You Call THAT an APP Buying Funnel?

You Call THAT a Buying Funnel?The four most common problems with app conversion funnels, and five proven ways to fix them.
By Jim Nichols,
VP Marketing, Apsalar

Introduction 3
The Four Most Common Funnel
Problems in the mCommerce App Space
6
Fixing Your Funnel: 5 Proven Tactics 10
About the Author 19
About Apsalar 19
CONTENTS

More and more marketers are
waking up to the fact that it’s a
mobile-first world. And increas-
ingly, that means an app-centric
world, too! In most countries the
majority of connected time takes
place on smartphones versus
PCs, and most of that smart-
phone time is spent in mobile
apps.
The latest comScore research
shows that mobile and tablet
connected time is edging toward
2/3 of total connected time. 87%
of mobile and tablet takes place
in apps.
These statistics are driving thou-
sands of companies, especially
companies that rely on ecom-
merce for a significant portion
of their sales, to quickly develop
and introduce mcommerce apps.
INTRODUCTION
Share of Total US Connected Time By Hardware Platform
PC Web, 39%
Mobile + Tablet Apps, 53%
Mobile + Tablet Web, 8%
53%
39%
8%
Share of Total US Mobile Time By Environment
In-Apps, 87%
Mobile Web 13% 13%
87%
Source: comScore, 2015. Source: comScore, 2015.
3Copyright © 2015 All rights reserved worldwide. | www.apsalar.com

APP ENGAGEMENT AND
REVENUE CHALLENGES
The revenue performance of mcom-
merce apps runs the gamut. Some
perform poorly when it comes to driv-
ing revenue and profitability, while
others fare much better. Either way,
most businesses with an ecommerce
app are leaning hard on their app mar-
keting teams to grow these business
faster and more efficiently.
Easier demanded than done. To deliv-
er on these increasingly challenging
goals, marketers need real insight into
the key issues that face app market-
ers in general, and their own app busi-
nesses in particular.

APSALAR’S UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO
THE mCOMMERCE APP SPACE
As the leader in providing app attribution and mea-
surement services for the mcommerce space, we have
unique visibility into the programs of dozens of
mcommerce app businesses. We can therefore
comment with authority on the key issues that face
many app businesses as they work to meet
increasingly high KPI goals.
We’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing
aggregated data across clients, trying to identify the
most com-mon problems, and the solutions to those
problems. While every app business has unique
elements, it is plain from our research that app
businesses have a lot of commonalities when it comes
to user flow and bot-tlenecks that limit it.
This paper summarizes the four most common app
buying funnel challenges, along with five tactics that
are demonstrated to recraft the size and shape of buy-
ing funnels and drive outstanding growth.
Our examination of the buyer flow across hundreds of
mcommerce apps revealed that there are four com-
mon problematic buyer funnel flows. The following
pages provide a brief summary of each of these iconic
buyer flows.

THE FOUR MOST COMMON FUNNEL
PROBLEMS IN THE mCOMMERCE APP SPACE
The “Blown-Out Umbrella” Funnel: The most common
buying funnel we see, the “blown-out umbrella” is what
happens when brands spend most or all of their mar-
keting dollars on driving installs. The funnel is extremely
broad at the installs stage, but quickly narrows to a sliver
when it comes to user engagement and purchases.
One of the key reasons why many app marketing
people place all their focus on installs is to establish a
leadership position before a competitor can. Certainly
it is important to build a big base of users, but you
need to have some balance in your spending.
Just because someone installs an app, that doesn’t
mean they’ll be very prone to making purchases. At
least without a little marketing encouragement. By
balancing your acquisition spending with efforts to
drive your users to engage, you can markedly im-
prove the success of an app.

The “Where is It?” Funnel: Most common among apps launched
for North America and the EU, the Where is It reflects a good over-
all set of ratios between installs, engagement and purchases, but
not enough scale. The principal cause here is a marketing team
that spends the vast majority of their total investment building a
gorgeous app, but don’t have enough money to drive installs and
trial at scale.
Retailers don’t fall into this trap very often; rather, this pattern is
most common among “tier-one” brands that focus a tremendous
amount of attention on a gorgeous in-app experience. Aesthetics
are critical for a successful app, but brands need to be prudent
about the tradeoffs between what they spend building an app and
what they can spend marketing it.
Recently a massive global advertiser told us that they had soured
on apps because the marketing teams always spent the vast ma-
jority of the budget on app design and production. In essence,
they took a Field of Dreams approach and found that ‘they will
NOT come’ just because you build it.

