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Advertising | Industry-Research

Meeker’s annual report exposes opportunities to connect with consumers

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report is often referred to as the state of the union for the media and technology industry. In it, Meeker—a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB)—highlights the biggest internet developments for the coming year. Her report provides insights on digital adoption, identifies which interfaces are resonating, and examines the dynamics of ecommerce.

Some key takeaways from her presentation:
  • Mobile dominates digital usage. U.S. adults now spend 5.6 hours a day using digital media, 3.1 hours (from 2.8 in 2015) via mobile devices and 2.2 hours on desktop and laptop.
  • The ad spend on mobile is not proportionate to the share of time spent on mobile. While consumers spend 28% of their time on mobile, only 21% of the digital ad dollars is spent on mobile media. This is expected to correct itself in the second half of this year.
  • As internet advertising continues to increase, the growth is concentrated in Google and Facebook, the internet duopoly. Meeker’s report notes that Google and Facebook control 85% of online ad growth. Google’s ad revenue grew 20% and Facebook 62% in 2016. For everyone else, the growth was less than 10% year over year.
  • Internet users are concerned about their privacy and security online. Consumers report being concerned with how their data is being collected, used and stored. Consistency and self-regulation of privacy policies are important steps in the monitoring the Internet ecosystem.
Where Meeker’s insights meet opportunity:
  • Voice recognition software and devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home are reshaping the consumer digital experience. In fact, Amazon Echo is now installed in 11 million households in the U.S. Further, 20% of all mobile searches are now voice activated.
  • Gaming goes mainstream. There are now 2.6 billion gamers today compared to a 100 million in 1995. In fact, viewing time for eSports, professional video gaming live-events and tournament, increased by 40% compared to a year ago. The gaming revenue concentration remains in Asia, with 47% of 2016’s $100 billion global market. Meeker believes video gaming’s socially engaging features will offer new businesses opportunities and sporting events.
  • Streaming music helps revives the music industry. Spotify, the marketplace leader, exceeded physical music sales, adding to the first revenue growth in the music industry in the last 16 years. Free trials are also driving sampling and subscription sign-ups.
  • Healthcare data is flowing with approximately 25% of U.S. consumers owning a wearable device, up 12% from a year ago. Further, 6 in 10 people report they are willing to share with health information with Google. Collecting and analyzing healthcare data has huge implications for the medical and healthcare sector from aiding clinical trials to identifying geographical and environmental healthcare concerns.

The marketplace is rapidly advancing and continues to grow in importance. According to Meeker, the top 20 Internet companies—many of which were not around before 1995—have a market value of nearly $3 trillion. New media platforms and information technologies are transforming new market economies. Yet it is important to note that Meeker sees new opportunities across multiple platforms to connect and add value for consumers.

 

Industry-Research

The new speed of mobile engagement

Does improving page load time positively impact readership?

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was launched in February 2016 to address both the increasing bloat of web pages and the subsequent consequences of a diminished user experience for readers, publishers, and advertisers. By creating a platform from which media companies could publish clean, streamlined versions of their articles, AMP promised to speed up the average page load time and make it easier for visitors to stick around and read their content.

But how does it deliver on this promise, and what is the impact on consumer engagement?

The Effect on Publisher Traffic

Chartbeat pulled actual consumer behavior data across 360 sites using AMP and FIA from June 2016 to May 2017. Our research shows that, while usage rates and the subsequent number of articles consumed on each platform differs, it turns out that both AMP and FIA content have been receiving larger and larger shares of publishers’ mobile traffic, and at fairly equal rates. As of mid-May 2017, a typical publisher who implemented AMP saw 16% of all mobile traffic on their AMP content. Comparatively, publishers with FIA saw 14.8% of all mobile traffic on FIA content.

The Need for Speed

These days, web experiences are all about speed. Almost half (47%) of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Even more significantly, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, meaning they never reach the published content at all.  So how are AMP and IA optimizing page load times?

Chartbeat analysis shows that AMP loads roughly four times faster than the standard mobile site experience, and Instant Articles load even more quickly. In fact, 88% of Instant Articles load too quickly for us to even register a load time. Now that’s fast.

This is a big deal, and proves that both initiatives are delivering on the promise of providing a much quicker load time to improve reader experience. And publishers are seeing the effects — with less time spent waiting for pages to load, consumers have more time freed up for engaging with content.

Better User Experience, More Engaged Readers

With so many distributed ways of finding content and such short consumer attention spans, every second counts. So how does AMP stack up?

Chartbeat’s data shows that readers engage with AMP content for 35% longer than standard mobile web content. They spend an average of 48 seconds with AMP content vs. 36 seconds with mobile web content when coming from search. The fact that readers are engaging for so much longer than they normally would suggests that user experience really does matter in catching and holding attention.

The Future of High Speed Mobile 

One big question still remains: Will publishers continue to scale their efforts and should these high speed platforms become the mobile industry norm?

While the increase in engaged time for publishers who have adopted both AMP and FIA are compelling, the jury is still out on whether the end justifies the means. The numbers here demonstrate that consumers clearly value these optimized mobile experiences and this may just be the evidence we need to validate their potential. However, larger questions still remain around each on both publisher value and quality.

