My 15 Minutes of Fame: mobile app

Showing posts with label mobile app. Show all posts

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Grocery shopping via mobile: A new & refreshing approach

AaramShop's mobile app brings a new perspective to market place apps. The app is unique in its approach in enabling consumers to select their preferred retailer in their neighborhood and then shop with that retailer.

The app upgrades thousands of neighborhood grocers via mobile apps and bring them on mobile devices of consumers along with their inventories and offers, enabling consumers to discover and then shop.

The app is currently available only for android devices and iOS app is expected over the next few weeks.

Download the app from here.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Mobile App Metrics: Attributed Install vs. Assisted Install

To stay ahead of the curve, mobile app marketers need to be looking beyond top-level metrics. One of these top-level metrics is the install.

Looking at which marketing channels and advertising partners convert installs doesn’t give you insight into what engagement helped drive that install along the path to conversion. Mobile marketers should look at attributed installs versus assisted installs to better understand the impact of channel and campaign performance along the conversion funnel.

Before explaining more about the importance of an attributed installs versus assisted installs, let's review some terminology.

Installs: New users that open the app for the first time.
Attributed Installs: Publisher with the last click, within the attribution window for the publisher.
Install Assists: Publisher(s) with a click prior to the last click, within the attribution window.
Publisher Install Contributions: The total number of installs for which the channel was involved (Attributed Installs + Install Assists).
Install Rate: The percentage of installs occurring from the total number of unique clicks.
Assist Rate: The percentage of assisted installs occurring from the total number of unique clicks.
Install Contribution Rate: The percentage of install contributions occurring from the total number of unique clicks.

Measuring attributed installs makes complete sense. Marketers need to know which channel and campaign converted that install. However, the assisted install metric makes it possible for marketers to measure the performance of the channels, campaigns, and advertising partners that focus on promotion and awareness (not only the ones that convert the last click).

This data is particularly useful for marketers that have campaigns running with a variety of channels and advertising partners simultaneously. Campaigns and advertising partners that focus on promotion and awareness – typically via banner and video ads -can re-engage users at a later time to install your app. These campaigns and advertising partners typically generate attributed installs, but generate a large number of assisted installs. If you have campaigns and advertising partners with varying business goals (for example, awareness vs. installs), then the assisted install metric gives you insight into how well each partner is achieving their goal.

Measuring assisted installs in addition to attributed installs also gives mobile app marketers insight into the duplicate (overlap) rate between campaigns and advertising partners. If an advertising partner or channel has unique traffic, then they likely have very few assisted installs. If an advertising partner or campaign has many assisted installs, then they are interacting with many users via ads that your other advertising partners are also interacting with (not unique traffic).

As a data-driven marketer, do you differentiate these metrics and measure the performance of each individually?

(via)

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Google Expands Mobile App Indexing in Search Results

Did you hear the news that Google is now indexing more mobile app content in its search results? That means, for those who have apps installed on their mobile devices, they could be seeing more relevant app content for their search queries. And with that announcement, Google also mentioned a huge opportunity for app creators: Android app indexing is now available to all.

Back in April and in May, Google revealed expansions to the feature it rolled out in December 2013. If you’re not familiar with the way it works, those searching on a mobile device can be served results from content within an app installed on their phone if it’s relevant to the query.

As Google puts it, "Sometimes the best answer is on a website, and sometimes it's in an app." With the latest announcement, Google also says there would be modifications to the way the app results were displayed.

5 Tips to Boost Your Facebook Ads Conversions

The organic reach of all Facebook pages has dramatically decreased causing uproar across industries since the king of the social networks is pushing all businesses to advertise on the platform in order to be seen.

Despite the outcry by many, this is a good thing for marketers since it will force the improvement of content shared by businesses on Facebook with better creative, targeting, and the ability to better measure the success of their campaigns on the network. Many of the existing Facebook marketing tips are still relevant for a company’s organic approach to the network, just less effective without the help of Facebook ads.

