Author: Dennis Mink

Dennis is VP of Marketing at Liftoff. When he's not busy running the marketing department, he can be found throwing spares and strikes at the bowling alley while grooving to Thievery Corp.

How ApplePay Helps Reduce Friction In Making In-App Purchases

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
February 26, 2015

Apple Pay LogoLast week I read a story on AppleInsider.com that ApplePay now accounts for 30% of all in-app purchases made in the Staples app, making it their number one in-app payment method on iOS. While so much of the focus on ApplePay is around the potential for it to revolutionize in-store purchases, for app publishers the news coming from Staples is the real story. ApplePay has the potential to dramatically reduce the friction involved in making purchases on mobile.

As anyone who has ever made a purchase on their phone knows – either via an app or a mobile website – the experience remains fundamentally flawed. I’m not talking about making an in-app purchase via iTunes or Google Play. Though this still requires entering a password for any non-iPhone 6 users, entering a password to make a purchase isn’t too painful of an experience. (more…)

Read More

How Programmatic Ad Buying Is Changing Mobile Advertising

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
February 12, 2015

If you haven’t heard of programmatic ad buying before, then now is the time to listen up. More than anything else, programmatic ad buying has completely altered the way that advertisement is bought and sold, both online and on mobile. There are a lot of reasons that the changes have been so dramatic, some of which I will outline here.

Read More

Liftoff Releases Q4 2014 Mobile App Engagement Index; Measures the Impact of App Install Ads

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
February 3, 2015

Mobile App Engagement Index

Today we are excited to announce the release of the Liftoff Mobile App Engagement Index. The index sets CPA benchmarks on a variety of post-install events taken by users acquired via app install ads, including registering, sharing, making a reservation or purchase, and subscribing to a service.

Most mobile app install campaigns are measured on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis. While buying on CPI is convenient for both the advertiser and the supplier, we found that CPI is weakly related to actual ROI of the advertising campaign, and masks the often poor value of acquired users.

To address this knowledge gap in the mobile marketing industry, we analyzed all of our Q4 2014 mobile marketing campaigns to establish benchmarks on both post-install conversion rates and effective cost-per-action for a variety of post-install events. Our analysis is based on 10.9 million app installs and 427 million post-install events across 6 distinct app categories: Dating, eCommerce, Finance, Social, Travel and Utility.

 

(more…)

Read More

5 Most Common Mistakes in Designing App Install Ads

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
December 18, 2014

iOS-app-store-iconThree.  That’s how many times a Director of Marketing I know opened her desktop computer during her recent maternity leave. Instead, nearly all of her online activity happened on her mobile phone and tablet.  As a marketer who’s product is almost entirely optimized for a desktop browser, this was a wake up call for her.

As our connected time spent rapidly shifts to mobile, so must we as marketers develop competitive mobile strategies to attract and engage consumers.  With apps making up 86% of time spent within a mobile device, mobile app marketing has already become a critical advertising channel for many verticals.  Growing your app installed and engaged user base is the first step. (more…)

Read More

Spotlight: Lifelock Drives Mobile Subscriptions with CPA-Optimized App Install Ads

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
December 10, 2014

Lifelock-logoLifelock (www.lifelock.com) is the leader in identity theft protection. On mobile, they keep us safe with the Lifelock Wallet app. The app makes it easy to securely store credit card information and subscribe to the Lifelock identity theft protection service.

To grow their subscription service on mobile, Lifelock turned to Liftoff for help in identifying and acquiring quality users. We started by profiling their most engaged mobile users, identifying key attributes and characteristics, then ran CPA-optimized mobile app install campaigns targeting users that looked like their best customers. The results of our efforts? Watch the video to find out. (more…)

Read More

Cost-per-Install: The Astonishingly Mediocre Metric Mobile Marketers Love [and Hate] To Use

Dennis Mink
By: Dennis Mink
December 4, 2014

performance_large_singleEvery company with an app these days seems to be running paid mobile app install campaigns. I can’t go a day without seeing an ad on my phone encouraging me to install an app. Sometimes I bite and go for it. When I do, I usually take a quick 15 second look before deciding if I want to keep the app to check out later. If I can’t figure out how to use it or just don’t see the value in the app, it’s gone. A press and hold of the jiggly app icon and off it goes into the big app trash can in the sky.

As a marketer, I cannot help but think about how much companies spend to get people to install their apps, only to see their apps deleted so soon after installing. How much money did they spend on my install? What was their CPI? $2? $5? $10?

According to VentureBeat, most users acquired via CPI are of astonishingly low-value. Over two-thirds of the users acquired via CPI have a sub-$10 life-time value (LTV), and almost one in six have profitability-dooming LTV of precisely zero. (Read more). Ouch! As the app space becomes more competitive (hard to believe, right?) and the cost-per-install continues to rise, the problem for marketers will only get worse. (more…)

Read More

Newer Posts »