Mobile Marketing

Television commercials, billboards, and magazine ads are the “must haves” when advertising traditional products. They have been around for years and will continue to be a staple in most companies’ advertising budgets. This fact, however, does not seem to apply for mobile game developers. Mobile games are anything but traditional and mobile game developers looking to acquire users have, until now, mostly stuck to advertising on mobile devices. Even though digital advertising is estimated to reach $47.8 billion in 2014, TV advertising will also keep on increasing up to $68.54 billion, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon.Times are changing: both traditional and mobile companies are starting to embrace the second screen.

As the saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. How about a motion picture then? There is no doubt about the fact that video ads are currently one of the most compelling way to advertise your mobile game (or app for that matter). Video is a strong medium because it enables you to convey a lot of emotions in short period of time. The truth is, however, that when talking of video ads for mobile user acquisition today most people think of in-app video clips.

Once again, we are keeping you up to date with the latest news at AppLift as well as a round up of issues affecting the wider mobile industry.

Effective retention strategies are the key to successful mobile game monetization. Creating a game, and marketing strategy, which hooks users in and keeps them returning results in good player retention levels and more revenue.

A few weeks ago we published a handy cheat sheet which featured the most important metrics to monitor for mobile game publishers in the fields of user acquisition, retention, engagement and monetization. However, we left out a hugely important part of most mobile publishers’ activity. Advertising. Today, even though the majority out of the overall app revenue comes from in-app purchases, monetizing through virtual items remains extremely hard and on average, only a very small fraction of the user base actually converts. For this reason, in-app advertising, when done right, remains an attractive monetization strategy for all mobile publishers.

A couple of days ago, in our summary of the WWDC14 keynote presentation, we wrongfully stated that we would have liked to see Apple announce more transparency and more advanced analytical features in iTunes Connect. This was without counting on the smaller developer sessions.It turns out, our wish came true as they did announce just that.

Yesterday, Apple held the keynote presentation of its annual WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) in San Francisco. The company announced a myriad of new products and features, including iOS 8, the latest edition of the mobile operating system, which will be available to the public later this fall.Overall, Apple’s announcements are quite strong, especially for app developers; for app marketers, Business of Apps nicely summed up the main improvements included in the release.Here, we would like to focus on just a few which we believe will directly impact the life of mobile marketers. Then, as it has also been noted that many of these new features effectively close gaps between iOS and Android (widgets and third-party keyboard integrations in particular), we would like cast a light on a few things that we would like Apple to catch up on in terms of app store marketing.

As presented in our Global Mobile Games Landscape infographic, and with $5.9 billion in revenue in 2013, Asia-Pacific is currently and by far the largest market for mobile games. The Asian mobile games market is also overall very lucrative, with a monthly average spend per paying player of $2.86.

With monetization happening after the install and for a minority of users, the Free-to-Play model presents serious challenges to mobile game publishers, who need to take the whole user lifecycle into account in order to be successful at developing, publishing Continue Reading