How to elevate your app campaign game with marketing analytics

Aditya Maheshwari, Head of Customer Success, AppsFlyer India, writes about how marketing analytics reports for app marketers have become a must-have tool.

Mobile marketing goes hand in hand with data analysis. Contactless payments, virtual socialising, online learning, and e-commerce transactions are few among others, which have become a customer’s necessity to manage their daily routine. These mobile app services have received traction like never before, resulting in an enormous user base. Hence, there’s a need for reports to structure this data and draw meaningful insights for the app-marketers.

Marketing analytics reports prove to be essential as they help optimise app campaigns, making marketers understand which media channels can attract the highest form of revenues.

Today, most app downloads on Google Pay are free of cost. Hence, a marketer gains profit only through customer’s transactions. This creates a need for generating an engaging audience to meet the end business KPIs.

Here are a few analytics reports that play a vital role in enhancing any app campaign. Let us understand its importance and application –

LTV (Lifetime Value Report): The word lifetime is confusing; to simplify, the report reads data from the day of install to the day the report gets filed – this gives time-constrained information. It could be made in monthly, yearly, or quarterly format.

An LTV report is beneficial in giving engagement boosting insights considering today’s freemium-dominated businesses.

Let us look at an example to understand better –

Consider the following two attributes:

• Media source A – which delivers higher number of profits
• Media source B – which draws small yields, but the users are willing to spend more

An LTV report will draw a study of users and their activities from the date of download. Here, Media source B will give marketers better revenue results if they outlay more money to it. It also helps recognise the audience’s geographies, what creative variations attract them, which media source is beneficial, and hence, where they should make more monetary investments.

Post analysing, one can draw a line between which users are revenue-generating. It makes the decision-making of the marketers easy.

Activity report: What if one wants to look at a particular time frame and not always from the initial date of app download? The answer to this is an activity report. Marketers can fix a timeline from start to end and observe their audience’s activity accordingly.

This analysis helps especially in event-specific campaigns. For example, Diwali and Christmas are peak transactional slots in India for the clothing and apparel industries. Hence, one can set a timeline during these festivals and observe consumer behaviour. Marketers can compare the previous year’s data with this year to draw better insights and plan the next effective campaign.

Retention Report: Ensuring customer retention on app is the real game. To retain your audience, apps must engage customers through different events.

Owing to the fierce competition for audience attention amongst marketers, it is evident for customers to keep high user-experience expectations. Hence, securing their loyalty is the next challenge.

This report closely observes user activities and alerts marketers when their customers are about to drop off.

The retention rate is calculated by dividing the number of active users on a specific day/ week since the install day/ week by the total number of users who launched the app for the first time during the selected date range.

For example, segment-1 may have the maximum number of users, but segment-2 might have a higher number of users who engage and retain. Hence, this report will help marketers identify that segment-1 needs re-work and how the following steps need to be taken to gain participation and meet business objectives.

Cohort Report: When a marketer receives audience data, it is unstructured. Users participate in different events, make several transactions, and belong to unique names, backgrounds, and geographies. What if this data could be broken down and grouped in terms of similar choices and interests?

The cohort report helps in clustering data. It breaks down and highlights activities that users show in high value.

For example, set-A shows high activity on the app on Monday, while set-B shows average engagement. Here, the marketer can make a note of what made set-A engage in high rates on Monday and track the details accordingly.  Marketers can then plan a campaign for set-A specifically and ensure their participation for upcoming Mondays.

Remarketing Report: Remarketing checks on various levels to ensure your user’s loyalty for the app.

Most users download an app but are not active on it. For the same, Remarketing report gives timely alerts on which user group needs re-engagement campaigns. Hence, this helps marketers in taking timely actions and saves their users from dropping off.

Exploring same data through different prisms

Running the same data through various reports gives vast yet granular level feedback to the marketers. It helps marketers observe the data through several prisms. It also provides clarity on the KPIs they should focus on.

Hence, marketing analytics reports for app marketers are a must-have tool. They are robust to turn unstructured data into meaningful insights and ultimately give confidence in making the right number of investments and gain expected goals.