Welcome to the ninth episode of our Mobile Industry Exposed interview series! This time, we interviewed Hugo Gersanois, co-founder of appiris, a fellow HitFox company, about mobile retargeting, customer lifetime value (LTV), mobile trends and more.
Before starting appiris, Hugo gained experience in the mobile advertising space through a business development role at AppGratis. He previously worked as an Analyst in the Private Equity team of BNP Paribas New York focusing on Oil & Gas investments. He also gained exposure to Venture Capital through Analyst positions at Ventech and Gamma Capital Partners evaluating business models in the TMT space. He graduated from EMLYON Business School with a Master in Finance and Strategy.Read our interview with Hugo to learn more about mobile retargeting, appiris’ LTV technology and the mobile trends that will be shaping the industry in 2015.
- appiris is a mobile user acquisition platform that also works on the monetization side. What do you offer exactly on both the publisher and advertiser sides?On the advertiser side, appiris performs user acquisition campaigns for mobile apps. We specialize in a number of non-gaming verticals such as classifieds, e-commerce, dating and entertainment. Our focus is on understanding the post-install KPIs of our clients and achieving them by acquiring the right kind of users.App publishers can monetize their traffic through ads coming from our platform, guaranteeing premium payouts on the campaigns available. We cover more than 150 countries overall.
- What are your USPs when it comes to your mobile user acquisition and monetization offerings?Our USPs are our understanding of client KPIs, our LTV solution and our focus on non-gaming verticals.Unlike many user acquisition platforms, we don’t look at the volumes and install figures. We look at the number of orders, transactions, subscribers or any other valuable metric. Our team also guides our clients to define the KPI that makes the most sense for them.In order to reach our clients expectations, we have built a proprietary LTV solution that enables us to constantly track the quality of our campaigns. We connect attribution tracking solutions to our servers and receive all the information automatically. Our technology then selects the best sources of traffic for this specific client. Being focused on non-gaming verticals is actually a very big advantage. Whereas most mobile advertising platforms focus on gaming, we put a real emphasis on understanding other clients, who have different goals and expectations from games publishers and advertisers.
- What are the main differences in terms of both user acquisition and monetization for a mobile game versus a non-game app?In gaming, and especially with freemium games, everything happens within the application. Revenues solely come from the actual usage of the app. With travel apps on the other hand, you could look at a hotel on the app, for example, before ultimately booking online or vice versa. Thus the user journey can look very different. Also, advertising and in-app purchases are very quickly measured in mobile games. In non-gaming verticals, there is generally a longer wait period between download and purchase.
- Is there anything mobile game publishers can learn from other verticals in terms of marketing and advertising?Game publishers are the pioneers of mobile marketing and advertising, so in that sense, they have always been leading the way and showing other verticals how to conduct the basis of their mobile marketing efforts.Now it’s time for other verticals to understand what is specific to their audience as well as their behavior, and learn and act consequently.
- How important is an LTV focus in mobile marketing and what role does it play in your campaigns?In a couple years’ time, asking the question “how important is LTV to mobile marketing” will be similar to asking “how important is oxygen to human beings” today :); I’m joking, but it’s certain that LTV tracking and optimization is something that advertisers would be extremely wrong to ignore. It always needs to be thought through before starting any campaign: which events do I want to track? What constitutes good KPIs for my app and its usage? Etc.
- How does mobile retargeting benefit advertisers?Retargeting is a huge industry on the web but gaming has never contributed a big chunk of the total dollars spent on retargeting campaigns. If you look at the clients of Criteo or Adroll, they are usually e-commerce or B2B companies. Retargeting solves a major challenge for these non-gaming verticals: convincing customers that have left the conversion funnel.I think we will see the same patterns follow on mobile; e-commerce and transactional businesses will spend heavily on mobile retargeting campaigns in order to convince customers to perform a transaction. The benefit is very clear: it improves the purchase rate on a given user.
- How do you prevent fraud in your campaigns?We look at proxies after a few days from the start of a campaign. If the results are too low (for example 1 percent 3-day retention), there is a big chance that a source is sending fraudulent traffic. So we stop using this traffic source.
- What will be the main mobile industry trends in 2015?I see mainly four hot topics for 2015:- An increasing amount of brands spending on mobile: Gaming will have a decreasing share of the global mobile advertising market, due to bigger growth from brands.- Consolidation: Mobile advertising companies will continue to consolidate or be consolidated. One of the last examples is MobFox acquisition by Matomy. Numerous deals are to come, and I also tend to think that big advertising agencies will start looking at performance players on the mobile segment. This is also a consequence of the increasing spending of brands on mobile as well. Agencies will have a need to cover all the media plan.>- Retargeting: Mobile retargeting is already and will continue to be a trend for 2015. There is too much churn on the conversion funnel for e-commerce companies right now on mobile. This problem will definitely be solved through relevant and well-executed mobile retargeting campaigns.- New analytics tools: We will see new types of advertising tools emerging, especially tools that allow advertisers to understand their cross platform (web, mobile, tablets) marketing efforts.
Our thanks go to Hugo for his time.