MagicSolver

Four Findings to Hone Your Mobile Marketing

Research conducted by MagicSolver into the performance of apps within our user acquisition platforms has uncovered a number of interesting trends for mobile marketers to tap into.

Examining the period May 2012 to May 2013, we discovered four key findings about our user behaviour that can be used to improve the performances of your mobile campaigns.

The Bargain Effect: The Role of Price Drops and Offers
Unsurprisingly, users are more likely to engage with a limited time money saving offer or an obvious bargain than with something already free. While freemium is driving monetisation within the app industry as a whole, our users downloaded paid apps that have gone free more often than apps which have always been free every month for the past year.

This may seem like an obvious point: after all, who doesn’t love saving money? But, equally, tapping into that bargain mentality is an important way to accrue additional downloads through an app discovery platform. Companies who have promoted freemium apps via our platforms with free bonuses (such as coins or in app extras) or raised and dropped the price of an app to price tier one have used the money saving mindset to increase user engagement considerably.

Perfectly Seasoned: The importance of seasonality
While user interest in downloading apps varies for a number of reasons over the course of a year, there is clear evidence that app downloads are affected by seasonal factors.

This can be evidenced in the “summer holiday” effect we saw in our apps last July. Interest in both paid and free apps featured in our app promotion platforms peaked that month, as school holidays and longer evenings kicked in. The spare time effect, when engagement increases at times such as the weekend, was effectively sustained from July 2012 until September 2012; meaning greater engagement with all our campaigns throughout the period.

As for the rest of the year, October, December and January also delivered strong performances thanks to the seasonal effect. With October boosted by Halloween and the Thanksgiving holiday and December/January benefitting from the Christmas device boom, our Halloween and Advent calendar apps are an excellent way to drive downloads at a time when users are interested and ready to engage.

Tooled up: Why utilities convert
While games are considered (not unfairly) the driver of the app industry in terms of monetisation, we’ve found they don’t drive as much interest as other categories of apps. Photography, Health and Education apps have all consistently driven high levels of user interest, often peaking at a conversion rate of between 20% and 25%.

In fact, Games consistently come out near the bottom of the user interest figures. With engagement ranging between 12% and 20%, they fail to hit the high standards of user engagement set by other categories of apps promoted within our platforms.

Mostly, this is a due to the differences within the marketing direction of the respective categories. While tools tend to meet a general practical need (heart rate monitoring, photo taking, lyric finding etc), games companies are making a conscious decision to target certain segments with a particular type of entertainment “service” to increase their chance of success.

So we recommend that, while you should target your audience carefully within the app, marketing assets such as logos or screenshots can entice users to hit the install button.

Select your player: Generalist vs Specialist Audiences
Continuing the explanation of why the games category as a whole engages fewer of our users, the increasing focus of a number of developers on high monetising “whales” instead of the general audience has driven engagement numbers in certain genres down significantly.

While social games, endless runners and other broadly appealing apps dominated the early phases of the app economy, recently the shift towards RPGs, deck building and strategy games (such as Kingdoms of Camelot, Rage of Bahamut and Clash of Clans) has seen marketers target an increasingly segmented audience who regularly spend; focusing their appeal.

The results can be seen in our user engagement rates for the different games categories. While generalist categories such as Racing, Kids and Puzzle games have consistently engaged between 15-20% of our user base, the specialist categories listed above regularly failed fell under the 15% barrier.

There are clear and understandable rewards to pursuing the specialist strategy, particularly as users within those categories tend to be spend and share more than other players. But when appealing to a general audience with a specialist game, we recommend that you create marketing assets with an appeal to a broader audience and offer freebies in your campaigns to bring potentially interested general users into the fold.

Conclusion: Delivering results to our clients
The strong level of support and engagement for our app discovery platform has helped us to improve and tailor our offering to suit your needs. At MagicSolver, we recognise the importance of delivering valuable downloads to a variety of different audiences and we use the data above to help you market your apps more effectively.

Our client facing team would be delighted to talk through any aspects of this research with you and demonstrate how your app could benefit from a feature in one of our recommendation apps. Contact us via newsletter@magicsolver.com and we can help you bring great users to your apps.