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Mobile platforms have become the most popular way of accessing the internet. As businesses continue to move online, they must lean on these platforms for success. With this in mind, where should you look if you want to advertise your product online? We collected the most popular mobile advertising platforms, analyzed the common ad formats and provided a short guide on defining your target audience. This article, describing best mobile app monetization networks, might also be useful for you. But if you need particular expert engineering help – let’s just schedule a call.
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Before making your selection among mobile app advertisers and starting an advertising campaign, you should understand what the budget looks like, choose the best format of ads and decide on a target audience. Understanding your target audience is important and ensures your ads are ending up shown to the right eyes. If you set up an ad that addresses too wide of an audience, you can spend a lot of money and receive poor results.
How to find a relevant target audience for your mobile app advertising_
Finding your target audience is what really matters to start any marketing campaign or choose among various mobile advertising companies. You should understand the interests, gender, age, location, language, profession, the income of your potential customers and the main problem you can solve for them.
You shouldn’t simply imagine or make up a target audience. Of course, you can make a few assumptions, but it’s better to analyze the current audience and make your conclusions. Find out who launches your application the most and analyze their data. You can do this in the following ways:
- Google Analytics
Google collects a lot of data about its users. You can see all the necessary parameters like age, gender, location, and more. Google Analytics helps analyze user requests, history of visited websites and launched applications. This can provide invaluable data for any mobile advertising platform.
- Facebook Insights
This is also a powerful tool for analyzing your target group. People spend a ton of time on social media. Every platform accessed collects data and allows marketers to do their job more efficiently. If your product has a Facebook page, you can understand the target audience in almost one click. Facebook offers information about page fans and those who engage with your ads. Even more, many ad platforms integrate with Facebook, which is a great benefit.
- Twitter Analytics
Twitter also has detailed statistics about users. You can view who is most active on your page and use it to design the portrait of your target audience. Twitter analytics produces information about gender, demographics, lifestyle, and interests. It understands what your audience likes and to what in-app advertisements they are most likely to respond.
- Surveys
With surveys, you can collect information yourself and run them directly in your app. Alternatively, try emailing your users with questions you need to be answered. Create a form with necessary questions, but be sure to avoid overly personal inquiries. Also, it’s best to keep the form anonymous. In doing so, people are more likely to give honest answers.
- Analyze the competitor’s audience
If your product has a few competitors, take the time to analyze their target audience. It’s quite possible you have a common audience. You can analyze their social media pages, blogs, and other resources to see what potential customers are wanting. Even comments on App Store or Google Play left by users after launching the app, might be helpful.
To wrap it up, you should find out the location of your target audience, their core interests, devices they use (smartphone or tablet, for example), their choice of operating system (Android, iOS or others), gender and age, perhaps their professions, and any other information that might be useful. The better you know your audience, the more efficient and effective your in-app advertising campaign will be.
5 types of mobile app advertisements_
There are five common formats in mobile ads: banner ads, interstitial ads, native ads, offerwall ads, and video ads. Let’s grasp the differences between them.
- Banner ads can include images, text and animations. Usually, it’s placed in the app’s interface and is usually serving the content from several ad networks, which advertise other apps, services or goods. It is one of the most popular forms of in-app advertisements.
- Interstitial ad is a full-screen advertisement that covers the interface of the app. It is a trendy format for games, especially when users finish a level.
- Native ads can be created as a video or a banner. The main idea of a native ad is to look like an item in an app feed. Thus, it does not fit every app, only the apps which have feeds — like FB or Twitter, etc. It can be a video or a static feed item consisting of an (optional) image and a block of text. It is always the case that the ad item is clearly distinguished from the content item in the feed. It can be marked by color and/or a badge like “Sponsored” or “Ad” — so although it fits naturally into the feed, the user can clearly tell an ad item from the feed item.
- Offerwall advertisements offer users the option of trying the interface of another application. For example, it can be an ad in the current game, suggesting you try another game.
- Video ads include short (15-60 second long) videos. You can advertise different goods and services. This is the universal format for all advertising apps. You can show a piece of an interface, list the advantages or simply tell about your product.
Now, let’s look at the top 10 mobile advertisers. There are some social media giants and other well-established solutions. Among them, we hope you’ll find the most suitable mobile ad platform to meet your needs.
