When it comes to the holiday season, there are two types of customers: those who plan their shopping far in advance and those who procrastinate until the last possible minute. However, when it comes to the holiday season, there should only be one type of marketer: the one who appeals to the planners and the procrastinators.

This blog will get you thinking about some things you should consider to achieve effective holiday marketing campaigns, including:

• Establishing campaign measurement
• Analyzing past trends
• Discovering high-value audiences
• Developing engagement strategies

Out-plan your planning customers and start thinking about your holiday marketing now so you can establish a strategy that will perform strong throughout the season.

A lot can be learned from analyzing prior campaigns – taking a look at previous holiday marketing initiatives to see what worked and what didn’t. Figure out which strategies made an impact and what areas you should invest more thought into. This can save you time and resources when preparing for future campaigns.

Another area to reflect on is customer information. Has your audience changed in the past year? Are you trying to appeal to a new audience this holiday season? Determining what has changed and what has stayed the same can provide clarity into your campaign messaging, timing, and platforms you run the campaign on.

It can also be helpful to look at current trends. Are customers shopping differently this year than they were last year? Have their spending habits changed? Do they have new interests or hobbies? In fact, it’s predicted that 21% of consumers are planning to shop more online in 2022 compared to 2021. With this in mind, how might your campaigns differ from last year? 

There is a lot that can influence a campaign’s success. Do research into your own campaigns as well as other factors that can play a role in your customers’ preferences.

During the holiday season, there’s a large spike in ad impressions, clicks, and conversions, which is great; however, the amount of ad space during the holidays doesn’t change. This imbalance causes fierce competition among marketers, resulting in higher advertising costs. Make sure your ad spend isn’t going to waste by optimizing your lookback windows and understanding your users journey to acquire high-value customers.

A lookback window, also known as an attribution window, defines how far back, from the time of engagement (e.g., downloads, app installs, purchases) to consider clicks and impressions for attribution. Configuring your lookback windows to their most optimal setting will help you increase campaign efficiency before your campaign reaches a diminishing return. They can also help you acquire high-value customers by only performing attribution on customers with the highest intent.

An MMP can help you optimize your lookback windows so that credit is given to conversions only driven by your campaign. With this data you can determine what audiences to target without wasting time and money on customers who won’t engage with your brand.

Once you have optimized your lookback windows, you will start to gather accurate data that you can trust. With this data you can explore quality user journeys. Figure out how your customers move through your app, website, or store, how they interact with the content, where they might drop off, and what, if anything, gets them back to make a purchase.

When you have a good understanding of your customers’ behaviors, you can decide what audiences you want to target and optimize your marketing for that specific audience. For example, if you have Gen Z (ages between 18 – 23) or Millennials (ages between 23 – 38) as your target audience you might want to consider putting more ad spend into social channels and influencer marketing. 

The higher the quality of your data, the higher the quality of your customers and the better you know what platforms, channels, and techniques drive customer acquisition and higher lifetime value (LTV). You can now define and target quality audiences that won’t waste your ad spend.

It’s helpful to see what other companies are doing with their holiday marketing campaigns and potentially incorporate their techniques into your strategy. Remember, though, that your product is unique and, as such, it requires a unique approach. What works for one company may not work for another. 

While many companies increase ad spend over the holiday season, it doesn’t mean your brand needs to. It might not make sense for your company to spend more on advertising at this time. In fact, the post-holiday season might be a more lucrative time to promote your product or service.

For example, a debt-management company spends little to nothing on advertising before the holiday season and instead, pushes all of their budget on advertising right after the holidays. Why is this? They have found that their audiences are more likely to use their app after the holiday season when they are trying to find ways to pay off their credit cards. Instead of wasting their budget on pricey holiday ad space, this loan company can push more money after the holiday season and appeal to those who are hoping to financially recover.

This is just one example of going against the holiday demand curve. If you’re in the fitness industry, maybe you wait until the beginning of the new year to promote gym memberships, workout equipment, or class deals. During the holidays, people can get very busy and might not have time to get fit. However, when the new year comes around, there’s a big motivation for people to work on their health.

Before you push a lot of money into your holiday marketing, determine if this time of year is the best time for you to promote your brand. Test what works for you and maybe that’s reserving your ad spend for a different season.

Kochava is your MMP for all things holiday marketing. By utilizing Kochava, you can cross all of the above steps off your list.

