6 Tips to Increase and Keep Your App’s Quality Users
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We live in a society that is measured in KPIs, numbers and quantitative data. Phones are quickly replaced by the next-gen model. Over 300,000 tonnes of clothes are sent to British landfills per year. Today’s light bulbs are made with intelligently integrated planned obsoletion, whilst the Centennial Light in Livermore, California, which was made in the 19th century, still shines bright after more than 100 years. We live in a day and age of quantity. However, a renaissance of quality is beginning to take shape. This is reflecting in advertising, marketing, and businesses, as managers are starting to recognize the pitfalls of obtaining large volumes of quick installs comes at the price of quality users. So, how in this day and age of sensationalist advertising promises, and wide-spread choice, does one increase and keep their app’s quality users and installs? Check out our 6 best tips below.
Why does in-app engagement matter? Quite simply, in-app engagement is a crucial litmus tests, for the sum-total of your marketing and advertising effort. If you have strategized and executed effectively, you should have acquired the right users for your app, that engage as you planned.
Don’t Use Incentivised Traffic or Installs
Some people don’t know that their campaigns are being shown to incentivized traffic. These are the users who are incentivized to download your app. Perhaps they are a gamer playing on a dragon battle app and will be given a cool new dragon egg if they download your app. This might be great, if your app is also a dragon-style game, but not so good if you’re an eCommerce store for children’s apparel. Therein lies the problem, you can never be certain that incentivized installs are your correct target market. Therefore, it should be no surprise if these installs have high uninstall, short session times, or low retention rates.
Keep Fake Users Out, Quality Users In.
A widely common fact of the digital advertising world is that much of installs, clicks, and traffic is fraudulent. These are disingenuous or fake installs, that either never happened or were carried out by fraudulent users. Our reports estimate that in Q1 2019, 32% of iOS traffic is fraudulent. These are installs, clicks, and traffic which advertisers are paying for. Now imagine having 32% of your fraudulent, inactive, install base, suddenly gone. This would certainly boost your quality users percentage, leading to a higher rate of (perhaps) longer session times, active engagements within the community and in-app purchases. Additionally, you’d be spending your time, money and effort on acquiring and retaining quality users and installs, not fraudulent ones.
Market Your Product Accurately
The main reason for a poor retention rate is unmet expectations. Which is ultimately the result of marketing and advertising. There is no benefit to paying for a large volume of installs on heavily manipulated marketing materials, making undeliverable promises to your users. This will equate to wasted money of acquiring the wrong target demographic and potential influx of negative app reviews. Rather, it is better to align your marketing and advertising materials with promises that can be met, leading to installs with accurate expectations, thus increasing the likelihood of acquiring and increasing your quality users, installs and clicks.
Use Video Ads
There is a lot of anecdotal and small sample-sized studies showing the outperformance of video ads versus static images, for example, HubSpot ran two identical advertisements and found the video ad received 20% more clicks than the static image ad. There are, however, a few variables to consider, such as video quality and loading size, content, length, etc. However, there are a few advantages of using a video over a still image – firstly, the user can get a more comprehensive understanding of your product or service, which could lead to better in-app engagements, session times, MAUs and retention rates. Additionally, sometimes videos can be more eye-catching than static images, which our modern-societal eyes have been trained to dismiss and ignore (due to the influx of advertisements people see daily).
Understand Your Uninstalls
Although uninstalls are an undesired outcome, it does provide an opportunity to pin-point exactly what sources are delivering engaged, loyal and quality users and which are not delivering quality users. Thus, it is useful to review your UA data to find out which ad-networks, sub-publishers, media-platforms, and countries have past success. This data can be used to optimize future campaigns. Additionally, don’t forget to factor in metrics such as CPIs or CPA, etc., as higher quality users might be exponentially more expensive to acquire. However, you must also factor in that uninstall rate affects your app-chart rankings.
Track In-app KPIs
Track your in-app data to understand the customer journey. Is there perhaps a massive drop-off from non-English users on a certain page? That page’s translation might require revision. Are in-game microtransactions heavily weighted towards the lower-tier bundles? Then the game-economy and value proposition might need to be tweaked. There is a wealth of in-app information which can be reviewed to understand the pain-points and successes of your app, and this can be tweaked to retain and engage and increase your potential high-quality users and installs.