As publishers continue to use these platforms and readers continue to react, it will be interesting to see how AMP and Facebook IA evolve in the future – possibly in two completely different directions.

At the end of the day, visitors deserve a fast, clean, enjoyable reading experience where they spend most of their time – on mobile. And publishers can benefit from a more effective mobile environment where they can distribute and monetize content and scale their success. But at what cost? How can we make this win-win?

John Saroff is Chief Executive Officer of Chartbeat, a leading content intelligence platform used by more than 50,000 of the world’s top media properties in over 60 countries. He has worked on the cutting-edge of media and technology for 17+ years, setting the daily operations and business development agendas of companies as diverse as Google, NBC-Universal and vente-privee. John received his undergraduate degree in History from Haverford College and a joint degree in Law and Business from Columbia University.

Perspectives

We say we don’t hate our audiences. Our mobile strategies suggest otherwise.

Some people’s phones are filled with photos of their families, of their friends, of beautiful landscapes, of adorable pets. My phone is a museum of rage-inducing mobile experiences.

Almost everything I do on the internet, I do on my phone. Which means that every single day, I am provoked to John McEnroe-esque reactions by what Ye Average Media Organization forces audiences to endure.

Like the, “oh, you wanted to do that thing? First jump through several hoops to download our app”:

Apple: punishing you for having deleted their not-at-all-best-in-class Podcasts app.

 

Pinterest: judging you for daring to want to check out Disney Princess tattoos in your mobile browser.

Or the “sign up for our newsletter that might or might not have anything to do with the story you want to read but now can’t because of this full-screen call to action that our growth team insisted we force upon you”:

 

On the left, Fusion. On the right, Blavity. At least neither of them went for the guilt and shame strategy.

Or the “how many things that are not the thing you want can we put between you and the thing you want”, in which the distractions from the journalism include “and now some content from our sponsor” that takes up an entire screen:

What exactly do you want me to do here, HBR and Runners World?

Or the “please allow us to passive aggressively shame you as only the English can even as we take that sweet, sweet money from Outbrain and Taboola”:

And we haven’t even gotten to the proliferation of the “Read More” button, a way for publishers to make your user experience worse so they can prove to advertisers that someone saw the ad that immediately follows your dispirited tap. Or the inescapable ad that autoplays as you try scrolling past it:

Or the truly evil forced browser redirect to the app store, where you might be prompted to download an app you already own or one you would never even consider because wow, ad targeting is terrible:

And so I ask: what have our audiences done to deserve any of this? And why do we think we deserve to have any audience at all when this is how we treat them?

Stacy-Marie Ishmael is a journalist and editor from Trinidad. She has worked for the Financial Times and Buzzfeed and is currently researching mobile/news as a 2016–17 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford.

Note: This article originally appeared on Medium.

 

Industry-Research

Attitudes toward news media are fractured along party lines

Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological, educational, and generational lines than ever before. So, it’s no surprise that they trust and rely on different news sources. However, they also disagree on the news media’s purpose. Do news stories and analyses of current affairs help keep politicians honest or distract them from doing their jobs?

A new report from the Pew Research Center shows that 89% of Democrats say that the news media reports keeps political leaders in line, while only about 42% of Republicans say the same. That 47% gap, is significantly different from a year ago when roughly about three-quarters of both Democrats (74%) and Republicans (77%) backed the news media’s watchdog role.

In whom do we trust?

Still, trust in news and information is questionable these days. Only one-fifth of adults say they trust “a lot,” of the information they receive from national news organizations, 25% trust local news organizations and fewer than 15% trust information from family and friends. Social ranks last as a trusted news and information source with just 5% of U.S. adults. Yet we all know that social, i.e. Facebook, is often quoted as a major news source.

Among these four sources, one-third of Democrats (34%) report “a lot” of trust in news and information from national news organizations compared to 11% of Republicans. For local news, approximately 36% of Democrats trust the local news media “a lot,” compared to 24% of Republicans.

Americans are also paying closer attention to national news compared to 2016. Four-in-ten U.S. Adults report following national news very closely, up from one-third last year. Nearly three-quarters of Americans (72%) report that news organizations tend to support one side in presenting news on political and social issues. In contrast, only a little over one-quarter of digital news users think the news media deals fairly with all sides. Specifically, more than half of those identifying as Democrats (53%) report that the news media tends to favor one side compared to 87% of Republicans.

Pew’s trending data shows it’s not unusual for Americans who support the President’s political party to be less likely to support the watchdog role of media. Still, the current gap is far wider than at any prior point over the past three decades.

News travels

As overall mobile usage increased this year, so did news consumption on mobile, with almost half of U.S. adults (45%) getting their news often on a mobile device, a 9% increase from a year ago. Among those who get news on both mobile and desktop, nearly two-thirds (65%) prefer mobile access to digital news over desktop access.

Overall, 73% of digital media users report that the national news media does well keeping them informed (21% “very well” and 54% “fairly well”). However, when looking at political orientation, 33% of Democrats report that the national media does “very well” at informing them, compared to 18% of Republicans.”

Importantly, when judging if a news story is trustworthy, about half of U.S. adults say the source of the story (51%) and the story’s publisher (48%) have “a large impact” on the assessment, followed by a gut instinct (30%) and the person who shared (26%) the story.

