15May

Three Ways Facebook Can Leverage Mobile To Boost Revenue

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Editor’s note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor, an ad management and technology company for Facebook campaigns. AdParlor manages over 1 billion daily ad impressions on Facebook for clients such as Ubisoft, SEGA, Groupon, OMD and Starcom.

I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their advertising business. Their revenue potential is as strong as it has ever been and the social network continues to grow its users and roll-out innovative advertising products.

While there are many things that Facebook can do to drive revenue related to display, search, and mobile – let’s take a look at three immediate steps Facebook could take to ramp up revenues from its 500 Million+ monthly active users on mobile devices.

1. Show more Sponsored Stories in the mobile news feed – A sponsored story is a piece of news that you would see in your news feed anyways – turned into an ad. It is relevant, social and most people who see a sponsored story wouldn’t even recognize it as an ad. Simply put – sponsored stories work. Looking at campaigns AdParlor has run across numerous verticals show that on average, sponsored stories have a 17% higher click-through-rate and a 38% higher conversion-rate than regular marketplace ads.

When sponsored stories were first introduced they were only shown on the right-hand column. They were then rolled out into the news feed on the web version of Facebook. At fmc they announced that they would begin to serve sponsored stories on mobile, and on April 26th it seems to have gone live. However, most users have seen few if any sponsored stories in their mobile news feed as Facebook is slowly rolling this out while monitoring user experience. Facebook can easily flip the switch on this, increasing the volume of sponsored stories it shows in the mobile news feed and increase their mobile revenues.

2- Combining Location & Offers – A while back Facebook attempted to compete with Groupon and other daily deal sites by creating a deals product. They quickly shut that down for multiple reasons – and then re-emerged recently with an offers product. These offers are coupons which any page owner can create for free – and will begin to appear in a user’s news feed on the web. The real benefit will start to roll in when Facebook begins to serve these offers in the news feed on mobile devices to users who are near the store providing the offer. Even though an offer is free to create – if Facebook can leverage location-based mobile offers – page owners will begin to see the ROI and will purchase ads and sponsored stories against these offers to get more distribution beyond what is given for free. Additionally, brands will now have a very clear path to seeing ROI when buying fans. The investment question around the value of growing your fan base – at least for physical location retailers – will be answered. This is sure to increase the ad spend these companies will make on growing their fan base.

3 – Open up mobile device-specific targeting – There is currently a Facebook broad category targeting option for mobile devices. Advertisers can choose between Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. However – this targeting simply means that a user has accessed Facebook through one of these devices. Creating an ad and selecting this targeting will show ads to these users – however they could be accessing Facebook via the web or even a different device. If Facebook were to tweak this and allow advertisers who select iPhone to have ads show specifically ON the iPhone to a user accessing Facebook from their iPhone – this would mark a significant opportunity. Specifically – one of the largest advertising categories on mobile devices is for apps – and the massive gaming subcategory. If Facebook were to enable actual mobile device-specific targeting – iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry application developers could then leverage Facebook advertising to drive application installs – taking the user right from the click of the ad into the corresponding app store. It seems that right now Facebook wants to limit mobile ads to be sponsored stories in the news feed for many reasons – to maintain user experience, to keep users within Facebook, and an effort to make it not feel like advertising. Given this – it is unlikely that Facebook would allow ads from the mobile news feed to direct users anywhere outside of Facebook. However – the opportunity is there – and the revenue potential is huge.



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08May

JumpTap: Kindle Fire Usage Has Declined After Holiday Boost, iPad Back To Pre-Fire Launch Levels

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Kindle Fire -1

The Kindle Fire from Amazon has stolen a march in the tablet world, with some estimating that it now makes up more than half of all Android tablets in use in the U.S. today. But the latest monthly figures from mobile ad network JumpTap today paint a different picture in terms of usage.

JumpTap noted that in the months after its launch, Amazon’s device rapidly picked up market share, reaching 33 percent of all traffic on its network in January 2012. But since then, the figure has gradually been in decline and is now at 22 percent. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPad — which had lost share to the Kindle Fire — is now back to 65 percent, or where it was before Amazon launched its tablet.

