The following is an exclusive guest contributed post from AppsFlyer CEO Oren Kaniel.
With people spending more time online in apps than on the mobile web and mobile advertising expected to grow in excess of 75% to top $31 billion this year, more marketers than ever before are looking for ways to optimize mobile advertising and quantify ROI. They’re also seeking new methods to demonstrate value for marketing spend and justify strategies to their boards.
Today’s data-driven advertising environment is a 180-degree turn from the old-school approach depicted in the famous TV show “Mad Men.” Modern marketers are more goal-focused and numbers-conscious. They don’t simply throw money at sources and hope something pays off in the form of better conversions and audience engagement – they actively seek to optimize their strategies in real time. Here are four tips you can use to get the most out of your mobile ad spend:
- Make sure you allocate resources effectively. The only constant in the new advertising ecosystem is change. Social media platforms rise and fall in popularity. Online trends come and go. To make sure your traffic sources are producing ROI, you’ll need hard numbers from an unbiased source on where installs, clicks and in-app purchases originate.
- Analyze, analyze, analyze. Advertisers in the Don Draper era could blanket the airwaves with an ad campaign, secure in the knowledge that there were a limited number of media platforms. Today’s marketers operate in a completely different environment; they need analysis that identifies which marketing channels are generating results.
- If it’s not working, change it. With access to hard numbers from an unbiased source, today’s marketers can be more agile. An advertiser who is spending $5 million in a quarter can analyze results after 30 days, and if she sees that five of 20 traffic sources are producing 85% of conversions, she can shift the spend to where it produces the best results.
- Build ROI in with a CPA strategy. In the early days of mobile advertising, marketers focused almost exclusively on click and installation metrics – cost per click (CPC) and cost per install (CPI). Today, there’s a better measure of success – the cost per action, or CPA, which measures the in-app events and actions that actually drive ROI.
Advertising today is a lot more complicated than it was a few decades ago. The number of advertising channels has grown exponentially, and company executives demand greater accountability. The complexity of today’s marketplace calls for greater transparency: Advertisers need to know where their money is going and which channels are driving results.
But thanks to the greater number of mobile advertising venues and the technologies involved, today’s advertising environment offers many more opportunities to effectively target customer groups and identify which traffic sources deliver results. Advertisers in the 21st century who can find an unbiased source of metrics and the analytics they need to optimize their campaign strategy can generate results Don Draper only dreamed of delivering.
