Effective analytics: The key to app marketing success

Authored by April Tayson, Regional VP, INSEA Adjust.

If your app marketing campaign is a finely tuned machine, then data is the fuel that keeps it moving. Every marketer should know this. And in an app marketing ecosystem where data privacy and user acquisition (UA) are more complex than ever, forming strategies that best leverage the data at your disposal are essential for success.

At a very high level, businesses who use data-driven strategies drive five to eight times as much ROI as businesses who don’t. So it’s no surprise that 87% of marketers say data is their company’s most under-utilised asset — and 40% of brands plan to increase their data-driven marketing budgets.

However, it’s not always easy. Agility and adaptability are essential for success, as app marketers are tasked with analysing data from an increasing number of sources. Given that a few percentage points can determine whether a campaign was a success or a failure, the ability to act fast is crucial. What this means, ultimately, is that success comes down to a combination of the skills of the marketer and the quality of the tools they have at their disposal.

With data sets flowing in from, for example, APIs, attributions, consented App Tracking Transparency (ATT) installs and SK Ad Network postbacks, there’s a huge number of factors to assess and analyze. Having all of this data in one place is the key to better decision making and an essential component to app marketing success. How can a marketer properly compare and contrast when flicking between dashboards, software sets, and spreadsheets? Moreover, teams should be empowered to focus on growth and strategy, not spending hours checking if numbers add up.

App marketing doesn’t end at acquisition

Increasingly, app marketing goes beyond the initial acquisition. Retention and engagement are key to ensuring your UA dollars are not wasted on users who churn quickly or don’t prove ROI.

According to Adjust data, the average global retention rate across verticals and device-types is 6% at day 30. This means that 94% of the users you acquire in a set cohort will be inactive within a month. The key to improving those numbers is having full visibility into the user journey. This allows you to pinpoint churn points and identify behaviors that indicate LTV, or Lifetime Value – with these things in mind, you’re empowered to improve your UX to better suit user needs and weed out issues, and to understand the campaigns and channels that are leading to the best quality users for your app. Armed with this information and the ability to make changes to campaigns and budget allocations quickly and easily, you can improve performance with relative ease.

Centralised data is key to making better, faster decisions

App marketers are dealing with a virtual firehose of data. Network data, attribution data, and SKAdNetwork data can add up quickly – especially when you are running multiple campaigns. Having all of this data at your fingertips in one place is the key to removing the headache of the day-to-day grind.

There’s no need to waste time navigating through confusing dashboard views, multiple tabs and screens, countless excel spreadsheets, and manual calculations. Whether you are trying to quickly spot anomalies or need to deep dive into D7 ROAS for a specific creative, marketers need tools that make it easy for them to get the information they need now. It’s the ability to act fast that can ultimately be the difference between a successful campaign and one that falls short. It’s also clear, easy-to-understand data that can be most successfully leveraged to build conversion value strategies and make up the basis for things like predictive LTV.

Ultimately, an aggregated data view allows UA and marketing teams to focus on more strategic and creative tasks – enabling more effective campaigns and more efficient use of marketing budgets.