So your hands are off the keyboard, your last piece of code is complete and you are ready to release your app to the hungry hordes of avid fans who are eagerly waiting in the wings… except you’re not Steve Jobs and this isn’t Apple.
You’re a mobile developer. Smart, sophisticated, but at the mercy of forces that lie outside of your control.
On one hand, everyone believes they hold a precious jewel, developed over months of hard sweat and elbow grease–the next big Angry Birds.
On the other hand, the keys to the kingdom (of users) lie in the hands of middlemen. Ad providers charge you good money to accomplish the two goals you need in order to succeed: scale and reach. But, it’s not that easy to do that, given today’s current mobile app marketing ecosystem.
The current state of things
Here’s the state of the mobile app marketing ecosystem today. Instead of transparency, you have opacity. Developers and marketers aren’t getting the right, timely information they need to effectively optimize their ad budgets and increase their ROI.
While there are many ad providers out there that provide reporting on user acquisition campaigns, there are also many that do not. Or, they provide manual data dumps on an irregular basis. Even when clean data is available, marketers and developers find it hard to efficiently process, match, store and analyze the information.
The point is that in the end, you still have to ingest a non-standardized set of data from all the various ad providers in the industry if/when you can get your hands on it. Because there are no clearly defined industry-wide standards for the measurement, collection and reporting of data from mobile advertising and cross-promotion networks, most mobile developers have trouble deducing meaningful marketing data from their user acquisition efforts. Ad providers, for their part, face the challenge of disparate, non-standardized data requests and protocols from many advertisers and publishers. Continue Reading…
0
