Web-to-app attribution

For close to a decade, in-app ads have been the primary user acquisition mechanism for mobile advertisers to grow their apps. Now, however, web2app is becoming more and more popular for cost, targeting, data collection, and audience accessibility reasons.

Highlights:

• Web to app mobile advertising is a powerful strategy for engaging mobile users and driving app installations.
• By strategically leveraging mobile web traffic, advertisers can effectively target and convert users to their app.
• Deep links and a seamless user experience are crucial for successful web2app conversions.
• Being able to measure and track web2app is critical for optimization and ROAS calculation.
• In-app advertising still has a major place, with advantages such as higher engagement rates and a less cluttered ad environment compared to the mobile web.
• Mobile web ads can actually be more powerful upper-funnel experiences than in-app ads.

The world of mobile advertising is large and includes many options, each targeting different users.

One key area is in-app mobile ads, which are very successful, and work well for many mobile advertisers.

But mobile web advertising, where ads appear on sites that people visit using mobile browsers like Chrome or Safari, is growing fast. This type of advertising has a large and growing reach, and it lets advertisers connect with  different audiences than in-app advertising.

Each of these areas has its own benefits. A successful mobile advertising plan usually mixes both of these methods for the best results.

In in-app mobile ads, ad networks can pop open SKOverlay to show the App Store listing pages for the apps they are advertising to iOS users. On Android, there’s no direct equivalent.

For the mobile web, on the other hand, ad networks and advertisers have all the freedom in the world, both for the ad they show and for a landing page highlighting an advertised apps features. It turns out that this freedom is your greatest asset, because it is entirely under your control. Advertisers can adjust, optimize, test, and release new versions as much and as often as they wish.

That’s powerful, but power means nothing if you can’t collect data, measure it, and analyze it for improvement.

Fortunately, not only are landing pages entirely under your control, you can also use tools like Singular’s web attribution, deep linking, and cross-device attribution to seamlessly measure new user journeys across different platforms (web and app) and even devices.

And that unlocks the power of web2app.

It won’t be the case for every app and every vertical, but web2app can unlock new data and new audiences that significantly reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Especially on iOS after SKAdNetwork, web allows for more data collection. And that, plus the new audiences you can now target, has vastly reduced the cost per trial for some apps: by up to 60%.

Those new audiences are critical.

Web-based UA allows marketers to tap into an entirely different audience. Older users, who are often more likely to convert, are more reachable through web campaigns. (In fact, some marketers say they intentionally screen out younger people in user acquisition campaigns for subscription apps, knowing they’re much less likely to convert.)

App Stores collect fees for in-app payments and subscriptions. But when apps or games are multi-platform, they can charge customers or players on the web and not in-app.

In fact, for some older and very established games, as much as 80% of their revenue is off-platform, and therefore not subject to app store fees.

That means you can save a significant amount of money.

Stash, which makes web stores for apps, says that their typical customers get a 30% uplift on net revenue. You pay 5% for the credit card transactions, not 30% for the App Store fees. And you develop a more loyal multi-platform customer, player, or user, that you don’t only have access to via a mobile platform landowner.

Web2app can also provide better onboarding.

Because you have a full-screen landing page in which to onboard a new user, player, or customer, you can take the time to ask just a few key questions about them. Then, when they use a deep link to actually get and install your app, you can personalize their first app open experience based on that insight, making it much more likely that they will engage, retain, and become profitable.

Your landing page also offers a richer opportunity to sell your product value.

While putting a step between an ad and the App Store or Google Play sounds like a bad idea that will lower conversion rates, the opposite is actually true, says Gessica Bicega, who has held key growth positions at Paired, Blinkist, and Kayak.

“We were able to unlock a new growth channel by putting a piece of content between the ad and the app store,” she says.

Web2app works well for gaming, subscription apps, and many more kinds of apps and verticals.

If you’re interesting in learning more about how to measure and optimize it, connect with us for a quick conversation!