Experiencing vs. Watching: Why The Future of App Discovery is an Interactive One
In recent years, mobile video has become the de facto king of the app marketing space. The power of sight, sound, and motion was and still is a huge step ahead of static banners and interstitial ads when it comes to introducing a new app or game. However, mobile video can only go so far. While users are able to watch what an app can do, they cannot interact with the app or experience it. And this is precisely what many ad platforms are now focused on bringing to market; interactive, playable ad experiences, such as AppOnboard’s Full-Fidelity Demos.
In our last blog post, we covered some of the ways these interactive ad experiences can be created — from HTML5 to app streaming — and how our differentiated technology at AppOnboard is enabling a new class of playables. What we hypothesized when starting the company was that users would enjoy the experience and convert better if they were able to sample an app in full quality instead of watching a video ad or viewing a static banner or interstitial. We believed that the future of app discovery was interactive, not passive. Initial results have confirmed our hypothesis with install rates ranging from 50–200% higher than standard mobile video and display ads and ROAS data between 200–850%.
What we’re even more excited about is the potential for our Full-Fidelity Demos (which also come with our patent-pending Chronological Heatmaps that show where and how users are engaging with the units) to open brand new doors for app companies that go beyond user acquisition. Here are some use cases that highlight the power and potential of our Full-Fidelity Demos:
- Generate Product Insights: Since our demos are accurate representations of apps and have built-in heatmap analytics, we not only deliver our customers high-quality users, but also aggregated user feedback data. These visualizations help developers understand how users are interacting with their apps and can even help improve their onboarding processes and UI/UX.
- Personalize the Onboarding Experience Post-Download: Since users are often times completing the onboarding experiences and/or earning points or virtual currency in our Full-Fidelity Demos, there is the potential to personalize app and game content once the user downloads and opens the app. For example, if a user completes a demo for a casino slots game and earns $100,000 in virtual currency, they would receive that amount once they install and start playing the game.
- Soft-Launch Apps Like Never Before: With our Full-Fidelity Demos also being easily customizable, we are able to work with our customers to quickly build out different versions of units that make our demos ripe tools for soft-launching a new app or game. For example, app companies can run different versions to see how users engage with different UI/UX choices, or to get user feedback on the most popular characters and content choices. With the heatmaps, which also differentiate between taps and swipes, they can see where users are getting stuck and can then make the appropriate changes to their app experience.
While mobile video and standard ad formats will continue to play a role in promoting app discovery, interactive experiences such as playables will forever change how the industry evaluates ad effectiveness and connects advertising with actions further down the acquisition funnel. As users begin to interact with apps and games before the download, the door is open for personalized content during the customer activation stage that should only help improve app retention and monetization in the long term.
If you are interested in learning more about AppOnboard and our Full-Fidelity Demos and Chronological Heatmaps, please visit us at www.apponboard.com, or contact us at contact@apponboard.com.