The insights from this study are especially important to publishers whose digital content is progressively reaching readers outside their own websites and apps. A publisher’s commitment to quality content produces value for its readers. While this may not cross partisan lines, it provides an accurate and level-playing field to strengthen the trusted relationship publishers and reader.

Industry-Research

Adults in the U.S. spend half their day with media

With the upfronts happening this week in New York—where the FOX Broadcasting advertising chief, according to one report, threw “shade at digital, likening it to subprime mortgage crisis”—the recently published U.S. Time Spent with Media report from eMarketer provides some facts and forecasts to the conversation. Specifically, how much media U.S. adults consume, and how it is consumed, across digital, TV, radio, and print.

The FOX head of advertising’s comment are especially curious given that only a couple of weeks ago, Recode reported that “This is the year digital beats TV” when it comes to ad sales, which surprised exactly no one who follows industry trends. That said, any reasonably well-informed marketer knows this much: TV advertising moves product. And most companies that can afford to promote their wares via television, do. Google has built an empire by serving up classified ads on a global scale. However, the platform can’t yet motivate us to purchase $80,000 cars, switch insurance carriers, or buy low-calorie-but-watery beer at staggering volumes. TV spots are incredibly effective at their jobs, no matter how stereotypical and annoying they may seem.

At the end of the day, neither digital nor television advertising are going away anytime soon, though the delivery backbone is certainly evolving.

Here’s what eMarketer’s findings show, and what you need to know about consumers’ media habits:

  • US adults will average 12 hours 7 minutes of media usage per day in 2017, up 3 minutes compared to 2016, and 15 minutes compared to 2014. Time spent with mobile will account for nearly all of this year’s increase. Following several years of rapid evolution—driven by digital and mobile—consumption is stabilizing across media and device types.
  • Digital and TV combine to account for 82% of daily media consumption. A breakdown of the 727 total minutes of average media consumption each day: 350 minutes with digital (48%), 244 minutes with TV (34%), 86 minutes with radio (12%), and 25 minutes with print (3%).
  • It’s important to acknowledge the “convergence” factor, meaning that there is a meaningful amount of video and radio consumption in the “digital” category. People are watching video and listening to radio via smartphones, laptops, and desktop computers.
  • Non-digital TV remains the biggest single element of US adults’ daily media usage, but its share slowly dwindles each year. Among millennials, time spent is declining sharply. Time spent with digital video keeps rising and is expected to average 1 hour 13 minutes per day this year.
  • Half of US adults read print publications (newspapers and magazines). More than 90% of U.S. adults are TV viewers, radio listeners, and mobile phone users. While most US adults will be internet users this year, a nontrivial 14% of them will not be.
  • More of the digital universe is designed to cater to smartphones, and this often takes the form of apps. In-app usage is expected to account for 89% of smartphone time and 77% of tablet time this year.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a partner at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based digital consulting company specializing in strategic roadmaps, digital marketing audits, and online marketing optimization programs.

Innovation | Perspectives

How to use push for mobile engagement—without being pushy

Consumer dependency on mobile apps for information and entertainment has shot into the stratosphere. In the U.S. alone, audience measurement and research firm comScore reports that mobile now represents almost two out of three digital media minutes. As a result, comScore declares that mobile apps “have completely shifted the digital media landscape in favor of mobile,” with mobile apps accounting for a whopping 60% of total digital time spent.

Clearly, apps have become the new addiction. Consumers spend more time “in-app” than ever before. To address this opportunity, smart media companies and app marketers are evolving comprehensive strategies to connect with consumers in ways that enhance, not interrupt, the user experience.

At one level, it’s about new uses of push. Push is the first direct-to-consumer communication channel designed specifically for the smartphone, to message and engage consumers on their devices home screen. At the other level, it’s about in-app messaging. Unlike push, in-app messaging allows marketers to deliver contextually relevant conversation, not just campaigns.

Push is widely used and offers marketers a broad range of benefits, which stems from the fact that it’s a perfect format to direct attention to a desired action. In practice, push prompts users who have opted in to engage with content or a mobile campaign. But without context (and therefore a clear purpose) push notifications can quickly get “pushy.” Done the right way, push can drive users into your app. Get it wrong, and you can drive users out of your app altogether.

Marketers Get the Message

This is where in-app messaging comes in. Messaging allows marketers to insert themselves into the flow at that all-important “mobile moment” when users are deep in their journey and dependent on their app. But marketers can’t just use in-app messaging to target audience context. Marketing content, which can only be displayed while the user is active within the app, must have the “look and feel” of native. (And that’s a huge plus if we consider the survey data that underlines the growing appeal of native advertising and the massive increase in the use of ad blocking tech on mobile devices.)

Granted, both app messaging formats have abundant use cases. But it’s time for companies to look beyond marketing and begin to view mobile apps as what they really are: the vehicle of a new kind of customer communications and engagement paradigm. Success is all about maximizing mobile messaging capabilities, including push and in-app messaging, to enable ‘conversations’ with consumers. This will encourage engagement and help build trust through ongoing interaction.

