Low user engagement with your App is not acceptable, to say the least, and that affects everyone in your team, from product to marketing, developers, and management. From low retention rates on day 7 to disappointing ARPU, Engagement is critical for everyone in your team, and it's the lifeblood for your App. With Great Engagement, there is much more room to test out creative ideas and trust your users to provide constructive feedback on recent updates and upcoming features. So how can you leverage this precious session time to grow and unlock engagement growth power to scale your in-app purchase?
Scaling your ARPU
Four main methods can create app revenue: In-App Purchase, Multi-Channel Platform ( Pay on a website and use the App - such as Netflix, Spotify ), 3rd Party Ads (AdNetowrks), and Selling Ads ( Facebook, TikTok). We want to distinguish between running ads and selling as those are two different models. For now, we will focus on in-app Purchases and running ads. To scale IAP, let's talk about engagement. It is a vast topic that covers any interaction time spent using or playing your App, so we would like to focus on engagement with your in-app-purchase content as a subset of the user experience. What is in-app purchase content? We will consider it any content shared with the user before the purchase. The content can be a part of the App or promotional content like an Ad or a text explaining what this purchase enables.
The engagement growth goal is maximizing the interaction time between the users and content that promote the IAP by measuring the interaction, quantifying the value of each exchange, and improving the next one. We focus on IAP as the developer controls the whole process with full access to all the data. The right IAP promotion strategy will ensure incremental improvements over time with this visibility.
We will measure engagement growth through time spent interacting with advertisements. We can increase this time by adding more ads placements or creating a core loop that forces more ads on the user. Although we can control the base factor of the interaction time, much of the data beyond this point is outreach. The Ads revenue is based on the advertiser's decisions and our user actions, and we can't improve it except by increasing the time that we sell. As we discussed in the previous blog on ads-mediation. For In-App purchases, we would stay on the same playing field as ads and start by measuring interaction time with the Purchase offer. it can occur in the app shop or after failing a level and receiving an offer to continue playing. For this content to be valuable, we need to make sure that the user understands the value of the purchase. Therefore, the offer is relevant to the user, and the way to complete the transaction is transparent. However, scaling is not as straightforward as ads with the current methods. When does the user interact with IAP content? Usually, IAP promotions are based on a display banner with 5-10 words of text within a popup or inside the shop section of the app promoting a sale. The banner promotion unit is a short content format, delivering a small amount of data to the user with no room to create an emotional connection with the promotion itself.This type of promotion can work great for teams in full control of their data and the user journey. The banner is the tip of a "data iceberg" timed perfectly with an appealing value to the user. Ads provide long-format content that better delivers their message by using video and playable ads. Optimizing the creatives is the most effective way to improve engagement as data has been more restricted.
Our suggestion for developers that don't have the data infrastructure and team members to act on this data is to promote IAP with longer formats content. Create an even playing field between ads and your promotion by working with the same content formats. New formats unlock new placements outside the shop and popup, offering new content from the app creator for engaging the user.
App Purchase Full Potential
App purchases are heavily dependent on the app content and updates. For example, deploying a new item in the app might be a complex and expensive process as it involves a great deal of development and product work. Because of this process, many developers focus on product development and pricing while neglecting the promotion content tools. Although some very successful companies built excellent purchase promotion tools, there is no off-the-shelf solution for longer format content with a full analytic suite. When was the last time you watched a video ad for purchase in the App you were using? When was the last time you watched a video ad on mobile? What was the content? In the last fifteen years, the mobile advertising industry invented many new ad formats such as video, rewarded videos ( to ensure view time ), Playable Ads, Offer walls, Banners, Audio Ads, and Surveys. Even the good old banner got some upgrades with GIFs, Rotating Images, and carousels. While in-app promotion stayed with the short format content - popup and banners moving most of the effort to data analysis and pricing, missing out on simplicity and promotion content as a growth channel.
Your app Your time
What is the goal of all those tools? The goal is to improve engagement with the IAP promotion content and make sure the value is understood. Engagement growth for IAP puts this concept at the center of delivering the right message and the right value. As repetition is the sure way to success, repeating the message ensures a response. A response may be no response, but this is also valuable data that can help you move on to the next value proposition. With current solutions provided by the app stores, you can understand end of the journey and learn a lot the most popular purchase, but it takes a while to understand why the purchase happens. You need to align analytics with the purchase data and determine the reason. In terms of controlling the purchase funnel, you can modify the App or change the prices of the different offers. The missing piece is mainly the value proposition of the offer. How much context can you put on a pop-up or a shop placement?
Use video It took the Ad industry ten years to learn that video is better than text or images. But unfortunately, it seems that IAP promotion is still not on board with this concept. By emphasizing the IAP promotion, you can discover new data on your users and what value they are looking for, allowing you to build new funnels to convert non paying users to paying users.Using long-format content to promote your purchase enables you to take back control of your user time and direct their attention to how the purchase improves their experience and unlocks new experiences. Purchasing may not be the only goal; the engagement growth concept can be used to promote softer KPIs like introducing your app community or sharing updates and new features.
Summary In conclusion, Engagement growth is all about utilizing the user time to your immediate growth funnels, providing an additional channel to share content. Aim to share long-format content and make sure to A/B different messages that showcase the benefits and value of the purchase or how much fun is going on in your Facebook group. Use 3rd Party ads as a revenue source for your App but make sure that this time can't be better used promoting your content.
