Mobile Marketing: Waiting for Darwin’s Shoe to Drop

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Darwin Marketing - KontagentBy kScope guest contributor
Matthew Wilcox, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Interactive Services at Zions Bank

Matthew Wilcox will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

It used to be standard practice, almost obligatory, to open articles like this one with statistics about the number of your customers who are, or who soon will be, shopping via mobile devices. No longer.

The patent ubiquity of mobile devices has rendered the use of scary, “get-with-it” statistics all but quaint. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you already know that you can throw a stick and hit a dozen people shopping on mobile devices. And you also know that it’s imperative to accommodate these customers or risk losing them. But the question becomes how do you convince them that your mobile experience is better than the competition? Continue Reading…

How to Develop Productivity Apps Your Employees Will Actually Use

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Employee Productivity App - Kontagent Analytics

by kScope guest contributor
Cora Cowles, User Experience Lead – Mobility at General Motors

Cora Cowles will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

When new technology is introduced, adoption and permeation by users should be watched closely. That “if you build it, they will come” strategy may sound good, but depending on how disruptive the technology is, users may have little to no experience with previous versions. They could be hesitant and untrusting to adapt, slowing the rollout process and putting unnecessary stress on previous versions.

Let’s say, for instance, that a company creates a new mobile app for their salespeople that’s designed to help them sell the company’s products. This hypothetical app makes it easier to show features and other relevant information to potential buyers.

But here’s the problem. While the app can be a powerful sales tool, generally the demographic profile for salespeople skews over age 45 and most are not particularly tech savvy. Now let’s say that through ethnographic research, we also learn that this group is self-assured of their tried and true sales methods and therefore hesitant to try new things. For many of them, pencil and paper are still the best things since sliced bread. Continue Reading…

How Your Mobile Apps Can Evolve

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Portfolio Analytics Kontagent MultiscreenAlyssa Simpson will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

Having a multiscreen presence is important to the success of any business. While it goes without saying that your core product always has to be stellar, the fact is that consumers today are tied to a plethora of always-on digital devices beyond their desktops, from tablets to (most importantly) smartphones.

That’s not to say a brand can’t achieve a decent level of financial success without ever engaging with customers beyond their core product, just look at Sriracha hot sauce. Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran built his company into a $60 million business without any advertising or social media. But think how much bigger his company would be if he interacted with customers using digital platforms.

We live in a multiscreen world and businesses that don’t take advantage of this are leaving money on the table. This is especially true for enterprises with multiple apps across devices. These brands are already positioned to influence customer behavior and drive monetization. The problem is they just don’t have the right intel to do it effectively. Continue Reading…

Do Day 7 Retention Rates Matter in Mobile Apps?

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Kontagent Mobile App RetentionJason Wu will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

When it comes to mobile, getting customers to try your application is a challenge, but making sure they come back can be even harder. In today’s crowded mobile market, content is king. And, it’s that content that will drive (or kill) your user retention.

Anyone who has a mobile app knows retention is the first step in mobile success. The longer a person uses an app, the more likely they are to start exhibiting the behaviors developers want—whether it’s monetizing in a game, banking on a phone or just engaging with a brand.

Savvy mobile-first businesses use analytics to understand their data is vital to maintaining and increasing customer retention. And among the many metrics available to gauge an app’s success, the Day 7 retention rate is among the most revered. What’s ironic is that some companies don’t really understand why it’s important—other than that it is.

While seven days may seem somewhat arbitrary, there’s a solid basis for why it’s considered such a vital key performance indicator. And understanding this will help you determine what makes a good Day 7 retention rate—as well as why it might not matter.
Continue Reading…

Breaking Down Candy Crush’s Formula for Success

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Candy Crush Saga Kontagent Money

Christopher Foley will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now for this limited event.

Candy Crush Saga has taken Facebook and mobile by storm, earning a permanent spot on smartphones, tablets and desktops around the world. But what really has the industry in a tizzy is that the game has only been out for about five months.

It’s no wonder that the lines for King’s GDC 2013 panel stretched across the convention hall. As the mobile gaming market becomes more and more crowded, developers are hungry for tips to turn their game application into the next… well, Candy Crush.

