquisition channels and optimize them over time. We work with developers to track all your campaigns across networks and then to perform channel testing and optimization. For example, if you’re running various campaigns with different ad partners/ad networks, e.g. Flurry, Tapjoy, Playhaven, etc., to acquire different cohorts of users, Kontagent provides insight into which specific users come in through each channel. With this data, you can then optimize these campaigns and they can make decisions based which campaigns are performing well—and which aren’t. It’s also valuable to look at user performance from ad channels vs organic channels.
Lin: Acquisition is a good start, but once a user enters your application, there is a new set of factors you should you pay attention to. In order to make monetize your users, you must first engage them. It’s actually a continuous loop of engagement and reengagement. All along the way, A/B test the changes you make to your app to determine what works. Because it usually costs money to acquire users, you should always be thinking of ways to engage and reengage them before they even enter your app. Engagement is important, and reengagement is when users are most likely to spend. As far as looking into what they’re doing, you need to understand in-app analytics—their behaviors once they install your app, what are they buying inside your app, what motivates them, etc. Drive the development of your app around these insights.
Josh: Within those testing cycles, you will get a better sense of what’s causing them to come back, or what might be causing them to not come back. Currently, in mobile there’s a lack of user dimensions, e.g., demographic information, so it can be a challenge to divide segments. Kontagent helps with this; you can user custom tags to measure in-app behaviors, and to look at events that are generating inside your app. Then, you can segment those events and perform A/B testing around them. This will help to improve cohort retention and engagement over time. It’s important to note that it can be extremely difficult to build out these systems internally. Kontagent has spent years doing this, and the big opportunity here is that we can help mobile developers who don’t yet have access to this data. Our mobile clients can see the events that users generate over time to understand where the fall-off points are, and this helps them determine what the lifecycle of engagement in their app(s) that may be causing users to drop off. This is instrumental to engagement and retention because you get more insight into what users are doing in their first session vs what they’re doing in 10th session, or their first hour of play vs their 10th hour of play. It’s a window into what’s occurring as users progress in your app, and gives you a tremendous opportunity to optimize engagement and retention.
Lin: Once you have people engaged in a game, you have three majors factors behind every purchase: an impulse to buy, the hurdle to spend and store friction. Are you effectively increasing their impulse? At the same time, are you lowering friction, making it easy for them to buy? We’re still in the early stages of mobile. Imagine Amazon in the early Internet days. People may not have been very familiar and/or comfortable spending money this online. But now most people are very comfortable pulling out their credit cards to make a purchase on Amazon or any other ecommerce site. That’s the current challenge for us in the mobile space—the hurdle we have to overcome is that users may not be completely comfortable spending money. They need that extra push. Put in-app incentives in the right place at the right time where they look at this purchase as justifiable. You have to get them to think, “I believe I should buy this at this time because of several reasons that apply to my needs.” Just as Amazon online store font has grown up over the years, you app should be constantly evolving, too. Think of features such as, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” Other features, such as one-click purchasing, lowered shipping costs, even creating personalized accounts so the customer doesn’t have to pull out their credit cards, also encourage the user. Can you create an experience within your app? When you put all those factors together, that’s what’s really driving your monetization. Josh: We find in general that developers are able to make huge games and increase monetization per user by attacking these dimensions. Purchase impulse: when are you presenting the opportunity to buy? Then, A/B test that. Does offering the opportunity work better at different points within the app? When do you offer items for purchase, and what are you offering them? Then there’s the spending hurdle. Test price points to find the optimal price that appeals to both the impulse to the purchase as well as minimizes or eliminates the spending hurdle. As you experiment with your application, this is really a process of continuous testing and improvement. When you’re doing that, it’s really important to look at per-user, per-segment ARPU and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) to get predictive indicators of purchase behaviors. Generally what we find useful there is to look at the Day 1 and Day 7 retention of user segments. These are usually pretty good predictors of how long users will stick around in your apps and how much they will ultimately purchase.
Lin: It’s always about how you can calculate the success of your campaigns and these metrics are a top-level view of what your users are doing in your app. How do you understand if what you’ve done across all these channels is effective? Break it down by specific metrics: average spend per paying customer, ARPU, daily active users (DAU), and retention. All of those factors play a part in determining LTV. You should remember that every game or app is different. Based on the way it is developed, you have to understand if all four really pay equal value to how you calculate the success of the game. Some games have lower retention, some have high retention. Therefore, set an objective on what you think the LTV will be. If retention is low, ask yourself whether it is the actual game or app design, or whether you are targeting the right (or wrong) users.
MITCH:Present demo
MITCH:Build credibility with roster of customers.
DAN:Conclude webinar. Tell viewers how they can reach us, sign up for white papers and additional content. Plug Twitter and kScope.