Inside Mobile Marketing

Great brief in the February 20th PC World article entitled, “App Store Grows, but Apps Are Seldom Used” – the article focused on data revealed by Pinch Media which offers a hosted analytics solutions specifically for iPhone applications.  The company collected data from “a few hundred” applications in the App Store that use its hosted analytics product. Applications that use the analytics offering include those that have been the number-one paid and free applications available in the store.  Here’s a sampling of the findings per the article:

• Users who download free applications from the App Store, only 20% use the app the next day, and far fewer do as the days pass. For paid applications, the return rate is only slightly better: 30% of people use the application the day after they buy it. The drop-off rate for paid applications is about as steep as for free applications after the first day.
• Generally, 1% of users who download an application turn into long-term users of it, Pinch found. Pinch has noticed some differences based on the kind of application. For example, sports applications get more use than others in the short term, while entertainment applications tend to keep users for longer than others.
• Pinch has discovered, or at least confirmed, some other interesting usage trends as well. Developers have a far greater success rate once they rise to the top of the store, which Apple ranks based on popularity. Once applications hit the top 100, the number of daily new users increases by 2.3 times, Pinch said.
• Also, free applications tend to get more use than those that cost. Users run free applications, on average, 6.6 times as often as paid applications, Pinch said.

I suspected as much, but app store data is hard to come by as Apple does not reveal insights other than  total downloads and segmented top download lists and companies like Pinch are few and far between. To date, most iPhone developers have been adding simple tracking methods within their apps on their own accord so the data available to advertisers is limited and hard to come by. Aggregated iPhone analytics is a niche “industry” whose time has come so that Media planners can get a better sense if the “channel” is working or not.  Companies to watch include -Pinch Media, Flurry, Medialets and Admob to some extent.  

From a marketing perspective, brands looking to make any real impact with an application really need to focus on the Media plan surrounding the launch of a new application to get the app ranked on Apple’s top 100 or better lists as it appears this is the make or break bar to hit in terms of a tipping point.

This brings up another issue – driving traffic to iPhone applications isn’t exactly a well known science yet.  Yes, many marketers are realizing you can deep link to an application from the Web to the iTunes page where the app resides, but others are incorrectly thinking they can buy their way into sponsoring the featured apps section within iTunes.

The net net of this post is this – if you are brand considering investing in an application be sure your expectations are grounded in reality.  The iPhone is great indeed, but remember its total global share is maybe 1-2% and it appears consumers are only interested in taking a peek and then walking away.  

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