Brands Can Now Use Facebook’s Dynamic Ads To Drive App Installs

What Happened
Facebook has updated its Dynamic Product Ads to allow brands to drive mobile app installs with more efficiency. Now brands with serving product ads on Facebook can instruct users that are browsing its product ads to install the branded mobile apps directly. This adds to the direct-response nature of the dynamic ad units, which delivers better results than ordinary mobile app install ads, according to Facebook, as they target users already interested in the product and brand.

What Brands Should Do
Just in time for the final push of this holiday shopping season, brands and retailers would be smart to leverage this new feature to spice up their dynamic ads and reach Facebook users more efficiently. Even if the installs don’t drive immediate returns, they can carry some long-term benefits, as having an app installed on a shopper’s smartphone keeps it top of mind.

For more information on how retailers can effectively reach connected consumers by taking a mobile-powered, omnichannel approach, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: VentureBeat

Snapchat Gears Up For More App-Install Ads

What Happened
After adding support for programmatic ads to its ad API, Snapchat has confirmed that it is testing support for app-install ads, which the company launched in June. The popular messaging app ran its first app-install ad in February, and adding this ad unit to its API will certainly encourage more brands to try it. Also, Snapchat is reportedly building a self-serve ad platform so brand marketers can set up their campaigns without going through a third-party ad partner or Snapchat’s sales team.

What Brands Should Do
Micro-investing app Acorns reports that it is seeing 40% higher install rates with Snapchat than it does with Facebook, attributing the increase to Snapchat’s swipe-to-download functionality. With the expanding ad API and some new measurement tools, Snapchat’s ad business seems to be catching up to its rapid growth and ready to compete for more ad dollars with leading sellers of app-install ads such as Facebook and Google. For brands, now is the time to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its young-skewing users.

 


Source: AdAge

Twitter Helps Advertisers Convert App Install Ads Into Native Ads

What Happened
Twitter has rolled out a useful tool for advertisers to convert their app-install ads into native Twitter ads. By simply checking a box labeled “native,” app install campaigns will appear as native ads across the apps using the Twitter Audience Platform.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter says its testing found that native app install ads received 56% higher click-to-install rates than ones that appeared as traditional banner ads and interstitials. For brands seeking to leverage social ads to drive downloads for their apps, this new feature offers a simple way to improve their campaign performance.

 


Source: Marketing Land

Snapchat To Add App Install Ads In Discover And Live Stories

What Happened
Snapchat’s ad sales team has indicated it is considering introducing app install ads to its platform. This new ad product will likely be placed on Snapchat’s content portal Discover channels and Live Stories as video ads that redirect users to the app stores for iOS and Android. App install ads have been a key piece of mobile advertising, fueling Facebook’s ballooning ad revenue with nearly 300% year-by-year growth in Q2 last year. So it’s no surprise that Snapchat is also looking into this important ad product in order to grow its ad revenue.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands, Snapchat offers a great platform to reach young Millennials and teens on mobile. This new ad product can be useful for brands to drive downloads for their branded app and help increase awareness among key demos. In doing so, brands should also be conscious of the content channels they will be featured in, and pick the ones that fit with their messages best. For example, a bank advertising its personal banking app should consider putting the ads in Wall Street Journal’s Discover channel to match with their audience.

 


Source: The Information

Header image courtesy of Snapchat on YouTube

Google Wants You To Try Out Apps Before Downloading

What Happened
App-install ads — mobile ads that prompt users to download an app – take up a significant portion of mobile ad spending, with U.S. mobile app-install ad revenue expected to top $4.6 billion this year. And now, Google wants to improve app-install ads by giving users a better idea of the advertised apps before they commit. Last week, Google introduced a new mobile ad unit called “Trial Run Ads,” offering users a 60-second immersive demo of apps before they download, and will only cost advertisers when users click the install button.

What Brands Need To Do
This new ad unit feels like an natural extension of Google App Streaming that the company started testing on Android devices last month, which allows mobile users to search and view app content without having to download the app. Trial Run Ads adds new interactivity to app-install ads, which should help make those ads more engaging and appealing to mobile users. For brands that are looking to boost their app usage, offering a demo through Trial Run Ads can help remove some of the frictions in getting users to download apps, while easily showcasing the features and capabilities of their branded apps.


 

Source: TechCrunch

Twitter Makes Push For App-Install Ads

Ad units designed for pushing mobile users to download apps has been one of the hottest ad products recently. According to BI Intelligence, US mobile app-install ad revenue was $3.6 billion in 2014, accounting for about 30% of mobile ad revenue last year, and it is estimated to top $4.6 billion in 2015. So it is understandable that the major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter are all locked in a tight race pushing for ad-install ads on their respective ad platforms. Among them, Facebook seems to be leading the game so far, with Yahoo being a close second.

And now, Twitter is making some extra efforts to make its app-install ad product more appealing to mobile advertisers. It will add videos to app promotion ads so mobile users can see how the app works in action. More importantly, Twitter will soon start charging only for the apps that are fully downloaded, instead of the current industry standard of clickthroughs. Together these two new options offer mobile advertisers a more visually impressive and fairly priced ad unit for driving app downloads, which could just be what Twitter needs to become a contender for the mobile ad dollars. It will also make the decision to advertise on Twitter easier as advertisers will only pay for success and will go in with the knowledge that Twitter is incentivized to make sure these ads perform.

Source: AdAge