Two-Way is the Right Way

We can already see an exciting proliferation of in-app marketing elements and types. Insert, a company that offers an automated in-app marketing platform, which provides provides marketers a broad set of customizable features – “inserts” – which can be launched into any live app without coding, picked up on this trend in The Giant Book of In-App Campaigns.

Examples range from “push with an insert” to send users to a specific piece of content or video, to “combo” approaches that allow marketers to tailor a “flow” to keep pace with user responses. All and all, Insert has collected 30 in-app campaign types. They offer insights into a brave new world of app communication approaches. And it should inspire marketers to use mobile for two-way conversations, not one-way campaigns.

Conversations are the real benefit of mobile. Unfortunately, we have somehow lost sight of this in the race for app installs and eyeballs. Over a decade ago, in the early days of permission-based text messaging and marketing, I advised companies to consider using SMS to ask consumers for their ideas and feedback on products and services. My view that the real power of mobile lay in its ability to spark “conversations” with valuable customers had its roots in the work of Eric von Hippel, an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who wrote the milestone book, Democratizing Innovation.

Fueling Engagement with Feedback

Back then, von Hippel was focused on harnessing “lead users” — users who have a high incentive to solve a problem and the ability to innovate. He believed that their input could yield breakthrough and profitable products and services. His prediction that advances in computing and communications technologies could enable lead users to innovate and develop exactly what they want is now a reality thanks to smartphones and apps. Of course this is great for everyone since what lead users want is precisely what the rest of the market will demand.

Dustin Amrhein, Solutions Leader at Insert, tells me that campaigns that use in-app marketing to ask users for feedback is “one of the most popular user cases thus far, and where we see some amazing conversion rates.”  But the boost in customer engagement – because users feel their opinion counts and will have an impact – is just one of the benefits.

The quality and appeal of their apps contribute to the ongoing success of media companies (and other app makers). Focusing in-app marketing and messaging on requesting user feedback allows companies to move the needle on their app, while saving much of the cost and wait associated with “trial and error.”

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

 

Industry-Research

Mapping “mobile first” for global consumers and content

The rise of mobile devices is an almost universal constant for global digital markets, but our new comScore report, Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs, shines a light on content and demographics that deliver particularly intense engagement on smartphone and tablet platforms.

The concept of “mobile first” has come a long way from its roots as a focus for UX design and technology-focused companies. Now it serves as a description for general consumer behavior. Over 60% of digital media time in the nine global markets analyzed (USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, China and Indonesia) is spent on mobile. Even at this top line level, regional differences begin to emerge: The figure is 71% for US compared to 91% for Indonesia. Global markets have evolved based on local factors, with some making smartphone and tablets their primary devices.

Digging deeper into how mobile time is distributed, apps take the lion’s share at over 80% of mobile minutes. But more specifically, there are content areas within each country’s digital market in which mobile adoption has occurred at an accelerated rate. At a content category level, we can group by balance of mobile audiences and engagement to create a map of hotspots for mobile first behavior. And these, the report goes on to demonstrate, align against Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Here are 3 more key observations that emerged from the report:

  1. “Mobile only” usage is not just a younger phenomenon

    On a per-user basis, younger users appear to spend more time overall with their mobile devices. However, there are other indications that these platforms may also be an ideal location to target older digital users.

    The “mobile only” audience is gathering significance – 12% of American users do not access the internet via desktop in a month. This number rises to 35% south of the border in Mexico. Interestingly, while the US figure increases to 17% among 18 to 34 year-olds, this is still lower than the 21% of 55 to 64 year-olds who are “mobile only.” This makes these platforms a rich opportunity for reaching older audiences.

  1. Publisher content is a key contributor to social media engagement

    Social media delivers over 20% of mobile minutes in all countries contained within the report. However, consumers’ specific social activities have shifted within the last year. Whilst the posting and reading of personal statuses remained relatively flat in 2016, the percentage of users sharing and consuming content from publishers and brands on these platforms rose considerably. This contributes to higher than average news consumption for mobile social media users. And it serves as a reminder that content is still king, but that distribution – even in the digital world – is as important as ever.

  1. Engagement does not always correlate with reach among top apps

    With apps dominating mobile minutes and offering focused consumer attention on specific tasks, it is important to understand how these audiences can be unlocked.

    Top app charts (by total users) are dominated by large, global entities. However, reach among mobile users is not a reliable barometer for engagement. Leading social and entertainment apps, such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Spotify offer both high reach and high engagement across many markets. This makes them attractive venues for brand advertising. Other high reach apps like Google Search and Google Maps do not rely on high engagement. Yet they nevertheless meet important consumer needs that result in extremely valuable low-funnel advertising opportunity for marketers. This variation in the app environment ultimately demands more use of native advertising that is less one-size-fits-all than what desktop display advertising typically affords.

There is no doubt that consumers are taking an increasingly mobile first attitude to digital media consumption, and understanding their hierarchy of needs on mobile can help brands and publishers to better identify opportunities and communicate with them.

For more information on the report or to how comScore can help you succeed in a mobile-first world, visit comscore.com/mobile.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to engage multitasking, multiplatform consumers

The avalanche of mobile services and apps has led to a sizeable shift in media consumption towards mobile. But the smartphone is not always competing for people’s attention. To the contrary, a new report from Deloitte tells us the smartphone enhances TV viewing experience. But this bright spot can’t disguise the brand imperative to re-think advertising to engage audiences, not annoy them.

