There’s a great marketing saying which goes “that which gets measured, gets funded”. It’s a very true statement in an economy where proving the value of a dollar spent on marketing has become increasingly important. To get a new initiative off the ground, and then prove that additional resources should be allocated to it you need to understand how the initiative is impacting your company.
All marketing activities should be measurable
It’s odd to think that new initiatives are often the most under measured activities. New marketing channels are often deemed experimental and measurement methodologies are in their early stages. Emphasis is typically placed on figuring out what to measure rather than benchmarking and forecasting performance.
Over the past two years, this exploratory attitude is the one we’ve seen most often with branded apps. Companies have relied heavily on download numbers as the key indicator of a project’s success with very little mention of usage trends.
We outlined in a previous post why there’s a logistical reason for this situation. App analytics is uncharted territory and many agencies still haven’t figured out how to collect the data your marketing department needs. As a result, analytics integration is often the first feature to get removed during the planning stages of an app.
Learning from other opt-in channels
The challenge with not having usage data is that you’re only seeing a small part of the app story. App downloads give you an understanding of the level of interest people have in the app’s topic (i.e. people interested in Mergers and Acquisitions news) but the download number falls far short of describing why people find the app valuable.
Consider the comparison to email marketing for a moment. Using only download numbers for measuring is like talking about the size of your list without paying any attention to open and click through rates. When you send a marketing email, you like to know how many people your email is going out but what you’re likely more interested in is who is opening the email and sharing it with their colleagues.
So how should I measure my apps?
A lack of measurement for apps has led to claims like “it’s a well known fact that apps are downloaded and only used once” but the truth is that the usage of most branded apps hasn’t been measured well enough for that to be a valid claim.
Our own data contradicts this assertion. We’ve found that 90% of visitors to a particular app come back at least twice after downloading and more than 50% of visitors come back to the app at least once a month.
To better understand branded apps as an opt-in channel, we need to continue measuring more app initiatives from a variety of industries. We need to see more use cases measuring things like depth of visit, frequency of visit, time on site and pages per visit so we can continue comparing app metrics in the context of permission based marketing.