Scoop

In my prior life, I ran one of the most highly trafficked mobile destinations for quite a while and we launched one of the most successful apps of all time. It still stands among the Top 10 Android apps within Android Market or Google Play (call it what you will). Even with all that experience, we were one developer, one drop within a larger cloud, buffeted by many of the same winds of change, but untouched by many of them as well.
Since I left and started interacting with literally hundreds of mobile app developers, I’ve learned many new things (surprise!). I had posted something earlier this month on my personal blog about lessons learned from interacting and working with over 287 mobile developers and I wanted to expand on the points that I had made over there. 

There were 10 items that I had pointed out (even though there are many more) as indicative of what you’ll experience when working with mobile developers. I’ll elaborate over here on each of those initial points:

• Some care about their brand equity. Some don’t. – A developer that cares about their brand equity doesn’t typically display flashing banner ads, or one-click purchasing where it is unexpected. They care about the message that they convey and may not even run ad networks or affiliate offers if it’s not associated with a positive message-type brand.
• Some care about user experience. Some don’t. – Some developer care about what their users think. Some just do the “pump and dump.” They throw out an app with some great monetary hooks, market the heck out of it, and then take whatever they can get. Once poor user reviews hurt their conversion rates, they move on to the next one. Or they just don’t ultimately care about how great their product works and acts. They have other priorities.
• Some care about the amount of revenue they can drive. Some don’t. – Not every developer cares about how much revenue they earn. Not every developer even cares about driving revenue at all. They have different desires and it’s important to understand who they are when talking with one about advertising inside their app.
• Some care about creating several different revenue sources. Some don’t. – You’ll come across developers that are happy just running advertising. Some want advertising and in-app purchasing. Or some just focus on the total dollar amount. On average, if you can introduce something that decreases the dependency on one type of revenue source, developers will be interested.
• Some care about working with multiple revenue partners. Some don’t. – Similar to the prior point, developers understand the need to decrease risk as much as anyone else and so if they can reduce their dependency on one revenue partner they will.
• Some care about advertising revenue. Some don’t. – With variations on prior themes, you’ll find that not all developers will place advertising in their apps. Some will only use in-app purchasing. Some will use nothing.
• Some care about in-app purchasing. Some don’t. – Some developers try to upsell their users and very often are successful with this type of endeavor. They can be particularly successful if it’s a natural extension of their product such as a premium version or currency for a game.
• Some care about the upsell. Some don’t. – Many apps have a natural upsell. It may be to a premium product that the developer has built or it may lead to another ancillary product that someone else is offering as a product. Those type of partnerships are the most natural. Not all developers focus on it though.
• Some care about paid apps. Some don’t. – There’s been a big shift from paid apps to freemium apps. With that said, you’ll still find many developers that only launch paid apps. Their traffic is usually next to nil when compared to the freemium guys, but sometimes their profit is equally as good. You don’t need many paying users when your users are actually paying. Even still, many of them are realizing that the best strategy around this is either freemium or the upsell to a paid version.
• Some care about money. Some don’t. – This is just a small, but important, sampling of what drives developers. Don’t assume that every developer wants to monetize. Some of them want to make the world a better place. And yes, that’s important as well.

When you talk with developers, it really pays to understand these points. Not because it’ll be an easier sell but because you’ll be better able to understand what they have to say and, as such, be better able to help them with your unique talents and products.

I know that we have been covering a ton of mobile marketing information here on the blog recently, but it’s for good reason.  Mobile marketing innovations are currently exploding, resulting in countless new opportunities for affiliate marketers.

Another new opportunity has “jumped up” in local mobile marketing which will specifically provide local retail businesses with a new and deadly mobile marketing weapon through Jumptap.

Utilizing the new found benefits of a data partner; PlaceIQ, Jumptap will be providing advertisers with the ability to market down to the city block level.  That’s right, hyper-local targeting down to the city block level!

Talk about powerful advertising for any affiliate or service provider working for local retail businesses!  Here is more from Jumptap on this recent development:

In the second half of 2011, Jumptap brought unique third-party data partnerships to market, which began to pay off for advertisers in the retail vertical and in other prominent categories. To further enhance its offerings, Jumptap has inked a partnership with hyper-local data leader PlaceIQ.