• The “Bulging” Funnel: This funnel reflects good install and engagement
rates, but poor purchase rates. It is particularly common for brands that
require customers to leave the app to buy and don’t manage
the transition seamlessly, or that have complex and clunky buying
processes.
When brands don’t deliver a smooth, integrated experience in these
circumstances, conversions suffer. Some brands also don’t focus enough
attention on usability, so that making a purchase can be difficult.
We also see many instances in which much of the engagement takes
place in an app, but purchases continue to occur on websites. It’s not
that the apps don’t have built-in buying but rather that for whatever
reason consumers are conditioned to visit websites for transacting. This
is particularly common in the travel/OTA business, where purchases are
well-considered.
When people leave your app to transact, or get frustrated and just
abandon a purchase, your entire business loses. While some of your
customers may decide to transact on your site, others will likely forgo
the purchase entirely, or get intercepted by competitors.

• The “Python” Funnel. This funnel shows excellent install to en-
gagement and purchase ratios, but fails to achieve the breadth of
usage necessary for scale. Here the issue isn’t necessarily budget
but rather how the brands spend their money – using scattergun
media that wastes dollars and impressions on the wrong people.
We see three big advertising waste culprits here:
Spending money on reaching the exact same sort of
audience that buys on your website, without first ensur-
ing that your app buyers ARE actually the same sorts of
people.
Using demo-targeted media to drive installs and pur-
chases instead of user audiences and robust lookalike
modeling.
Failure to expand your target audience beyond its
“bull’s-eye.” Here, you just aren’t aiming broadly enough.
a
b
c

1
Now that we have established the four most common funnel challenges facing
app marketers, let’s focus on five key tactics that have been demonstrated to
address issues in one or more of these problem scenarios.
FIXING YOUR FUNNEL:
5 PROVEN TACTICS
Brand dress and rich experiences are critical parts of differ-
entiating yourself, and should play a part in your mcommerce
app. But with an app, and especially with a retail or compan-
ion app, utility is paramount. The app needs to provide clear
answers to the magic questions: A) Why would I bother with
this kind of app? and B) Is what it offers actually unique?
Here’s where we may get in a little trouble with some ad-
vertising agencies. People who usually focus on developing
strong paid media experiences tend not to produce great
apps. App development is best left to app dev experts, who
understand the utility or entertainment goals of an app and
reflect those in every aspect of what they build.
Brands often leave development of an app to their agencies
to manage, which can be a great way of delivering a good
finished product, provided the agency has or contracts out to
app dev experts. And provided that the markup on managing
the project is reasonable.
As for the ratio between dev costs and marketing dollars, we
don’t believe that there is a magic number to look for. But,
unless there are truly unique circumstances, we would ques-
tion any project in which more than a quarter of total spend
was on app dev. A quarter, BTW, is being quite generous here.
And the more the total budget you have for an app initiative,
the lower the percentage you should be spending on app dev.
Right-Sizing App Development Costs

I am sure that someone reading
this will be able to provide an
example of an mcommerce app that
broke these general guidelines and
succeeded. But recognize that no
matter how good your app, it faces
1,400,000 competitors in the Apple
App Store, and 1,500,000 in Google
Play. Some gaming apps are poised
to spend more than $50M to drive
installs this year. Do you really think
your mcommerce gorgeousness can
break through in an environment like
that? Without marketing support -
and plenty of it - you’ll get lost in the
clutter.
If you are a bricks-and-clicks retailer,
you can overcome some of the need
for marketing spend by leveraging
your people and in-store materials –
signage, CRM, receipts, bags etc.-to
drive app awareness. But you will
still need to spend significantly to
get a strong foothold on which to
build.
HOW THIS TACTIC
FIXES YOUR FUNNEL
Since overspending on app dev
is the principal cause of having a
“Where is it?” funnel, this tactic
offers the greatest benefits in
that use case. But freeing up
cash for working media can help
any app business grow larger.

