SocialClicks

How to get attention through Facebook’s mobile ads — blue hair?

Standard
English: Map with the 'Top 10' of countries wi...

English: Map with the ‘Top 10’ of countries with more users in Facebook. Español: Mapa con el ‘Top 10’ de los paises con mas usuarios en Facebook. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Evolution of the number of Facebook users. Dat...

Evolution of the number of Facebook users. Data comes from Facebook’s press room: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How to get attention through Facebook’s mobile ads — blue hair?

shutterstock_98089421As more Facebook users check their News Feed from their phone, the mobile app install advertisement is becoming the hottest trend for developers. But it takes more than just a screenshot of the app to get a user to download it.

Leah Na’aman, the marketing manager forSocialClicks, talked at the Inside Social Appsconference recently in San Francisco to share some best practices for really reaching customers and potential app users through the News Feed.

The one fail-proof tip? Blue hair.

Well, the blue hair won’t work for everyone, but Na’aman said that game developers can tint their main characters’ hair in the mobile app install ad as a fallback when everything else fails.

Na’aman pointed out that there are plenty of opportunities on Facebook for game and non-game app developers. 20 percent of Facebook users play games every day, and the company is experiencing a 25 percent increase in monthly paying users. More than half of Facebook users are on mobile now, and 3,800 developers used mobile app install ads in the first quarter of the year to drive 25 million downloads. She noted that 25 percent of mobile display ads are on Facebook, and that mobile app install ads yield click-through rates around 2 to 3 percent.

Na’aman encouraged attendees at the Inside Social Apps conference to utilize mobile targeting to make sure they’re getting the most bang for their buck, ensuring that the ads are being served to the users who would care about them. Additionally, she recommended that developers look into utilizing custom audiences so companies can target and retarget their Facebook ads.

She then described what makes for a winning ad in the mobile Facebook News Feed:

The ideal ad is a combination of the right targeting, the right image, the right text, and then A/B testing all of these different variables until you get the perfect combination of them all. This ideal ad is going to talk to the right people, in the right place, and in the right way, and in the right time.

One of Na’aman’s biggest recommendations from her speech was to stop making statements in Facebook ads. It’s not really exciting to just tell a user about a product — questions usually perform much better than statements. Developers can either command users to do something through a call to action or ask for input. But just having a statement about how awesome the app is will usually fail to excite the users enough to click on the ad and install the app.

She also suggested that advertisers play with colors and shapes. Depending on the type of game (or other app) you have, bright, vibrant colors tend to catch the eye more than dull ones. This is where the blue hair on the character image for the ad creative comes in. For gaming apps, the image that accompanies the mobile app install ad should really pop and show various characters, letting gamers know that they have options.

Additionally, once a user purchases the app or makes some kind of transaction — don’t let the engagement end there, Na’aman said:

Utilize your advertising for the whole lifecycle. Customers can come back, re-engage, and keep using your applications, and keep playing your game, and keep monetizing for you in the future.

Readers: What best practices have you found with regard to mobile ads?

Related articles

Mobile Metrics that Matter

Standard
Mobile Metrics that Matter

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Phones

In today’s social advertising landscape, mobile is simply inescapable. The mobile revolution is reshaping social advertising, and has clearly led to more engaging and targeted ad campaigns, as well as a growing demand to accurately measure their value. Traditional metrics such as CPM and CPC leave much to be desired in terms of attributing the real value driven by advertising directly to spend. Moreover, they are unable to accurately measure advertising ROI and are also entirely ineffectual when it comes to forecasting customer LTV.

At SocialClicks’ we work to overcome this challenge by tracking in-app behaviors that offer the deepest insight into user performance and engagement, which have been shown not only to properly measure and attribute immediate results to your ad campaigns, but also to help you better predict the results they will drive into the future.

The most effective way to leverage the opportunities offered by mobile advertising is to closely analyze audience behavior, and intelligently link it back to your ad campaigns. Below, we’ve compiled four metrics to help guide your way to the most cost-effective and LTV-minded mobile campaign success. Several of these are easily tracked, while others require post-acquisition event tracking to identify the highest-quality users and forecast long-term user value.

Four essential mobile metrics:

Active Users Directly Acquired Through Advertising – Tracking active user numbers is basic, but the next step involves granular segmentation. Which campaigns, and even individual ads, have driven traffic that resulted in the acquisition of active and long-term users for your apps?

User Retention Rate – Now that people have downloaded your app, it’s time to track when and how often they return to it. At SocialClicks we help our clients achieve this by using integrated in-app tracking to monitor critical mobile events such as Day One Retention. Given the significant drop-off in usage after initial installation, Day One Retention can be an excellent indicator of whether you’ve successfully targeted the right audience.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) – Collecting data on user monetization is crucial to gaining actionable insight on in-app engagement. ARPU is a vital post-download action that can be used to identify loyal users, making it easy to exclude low-performing ads with little monetization, and optimize images and text for best performance in the future.

Session Time – A major difference exits between users who spend 1 minute in your app, and those who spend five or more. The amount of time per session can disclose a great deal on whether users are likely to return – or monetize, in the future, and can be used as a strong determinant of current and future user loyalty and monetization.

Tracking the right analytics is key to ensuring you reach the precise high-quality users that ultimately determine the effectiveness and lifetime value driven by your ad campaigns. Clicks and conversions may have been sufficient in the past, but mobile advertising today requires close examination of insights that go far beyond these initial actions. Post-conversion event tracking lies at the core of SocialClicks’ mobile strategy, helping us drive the users who monetize best today and forecast which customer and user segments will have the highest lifetime value into the future.