JumpTap, which bases its numbers on ad impressions on its network, noted that the Fire tablet came its closest to the iPad’s traffic share in January, when the iPad’s share of traffic had declind down to 48 percent.

Meanwhile, the rest of the tablet market seems to be stalling out: collectively, the others currently account for 14 percent of all traffic on JumpTap’s network, the same proportion they had for the past three months.

In fact, the rest of the tablet market, excepting the iPad, seems to have been hit the worst by the rise of the Kindle Fire: together, they made up 31 percent of all traffic on JumpTap’s network back in November 2011 — in other words, their share has more than halved.

So why the decline for the Kindle Fire, and the growth for the iPad? JumpTap attributes it to strong sales of the newest iPad. But it could also be that while the Kindle saw a big boost in purchases after its launch and during the holiday period, it could be that some of the novelty of the product has worn off and people are now using it less.

However, important to note that JumpTap says that even as the Kindle’s share of traffic has declined, in real terms usage has actually increased three-fold over Q4 2011 as a result of the overall growth in tablet usage. It doesn’t give comparative traffic numbers for other devices.

 

 



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04Apr

Palin & Couric boost ratings

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06Feb

Appoxee Raises Funding, Helps Mobile App Developers Boost User Engagement

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Israeli startup Appoxee has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage investment firm Cyhawk Ventures.

The company offers a service that helps app developers and publishers increase user engagement through rich push notifications and helps them with things like audience segmentation, targeting, analytics and reporting.

Read more over at TechCrunch Europe.



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26Jan

Distimo: Being Featured In The Android Market Can Boost Apps’ Rank By 172% While Featured, 828% After

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Earlier this morning, we looked at the findings from analytics provider Distimo‘s latest report, which examined what happens when mobile apps go on sale. (Spoiler: when priced correctly, revenue goes way up). The second part of the report looked at the ranking gains that occur when an app achieves “featured” status in a mobile app store like iTunes or the Android Market.

Developers often don’t know their app is being featured until they see the large, unexplained jumps in download numbers in their preferred app analytics service. The effect can be remarkable. In the iPhone App Store, for example, a featured app sees an average jump in its ranking of some 15 spots or so, during the first three days. Some apps gain significantly more, while others see much less action. (Distimo looked at Q4 data for the top 100 most popular apps to determine these findings).

In the iPad App Store and Android Market, featured apps see even higher gains than on iPhone. iPad apps’ average gain was +27 during the first three days, while featured Android apps (i.e., “Staff Picks”) were boosted up +42 spots.

Below, the chart shows the proportion of apps that gained more than 50 ranks, more than 25 ranks and those that lost ranks after being featured (oddly, that can happen), again, during the first three days.

But not all apps immediately feel the effects of their featured status. In fact, one-third of the featured iPhone apps Distimo examined did not gain in the first three days of being featured. Given that apps are, in general, only featured for seven days in all three major app stores, these first few days are critical.

During the full seven days that apps are featured, the average gains are +65 spots for Android, +15 for iPhone and +28 for iPad apps.

Distimo cautions that even though the differences between platforms seem spectacular, the app’s overall position matters, too. For example, a jump from 10 to 5 would means a substantial uptake in downloads, but going from 50 to 45 wouldn’t matter as much.

To depict this visually, the graph below shows the relative rank gains. (A rank change from 3 to 2 is an increase of 50%, while the change from 50 to 25 is 100%. All figures are 7-day averages).

The chart shows that approximately half the apps that have been featured in the Android Market have an increase over 100% while one-third of featured iPad apps gained more than 200%. (Ranks were as follows: iPad up 252%, iPhone up 137%, and Android up 172%).

Also interesting is what happens when the featured period ends. Using an average from the following five days after being featured, Distimo found that the boost was still having an overall positive effect. On average, iPad apps were up +145%, iPhone apps were up +75% and Android apps were up +828% during this “post-featured” time period.

Note that this report only looked at the top 100 most popular apps in any category – the gains in less popular apps could be quite different.



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