Cross Promotion Through House Ads With InMobi Analytics

With the multiverse of apps available in the mobile ecosystem, managing and growing your user-base amongst your suite of apps is a challenging proposition. Apart from focussing on building beautiful apps, you also have to focus on the three pillars - user acquisition, retention AND monetization, and each pillar requires time and effort. There are several solutions to these challenges that work in unison to grow and maintain your user-base.

One simple solution that works in retaining your users within your app suite is cross-promoting your apps through house ads. And guess what? It is low-cost, easy-to-implement and therefore less-risky!

Cross Promotion Through House Ads

• Scenario 1: Getting Users to Try Your New App

Your existing, loyal users trust you, and any new app that you launch already has pre-established credibility with these users. When launching a new app, notify your existing users and get a critical mass of users for your new property very quickly. This not only retains your existing users within your property but also gives you an initial set of reviews and download count on the app stores which people typically consider while making the download or not-to-download decision.

Pros: Accelerates the user base growth for your new app.

Cons: If you are a gaming publisher, this may migrate users from your earlier game to the new game. And if those users are high-paying users, this may result in lost-revenue. A viable solution is to segment your users into paying and non-paying, and cross-promote only to the non-paying user base.

• Scenario 2: Retaining Your High Quality Users

Let’s say you have a game with 100 levels with a well-established user base. When a user finishes all the 100 levels, where does he/she go? You want to retain these loyal users who have worked hard to complete your game and are extremely likely to try out a new game. Segment your users based on the level they are on and cross promote your new app to the users who are at level 95 and above. The end-result? You have now managed to successfully retain your loyal users through another offering of yours.

Pros: Retains users who would have left otherwise, thereby protecting your revenue streams.

Cons: Acquiring users for your new game through this strategy depends on the number of your users who play to reach the final stages of your game. The size of this user segment may not be huge enough to give you a significant bump in your user base for the new game.

• Scenario 3: Tapping into Users' Networks for Promotion.

Users sharing stats and information about your new app on their social networks can result in new user acquisition for free. If your earlier published app has a social sharing feature built-in, you can segment your users based on the number of the times they have shared in-app statuses on social networks, and cross-promote your new app to them.

Pros: Free user acquisition through social network virality.

Cons: This strategy depends on the “Social Media Quotient” of your users - how active they are on social media, how big their social networks are, how influential they are, etc. All these are important factors that determine the success of this strategy. This is not a disadvantage but can cause a variability in the factors that determine success, thereby causing unpredictability in the end result.

All these actions are easily possible through InMobi Analytics.

How do I do this through InMobi Analytics?

Step 1: Download the InMobi SDK from here.

Step 2: Integrate the SDK ( iOS, Android) and ensure the following:

a) Define the appropriate slot where you want to show the cross-promotion. Follow this guide to register your app and set up the slotId to be used in your code base.

b) Ensure that you have defined the relevant custom event such as tracking “Social Sharers” if you are targeting that segment.

Step 3: Create a segment by visiting “All Segments” against your app’s information in “Reporting” and hitting the “Create Segment” button with the appropriate rules.

Step 4: Hit the spanner icon against your app under the “Properties” tab and select “Actions”.

Step 5. Define the action by setting up your creative for cross promotion and select the segment you want to target.

Learn more on how you can implement these strategies with InMobi Analytics by visiting this link.