Drawing on a survey of 2,131 U.S. consumers Deloitte’s 11th Digital Democracy Survey highlights how key audience segments including Millennials, Gen X and Gen Z (in other words, a broad spectrum of user ages 14 and above) interact with mobile, video, TV and the Internet.  While the findings are not surprising, they are an important confirmation of people’s attitudes and behaviors and the trends sure to shape the future of media.

Optimizing Experiences

“The shift to streaming, mobile, on-demand services and personalization are significant opportunities in 2017,” Kevin Westcott, vice chairman and U.S. media and entertainment leader, Deloitte LLP, says in a press release. “Brands can bring new value, services and incredibly entertaining content to the empowered consumers across all age groups in a manner that can be monetized.”

But it won’t be a walk in the park. Yes, there is ample proof that American consumers streamed, “binge-watched” and demanded more media than ever in 2016. However, there is also an increased reliance on social networks (and friends) to make purchase decisions.  Social recommendations are proving “more influential” than traditional advertising, the report says. For example, nearly one-third (27%) of Gen Z respondents say an online recommendation from someone within their social media circles can highly influence a buying decision.

Multitasking also makes it tougher for traditional media, such as TV, to grab (and keep) audience attention. The shift to second-screening may enhance the viewing experience. (I’m thinking here of the uptick in mobile app interaction and social media sharing that coincides with the broadcast of cult shows like The Walking Dead). It also detracts from the effectiveness of TV advertising. The verdict from Deloitte: “Enlisting online influencers and creating social buzz” are likely the more effective avenue for getting through to younger consumers.

Remastering Marketing

Another barrier that companies need to overcome is the quality of their advertising – or rather the lack of it. The report reveals the vast majority (more than 80%) of consumers will skip an online video ad if allowed. And 67% of consumers are tuning out mobile ads on their phones because they find them irrelevant. Against this backdrop, a large percentage of respondents are reaching to ad-blocking tech to snuff of unwanted advertising. (Although, to be fair, their motivation is linked with the desire to improve the speed and performance of the content and videos consumed online and on mobile.)

Amid the doom-and-gloom data that leads us to believe consumers hate ads, a few surprise findings (buried on page 12) show the way for brands to improve the experience for consumers and the effectiveness of their advertising. More than half of all consumers say they would be willing to receive advertising on their smartphones based on location.  Significantly, 46% said they would pay more attention to an ad if they were able to make the call on whether they view it or skip it.

It’s a report that reinforces what has become my mantra: People want what they want – when, how and where they want it. Consumers crave more geographic relevance in their advertising and they want more control over the advertising they have to view as a condition to access and enjoy content. Clearly, brands are well advised to adapt their advertising approach to these consumer requirements. There is no guarantee the changes they make will trigger a conversion, or win customer loyalty. But it’s sure to grab at least some attention. And in a world where consumers are multitasking and massively reliant on their social circles, a little attention can mean major traction.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.
Industry-Research

Understanding the impact of mobile multitasking

The mobile device is the command center for the hyper-connected consumer. Increasingly, it provides the point of access to the Internet of Things (loT). Today’s publishers and brands need to understand cross-device usage and identify the best pathway to attract and engage the hyper-connected consumer. In order to identify the appropriate channels and marketing opportunities, Verto Analytics analyzed cross-device usage in their research report, “Multitasking and Mobile Apps: New Ways to Measure Consumer Behavior.”

It’s no surprise that mobile device usage is on the rise. On average, American adults own five devices, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, and wearables. In Q4 2016, PC usage totaled an average of 104 minutes per day. That’s slightly less than consumer’s total mobile device usage, which averaged 75 minutes per day on smartphones and 39 minutes per day on tablets (totaling 114 minutes per day).

Mobile apps also drive usage and far exceed mobile web usage. In fact, consumers spent 6.9 billion hours on mobile apps compared to 1.2 billion hours of mobile web usage in December 2016.

Mobile App Usage

Overall, consumers have an average of 89 apps installed on their smartphones and use approximately 25 each week and only eight per day. Fewer than 10% of all apps installed on a smartphone are used daily.

Device sessions:

  • 56% of all device sessions are still single-app sessions.
  • 19% show at least three distinct apps being used in a single session.
  • 9% show at least four distinct apps being used in a single session.
  • 5 to 4% of all smartphone sessions are multitasking sessions.

Multitasking Sessions

Verto Analytics defines a multitasking session as using at least four different apps and at least seven differ shifts (movement from app to app).

Consumers are using multiple apps to engage with the external world. External environment apps allow consumers to interact with their environments. This category of apps includes fitness tracking apps, connected home and personal assistant apps, and streaming media apps combined with hardware.

Personal assistant apps (i.e. Amazon’s Alexa) currently make up only 4% of all usage. Verto Analytics predicts these apps will increasingly be incorporated into consumer’s multitasking behavior.

As one would imagine, social media services and messaging apps (such as Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and WhatsApp) are most likely to be a part of a consumer’s multitasking behavior.

