5 ways to be ahead of the curve and how you can be too.
Lessons from the App Promotion Summit, London, 2017
By Anna Derezinska
The App Promotion Summit in London this year centered around the future of app marketing, with a strong focus on users and personalisation.
There were a good variety of talks and workshops and we who attended from Skyscanner particularly enjoyed the following sessions:
- The future of mobile growth
- Achieving international growth through ASO panel discussions
- How to win with Facebook App Install Ads in 2017’talk by Adam Turowski, from www.peak.net
- Understanding the value of your app users workshop by Ekaterina Makarova from Google
- Reaching users with precision and scale on Facebook masterclass by Morgan Monnet and Felix Meissner from Facebook
The event was very valuable for our paid app acquisition team to learn from what advertisers in other sectors are doing. We were also delighted to see that our approach is top class in the industry. Combined with our Skyscanner principles for Growth, we came to a few conclusions on how to make sure your marketing efforts put you ahead of the curve:
1. Get to know your data:
Do not look at your app marketing metrics in silo — try and ‘connect all your data points into one single source of truth’ (Gadi Eliashiv, www.singular.net). Where your app acquisition metrics may look different from retargeting metrics or from your e-mail marketing metrics, put effort into connecting them to understand where your users (and your business) find most value.
2. Automate
Do not waste time on tedious tasks. Automate those that are key to bringing value to your business — be it automated roll-out of your most successful creative variants (Adam Turowski, www.peak.net) or automating your reporting (at Skyscanner this has been critical to our success in scaling experimentation of app acquisition activities).
3. Personalise
Test and optimise all the most useful targeting capabilities that partners like Facebook and Google have to offer — and then adapt it for your customers. A great example of this approach is Facebook Nested Lookalike Audiences targeting tactic (to avoid wasteful audience overlap, exclude smaller lookalike audiences from bigger ones).
4. Be an early adaptor of recommended best practice
Google Universal App Campaigns are now a go-to advertising product on Google for app growth and will soon replace other stand-alone Google app products. By adapting to this product in its early stages and applying best practice, we are now in strong position to capitalise on this shift in the market, having all the basics covered early on. It pays off.
Facebook now allows you to optimise based on in-app events — and we’ve benefited from being an early adopter of this technique too.
5. Test, test and test
What you know works today may not work tomorrow. The ‘next big thing’ that the industry believes will make your app grow may in fact not be the best one for your product. Or may not be where your users are.
Apple search ads, Snapchat App Install Ads and Pinterest Promoted Pins for App Installs were named as a few of the ‘next things’ for mobile growth at the App Promotion Summit. Our approach at Skyscanner has been to test each one and invest effort into those that prove right for our product.
The method to all this? Think like a scientist, act like a growth hacker — a topic upon which our colleague Paul Teresi presented during the summit.
Grow with us
Fancy working with a great team in one of our global offices across 10 locations? If you see a role you like and interview successfully we’ll offer to relocate you. Take a look at our perks then our Growth Marketing, Design and Engineering job roles within our Growth Tribes.
About the Author
Hi, thanks for reading my post! I am Anna and I am a member of Paid Growth squad at Sksycanner, where we look after all digital advertising for our company. Working in such diverse, multicultural and fast paced team is a great experience that nourishes a true growth mindset and never lets you get bored.
Want to find out more about what it’s like to work at Skyscanner or more about what I do here? Email me at Anna (dot) Derezinska (at) skyscanner (dot) net and let’s get talking.
