It’s hard to believe that this year marks the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. It also marks the close of the first decade of mass mobile app adoption. Can you even begin to imagine life without your smartphone and the apps you use to communicate, follow sports, trade stocks, hail rides, shop, stay fit and stream video?
The mobile app revolution has had an extraordinary run. Even one year – let alone ten – is a tremendous amount of time in the mobile ecosystem. In the tenth year of mobile apps, Flurry Analytics found that overall mobile app usage grew another 11%, and time-spent in apps grew by 69%. Further, in terms of time spent, as reported in IAB’s Mid-Year 2016 Digital Usage Trend report, shows the dominance of mobile apps (87%) compared to mobile web (13%).
While usage and time-spent continue to grow ten years into their adoption, it’s becoming more and more difficult for app developers and marketers to compete for consumer attention. As more apps compete for a finite amount of user time, app marketing becomes an increasingly critical tool for driving app installs, app retention, and app monetization.
As an emerging marketing discipline, app marketers experiment with different providers, target audiences, and creatives, testing new ideas for their campaigns. This is why IAB created a Mobile App Marketing Working Group as a forum for members to discuss marketing practices for apps including user acquisition, user engagement, and app monetization.
To advance the discussion of app marketing best practices for buyers, and because buyers today face many choices when planning their campaigns, the working group put together “App Marketing: Top Evaluation Criteria for Buyers” to help them compare the wide variety of providers offering access to mobile audiences. This evaluation criteria covers four focus areas for mobile app buyers to evaluate in their conversations with providers: media, targeting, creative, and reporting. This document builds off the IAB App Marketing Glossary that the working group created late last year to address the needs of app marketers.
To learn more about the IAB Mobile App Marketing Working Group, please email [email protected].
View App Marketing Evaluation Criteria