Editor’s Note: this article is the first in a series of guest blog articles we will be hosting throughout the year. If you are interested in writing for AppMasters, just contact the editor via jeff@appmasters.com with your idea.
Ever feel like you are trying your luck when it comes to optimizing your user acquisition campaigns and ad monetization?
Do you have an inkling that your app marketing efforts are missing something?
Through UX analytics, you can achieve much in optimizing your user acquisition and ad monetization campaigns. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Money, money, money—a lot of it can be involved when it comes to user acquisition and ad monetization. With all the expense that app creation and growth entails, app marketers need to be diligent and make sure that they are implementing initiatives to allocate and maximize funds in the best way possible.
Still, the task of executing effective user acquisition and ad monetization is without a doubt one of the most significant challenges, especially considering today’s mobile landscape and user. This is where the power of UX app analytics tools like Appsee can play an important role.
While traditional analytics tools provide a slew of numbers and statistics, they are often not capable of providing the sort of information that gives you valuable, actionable insights regarding your users. UX app analytics platforms can help you understand the fundamental, qualitative reasons behind data and KPI metrics, by zoning in on the nuances of user behavior.
With user experience visualization tools provided by this type of analytics, such as Appsee’s user recordings and touch heatmaps, you can effectively address any problematic areas within your app, increase conversion rates, in-app purchases, and user retention, and ultimately deliver the best possible in-app experience.
In particular, let’s explore how UX app analytics can also enhance two major prongs of your app marketing strategy.
App Acquisition
Let’s say you are running targeted download campaigns on Facebook and Twitter for your retail app and tracking them with an attribution tool. Over the space of a month, you see that you were able to achieve a significantly larger number of downloads from Facebook than from Twitter.
Unfortunately, almost none of your users from Facebook are completing in-app purchases, while your Twitter users are converting significantly more. Basic app analytics tools will inform you of this disparity, but will often leave you guessing and digging for the reasons why. Figuring out the “whys” can take precious time. The sooner you can optimize your app and troubleshoot any potential errors, the better.
Specifically, powerful fusions of app attribution and UX analytics tools can help you efficiently get the answers you are looking for. By examining visualized data, such as user recordings and touch heatmaps, compared with attribution data, you can see for yourself what possible obstacles are deterring your Facebook-acquired users from completing an in-app purchase.
Furthermore, you can use user recordings to gain a comprehensive understanding of the in-app behavior and funnel flow of your targeted users from Facebook vs. Twitter, or any other channel for that matter. Maybe users acquired from a Facebook campaign are actually more receptive to in-app messages and feedback requests over Twitter acquired users? Or maybe users acquired from Twitter campaigns are more engaged with loyalty programs? Unique insights like these can help you better formulate and tailor your acquisition campaigns.
Yet while it’s certainly important to acquire users, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It is even more important to fully understand what makes those acquired users stay and convert and what doesn’t. UX app analytics supplies you with this essential understanding.
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- Typical user acquisition analytical data
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- Appsee’s user recording feature
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- Appsee’s heatmap feature
Example of Appsee’s user recordings and touch heatmaps paired with AppsFlyer attribution data.
App Ad Monetization
Once you have acquired a large group of users, you want to drive revenue from them, specifically via in-app ads. This is a logical plan, but you will probably encounter, or maybe you have already encountered, some hang-ups along the way.
Despite the essential value of in-app advertising, it is unfortunately known to pose a substantial risk of decreased engagement, retention, and affinity for an app.
Have you ever experienced a horrific moment where you get a message and/or review from an angry user complaining of an inappropriate ad appearing during their experience?
An example of an incompatible ad for a particular app. Image credit: funnystuff.ga
We hope you haven’t—but unfortunately, many other apps have had to deal with this. When cases like this happen, it can not only be detrimental to the user experience, but it can ultimately spur a user to uninstall your app.
Some users won’t even “warn” you via a support contact form or app review, they might simply choose to exit your app and never reopen it again. Cue the dramatic music!
Basically, no matter how robust or highly acclaimed of an ad network you are working with, there is always an inherent risk of inappropriate, unsuitable, and/or low quality ads weaseling their way into your app’s ad space. While many app monetization tools will provide you with certain means of control, they do not supply the ability to see exactly how ads are appearing to your variety of users.
This is where utilizing the power of UX app analytics can greatly help. Specifically, the UX visualization tool of user session recordings can allow you to see through your consumers’ eyes how the ads (from banners to videos) are actually appearing on your app’s screens and whether they fit your app’s culture.
You can also observe for yourself whether an ad potentially interrupted your users’ experience/journey, had a technical or quality issue, and/or led the person to instantly quit your app. Basically, user experience visualization tools can help put that decisive control back in app marketers’ hands.
You must remember that you shouldn’t let the need to monetize cloud your vision—at the end of the day you want your ads to be a positive, unobtrusive aspect of your app’s user experience, otherwise you won’t have any users to advertise to!
Ultimately, with the mobile app world extremely saturated and users’ standards higher than ever before, user acquisition and ad monetization are certainly no mean feats. Still, with the aid of high quality UX app analytics, these marketing endeavors will actually become a lot less daunting and a lot more navigable and effective.
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