In March, click-through rates on ads for mobile adds on iOS devices reached new heights, increasing fivefold from the previous year. CTRs on Android were nearly three times higher than a year ago, reports mobile app marketer Fiksu in its latest pulse of the app market.
All those clicks are driving record downloads. While the report doesn’t capture Android downloads, a new high of 7.1 million iOS apps were downloaded daily in March, up 41 percent from a year ago.
Fiksu says that in addition to apps themselves becoming more compelling, programmatic solutions, better targeting and ad formats — app install and video ads along with mobile-specific ads — have helped keep marketing costs manageable even as activity has increased.
Cost per install that could be directly attributed to advertising for iOS apps ticked up just 2 percent from February to $0.97 in March. On Android, which has seen more volatility, cost per install fell 16 percent from February.
The cost per app launch — an indicator of customer engagement and lifetime value — was cheaper on both Android and iOS in March. The cost per launch on Android fell 5 percent from February to $0.10, a drop of 37 percent from the previous year. On iOS the cost fell 10 percent to $0.17, though that’s a slight uptick of 2 percent year-over-year.
Fiksu cites the impact that efforts from major players like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo (and soon Google) have had on the market with the introduction of ad formats designed specifically for app marketers. With better resources, “marketers are getting smarter about leveraging the right ad formats, ad creatives and targeting tools to reach the right users. Otherwise, without these optimization and targeting capabilities, the CPLU Index would have likely seen an increase of 20 percent year-over-year,” the report concludes.
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