So how did a simple tile-matching puzzler suddenly take the top spot on mobile devices the world over? While some industry analysts will be quick to attribute Candy Crush’s meteoric rise to luck, the reality is far from it. King’s game has staying power because it embodies something mobile developers have yet to realize: viral techniques still matter in mobile games. Continue Reading…

The Challenges in Turning Freemium Casino Players into Online Gamblers

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Social and Mobile Casino Games Laptop - KontagentDavid Gutierrez will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

There’s no doubt that there will be a lot of profit to be made in online real-money casino gambling. It’s a $30 billion industry set to grow to $40 billion by 2015. While this is definitely nothing to sneeze at, the problem for most online casinos is that the cost of acquiring new players is very high, at about $200 per customer.

On the other hand, social and mobile freemium casino players are much less expensive to acquire, taking only about $1 or $2 to hook new players. Of course, the caveat is that since real money isn’t wagered in freemium casino games, these players also generate less revenue for the industry ($1.6 billion in 2012). In general, their lifetime value ranges from $10 to $78 per customer compared to about $1,600 for the average online casino gambler.

From a business perspective, the obvious solution then would be to try and convert freemium players into real-money gamblers. This would allow online casinos to reduce acquisition expenses, while boosting revenue. And that’s exactly what some pioneers have been trying to do.

The problem is that it hasn’t been working very well, and it probably won’t—with good reason. Continue Reading…

The Holy Grail of Mobile Apps: How to Predict Customer LTV

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Predictive LTV - Fry shut up and take my moneyMartin Colaco will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

In the world of mobile applications, the ability to predict a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) is akin to finding the Holy Grail of mobile analytics. Imagine if you knew how much your customers were going to spend in your app over their entire lifetime. It’d be an incredible business advantage, one with uses beyond just being able to accurately forecast your revenue for investors.

You’d be able to hone your marketing to target only the highest monetizing customers and increase your profits by tweaking your app to keep your big spenders engaged longer. But the applications don’t stop there. Predictive analytics could also solve the litany of other problems plaguing the app market, like fraud. Heck, with the right data scientists and business analysts on hand, you could potentially even figure out a way to transform app pirates into paying customers.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, being able to accurately predict LTV at this level is incredibly challenging. But building the perfect predictive model might not be so faraway and the process starts with feature extraction. Continue Reading…

GDC 2013 Roundup: The Only Stat Developers Need to Know

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Kontagent GDC 2013With another Game Developers Conference behind us, we’d like to first thank everyone who came by the Kontagent booth! Among all the awesome GDC 2013 panels and reveals, one thing is clear: mobile is the future of games and data will be its key.

A bold statement for sure. But before we get to why, here are some highlights from this year’s GDC.

And now the moment you’ve been waiting for… Continue Reading…

Conde Nast and Yahoo on the Changing Mobile Landscape

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Conde Nast’s Ned Newhouse on how mobile is changing content creation; Yahoo’s Patrick Albano on the right mobile analytics solutions to effectively track ROI.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’ve heard all the hoopla about how mobile is revolutionizing the way we live and work. What you may not realize, though, is that when it comes to how businesses are approaching their mobile strategies, it’s upside-down. According to more than 1,300 business leaders worldwide who participated in a study we conducted with Econsultancy:

  • While most companies are rushing into mobile, more than two-thirds of them admit to not having well-defined mobile strategies.
  • Less than 30% know which specific key performance indicators to track.
  • Yet 75% plan to increase spending for marketing and development in their mobile channels in 2013.

Kontagent recently hosted a forum in New York City to address these discrepancies. Attendees included select executives from leading brands such as Macy’s, Tory Burch, Citi, Gilt Groupe, American Express, ESPN, Barnes and Noble and Travelzoo. We led the discussion with these following panelists:

Kontagent kScope - Ned Newhouse Patrick Albano

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s what they had to say:

Continue Reading…

Got a Struggling App? Save It with Cohort Analysis

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Cohort Explorer and Revenue Analysis - Kontagent

One of the most important events in measuring a customer’s lifecycle of engagement with an application is the moment when they install or first monetize. Understanding those critical days, weeks or even months afterward are what can determine either the success or failure of an application.

How does one continue to monitor these essential metrics when customers are in a constant state of flux you ask? The simple answer is cohort analysis. While statistical in nature (and a tongue-twister to say), cohort analysis is an extremely powerful tool that can benefit nearly every role: product managers, marketers, executives and analysts alike. Continue Reading…