Multitasking Likelihood

Interestingly, the report found that the list of apps with the highest total number of returns does not necessarily correlate with the list of apps with the highest return rates (total number of people returning to the same app). The return rate is an important metric. It’s the ratio of multitasking sessions when a given app experiences a return against the total number of sessions of that app within a given time frame.

For example, if a consumer uses the Waze app once a day every day for a month (30 days) and on five of the those occasions, there is multitasking session (the consumer leaves and returns to Waze during the same session), the return rate for Waze is 18% (5/30). Waze, in this instance, had an 18% tendency to attract consumers back to the app during a multitasking session. What we learn from this is that the plays a central-role in a consumer’s session because it is actively used with other apps. Learning about how consumers actively use apps with other apps, often referred to as a smart hub, plays a key role in chart the consumer pathways to best target for frequent interaction and engagement.

Understanding multitasking, the best rate of return, and smart hubs offers insight into important mobile touchpoints. Brands and publishers need to identify and understand these points of interaction and their relationships to drive usage grown, engagement and monetization.

Industry-Research

App marketing shifts from installs to engagement

More apps mean more competition for users. This dynamic is driving user acquisition costs into the stratosphere. Companies have a choice: They can pay higher prices to acquire app users, or they can invest more effort in retaining high-value customers. Reams of recent research reveal a seismic shift to the latter as more app marketers sharpen their focus on approaches that emphasize “quality over quantity.”

It’s all about keeping users loyal. App marketers are beginning to understand that the customer-centric rules of online, digital and physical marketing also apply in the App Economy. For example, online a single-digit increase in retention can mean a double- or even triple-digit increase in profits. When it comes to marketing and monetizing apps, the advantages of identifying and inspiring quality users can be just as massive.

App Engagement

AppsFlyer is a platform for mobile attribution and marketing analytics whose tracking technology is found on 98% of the world’s mobile devices. The company regularly undertakes research to analyze best practices and trends. The State Of App Engagement, AppsFlyer’s most comprehensive and ambitious report to date, draws on billions of data points across the second half of 2016 to help app marketers identify quality users who will engage with their app over time.

The report offers marketers a breakdown of key engagement benchmarks by platform, category and region:

  • Retention rates
  • Average sessions per daily active user
  • Cross-funnel conversion rates
  • Lifetime engagement

The report focuses on Shopping, Games and Travel apps. However, the overarching observations and trends offer valuable guidance to all app marketers as they seek to optimize their campaigns and target audiences highly likely to engage with their apps over time.

The research confirms that app retention is an elusive goal to reach (findings show only 10-12% of users remain active 7 days after downloading an app, and only 4-5% are still active after 30 days). Yet it also points to positive results that show marketers using data to drive results. Based on a year-over-year comparison the report shows how overall retention has improved in some regions and across some app categories. “The good news for marketers is that retention has mostly improved – especially among non-organic users on both platforms,” observes report author Shani Rosenfelder.

Organic traffic – that is, people who download your app without you having to invest in paid or social promotion to get their attention – is great to have but not the way to drive serious growth. In a marketplace brimming with apps, and where app store search is fatally flawed, marketers can’t rely on WOM to take their app from good to great. For that they need to target non-organic traffic. To do so, they must harness data that will allow them to target audiences that promise high engagement and low wastage of their ad spend.

Among the findings:

Small gap, big opportunities: Average sessions, the number of times a daily active user will engage with your app, used to be vastly different between organic and non-organic users. However, the gap between these two groups of users across platforms is closing fast. Globally, Android organic users come in at 3.81 sessions compared with 3.56 sessions for non-organic users on the platform. That’s a mere 7% difference. On iOS, the gap is slightly wider with organic users outperforming non-organic users by 9%. The report reads this to mean there is “substantial quality to be found among non-organic users.”

Retention rates rocket: When it comes to retention North America has the best Android score across all regions. For organic users the breakdown is 35.8% for Day 1 Retention and 4.1% for Day 30 Retention. Retention rates among non-organic users on Android is 27.3% for Day 1 and 3.5% for Day 30. On iOS retention rates for organic users comes in at 30.6% for Day 1 (26.3% for non-organic users) and 5.1% for Day 30 (3.1% for non-organic users). The report also lists the cities across the U.S. where marketers are highly likely to find high-quality users for their app.

Significantly, some of the less prominent media markets have the highest mobile app engagement rates in the country, according to AppsFlyer.

 

Engagement is encouraging: Overall, organic users of Shopping apps on Android engage in 41.94 content views (for the period studied). Non-organic users engaged in 26.14 content views. (In the case of iOS the content views are 29.46 for organics and 12.14 for non-organics.) Draw a completely plausible parallel between Content Views for shoppers and “News Views” for consumers, and the report gives app marketers at content and media companies good reason to be positive about the results they can achieve. One audience looks at products, the other looks at articles. In both cases, more views mean more chances to engage and retain (or monetize) your audience.

