4 Tips to Make Your Mobile Advertising Campaigns More Effective

by GameHouse

One of the most powerful aspects of mobile advertising is that it gives app marketers a variety of options to test, track, and refine their campaigns. Unlike the “old days” of print advertising and TV advertising campaigns, mobile ad campaigns can be quickly and cheaply adapted so you can run multiple versions at minimal additional expense and test the results with accurate, real-time data.

But even though mobile advertising gives unprecedented options for tracking and testing to find out what works best, not all app marketers take advantage of these opportunities and instead “go with their gut.” They launch one creative option to their entire audience, often without any targeting parameters and without testing different messages for different groups of customers.

Make sure your next mobile ad campaign maximizes the opportunities to track, analyze, adapt and improve your marketing efforts.

Here are four areas for testing on your next mobile advertising campaign:

  • Targeting: There are many categories of targeting that you can explore with your mobile ad testing. For example, one of the biggest advantages of mobile advertising is that it enables app marketers to target consumers based on their physical location using GPS coordinates. Until recently, it was hard for game developers to use location based advertising to their advantage; however, with the release of iOS 7 and the new “Near Me” section on the App Store, app marketers can target their mobile advertising to specific geographies to receive significant additional exposure without the enormous expense required to drive your app in to the top charts. Mobile app marketers should also consider demographic targeting. Do some types of customers perform better than others based on age, income and other demographic identifiers? Why or why not? And how can you craft better mobile ads to boost your performance among the various demographic groups?
  • Content: One limitation of mobile advertising is obvious: the screens are small and the ad sizes are, by default, even smaller – but a benefit of mobile ads is that you can try lots of different combinations of mobile ad designs. Test different banner and interstitial ad creatives, new calls to action, different colors, different photos and images. Sometimes it’s surprising how a slight difference in design can produce a dramatically different result.
  • The Offer: What is the incentive for someone to be interested enough in what you’re promoting to actually click on your mobile ad? Whether you’re trying to drive downloads of your app, or virtual goods (such as badges or “points” for an existing game), your customers will be more likely to click on your ad if you can answer the age-old question, “What’s in it for me?” You might find that specific sets (or cohorts) of customers respond differently to various offers – for example, one demographic cohort may convert at a high level when offered a sale on virtual goods, while another is most interested in specific features.
  • The Next Step: Once your customer clicks on your mobile ad, they are sent to the “landing environment” – in the case of pay-per-install advertising this is most often the app store page where they can download your app. There are numerous elements of your app store page to optimize, such as screenshots, app description, and calls to action. It may go without saying that every app marketer should consistently work to optimize their app store landing environment to convert as many visitors as possible. If you are sending users to a mobile website, it’s important to provide them with a clear, easy-to-navigate landing environment so they can go through with the rest of the process, whether that’s signing up to buy something, entering an e-mail address, or registering to follow your company on social media.

Mobile advertising campaigns are never really “done”; it’s an ongoing process that enables marketers to build, measure, learn, and repeat the process over and over until they receive valid, repeatable results. If you plan your tests in advance, targeting specific sets of users with different advertising creatives & offers you can identify what factors drive the highest conversion rates. Lastly, don’t forget to that measuring customer lifetime value is vital to every app business, and when combined with mobile advertising testing can have a dramatic impact on your business.

What’s your take on this? What are the most surprising test results you’ve seen from a mobile ad campaign? How do you decide which aspects of a mobile ad campaign to test? 

By Ryan Morel

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