In the end, this focus on paid advertising will be better for Facebook users who will see higher quality ads that are more relevant to their interests. Facebook’s ad network is incredibly powerful since it has access to such a vast amount of people, 1.2 billion active monthly users to be exact, and the ability to target to these users based off of their unique interests.

Running Facebook ad campaigns can help your organization drive greater visibility to your offerings and most importantly, convert Facebook users into customers with the right approach.

Take these five tips into consideration when managing your Facebook ad campaigns.

1. Choose the appropriate call-to-action button for your ad campaigns.

This past January, Facebook introduced call-to-action buttons that allow advertisers to add either Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, Book Now or Download to their Facebook ads.

These call-to-action buttons help advertisers increase their conversion rates for their ad campaigns since it’s extremely clear for a Facebook user to understand the objective of the ad and therefore, when it’s relevant, they’re more likely to take action without any surprises.

When using call-to-actions on your ads, match the button being used in your ads to the goals of your campaigns whether it’s to increase downloads of your apps, generate more sign ups to your email list, send additional shoppers to your e-commerce store etc.

These buttons help guide a user to the next step of your campaign, especially when it comes to Facebook advertising on mobile devices. Spending on mobile app installs ads from Facebook is on the rise, since it’s working to drive results for businesses looking to convert the Facebook audience.

2. Focus on mobile-first across ad campaigns.

Facebook makes up 60.3% of all social sharing occurring on mobile phones, further driving attention to the fact that a majority of activity happening across social networks on mobile is happening on Facebook.

Here forward your Facebook advertising campaigns should be mobile-first before focusing on desktop ad campaigns when it comes to how your spend, strategy and resources are being handled.

With the acquisition of successful mobile apps WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook is continuing to position itself as a leader on the mobile web. By also separating Facebook messages into the Messenger app from the main Facebook app, the company is completely focused at driving the best experience possible for its enormous user base.

Focus all of your future Facebook ad campaigns on mobile first to increase your conversions and better justify your social advertising costs.

3. Upload customer e-mails & phone numbers to retarget existing leads.

One of the best features of Facebook advertising to date is custom audience targeting. Custom audiences allows your business to target your ads to a group of people you’ve already established a relationship with on or off of Facebook. This allows your organization to upload the emails, phone numbers, app user IDs and more to target your existing customer or user base.

Since you already have data related to these users or customers, your team can better prepare your the messaging on your ads to each subset of this audience to more effectively reach them. Since the creative, ad copy, and call-to-action is more likely to be relevant to a user, it’s more likely that they’ll convert after seeing your Facebook ad.

Targeting your existing audience can help decrease customer churn and re-engage your customers with an offer, discount or other form of incentive on Facebook to have them frequent your business once again. Alter your approach based on the segment of your audience to experiment and see what particular approach works best for each type of customer.

4. Use oCPM – optimized cost per conversion bids when trying to reach the right audience.

Another important feature to make use of for your Facebook advertising is the oCPM bidding. This bidding, known as optimized cost per conversion, allows an advertiser to establish their goals and constraints for their campaign and then Facebook will bid automatically, capturing the most valuable impressions to users who match your established customer profile for your particular goals.

The ROI on these campaigns often trumps the success of a traditional CPC or CPM campaign since your ads are basically shown to Facebook users who are most likely to perform the desired action you’re looking to achieve and convert. Using an oCPM bidding system can drive higher quality traffic to your online properties, but if you aren’t sure if this bid type is right for your campaign or not, run a small test first to ensure it’s the right approach for your Facebook ads.

5. Setup Facebook conversion tracking correctly to ensure accurate measurement tracking.

Measuring the success of your Facebook ads properly will help inform future campaigns, ideally leading to better converting ads and a stronger ROI for your business. Make sure that your offsite pixel is properly configured before launching your Facebook advertising campaigns to ensure everything is being tracked appropriately when it comes to the actions occurring after a person has viewed your Facebook ads.