• Establish an omni-channel measurement strategy – measure every touch point your customers are interacting with. From owned and paid media to advanced devices and platforms, Kochava can gather insights into all of your advertising channels.
• Take a look back at previous holiday marketing campaigns – Kochava makes it possible to import historical attribution and user engagement data into the platform. You can also store your data long-term and pull it whenever you need so you don’t have to pay to re-acquire existing customers. 
• Acquire high-value customers – with Kochava audience activation, you can identify top performing customers to create lookalike modeling and group lapsed customers for reengagement to find new customers who will provide you with the most value.
• Practice modern engagement strategies – Kochava allows you to identify existing high-value customers and trigger targeted campaigns when they start to lag.
• Build a strategy that works for your brand –  Kochava makes it easy to alter, update, or change campaigns if needed. The flexibility of the platform allows for marketers to make quick decisions based on campaign performance and measure the data to reflect those changes.

These are just a few ways Kochava can help you in your marketing journey during the holidays and beyond.

Post-holiday marketing can be just as important as pre-holiday marketing. Keep your measurement and marketing strategies going all year long so you have rich data to analyze and optimize for next year. 

Get started with Kochava. Contact us or email support@kochava.com. Happy marketing!

Custom product pages (CPPs) recently released by Apple allow app developers to customize up to 35 variations of their app product pages. Prior to this release, only one product page could be created, leaving marketers stuck fitting a range of content into a single view. 

With 35 app page variations, marketers can curate content (text, images, video) for 35 distinct audiences which can increase app download rates and overall engagement.

For each CPP, the following product page metadata can be customized: 

• App Preview Videos
• Screenshots
• Promotional Text

Personalizing content, creative and messaging is important in reaching and connecting with distinct audience segments. In this blog, we will dive into best practices and key considerations when creating CPPs to increase your app install rate.

The app preview allows you to demonstrate the experience of your app in a short video. The product page(s) can contain up to three app preview videos each with a max length of 30 seconds. The video(s) will automatically play with muted audio as soon as the user lands on the page.

Screenshots of your app’s UI can be added to your product page(s) to show the features and the user experience of your app. Each page can contain up to ten screenshots. When no app preview is available, the first to third screenshots will be displayed.

The promotional text appears before the description and can contain up to 170 characters. This section can be changed any time without having to resubmit a new version of your app. The description section of your product page(s) highlights the functionality and features of your app in more detail. The description can only be updated when a new version of the app is submitted.

You should now have a better understanding of CPPs and how to use them. From here you can start establishing a marketing strategy for your CPPs. While you are allotted 35 page variations, there is no need to utilize all of them, at least not right away.

For example, an eCommerce app sells only socks. They range in color/pattern, size, activity, and other features. The app wants to create CPPs in the hopes that they can get more people to download and use their app. Where should they start?

If you do not already measure your app activity with the help of a mobile measurement partner (MMP), now would be a good time. The data that an MMP can collect and analyze will help you define target audiences, segment and syndicate new audiences, and measure all of the engagement from your app users.

An MMP like Kochava can do all of that and more as your needs grow. For more information on measuring CPP engagement with Kochava, read more here.

The sock app starts working with Kochava to measure and analyze their current app data. With the information gathered, they are able to go into the Kochava platform and view their app installs, what source(s) drove the installs, and other important KPIs.

Whether you have gathered audience data from your MMP or from another source, you can start identifying which audience(s) you would like to focus your CPP efforts on.

With so much accurate and insightful information, the sock app can conclude that most of their app installs are coming from uses over the age of 45. So they decided to create a CPP targeting users between the ages of 18-30. Once they have identified their target audience, they can work on creating a CPP.

After establishing a target audience, you can choose content within your app that would appeal to that specific audience. Which items would your target audience be most interested in? What wording resonates with that demographic?

With the data gathered from their MMP, the sock app notices that their few customers who are between the ages of 18-30 tend to buy more socks with patterns as opposed to solid colors and prefer mid length socks instead of knee high or short socks. They also rarely buy the same thing twice and like to save items before buying them.

At this point you have a good idea of what your target audience wants to see and what app features they find the most helpful. The next step is to gather content and/or create new content that will appear on this CPP. Take screenshots and record short videos of your app’s UI to show your audience different features and functionality that they will find the most captivating.

After all of the content is gathered, you can order it with the most important information appearing first in the image preview. You can choose to write copy that will overlay the images or videos if it will help explain the image(s).

