I’m getting asked a lot about how to properly monetize an app, so I decided to prepare this article and hope it will help you take the right decision.
App Industry
In the app industry, it often demands exceptional awareness and brand name recognition to get users to buy an app. With a free mobile app, developers simply have to generate revenue through advertisements, which sometimes appear in the form of disruptive third party pop-ups or even prolonged pre-roll, causing major deterrents for regular usage.
Visitor retention
An essential component of app monetization has something to do with visitor retention. Enhancing engagement with your visitors and active user base is also crucial. In this fashion, your app has a captive audience that is required to monetize your app with the use of the different models.
When companies discover ways to monetize their free apps properly, they will retain much more users and also boost app usage. Appropriate integration of advertisements into the content of the app is a way of avoiding unwanted friction for users — a feat that is quite possible but rarely witnessed.
A big mistake a large number of app publishers make is that they develop app first before they monetize it. Concerning app development, it must go together with app marketing and good monetization strategies. Putting time, efforts and money on developing an app and merely releasing it to an app store, with the expectation that money will roll in is not a good idea, with the wide variety of apps out there.
Even while traditional paid and premium models are attractive, both can be hard to figure out and not always sufficient. Their third friend – in-app advertising, once it’s done right, will support some other revenue streams or simply serve independently as a monetization soloist.
To make money from a free app and at the same time retaining users can be done. Companies should just become more strategic with advertising options. Here are some secrets and techniques:
Don’t use ads that are disruptive
Once a user went through the fuss of downloading and opening the app, half of the battle has been won. At this point, an app has the chance to convince a user with engaging content.
Unfortunately, several mobile advertisements are just so intrusive that end users never have the opportunity to appreciate the content. In particular, pre-roll video ads automatically play and force the users to watch before they can gain access to app content. These are typically too long for the consumer’s attention span and usually serve as an opportunity for the user to question his interest level in the app.
Pop-up advertisements, while on the screen for a considerably shorter period, are likewise disruptive to the user’s experience. They are difficult to exit out and often make the user accidentally tap on the ad and unwillingly being redirected out of the app completely. Furthermore, the casual tapping of a pop-up ad equally creates false data that can skew advertising metrics.
Integrate ads into the content
In an effort to avoid using ads that discourage regular usage, advertisements should be relevant to the user and also integrated into the existing content on the app. Native advertising ought to be a part of your technique.
As an illustration, if I am using an app to organize my travel itineraries and tickets, probably I’m not interested in pop-up advertisements for a new dating website. The ad might capture my attention, but it tracks more logically to populate a travel app with travel-related options. Moreover, when you incorporate the ads into part of the app content, the placements is much less obtrusive to those that are not interested and may become more compelling for people who are. The ads then become an important part of the app experience.
Enhance the experience
Ads are not a necessary evil. By making use of placements more as a sponsored content within the app, advertisements can genuinely enhance the user experience.
Getting back to the travel app illustration, the user is much more likely to click ads for hotels or perhaps cab services while navigating through the app. While this provides valuable metrics for advertisers, it can also create convenience for the user.
Some other ways through which advertisements can benefit the user are providing the user access to exclusive offers or any real-world incentives, or even having marketers sponsor interactive quizzes or polls. Geo-targeting advertisements within an app can help you boost engagement by showing ads that are local to the user. Also, deploying remarketing strategies within your app can strengthen ad content that the user has shown interest in, further personalizing the experience.
In an over-saturated app market, a user probably won’t reconsider deleting a free app with intrusive advertising while moving ahead to a competitor. To achieve success, companies have to keep simultaneously both users and advertisers happy. It is an acute balancing task in which you cannot have one without the other. Only the companies that take the initiative to monetize free app appropriately becomes more navigable.