Using Facebook’s Power Editor, click on “Conversion Tracking” at the top right and then click on “Create Conversion Pixel.” Next, label your pixel based off of what you’re tracking and then choose the appropriate category that defines that conversion such as checkouts, registrations, leads, key page views, adds to cart or other website conversions. After selecting the right category, click “Create Pixel.”

(VIA)

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Why Mobile Apps Will Drive the Future of Marketing

Virtually every day, new evidence emerges of the consumer shift to mobile. According to new data from Gartner, by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion and making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe. To put these huge numbers in context by comparing them to the current world population of approximately 7.1 billion and counting, by 2017, every man, woman and child on the planet will have downloaded 37 mobile apps. In reality, considering that a large swath of the world’s population still does not have access to mobile apps or capability to download them, this means that those of us who are wielding smartphones and tablets will be downloading A LOT of apps. Looked at another way, by 2017, mobile apps will have gone completely mainstream, giving businesses a new way to connect with consumers.

Of equal significance to businesses, Gartner predicts that mobile users will provide personalized data streams to more than 100 apps and services every day. Taken as a whole, the Gartner findings anticipate an overarching theme that will continue to gain force and shape the marketing function in the digital age: consumer connection through data aggregation. It is in this way that mobile apps will drive the future of marketing.

Forming Connections with Mobile

Even now, research shows that apps are beginning to dominate the mobile ecosystem. In 2013, the U.S. consumer spent an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80% of that time (2 hours and 7 minutes) was spent inside apps and 20% (31 minutes) was spent on the mobile web. Digital marketers focused on producing ever greater amounts of web-based content in an attempt capture consumer mindshare may want to consider this and shift some resources into specific-use mobile app production.

Businesses can utilize specific-use mobile apps to enhance and/or simplify the customer experience with their brand. As mobile device usage proliferates, users are becoming more reliant on mobile apps for search and needs discovery. Businesses should view this not as a threat, but as an opportunity to gain competitive advantage.

The very idea of mobile implies proximity (be it geo-locational or online) in action. Moreover, given that mobile devices are ultimately toted around by humans occupying a physical (and virtual) space, the future of mobile is inextricably linked with social media.

As I’ve written before, the rapid advancement of mobile technology - with its integration of social media and expanding geo-locational capabilities - has elevated the concept of contextual relevance in digital marketing. This is equally important for businesses, as contextual relevance breeds brand affinity- a necessary prerequisite to forming connections with consumers. Today’s social-Local-Mobile (SoLoMo) consumers now expect businesses to provide contextually relevant online content and resources that inform and entertain, or resolve a need or a want. In brief, SoLoMo has shifted power to the consumers, and they know it.

Consumer Connection through Data Aggregation

To survive and thrive in the consumer-driven digital age, businesses must figure out how to provide contextually relevant content and resources to consumers. They need information and feedback- some way to tap into the continuous streams of consumer-generated data to properly measure and refine their initiatives- all in an ongoing attempt to connect with their target audience. In an era rife with data, the greatest challenge for businesses lies not in the data itself, but in its efficient aggregation and meaningful interpretation. The ability to quickly compare marketing initiatives with real-world results allows businesses to continually refine brand messaging and marketing initiatives, using content and context to form deeper connections with prospects and customers.

As the aforementioned Gartner data suggests, mobile apps provide an indispensable tool for businesses to form connections through data aggregation; by doing so, they will drive the future of marketing.

(via)

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Interactive Wireframing Comes of Age

As you most likely know, wireframes are black-and-white box drawings that describe a screen (be it a web page, a mobile app, or anything else that needs to be laid out and designed). Traditionally, wireframes are created in the design process to show the client the functionality, process flow, and general layout of the application before the designers and developers go to work implementing the idea. Wireframes are great because they are easily changeable and help the client get a "hands-on" feel for what we are building so there will be no surprises once the system is built.