The data provider transforms ‘location into context’ by ingesting large amounts of unstructured, unrelated, anonymous location-based data types such as photos, place, event, digital, social and more. After cleansing and normalizing vast amounts of data, PlaceIQ then extracts patterns, trends, intelligence and context. The resulting hyper-local ‘location profiles’ (down to a city block) suggest the likely context and behavior of an anonymous user, or device.

When coupled with time and location, these anonymous profiles can provide powerful targeting opportunities. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ offering will make it easier for advertisers to reach precise grids that are most likely to contain people at work, luxury shoppers, tourists, students, travelers, and more.

This approach is privacy-friendly, as PlaceIQ profiles locations not users, and no personally identifiable information is gathered, stored or used. As smartphones proliferate, retailers are recognizing the power of location awareness to drive foot traffic and in-store behaviors. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ partnership is squarely aimed at delivering on this promise for retailers.

“Jumptap’s retail business experienced explosive growth in 2011, and retailers who leveraged our unique third-party data to target specific audience segments during the holiday season saw significant performance uplift,” said Todd Anderman, Chief Media and Revenue Officer, Jumptap. “Matthew’s retail expertise combined with our retail insights, existing third-party data relationships, and the addition of PlaceIQ’s hyper-location data will help our retail partners further integrate targeted mobile advertising into their overall media mix and increase sales.

If you aren’t utilizing mobile marketing through the Adwords platform yet…you should be. Some of the most profitable and highest ROI campaigns in the affiliate space these days are mobile-targeted campaigns. Think pay-per-call and mobile relevant offers and landing pages.

One of my favorite strategies for lead generation across nearly all verticals is to drive calls and clicks from mobile targeted ads. One reason is because even today there isn’t a huge amount of competition. However, another reason is that most mobile advertising platforms, like Adwords, allow you to target very specifically according to device type and other characteristics.

The marketing tip here is to understand that each device typically caters to a certain demographic. In other words, most devices have demographically similar users. This is powerful knowledge and an extra tool in your ad targeting arsenal as compared to non-mobile campaigns.

Think about the likely demographic of a simple feature phone or gophone user vs. the demographic of an iPhone 4S user. Powerful demographic knowledge there and it gets even more detailed when you break down very specific devices.

Understanding the demographic of the users of a specific device or device type will allow you to include or exclude the users of that device seeing your ads. Kind of like cpv targets, or ppc keywords, you can filter out and turn off devices that aren’t converting for your offer or turn on a specific device where the users are converting for your ad. Mobile optimization rocks.

Non-mobile campaigns don’t give you this added tool for targeting, simply because targeting specific non-mobile devices will normally not give you a demographic that is targeted enough to make a difference in your campaigns. Bummer PeeWee.

With that being said, mobile targeting just got even better and more flexible on the Adwords platform. Google has now given us the tools to target mobile users based on OS version, and whether or not they are connecting from a WiFi connection. This should only serve to further increase the ROI of our mobile campaigns. Score.

We already have the ability with Adwords to target based on the operating platform, but now we have the ability to drill down even further and target based on a platform and version of that particular platform. This kind of targeting is especially relevant to App and software developers, but can also be used more creatively if you think outside the box a bit.

Now we can also target users based on their connection speed. This is extremely powerful because we can now target users that we know have the capability to view higher bandwidth pages which might contain audio, video, etc. We all know that incorporating audio/video, etc. can significantly increase conversions…but it was too much of a risk to incorporate those things in our current landers.

Well, now we can because we can setup a campaign for high-speed connections and a campaign for low-speed connections which will allow us to serve different landing pages to each type of user.

Thus, we can maximize conversions by showing users that can watch a video, a page with video included…yet not lose the low bandwidth users by ensure we still serve them a more stripped down version of the landing page.

You can find these new targeting features in the “campaign settings” menu under the “networks and devices” and “Advanced mobile and tablet options”.

Adding these two new tools to the mobile targeting arsenal in Adwords should get you very exited. Happy increased margins!