Cross-Promotion and Direct Dealing Even those who have never heard of cross-promotions and direct deals can quickly make sense of them, which is good because theyre a big part of almost all app developers marketing strategy these days, but how is it done? Well, even for the lucky few who are still in the dark, its not that hard. However, its worth remembering that your app needs to involve a deep analytics system before you start attempting this. As is true with any form of advertising, you need to have the right figures at your fingertips in order to make informed decisions. Gut feelings are all very well, but its more professional to trust key performance indicators if you want a good return on investment. And these analytics need to track users throughout their experience through your entire portfolio of apps in order to discover their lifetime value. Once youre all set with the correct numbers, you can look to putting your marketing strategy in place. Bear in mind that if youre going to be using a network like Chartboost or similar to direct deal or cross-promote through, you need to ensure you meet its minimum requirements. For instance, Chartboost requires your game to be opened in excess of 20,000 time per day before allowing you into its direct deals market. To cross-promote your portfolio through one firm, you need to make sure you have at least two apps or games that appeal to similar audiences, and that you already have a reasonable user base. Even if youre considering an incentivised campaign, such as gems or tokens for each install, its important that each promoted app deliver a return, or youll merely be left with some extra installs but no paying customers. Once you have all your ducks in a row, its time to make things happen. If your portfolio contains apps similar enough, as Supercell does with Clash of Clans and Boom Beach, both being base-building strategy games, then youre ideally suited to cross-promote each app through the other. If, however, youre looking at making a deal to promote your app on another companys product, its time to find the right partner. Picking a partner Heres where the gut feeling comes into play. We all have a sense of whos doing well and who feels like the right lot to go into business with, but numbers need to be used to confirm the feeling. Keeping track of your CTR, IR and download figures allows you to use them to negotiate the best deal with prospective partners. Also, choose the companies whose apps have high indexes. If youre mainly looking to get your apps name out there, team-up with apps that have good click through rates. If you are attempting to squeeze a little more cash from your customers, decide who has the greater eCPM and work with them. As all these factors depend on the numbers from a particular campaign, keep in mind that different ad and creative styles will result in differing CTR and IR. So, when choosing apps, work campaign by campaign. Once you have uncovered the apps you think your product should be associated with, do your research. Download them and go through the full experience. Try to see why their indexes are high, and decide if they work with your app in a complementary fashion vis-a-vis your customers enjoying both and, if thats the case, go ahead and talk to their developers. To assist your promotion plans, try to choose an app or game that identifies with a broad audience. The more users it reaches the better and, say, an arcade game that has mass market appeal is a great platform to use to direct players to a related strategy game or simulation that can increase their LTV. Keep in mind though, that for any app you choose - the higher its CTR and IR, the lower CPC and CPI you will be able to negotiate. Negotiations As we all know, negotiation merely comes down to finding a deal that works for both parties: If youre the developer trying to promote, you want to pay as little CPI as possible without forcing your potential partners eCPM as low as the network eCPM, or theyll have no reason want to work with you. If youre being approached to promote someone elses product on your app, obviously youll want as high CPI and CPC as you can get away with, but it still cant be higher than the networks, or theyll go elsewhere for a business partner. Because dealing directly between the two of you removes the network fee factor, you both are starting the negotiation with an advantage and one less expense to worry over. This allows the freedom to push the deal to mutual satisfaction. With Mobile game cross-promotion, its a lot more difficult to work out how optimum a deal might be. You have to compare all revenue from the LTV of your potential new users the deal will gift you, with what you would expect from traditional advertising through the network. If theres more money with the network then its not worth cross-promoting. Consider proposing alternate timing for your cross-promotion ads when finalising the deal. For instance, if you have a new update ready to go next month, wouldnt it be a good idea to kick-off the campaign after the update drops? Making this kind of deal with multiple publishers can enable you to rack up installs quickly and push your way up the app store charts. Implementation Any kind of advertising essentially boils down the same thing, getting your app featured within another app – or other media – for the purpose of promotion. If your app is yet to feature any ads, run through it and find the places advertising could appear without disrupting flow too much or ruining the user experience. Consider passive elements like a more games button, as well as active push notifications or interstitial ads that could feature cross-promotions or ads from any direct deals you have made. The most important factor is to integrate the app smoothly with your interface. Its possible to use the SDK from a network to make quick changes without altering assets or code, but its not the slickest way to display the other app. Some ad networks are clever enough to allow customisation of the ad window, thereby making it feel less artificial and and hopefully raise the CTR. Its also possible to make the ad part of the experience and included in your apps interface, along with custom animations that match the rest of your apps style perfectly, and this should lead to much higher conversion rates. However, this means that if you need to make any changes later, its likely to be necessary to update your entire app. In the end, you must choose the solution that works best for you and your circumstances. When youre finally ready to roll, separate your users into paying and nonpaying customers, and only show the ads to the latter. It would be disastrous if your best customers were tempted away to a rival. After all, usually the most profitable users seldom make up more than 5% of your user base. Even cross-promotion ads come with a certain amount of risk, as it could lower their LTV or turn them off paying altogether. Different apps will monetise differently, dont forget. Even so, if youve got the analytics to back it up, using cross-promotion ads on a high-paying customer as they are about to churn is ideal, provided you can show them a similar experience elsewhere. But this involves extremely accurate tracking. In an ideal world you would create an endless loop of cross-promotion that bounces paying customers from one app to the next throughout your portfolio, so even as they churn they simply head to another of your products and their revenue keeps rolling in. The trick is to show them another app at the right point. Placing interstitial ads around the last five or ten levels, for example, or segment the users that are logging in fewer times each day and target them with your cross-promotional adverts. Those using direct deals can find cross-promotion an inexpensive way of A/B testing your ads. Simply use the most converting formats in your direct deal campaign. Neither cross-promoting or direct dealing are new ideas, so there are numerous companies around to supply tools and platforms to help you facilitate these deals, if youre not up to handling the whole transaction yourself, including even marketplaces that help you search for partners. Of course they will all end up taking a cut, but hopefully this advice will help you realise that how many you use and how much they take is up to you. Source: Word data
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:47:00 +0000
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