User acquisition campaigns that focus on driving installs are passé. The next wave of activity and excitement is all about finding ways to identify audiences that will interact with your app repeatedly. Marketers need to approach this challenge armed with the critical data they need to optimize their investments. It is essential to understand the key characteristics that separate loyal and quality users from everyone else and target non-organic users who measure up to their organic traffic.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research

Understanding why people uninstall your app

Mobile has become the primary vehicle for expanding audience reach, eclipsing desktop browsing and TV viewing as the preferred on-ramp to explore the world of information and content at our fingertips. But mobile apps are where the real consumer engagement happens – provided companies and marketers add real value.

Why People Install
Thanks to research from Google and Ipsos, How people discover, use,  and stay engaged with apps, we have a better idea of the reasons that will convince a consumer to download an app. And, since people aren’t downloading as many apps as they used to – suffering from what mobile analytics attribution company TUNE calls “download fatigue,”  it’s smart for marketers to make a greater effort to understand factors sure to trigger an app install.

Here are three major takeaways about the factors that cause consumers to download an app in the first place:

  • Price points: Drawing from data from a survey of 1,000 smartphone users in the U.S., Google’s report finds that consumers are price-conscious and privacy-focused. The majority (85%) look at price first and content second. Ironically, 50% of respondents have paid for content and 50% have not. Of the consumers that did purchase content offered by an app, it was access to content and features/functionality unavailable on free alternatives that clinched the deal. Consumers were also willing to pay to remove advertising.
  • Privacy concerns: Another deal breaker was privacy. Consumers will not tolerate (or download) apps they feel invade their privacy or compromise their customer data. Apps that eat memory or battery power are also a no-go.
  • Easy does it: Predictably, most consumers (61%) love apps that are easy to use and navigate. Fresh content (34%) and personalized experiences (29%) are also crowd-pleasers.

Why People Uninstall
So now that we have a sense of the features consumers care about most, it is essential to understand why they uninstall more than 3 of every 10 apps globally. We get some of the answers we need in the November 2016 App Unistall Report, a new report from mobile attribution company AppsFlyer. The report provides critical context around app uninstall rates – data that is not provided by app stores.

Drawing from a sample of 20+ million uninstalls of nearly 500 apps globally the report highlights uninstall rates over a 30 day period (September -October 2016) across platform (Android and Apple’s iOS), category and country (U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, U.K., Germany, France, Russia, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia). It finds that Android users uninstall apps at a rate that’s more than double the rate among iOS users – an outcome it links to factors such as device space. Faced with the choice between downloading a cool new app, or conserving storage, it appears Android users are quick to click delete. It may also be linked to the fact that Apple devices warn users when they are about to delete an app; no such notification exists on Android.

The report also reveals what Shani Rosenfelder, report author and content marketing lead at AppsFlyer, calls the “insanely high” uninstall rates for app categories on the Android platform such as News (44%), Games (43%) and Travel (33%).

Some of what the report finds is just common sense. For example: Games, which are highly competitive and aggressively promoted using incentivized installs, can see a shorter shelf life and fail to inspire lasting loyalty among an audience demographic that changes taste more often that socks.

Likewise, Travel apps, because they appeal to most consumers during holiday seasons or summer breaks, are not integral to a year-round routine. Unless you travel a lot for your job, it’s hardly out of the question to delete a travel app once it outlives its immediate relevancy. At the other end of the spectrum, Retail apps—ones that consumers reach for often to do their shopping and access deals and discounts—see relatively low uninstall rates (21%).

But common sense can’t fully explain the alarmingly high uninstall rate of 40%  for News & Magazines over a 30-day period. Unfortunately, AppsFlyer doesn’t offer much insight into why this segment is hit so hard. However, we can piece together a convincing list of factors if we remember the reasons Google says people download apps and – more importantly – keep coming back.

High uninstall rates would indicate News & Magazine apps fail to meet our requirement – even demand – for an amazing user experience. Content companies serious about attracting and retaining their users are advised to examine their apps and use analytics to pinpoint where their app is engaging, or annoying, their audience.

Essential issues to consider: Are these apps too difficult to navigate? Is the content stale or irrelevant? Does the app fail to deliver personalized content and experiences? Is the paywall a barrier? Does the app owner collect data without making a convincing case for it? A data-driven approach will provide insights into what flies, or fails – allowing you to allocate resources to address major issues and put less important updates on the back burner.

And a final word about metrics. The AppsFlyer report introduces all app marketers – across all business verticals  – to a new performance metric: uninstall rates.  Marketers must watch and calculate to determine the true lifetime value of their users. Whether that value is measured in brand visibility or monetized through mobile advertising, prudent app marketing and financing takes app uninstall rates – and their differences and similarities globally – seriously.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Advertising | Perspectives

The Big 10: Media executives call out the industry’s biggest challenges

While it is appealing to start off a New Year with rosy predictions, it is also important to take a clear-eyed look at the road (and roadblocks) ahead. We asked a few of our members what they see as the biggest challenges the digital media industry faces today.

Here’s what leaders at ten diverse media companies see as the biggest challenge in the year to come:

———-

Scott Bailey, President, TEN Automotive Division
@TENenthusiast

Monetizing scaled social audiences and the content made for these channels is a challenge. We see the benefit of being a first mover and building a large social audience. That said, the benefit today lies heavily in the marketing value it provides in driving traffic to our sites and leveraging it to convert fans into paying customers through subscription offerings like Motor Trend OnDemand. We are able to monetize through advertising, but the nature of the monetization on social is more challenging to do at scale, as it requires a more custom approach compared to more traditional, turnkey placements/buys.

