Being visible in app stores and reaching the number of downloads desired are not easy jobs. There are many crucial components to be part of the game, such as App Store Optimization. However, the most successful app marketing strategy consists of mixing both ad campaigns and optimization operations together.
Terms to Know Before Starting
When it comes to ad campaigns to get installs, there are many important terms you need to know in order to fully understand the concept and goal-setting strategy. Let’s start with these significant terms, before diving into incentivized and non-incentivized traffic.
- What is Incentivized Traffic?: It corresponds to the traffic coming from all types of advertisements in return for a reward. The user is asked to complete a specific action in return for a reward. This action might be watching a short app video while using an app, suggesting an app to another friend, downloading an app, or registering to a service. The reward may also be varied from collecting money, credit, or currency for the app, to a discount.
- What is Non-Incentivized Traffic?: Unlike incentivized traffic, with non-incentivized traffic, there is no reward offered to the audience. With a more specific advertisement, the audience makes a decision by showing a real interest. The non-incentivized users tend to show interest in the ad content like previewing a video or banner to take the action you desire.
- CPI: As known as Cost Per Install, CPI is the amount of money charged in return for a unique install. Because there are many parameters that affect the CPI and CPM like country, category and app store itself, the aim here should be finding the ideal CPI for the high user LTV.
- CPM: AKA Cost Per Impression, which is the cost charged in return for a unique display of the ad.
- CPC: Cost per Click is the amount of money charged for a unique click to the ad.
- LTV: Lifetime Value is a very important metric to calculate the quality of user. After calculating customer LTV, you’ll have an idea about how much a new qualified user is worth and what amount you should spend to retain this user. It is better to have a higher LTV to keep retention rates as high as possible. According to Lloyd Melnick, there are 3 variables that comprise LTV: Monetization, Retention, and Virality. Thus, it is not an easy job to interpret, analyze, and improve it, but what you should be aware of is that LTV is a crucial metric to see your profitability, insights about your category, and more.
Things to Know
- Incentivized Traffic provides fast & easy user acquisition over a short period
If you want to make the user acquisition quickly, incentivized traffic is a good starting point. The average period for incentivized campaigns is 3 days in app stores. It helps you to reach the top of the category your app is in as soon as possible with the mass of downloads. One of the main reasons why people prefer incentivized downloads is increasing their rankings in the app stores quickly.
- Incentivized Traffic is cost effective
When we compare it with the non-incentivized traffic, incentivized traffic is cheaper. By rewarding the users, you can have a bunch of downloads. It also helps you to keep user flow, to avoid losses in app stores at a minimum cost.
- Incentivized Traffic improves your app store ranking and provides organic uplift
As I mentioned in the first 2 advantages, incentivized traffic enables you to improve your app store ranking with the help of a high number of user acquisition. Another advantage of this user acquisition is organic uplift in your traffic. It means all these installs provide you with organic installs and traffic as a result of increasing app store rankings and downloads.
- Non-Incentivized Traffic provides organic traffic with higher LTV user acquisition
Higher LTV means more loyal users. Non-incentivized traffic provides you higher quality of users as distinct from incentivized traffic. Of course, it costs more to have more qualified users, but it keeps your retention rate higher if your users become loyal.
- Non-Incentivized Traffic provides high quality users with engagement
What you understand from engagement should be higher will to give feedback, higher response rate for push notifications, and better reviews. Because you have a higher LTV user acquisition, your users will be more willing to talk to you. It also means you can promote your app without any more marketing cost.
- Effective burst campaigns by mixing incentivized and non-incentivized traffic
As you can understand from the results, there are many pros and cons of each traffic type. The best strategy to get the most benefit out of your ad campaigns is creating burst campaigns by combining incentivized and non-incentivized traffic.