The sock app took screenshots of their top selling patterned mid-length socks as well as recorded a screen video showing the ability to save socks for later. They only included one video that will appear in the first section of the CPP with the screenshots to follow.

Once everything is in place, it’s time to publish your custom product page. Remember, the description of your CPP can only be changed if you submit a new version of your app to the app store. However, the promotional text section can be updated at any time. 

Write a description that highlights the features shown in the screenshots and video as well as other app functionality. Because you can update the promotional text whenever you need, create a few variations that you can test to see which one results in the most engagement.

The sock app created a marketing campaign around their CPP target audience in which they included the link to their specific product page. They measured and analyzed the engagement with Kochava, and after a period of time, they were able to increase their app downloads from mid-age customers and improved their sale of patterned socks.

Custom product pages are a great way to capture multiple audiences and increase app installs. App preview videos, screenshots, and text copy are all customizable and should be altered for each CPP. Consider working with an MMP for helpful audience insights and what content to display to develop CPPs for optimal engagement.

Keep in mind that you can only take users to your CPPs if you direct them via a link. Any organic traffic will take users to your default product page. When focusing on organic traffic, product page optimization (PPO) is a way in which you can A/B test that default product page. We will discuss PPOs and how to use them in a future blog.

Learn more about how Kochava can help optimize your custom product pages by visiting kochava.com or contact us at support@kochava.com.

Why you need it and how to incorporate it into your marketing strategy

Historically, physical and digital marketing channels have lived separately, each excelling in their individual areas, but recently, brands have been converging these channels to form a more seamless experience for their customers. Phygital marketing combines the best aspects of physical and digital marketing into one, well-rounded experience. 

While digital technology keeps increasing its reach into the real world, consumers still value physical experiences. 

Listening to a band on the best headphones is great, but there is nothing like going to a concert and hearing them perform live.

In an effort to merge these two experiences, marketers are turning toward phygital solutions that will provide their customers with the familiarity of physical and the ease of digital.

Phygital marketing can incorporate digital strategies into physical environments, and it can also incorporate physical experiences into digital environments. Depending on your business type and objectives, phygital marketing can be utilized in many different ways.

No matter how you choose to incorporate phygital into your marketing strategy, establishing a measurement plan is essential to gain the most insights into your user’s journey as they interact with content through different channels and platforms.

Benefits of phygital marketing

There are many reasons why marketers are looking towards phygital marketing strategies. Improving the user/consumer experience is just one of them. Below are some other benefits you can attain with phygital campaigns:

• Measuring engagement: By working with a mobile measurement provider (MMP), you will be able to measure physical interactions to resulting in-app digital activity and analyze the impact of your marketing efforts. 

• Mitigate churn: Keep your customers coming back through phygital marketing techniques. By providing your customers with a unique experience that makes them feel valued, you will keep them coming back for more. 

• Enhances physical experiences with information: Provide more information about your product or service by overlaying your physical space with digital content. When customers walk into your store they can receive information about certain products via an app or webpage. Scannable quick response (QR) codes offer a great mechanism to digitally engage visitors in a physical context.

• More opportunities to sell products: If you are solely an eCommerce store, consider creating a pop-up experience to attract new customers who might not have interacted with your product in its original form.

• Provide a seamless experience: Phygital marketing helps businesses both recognize areas that need improvement and provide solutions to improve those areas so that the customer journey is seamless from start to finish.

• Produce personalized content: Overlapping marketing channels allows for a better understanding of your customers needs, habits, and patterns. This helps you predict future interactions and serve your customers with content or products that they actually want.

These are just a few of the many ways that phygital marketing can benefit your business. An MMP can help you identify how to best measure the impact of these experiences.

Examples of phygital marketing

Phygital marketing can be applied across different marketing channels in a variety of creative ways. Finding unique methods to market your products/services will capture your customers and encourage new audiences to engage with your brand. Here are a few examples:

Social Media
Social media provides a digital platform to buy products and services. Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms have incorporated eCommerce functionality into their apps which makes it easy for businesses to sell their products without the need of a physical storefront. Additionally, social media makes it easier to engage customers with special offers and discounts.

Pop-Up Stores
If you are looking to take your digital marketing into a physical space, consider creating pop-up stores that bring a physical experience to your customers. They can engage their senses by touching, smelling, hearing, or even tasting a product. Pop-ups allow your customers to actually try the product before buying it, adding a new dimension to their experience.