The only real drawback of wireframes is their implicit static quality: they tend to exist on a sheet of paper. In this day and age in which in-page interactivity has become the norm, and when some processes happen over a series of pages/screens, simple wireframes fall short. They traditionally aren't good at letting the user "feel" the application, and only trained eyes are really good at following wireframes across multiple pages to get a feel for where the eye goes as pages refresh during a specific task.

For the last 12 years, my company has used "interactive wireframes" as part of our design process. These have traditionally been simple HTML pages that contain graphic versions of the mockups, and use image-mapped hotspots to let the users click around. Sometimes we'll create full HTML versions instead of use images if the interactivity is easier shown in HTML. While this is a time-consuming task, interactive wireframes give our clients a much better sense of what the finished application, site, or process will feel like.

Recently, an iOS app called POP (short for Prototyping on Paper) was released that is the perfect tool to help us (and you) make this interactive wireframing task that much easier. The tool is simple: snap photos of your wireframes and link them to each other using rectangular hotspots. You can then walk through your prototype and click around as if it were a real application.

Of all the rapid prototyping tools we've tried, POP is certainly the easiest. But it's not without some major drawbacks. At the moment it is really geared toward app development, and when you share the prototypes, the screen shape/size reflects that of an iOS device. The system shows prototypes via any web browser, but puts an iPhone frame around the prototype. This makes the app unrealistic to use for any professional purpose beyond iOS prototyping.

It is my hope that the makers of this app will realize that its potential uses go far beyond mobile apps and they expand this to allow for full-page prototypes for regular websites.

Until then, we'll continue making our interactive wireframes by hand. If you are still making plain old static wireframes, it's time to start adding life to them. The ROI is simple: a clearer understanding of your project's flow will save you time and money later, as there will be no surprises in the development phase. Plus, clients like to interact with the work, and letting them do this in the wireframe stage adds to your wow factor, and gives them something more tangible to understand.

(VIA)

Monday, October 14, 2013

6 Important Mobile App Features for Your Business

From small businesses to large scale corporate companies, Mobile has become the latest frontier. Entrepreneurs now seem to delve more into building a mobile application for their business instead of investing in a mobile friendly version of their website.

The mobile app world offers countless applications, but generating an application that actually adds value to your business is the major challenge. Some applications actually facilitate in creating great revenue for their businesses. Here are 6 important mobile application features that every business must consider.

1 – Social Integration

Integrating social media sharing has become a necessity for every mobile application. The crowd over social media will share almost everything they feel passionate about. Use Facebook or any other social media platform to allow your user to sign up, like, comment or share posts about various events, making it simple for the users to remain engaged with your application.

2 – Allow Customization

Make sure that the users feel safe and comfortable using your app. Allow them to customize the app the way they like it, by choosing colors, fonts and most importantly if it happens to be a social application, allow them to get a strong hand on the privacy settings. This way it gives users the opportunity to alter the application to the way they like it.

Facebook Apps Need to Be Mobile, and Here's Why

It’s 2013, and there are a vast number of people making money as fortune tellers. Let that sink in. Fortune telling is still a profession. There’s absolutely no real evidence to support that what fortune tellers are doing is legit in any manner, yet we’re still asked to provide stat after stat to convince people to make mobile versions of Facebook applications.

“But why do we need a mobile version of a Facebook app?”

“You see all those people walking around the street with their noses stuck into a screen of a phone, walking into oncoming traffic and telephone poles? That’s why.”

“Hmm, yes yes. But that's not quite enough data, is it? Can you give us something a little more concrete than what we just see around?”

People love statistics and numbers, even if they don’t mean or translate to anything for them. They’re fun to throw around and useful to convince yourself and your team that what you’re doing is justified by research and data, and therefore makes you a little more comfortable doing something you’d probably have done anyway. So I'm going to throw a few numbers and stats at you to convince you that Facebook apps do indeed have to be mobile.

