Rene Descartes once said that “I think, therefore I am.”. As mobile app marketers, you should say that “I advertise, therefore I am”. Without mobile app advertising, it will be difficult to build a strong presence in the app markets. And the right kind of advertising can only be achieved with a good understanding of the audience and the market. For this matter, it is crucial for any marketer to keep abreast of the market.
So, let’s take a look at the Top Advertising Apps in the United States for August 2021.
With our Top Advertisers tool, we can take a look at the apps with the highest focus on paid growth for both the App Store and the Play Store.
Firstly, the Apple App Store is dominated by the games category while Google Play Store has a more diverse category distribution in top advertisers. ABCmouse.com is the only app that is not under the game category on the Apple App Store Top Advertisers list. On the other hand, We have a wide range of apps from business apps to social apps on Google Play Store.
Secondly, apps seem to run more unique creatives for Google Play Store than they do for Apple App Store. The highest number of unique creatives on the Apple App Store Top Advertisers belongs to Bingo Clash with almost 968. Among Top Advertisers in the Google Play Store, this award goes to “SmartNews: Local Breaking News” thanks to its over 11k unique creatives.
Lastly, for the US market, the publishers that rule the advertisement race are mostly from the US and Far East Asia, the only exceptions are Turkey, France, and Australia.
While these were the main differences between the two markets, let’s take a look at some of these top advertising apps for a better understanding of successful mobile app advertising.
SmartNews – Local Breaking News
Let’s first start with SmartNews: Local Breaking News. Our mobile App Intelligence tool hands you everything from the product page to the visibility score of the app. 83 visibility score states that they are making a good fist of App Store Optimization. So what is this app that rocks both mobile app advertising and ASO?
Let’s take a look.
Surprisingly, it is a local news application that brings the breaking news from your neighborhood. Bet you didn’t see this coming! Jokes aside, you can browse news headlines, get notifications, and track local news with it. As you can see below, they are presenting their value propositions successfully in their screenshots in order of importance.
Although they have 5819 active creatives, their campaign analysis shows that their ads were published at 5601 ad publishers to run 22.920 ad creatives in total. Great numbers for mobile app advertising.
These active creatives are also passing through a localization process.
As you can see, they have different video creatives localized for better communication with their Japanese users. You may want to ask why specifically Japanese. It’s a good question and the answer is centralized in their marketing goals. They are extremely focused on the US and Japan markets to increase app downloads, as 99.75% of estimated impressions come from these two countries.
Apple Search Ads Strategies of Smart News
Lastly, we should mention their Apple Search Ads efforts. Since they are a top advertiser in Google Play Store, this doesn’t mean that they are ignoring Apple App Store.
With over 4k paid keywords in 2 countries, they are promoting their apps with Apple Search Ads in the Apple App Store to support their creative advertising strategy. As seen, they are getting at least 65% of impression share for every single one of their brand keywords. The universally consented rule: Defend your ground first, attack next. They seem to successfully embark on this strategy.
Above, we see the impression share of SmartNews in one of its competitor’s brand keywords. Meaning, even if users specifically search for that app, SmartNews will probably be the first app the users will see. Seems like a pretty strong marketing strategy, doesn’t it? Well, it is.
Let’s say Kudos to SmartNews and move onto our next subject: Ball Sort Puzzle.
Ball Sort Puzzle – Color Sorting Game
Although they are not among the top advertisers yet, they have been rising through the rank with their strong paid growth strategy. At the first glance, we see that their app name is optimized to rank better in organic searches.
Above, we have their screenshots. Could have they been better? Definitely. Thanks to the upcoming update of iOS 15, they will have a chance to A/B test their product page. However, we should do justice to them since they truly created an addictive game. It is a simple, fun, and relaxing game where you try to put balls of the same color in one tube.
They are also supporting their app with mobile app advertising. Let’s check out some of their ad creatives.
As seen, Ball Sort Puzzle is localizing its creatives just like any other prospering app. Moreover, they are localizing their product page for some of the countries, too.
It is important to communicate with local users in their own language. You are wondering what is written in their description, aren’t you? Well, non-English speakers feel the same way when we don’t localize our product pages for them. We should not let fruitful users slip due to a simple issue like this.
As seen, Ball Sort Puzzle showcasing its real gameplay with a visually engaging video creative. These kinds of ad creatives will benefit our mobile app advertising more than we think. Simply because the users will come to our app, knowing exactly what they are going to experience. Happy customers, top-chart apps.
ABCmouse.com
Now, this app is a learning program. If you have a kid between the ages of 2 and 8, you might want to check it out. It offers classes in math, reading, art, and more. Moreover, they claim to have proven results for increasing skills in these areas. But what about mobile user acquisition strategies?
Let’s see if we can improve your skills in mobile app advertising via ABCmouse.com.
They are running 44 active creatives on 9 Ad Networks and 4423 Ad publishers. Moreover, we can see that they have 90 creatives in total. It shows that they are A/B testing their creatives to get the best results.
Our Mobile Ad Intelligence shows that over 60% of its creatives run in English-speaking countries. And they don’t do localization for the remaining 40%.
When we look at their approach to mobile app advertising, we see that they are trying to combine different kinds of ad creatives into their strategy.
Satisfied users make the best advertisement, right? Here, we have a mom explaining the benefits of the app however, we don’t see much of the gameplay. This aspect can be counted under the cons list. Because users might want to see a creative that gives a preview of the real gameplay.
Nonetheless, these kinds of creatives are great assets for your marketing campaign because of their complementary nature. What does this means will get clearer after we analyze their next creative.
Now, this creative actually showcases the features of the app, right? We can see what kind of things we can do with the app. However, a single ad creative, most of the time, is not adequate for receiving a download. That is why we need complementary creatives to support our goals. As seen, Abcmouse.com is nailing it.
Apple Search Ads Strategies of ABCmouse.com
iOS app developers, this segment is for you because now we are going to talk about how to promote an app via Apple Search Ads.
As you can see, ABCmouse.com has also a good Search Ads visibility score. They have nearly 5k total paid keywords and are active in 4 countries. These are good numbers but let’s check their performance on bid keywords.
Via our Search Ads Intelligence tool, we see that ABCmouse.com has one-third of impression shares in 360 of their bid keywords. It means that they are at least at the top two for these keywords. When we take a closer look at their keyword selections, we see that they are benefitting from long-tail keywords greatly.
As you can see, they have over 60% of impression share for user-friendly keywords such as “games for kids 4-5” or children games. These keywords also have good search volume and users who search for them will see ABCmouse.com every 2 out of three times. We know that users using long-tail keywords have a higher intention to download. Therefore, we can say that ABCouse.com will probably receive downloads at two-third of the times when these keywords are searched.
Based on these findings, it can be concluded that ABCmouse.com is entitled to get at an A on “how to market an app 101”.
If you want to ace your advertising classes, schedule a demo with our experts now, and let’s start growing together.
