App marketing is a tricky game. There are many different factors to consider when thinking about how to promote an app. App Store Optimization is one way to boost app download, however, paid growth strategies are also very effective if implemented correctly. That is why mobile ad intelligence is a fundamental asset for efficiently promoting your app.
When building your app marketing strategy, trusting your instincts can get you only so far. Without conducting app market analysis, you will have slim chances of running a successful advertising campaign. You need data to make informed decisions, and this is where ad intelligence tools step in.
Mobile ad intelligence will allow you to answer many questions, such as which ad network to use, where to advertise or even what kind of creatives to produce. This article will provide you with some guidelines on how to promote your app using ad intelligence.
For the rest of this post, we will put ourselves in the shoes of an app marketer, who is trying to promote a casino app. Using MobileAction’s Ad Intelligence tool, we will build up our mobile advertising strategy.
Understanding Competition
Often, you will find that analyzing competitors will provide you with valuable insights to get started. If we can locate successful competitors, using mobile ad intelligence, we can examine their advertising strategy and see what practices are currently effective in the market.
To achieve this, first, we need to locate apps that are using paid growth strategies. More data will lead to more accurate insights. That is why the Top Advertisers list is the perfect place to start our research. Thanks to multiple layers of filtering, we can tailor results according to our needs.
Starting with basic filtering, we can choose a platform, storefront, date range, and country. If you wish, you can also choose to view apps that use a specific ad network. For now, we will look for the top advertisers in the App Store on the 22nd of February, who belong to the game category.
The app filtering option greatly enhances our ability to specify. We can use the app keyword filter to find apps based on search terms. By choosing casino and cards as keywords, we can see apps which are organically ranking for these keywords.
Even though we did not prefer to use them for this case, we could also filter apps by App Name (through specifying keywords in their app titles), top charts and app publishers.
Here you can see the output (first five apps) after we filtered our results. These apps seem to be similar to the game we are developing. We can see the number of unique creatives they used during the interval, along with their ad networks. On the far-left, we can see their placings in the overall advertising rankings.
App Advertisement Strategy Overview
Cash Frenzy – Slots Casino appears as an app that is worth looking into. Campaign Analysis allows us to get a general understanding of the paid growth strategies that our competitors use.
Immediately we are presented with the apps ranking on the overall Top Advertisers list. Cash Frenzy is currently ranking 28th, which is pretty high considering the number of apps in the App Store. We can also view the number of apps that Cash – Frenzy is publishing its ads in, which is 15,247. On the top-right corner, critical data for creative strategy is presented, the creative format distribution. We can add apps to the list of our favorite apps, which will allow us to track them and make creative analysis easier.
As you use mobile ad intelligence tools, you will notice that certain apps frequently use similar creative formats. For example, gaming apps tend to use video creatives as it allows them to present the overall user experience in a short amount of time. In this case, we can see that Cash-Frenzy is mostly using video creatives, which we will also do.
Mobile Ad Networks
Next, we can view the ad networks that Cash – Frenzy is using to publish its ads. This is important as it allows us to see the ad networks that our competitors are using. You can read our casino game creative trends post to learn more about the specifics. Using several competitors, we can get a general understanding of the mobile ad networks used to push ads that are used by apps similar to ours. This way our ad network choices can also be backed by data.
You can also view the estimated impression share that each ad network is getting. This allows advertisers to get an approximate understanding of the effectiveness of mobile app ad networks.
Another important reference point is the number of creatives being used by our competitors. As we can see, Cash-Frenzy used nearly 16,000 creatives last month, of which only 1,968 are currently active. We will go into further detail about creative strategy later on.
Favorite Apps
As mentioned earlier, we added our two competitors to the list of our favorite apps. To keep this post as brief as possible, we only have 2 competitors. However the more competitors you have, the more you can benefit from mobile ad intelligence.
If you are marketing numerous apps, creating several lists in the Favorite Apps tool will come in handy. Here you can easily monitor a snapshot of the advertising activities of your competitors.
Discovering Creatives
With nearly 20 million creatives, MobileAction provides unrivaled mobile ad intelligence data. By using these creatives, you will be able to keep up with the most recent trends and adapt your strategy to reach maximum results. The Top Creatives tool is not only useful for creating an ad strategy, but it can also be used to develop your product and find new feature ideas.
Let’s take a look at some of the creatives of our competitors. Similar to Top Advertisers, we can conduct filtering to narrow down our results. Do you remember how we added our competitors to our Favorite Apps list? Here we can directly choose the list we want to focus on, thus viewing creatives belonging to any of the apps in our list. As video creatives were mostly used, we can filter our results to focus on the format. You can see that we have saved these filtering options under the segment ‘Ad Intelligence Casino Games’.
As already mentioned, you regularly want to check the trends in the market to make sure you are not missing out on opportunities. That is why Ad Intelligence allows you to subscribe to the segment you have created.
By default, creatives are sorted by impression score. You can instantly view the creatives that got the most impressions.
Creative Analysis
Now we can take a closer look at some of the most popular creatives, and see if we can draw any insights.
We can see the apps where this creative is getting published, along with the ad networks and duration. If the creative is being run with different subtitles or in different regions, it will also be presented.
We can see that Cash-Frenzy is using a “testimonial” as a creative. Perhaps we can create ads with similar concepts.
Above, you can see a video creative example from Cash-Frenzy. Now let us take a look at one of DoubleDown’s creatives.
You likely noticed some commonalities between these creatives. First of all, the color palette is very similar. A very attractive, purple-ish tone is heavily used in both creatives. Additionally, the visual effects are very strong, capturing the gaze of the eye. Lots of turning, popping, and exploding can be seen.
Another commonality is seen in the creative texts. Both apps seem to offer millions of free coins to new users. Perhaps we can also use similar colors and CTA’s in our creatives to grab the attention of possible users.
Jackpot World is another game developed by Cash-Frenzy’s publisher, SpinX Games Limited. We can see that they are using very similar video creatives for these two apps. This is most likely due to the effectiveness of the creative.
Finally, here is another type of creative from Cash-Frenzy. We can see that they are using real actors who react strongly to in-app events. Considering that these creatives have been active for a long time, it is likely that they are efficient. Thus we can also use real-life creatives to advertise our app.
Throughout your advertising campaign, A/B testing will be essential to keep your efficiency high
Boost App Growth with Ad Intelligence Today
This post aimed to provide just a single demonstration of the uses of mobile ad intelligence.
Starting a mobile app advertising campaign can appear overwhelming. Especially if you do not have a reference point, it is easy to feel lost.
Ad Intelligence will allow you to understand the strategies of your competitors, giving you a head start in the game. Rather than trying to start from scratch, you can just accept the help of data and speed up the process. You will save time, money, and frustration.
MobileAction provides an industry-leading Ad Intelligence tool with data from 16 Ad Networks, 78,000+ publishers, 151,000+ advertisers. With nearly 20 million creatives in its library, there is no limit to the things that you can achieve. Schedule a demo with us today and let us show you the power of app intelligence.