Understanding which of your media partners are most effective, and what your users do in your app, is absolutely critical to
optimizing your buying funnel. Costs for measurement are consistently a tiny fraction of the economic benefits you can derive from
it. With mobile app attribution, you can score some immediate benefits, including:
2 Invest in Mobile App Analytics for Immediate and Long-Term Benefits
a
c
d
b
Measure and Optimize to Install Quality. Over and over we
see companies try to use the quantity of installs per dollar in-
vested as a surrogate metric for vendor quality and investment
worthiness. But install quality varies. Incentivized, sideload, and
APK-based installs tend not to convert as well as other types
of installs. In fact, the lowest cost per install vendors often drive
the lowest quality installs, yet brands mistakenly invest more and
more money with them. Even vendors buying with CPM-based
contracts often vary markedly in the extent to which they drive
eventual CUSTOMERS. Use an analytics platform to optimize
to cost per buyer rather than installer and radically improve the
metrics of your business. We’ve seen improved media allocations
that drive 10-30% more BUYERS per dollar invested in install
media.
Leverage Pre-Built Integrations for Faster Tests and Greater
Data Security: App attribution platforms tend to have a broad
range of pre-established integrations with leading media com-
panies. With these in place, you don’t need to incorporate all of
those publisher SDKs into your app. That improves your security,
helps protect you against data loss, and drives media efficiency
by enabling you to test and implement with new vendors faster.
Optimize Media Vendor Allocations.
App attribution can help you improve
the way you allocate your media dollars.
When it comes to spending precious mar-
keting resources, you should be focusing
on vendors that deliver better results. By
uncovering which vendors are best at
driving your install and re-engagement
KPIs, we have seen media efficiency gains
of 5-40% for mCommerce brands.
Eliminate Double-Counting of Installs.
Many media companies will likely touch
someone before they install. Typically
it takes dozens of clicks – or more – to
drive an install. If you don’t have a way
of attributing a new install or re-engage-
ment event to a single vendor, you may
be paying twice – or more – for any CPI
based installs that you drive. We routinely
see client cost per installs drop over 20%
when they implement attribution and use
our third-party verification to attribute
each install only to one vendor.

Copyright © 2015 All rights reserved worldwide. | www.apsalar.com
HOW THIS TACTIC
FIXES YOUR FUNNEL
Better understanding your busi-
ness is essential to identifying the
barriers that are impeding your
growth. It helps at all levels of the
funnel, improving install quantity
and quality as well as providing
the data necessary to engage
and activate users. This tactic is
probably most useful for “Python”
and “Bulge” funnels, but can offer
significant benefits in all four use
cases.
13

A huge portion of apps are used
only once. Another huge portion
are NEVER USED AT ALL. This is
especially true of APK-installed
apps and “side loads”, where users
agree to download an app in ex-
change for free wifi access and the
like. Same thing with incentivized
downloads like getting free gold
for a game in exchange for an in-
stall. All these tactics tend to drive
lower quality installs.
Once someone installs an app,
the battle is only half over. Tools
now exist to enable you to deliv-
er targeted messages specifically
to people who have installed your
app. First, leverage channels like
emails and push notifications to in-
cent and or drive usage. Then, de-
velop targeted app ad campaigns
using your collection of device ids
as the targeting base. Many ad
networks and the leading social
networks can do this if your app
install base has reasonable scale.
Note that doing this right requires
accurate data, which is why we so
strongly recommend having reli-
able third-party measurement and
attribution data available.
3 Retarget to Re-engage
Targeting your
app users
specifically
versus using
demo- or life-
style based
targeting can
be many times
more efficient.
In addition, numerous industry studies show that it
costs 80-90% less to drive a purchase from a buy-
er as it does to make someone a buyer. Businesses
need a constant inflow of new users. But most
don’t spend enough time and energy working to
maximize revenue and purchase occasions from
the buyers they already have.
You can also use your attribution and measure-
ment platform to identify your install or buyer
base so that media companies can do precision
lookalike targeting and dramatically sharpen the
effectiveness of your acquisition media.
HOW THIS TACTIC
FIXES YOUR FUNNEL
The best use case is if you have a “Blown-Out
Umbrella”, because this tactic can improve
user flow through to purchase. But it can also
improve install efficiency, so it does have ben-
efits for all four use cases.

Key to making the most of retargeting and re-engagement efforts is to take a more personal approach to messaging. While
completely individualized messaging often isn’t all that efficient, you can get precise in the ways that you segment your user base,
and deliver targeted creative designed to motivate them to take the next action. Here are some examples of how segmenting users
into high-performing audiences can make a huge difference for your business:
4 Segment, Create and Export
High-Performing Audiences of Your Users
Build Specific Audiences Based on Your Business Objectives
Use event level data from Apsalar to create segments and build your Custom Audience.
Drive First
Purchases
Close Sales in
Progress
Encourage
Incremental
Purchases
Reactivate
Lapsed Users
Deliver
Promotions
and News
Package users
who have
installed the app
but not yet made
a purchase
Export list of cart
abandoners to
bring them back
to buy
Deliver reminders
and offers to past
buyers/past
category purchasers
Create an audience
of people who
have not used the
app in N days
Create a super list of
all of your app users
for broad-based
messaging
Once you’ve created your audiences, you need to export them to the media providers you like. Apsalar, for example, offers Apsalar
Audiences for Facebook, which delivers an audience of your users’ device advertising IDs, based upon criteria you select, to the
Facebook Ads Manager. All with a single click. We offer similar services in partnership with many other media vendors as well.
Audiences

How much can marketing with these audiences grow
your business? Well, it varies significantly, but here are
a few simple calculations you can do:
Identify the number of cart abandoners
you have, plus your average transaction
size, and multiply your transaction size
times 10% of your abandoners.
Identify the number of buyers you have,
and calculate the value of converting
one more purchase at the average pur-
chase size from 10% of them.
Calculate the value of getting 10% of
your buyers to spend 10% more per oc-
casion.
The millions quickly add up. The percentage improve-
ments we’ve outlined above have been achieved by
more than a few brands that have focused more of
their efforts on precision targeting and messaging.
a
b
c
How This Tactic Fixes Your Funnel
Because its benefits are concentrated in driving
more effective and efficient re-engagement, it’s
definitely the tactic for you if you have “Blown-Out
Umbrella”. It can also improve engagement and
close rates, which can help in each use case.