It’s not a secret, Google Ads is the most popular advertising platform. Every digital marketer is familiar with this platform and possibly has experience with the process of advertising configuration in Google Ads. This platform works with both mobile and desktop devices.
It has multiple formats like banners (text, images or both), videos and different in-app ads. You can choose to only target mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) or only desktops. Also, Google Ads allows you to set goals (calls from customers, visits, etc.) and budgets.
When talking about Google Ads, we can’t avoid Google AdMob. Google bought and developed this service. This is now a powerful mobile ad platform that helps monetize your applications. It allows you to use banner ads, native ads, video ads, and full-page interstitial ads.
Actually, it’s now called Facebook Ads. Before the merger, Instagram had its own mobile advertising platform, but you can now set up ads on Instagram and Facebook using one Facebook account. This platform supports the following formats: full-screen ads, native ads, banner ads and different formats of video ads.
Facebook and Instagram are the most launched apps, so you can expect a broad audience for advertising. Facebook Ads allow targeting advertisements for a wide or narrow audience. The better you know the target audience of your product, the more efficiently you can target the ads. In your account, you can view the efficiency of an advertising campaign, analyze information and change your targeting to have better results.
Bing is a little less popular than the previous two behemoths but still has a big audience at a smaller price, offering a great advantage to small companies or startups. Bing allows setting the language, location and other parameters for your advertisement. Also, this is a great platform if you want to target not only smartphones and tablets but also readers. Why is that? Bing is the default search engine for all Kindle devices.
This is a good solution for marketers and game developers. AppLovin can help attract new users and assist with setting up in-app advertising. You can use the following formats of ads: video, banners, interstitial and playable. This solution gives you access to an extensive database of users and algorithms, which helps choose the correct target audience. The service also has in-depth analytics, so you can see the results of the advertising campaign and adjust settings or targets when needed.
AdColony is a popular platform for mobile ads. It helps show in-app advertisements. For example, with this service, you can show ads in games after challenges or achievements. With AdColony, you can target your ads by the device (smartphone or tablet), platform (iOS or Android), type of connection (Wi-Fi or mobile internet), type of content (games, entertainment, training apps, etc.), geographic data and much more.
This is a powerful game development platform that helps developers monetize their apps. You can build games on this platform and set up ads on the spot. You can even create an advertisement on Unity if you previously built your application on another platform. Unity supports a variety of ads, including rewarded video and AR. It helps attract users and monetizes your application.
TubeMogul is a solution from Adobe. The main feature is a sensor that detects bots (fraudulent traffic). Using TubeMogul, you can be sure your advertisements are shown to real people without overpaying for bots. TubeMogul helps target ads according to different parameters while optimizing and analyzing your campaign.
This platform is popular for Android devices but is also used for iOS. It supports many formats like video ads, overlay ads, push notifications, in-app banners, abstract banners, rich media ads, etc. Airpush helps with optimization and targeting. You can use HyperTarget, which targets users based on their app downloading history and interests. Also, the platform offers reports that help you analyze the results of your ads.
This specific solution only works for iOS apps. The Apple Search Ads platform allows you to place your application listing at the top of search results. You can set goals, manage ads and check the campaign efficiency. You can also use the basic or advanced version of Apple Search Ads, being free or paid for accordingly. The advanced version allows users to choose a target audience and customized keywords. Appropriate optimization and metadata will help promote your application in the App Store.
One more mobile platform linked to social media. If you know for a fact your target audience uses Twitter and enjoys short laconic messages, this is a great solution. Twitter has a large and solvent audience, which makes it a cost-efficient choice. On this platform, you can run ads on the auction and set your own bid, or use automated bidding. Also, you only pay for specific users’ actions like launching the application.
Conclusion_
We unpacked 10 of the best advertising platforms you can utilize when placing your advertisements. Some of them rely on social media resources, while others operate using in-app ads or alternative ad formats. To choose the appropriate solution, you should first analyze your target audience (for example, they may not use Twitter or Instagram) and also your goals. This approach will help you choose the appropriate ads format and the most fitting platform for your needs.
Last, it is important to pay attention to the functions you need and, of course, your budget. It’s also ideal to first test a few mobile app advertising platforms, before choosing the one most appropriate for you. You can even use a new platform each month, analyze the results and choose which was most efficient for your case. This will help you promote your products, apps and services cost-efficiently and help secure long-term success for your business. What mobile ad platform have you found most lucrative? Let’s discuss it!
