Event Diary - MAU Vegas 2017

InMobi regularly participates in and contributes to a series of events, meetups, webinars, sharing best practices with partners and thought leaders, across the globe. In this edition of the InMobi Event Diary, we are looking at the highlights and developments from MAU Vegas 2017, an event organized by Grow.co where over 1,000 leaders from top mobile brands gathered for two full days of learning and networking at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

InMobi was proud to be an official partner of this year’s MAU Vegas event, organized by Grow.co, joining many of the world’s top minds in the mobile app marketing space to discuss the latest trends and technologies in the market today.

The InMobi team had a blast talking to various attendees at our InMobi booth during the Meet & Greet Happy Hour event on Day One of the two-day conference, including many existing customers and partners. Most people who came to the booth were curious to hear more about InMobi’s User Acquisition and Remarketing solutions for performance advertising and also our solutions for publishers to monetize their app with the suite of InMobi Video Ads. However, ALL the people who visited the booth seemed interested in entering for a chance to win a free Nintendo Switch!

The evening of the second and final day of the conference, InMobi co-sponsored the MAU Vegas 2017 Official After-Party to support Women in Wireless, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping connect, inspire and empower female leaders in the mobile and digital space with over 12,000 members in 10 chapters across the world. The party was a wonderful opportunity for conference attendees to get together and unwind after an intense couple of days of conference learnings and networking.

While MAU Vegas 2017 was certainly a great opportunity to network and connect with fellow members of the mobile growth industry, it is first and foremost an educational forum where the top minds in the mobile app marketing space discussed the top trends, technologies and best practices surrounding user acquisition, retention/engagement through remarketing and methods to effectively monetize app users.

Here are three key themes discussed during the conference:

1. App Install ≠ Customer: The Importance of Remarketing

Throughout the two-day conference, a clear theme emerged that user acquisition is only half the battle to any mobile growth strategy. What good is paying for countless new installs when over 75% of users never use an app again after 72 hours of downloading? If your user hasn’t been to your app in over two weeks, how can you reactivate these lapsed users and bring them back? The answer is remarketing.

Remarketing technology has come quite a long way in the recent years. What started as something very desktop oriented and cookie-dependant, using only static ads creatives and vendor-controlled attribution has now greatly evolved for the current mobile-first landscape. Today, app marketers can retarget on mobile using technology equal to, and even exceeding, what is available on the desktop. Remarketing campaigns today can utilize the latest technologies such as serving dynamic ad creatives, support for deep linking, cross-device targeting and integration with a variety of attribution partners.

Combined with user acquisition, remarketing is a crucial component to any mobile strategy to acquire, convert and retain those hard-earned users.

2. A/B Testing is Key

Something that was discussed again and again throughout the conference during a wide variety of session topics, is that marketers need to always be A/B testing. This applies to almost everything in the mobile app world including testing minor changes made to an app for impact on user experience as well as testing ad creatives and strategies for effectiveness. In regards to A/B testing mobile performance campaigns, some things which should be tested include conversion rates, conversion velocity, average order value, and lifetime value (LTV).

During the panel titled, “Grow and Engage Your Active Users Through Precise Audience Targeting,” Christian Gladwell, President of Client Services at MachineZone discussed how his company is constantly testing ad creatives. He broke it down further in that 90% of their campaigns are testing new creatives while only 10% of campaigns are using pre-existing tried and true creatives. By building a strategy around constant A/B testing, MachineZone has found that simple changes can have a profound and positive impact on conversion.

3. It’s time to think beyond Facebook and Google.

The quality and scale of users from Facebook and Google are strong, but extremely expensive. At the current price of Facebook and Google installs, performance growth marketers struggle to meet their LTV needs. Mobile marketers are now turning to alternative ad networks and new media sources to achieve similar high quality installs at more reasonable pricing than these two giants are currently offering.