App customer relationships don’t come through advertising alone. Mobile now
offers a vast array of potential communications paths that marketing automation
platforms can leverage to reach and engage users. Here are some of the most
commonly used:
Push notifications
Emails
SMS/texts
Message center communications
mWallet offers
In-app personalized experiences
Mobile site personalization
Landing page personalization
By automating the deployment processes, an automation platform can use any
or all of these tools to automatically create a personalized experience for the
user. Marketing automation and the personalized experiences it creates have
been shown to drive big increases in revenue and accountability for app busi-
nesses. For a more concrete measure of potential ROI, we suggest you contact
some vendors in the space.
5
Leverage Mobile Marketing Automation
for Better Purchase Conversions, AOV,
Purchase Frequency and LTV
We do, however, get a strong sense
of these improvements in the data we
collect. The Apsalar DMP helps make
data, profiles and audiences available
to marketing automation tools more
quickly and easily. By measuring in-
app customer events and combining
that data with mobile-web and other
first-party data sets, we create incred-
ibly rich 360 profiles and can deliver
real-time data to an automation tool
in batches or real-time. Most DMPs
have little or no visibility into custom-
er events inside apps. Apsalar enables
you to measure any type of consumer
event, for rich insight and granular
marketing automation programs. Our
DataSync offering makes it possible to
easily and securely share event data
with leading mobile- and web-based
automation products, right from the
Apsalar interface.
How This Tactic
Fixes Your Funnel
Automation primarily offers post-
install benefits, so it is great for
“Blown-Out Umbrella” funnels. It has
some relevance in the other scenarios
as well, though least for the “Where
is It?” because the key issue with the
“Where is It?” is a lack of installs.

We’ll be the first ones to admit that the bene-
fits you see from taking these actions may
be larger or smaller than our estimates.
Our figures relate to an aggregation of
what we see across clients and catego-
ries. But, even with this qualification, it
seems prudent for any app marketer
to explore these sorts of steps if they
have reason to believe that there are
issues with the size, shape and flow of
their buyer funnel. Ultimately all of the
tactics described in this document are
about consumer-centricity, which is sure-
ly of benefit to any app business.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Nichols is VP of Marketing for
Apsalar. Jim has 20+ years experience
in over 80 different categories,
including developing successful
positioning and go-to-market plans
for more than 40 adtech and martech
companies. He joins Apsalar after
several years as VP of Marketing for
Conversant, where he led various
efforts in the successful rebrand of
the company from ValueClick, Inc.
The rebrand and associated industry
attention for the company contributed
to the $2.3B sale of Conversant to
Alliance Data in December, 2014. He is a
prolific writer for digital trades on brand
marketing, mobile, video, data, and
customer profiling. Publications include
iMedia Connection, Inside Radio,
VentureBeat, ad:tech, ShellyPalmer.
com, Jack Myers, and many consumer
publications. He holds a B.A. in
U.S. History from the University of
Pennsylvania and an MBA in Marketing
from the University of Chicago.
Visit
www.Apsalar.com/Resources
for more Take 5 content!
ABOUT APSALAR
Apsalar, the leader in mobile data management, helps direct marketing brands get
better marketing effectiveness by providing a mobile data management platform
that delivers a true understanding of customer behavior in apps and across other
marketing channels.
The Apsalar Mobile DMP enables brands to measure marketing effectiveness,
enhance, manage, enrich and segment profiles to build audiences, and easily and
safely connect to other marketing partners so brands can confidently share their
data and audiences.
APSALAR
ATTRIBUTION
APSALAR
AUDIENCES
APSALAR
DATASYNC
MOBILE DMP
Collect and measure in-app
consumer behavior and
marketing performance.
Measure every in-app action
relevent to your buinesss
Unite your first party data
from all sources, enrich it
with third party data, and
build high performance
marketing audiences
Easily and safely share
customer audiences and
data with your digital
marketing platforms,
including analytics,
marketing automation,
media companies and legacy
DMPs

You Call THAT an APP Buying Funnel?

More Related Content

You Call THAT an APP Buying Funnel?