Jordan Bitterman, Chief Marketing Officer, The Weather Company, an IBM Business
@JordanBitterman @weathercompany

Our industry must build a parallel world adjacent to the current one dominated by Google and Facebook. This new world must be scaled, intelligent and open. Currently, 85 cents of every new dollar are going to the two biggest players because they have been solving for scaled and intelligent – and have done a great job doing so. But, an open garden is increasingly becoming a requirement for sophisticated advertisers who want partners who are flexible on data and transparent on pricing and performance.

Jim Brady CEO & Founder, Spirited Media
@jimbrady @spiritedmediaco

It’s hard to pick a “biggest” challenge, as there as so many. But, to me, refining user experience remains a crucial one. There are still way too many sites alienating readers for a quick buck by hammering them with pop-ups, unnecessary slideshows, pagination, interstitials and more. Yes, we need to make money. But gouging readers to the point where we drive them away is an abysmal long-term audience strategy. Treat your audience like you don’t care about them, and they will surely return the favor.”

Steven Smith, President of Digital Media, AccuWeather
@accuweather

In 2017, we continue to hurtle toward a ubiquitous global user audience, accessing data from every imaginable kind of device with a greater focus on personalization, localization, service and mobility. Content providers are going to have to step up to meet the needs of an audience that wants fast, relevant, and localized—and provided consistently regardless of device, from smartphones to connected refrigerators. That makes strong partnerships with vendors a necessity, from Cloud storage providers for scaling data to meet demand demands to robust content management solutions to help port news from format to format and device to device. And of course, the audience will continue to demand content that is more timely and relevant than ever.

Joy Jones, Vice President, Global Products, Associated Press
@AssociatedPress

The biggest challenge we face is building diverse streams of revenue that support innovative storytelling. In 2017, digital media companies must bridge the current divide between creating compelling stories that attract interest and attention, and the opportunities for monetization that are increasingly concentrated on just a few of the largest platforms. The industry is not going to be successful if there’s too much focus on trendy stories that spin up on a one-off basis or so-called native ad content that lacks authenticity. We need immersive and captivating high-quality content that engages diverse audiences and creates a wide fan base across emerging media platforms. That diversification of revenue will be critical to building and maintaining a sustainable engine for digital media innovation.

John Kosner, EVP, Digital & Print Media, ESPN
@JKosner @ESPN

Establishing timely and trusted cross-media measurement is an enormous challenge — but a critically important one. People consume media on an ever-growing number of platforms and devices and we must establish accurate ways to measure the total audience we reach and their engagement with content. That means having clear, trusted standards and metrics — which measure across TV, apps, web, OTT and more — and do so both in- and out-of-home. The connection people have with digitally-delivered content and advertising continues to grow enormously. But so does fake content and ad fraud. Trusted and transparently-measured environments will become ever-more valuable.

Beth Lawrence, EVP of Digital Ad Sales, Scripps Networks Interactive
@ScrippsNet

A big challenge in digital in 2017 will be the ability for clients and consumers to separate the wheat from the chaff. We all know digital is here to stay and continues to be a more important revenue driver every year. But the quality of digital content has been under the radar, and in the final analysis, marketers care what brands they associate with. Period. Content matters; quality content rules. It will be a year of cleaning up, properly measuring and delivering great results in digital.

Matt Minoff, SVP, Digital Platforms and Strategy, Meredith Corporation
@mattminoff @MeredithCorp

The biggest challenge will continue to be capturing consumer attention as existing platforms grow and new platforms emerge.

Vikki Neil, SVP/GM of Scripps Lifestyle Studios
@ScrippsNet

In digital, you must stay open to all ideas that come your way, but disciplined enough to say no to many. You must move quickly and not wait for perfection, but perfect what you do daily. There’s not time to develop a long-range plan like a traditional media business offers. From my seat, the biggest challenge is a combination of making the right bets, and moving as fast as humanly possible to understand the space before your competitors, so that you can build the best offering for consumers and advertisers. It’s impossible to be everywhere across all opportunities, so choose wisely, go quickly and iterate daily.

Alex Skatell, Founder and President, Independent Journal Review
@AlexSkatell @TheIJR

The biggest challenge for media is building community. The strategies that have propelled many digital media companies into large audiences are largely commoditized, so you need to figure out how to connect your content and communities together in a deeper and unique way.

Brendan Spain, VP, Advertising – Americas, Financial Times
@spanishbrendan @FT

The biggest challenge for digital media in 2017 will be for quality publishers to cut through the noise – of ad fraud, fake news, and non-human traffic – to command fair market pricing for their trusted brands and influential audiences. Evaluating and leveraging these trusted environments will continue to be both important and difficult as the market weighs chasing scale and audience against quality and transparency.

Domenic Venuto, General Manager, Consumer Division, The Weather Company, an IBM Business
@dvenuto @weathercompany

As we look at the 2017 media landscape, there is potential for a massive upheaval on multiple fronts with the forecasted political uncertainty. The industry is resilient and adaptable, and we must remain focused on building great products for fans. And perhaps anxiety is unwarranted.

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