New Technology
New technology is being implemented into the digital space. Wearable devices that exchange information automatically or virtual reality experiences that take customers into a digital space is the epitome of phygital marketing: elevating the customer experience to provide a simpler and streamlined engagement with a brand.

Creating your phygital marketing strategy

Before you incorporate phygital techniques into your marketing strategy, consider taking the following steps:

1. 1. Work with an MMP – As mentioned above, an MMP will help you gather, measure, and analyze your data to provide you with a holistic view of your marketing efforts. Before you start running new marketing campaigns, it is important to utilize an MMP like Kochava so that you don’t miss out on valuable performance data and engagement insights.
   2. Understand your customers journey – It’s important to measure and analyze the customer journey as they move through your app, website, or physical space. What is the first thing they do and what do they do next? How many steps does it take before they make a purchase and what are those steps? Knowing what your customers do and where they do it will help you see gaps in their current experience. From there, you can find ways to improve those experiences through digital or physical marketing efforts.
   3. Figure out what your customers like/dislike – You can survey your customers to find out what they like and don’t like about the current experience. Is it lacking human interaction or is there too much going on within a physical space? Maybe your customers want more personalization in your store or less distraction online. Finding out what your customers want more and less allows you to solve those problems with phygital solutions.
   4. Utilize automation – For businesses who want to incorporate digital into their physical space consider taking advantage of automation and other digital technologies. For example, Amazon Go has created a physical space that allows customers to pay for their items without having to wait in line. As customers exit the store with their products, their Amazon app automatically charges them. This streamlines the user’s experience within the store while still providing them with all of the sensory experiences gained from a physical space.

Taking these steps will set you up for a successful campaign, but depending on your business, other steps might be needed. Above all, get organized and formulate an objective/goal to keep you on track.

Get started with Kochava

Kochava is a leading omni-channel measurement and attribution solution that provides marketers with valuable tools to optimize their marketing efforts. Here are a few ways in which Kochava can help you tackle phygital marketing.

• In-App Events – Kochava allows you to create and manage in-app events to understand the correlations between attribution source information and post-install behavior. Within the phygital space, you can map physical user activity to subsequent in-app interactions to see how your users move between channels.
• QR Codes – QR codes are a great way to connect content at physical locations to online, digital information. Kochava QR codes with SmartLinks will help you maximize customer engagement, getting your users to the content they are looking for faster. As soon as the user is in the app, you can tie any in-app activity back to the QR code that was scanned for an increased understanding of your app users.
• IdentityLink® – Connect the dots between all of your marketing channels to see a complete view of your customer’s journey with IdentityLink. Gain a holistic view of every device, platform and channel your users interact with to optimize your ad spend.

Physical spaces are merging even more with digital content to create an improved customer experience. Phygital marketing has many benefits. Knowing what areas within your current marketing strategy need improvement can be solved by introducing physical or digital solutions.

Kochava is here to help you identify the gaps in your marketing and provide you with advanced solutions to increase your customer base. Want to learn more? Visit kochava.com or contact us at support@kochava.com.

Track subscription events with Kochava to maintain a happy and healthy audience of subscribers.

In the past year, subscription mobile apps have rocketed in popularity, netting an impressive $120B in revenue last year, according to an App Annie report, with non-gaming app subscriptions growing in popularity year-over-year. While a subscription model is an ideal way of securing revenue and consumer adoption of subscriptions has been growing, measurement remains key to user retention, or else consumer acquisition costs will outweigh your profits.

Obtaining app subscribers is a major win in user acquisition as these are typically high-quality users committed to using your app on a regular basis, or at least considering it with a trial. With subscriptions, user retention is key for profitability, and marketers need to understand the user experience and the behaviors shown.

Measuring app subscriptions

Congratulations, you’ve won users to begin a trial, but don’t stop measuring there. From the moment a user signs up, you begin your courtship with them through reengagement. While there’s no “set and forget” formula to this, with proper preparation and measurement, you can understand your audience, increase or maintain retention, and keep them engaged with content they enjoy.

Keep in mind that not all users subscribe for the same reasons so don’t treat them the same way. User engagement metrics and audience segmentation are key to understanding your users as individuals and retaining them. To do this, you’ll need to have your key performance indicators and cross-app tracking capabilities in place when you launch your campaigns.