In certain cases, such as Coke's #ShareMyCokeLah campaign - where Circus Social built a Facebook app for Coke that generated an Instagram feed of images tagged with the hashtag #ShareMyCokeLah - a mobile version is a no brainer. But for the other Facebook apps and campaigns: here's something to sway you.

1. Mobile phones account for 17% of web usage worldwide and 26.6% for Asia

Of the 17% of web usage worldwide via mobile phones, a little over 80% is spent on social media. Most of the rest probably goes to Candy Crush Saga. People often head home and don’t open their laptops again and simply catch up on e-mail and messages through their mobile phones given Samsung and LG now have phones with screens as big as Justin Bieber’s ego. So if you have to get a hold of them and let them use your Facebook apps, it has to be mobile!

Statista's Infographic on Mobile Usage on the Web

2. On average people check their phone 150 times a day – once every 6.5 minutes

Now we’re not saying that like clockwork the entire world reaches into their pocket and pulls out their phones once every 270 seconds of course. But you get the hint. It’s second nature to just pull out your smartphone when you’re idle for a second, and in the event that they decide that they’re going to utilize that free time to get in touch with your brand, check out your products on Facebook or even make a purchase, you don’t want to deny them.

3. 819 million People Use Facebook on their Mobile Phone Each Month

That’s out of Facebook’s total user base of 1.15 billion, equating to 71.2% of people on Facebook. I really don’t think we need to expand on what this stat means for you.

4. Mobile e-commerce now accounts for 23% of online sales

In the most simplistic view possible, brands selling their products online see a quarter of their sales coming through the mobile platform. Are you really willing to sacrifice close to 25% of your total sales just because you don’t want to develop a mobile app for an app you’re already developing?

Well that ought to do it! Oh wait, sources. We’ve gathered the above statistics from Mashable, PC Mag, TechCrunch and eConsultancy. All reliable, all dependable. A mobile version of a Facebook app is a necessity people, don’t leave a portion of your fans high and dry.

via

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

26 Mobile Apps to Improve Your Business and Networking

#1: Adobe Reader

Do you need to work on PDF docs on the go?

Adobe Reader offers features to view PDF documents, store and access documents in the cloud with Acrobat.com, navigate through PDF content, annotate and comment on PDF documents, fill out forms, organize documents, electronically sign and print and share.

"Easily access, manage and share a wide variety of PDF types."

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Monday, August 18, 2014

Related articles

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Sunday, May 18, 2014

1. Choose the appropriate call-to-action button for your ad campaigns.

2. Focus on mobile-first across ad campaigns.

3. Upload customer e-mails & phone numbers to retarget existing leads.

4. Use oCPM – optimized cost per conversion bids when trying to reach the right audience.

5. Setup Facebook conversion tracking correctly to ensure accurate measurement tracking.

Related articles

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Forming Connections with Mobile

Consumer Connection through Data Aggregation

Related articles

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Related articles

Monday, October 14, 2013

1 – Social Integration

2 – Allow Customization

Monday, October 7, 2013

1. Mobile phones account for 17% of web usage worldwide and 26.6% for Asia

2. On average people check their phone 150 times a day – once every 6.5 minutes

3. 819 million People Use Facebook on their Mobile Phone Each Month

4. Mobile e-commerce now accounts for 23% of online sales

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

#1: Adobe Reader

#2: Bump

#3: CardMunch Business Card Reader

#4: DocuSign Ink

#5: Easy Note + To Do

#6: Foursquare

#7: Google+

#8: Highlight

#9: Instagram

#10: Job Search

#11: Kindle

#12: Logo Mania Quiz

#13: Meetup

#14: Nook

#15: Odometer

#16: Photo Covers for Facebook Lite

#17: QR Reader

#18: (i)Reddit

#19: Square Register

#20: TED

#21: UberSocial

#22: Vintique

#23: WiFi Finder

#24: (e)xcel Contacts Lite

#25: Yelp

#26: Zendesk