PODCAST: Bango CEO Tells Developers To Take Promotion Into Their Own Hands & Outside App Stores
In brief: An open and outspoken podcast interview with Ray Anderson, Bango CEO, provides how-to advice on app promotion and distribution and outlines how developers can (should) maximize revenues by measuring real results. Also: a frank discussion of app stores dynamics and why developers – not app stores – have the responsibility (and an interest) to market their apps.
The recent raft of recent stats and forecasts on smartphone sales and shipments confirm a buoyant outlook for devices and app downloads. Gartner, for example, reckons downloads could reach 4 billion this year alone, and rise to a whopping 21 billion by 2013. Meantime, smartphone device shipments are on schedule to surpass 390 million by 2013.
This is great news for developers who are lining up to capitalize on this mega-opportunity. But, before we break out the champagne, developers everywhere have to be clear about the current conditions of the marketplace, the best practices for app distribution and monetization, and the nuts and bolts of maximizing revenues and measuring real results.
This is where the new white paper from Bango – “ap(p)tly titled Make Money From Your Mobile Apps – comes in. In addition to some key web browsing numbers and trends, the white paper also outlines how developers can make the most out of their mobile apps by knowing who their audience is, what phones they have and how people interact with their apps.
I caught up with Ray Anderson, Bango CEO, to review the key takeaways, which include the surprising results of a road test of the Nokia Ovi and Android Market app stores.
Among the highlights:
KEEP AN EYE ON PROFIT: It’s business critical and it’s the responsibility of the developer. “The first thing you need to do is track responses to your campaigns to find out how much your responses are actually costing….Secondly, you should track your sales – it sounds logical, but you should track how much money you actually make from each sale, not just how many sales you get….So, if you track those two pieces, the cost of each marketing action and the amount of money you get as a result of them, then … you can figure out how much sales you’re making per marketing dollar and you can decide whether each particular campaign is worthwhile.”
ROAD TEST: The white paper documents the registration and payment procedures in the Nokia Ovi and Android market app stores. Both are long winded and complex (at least the first tie around). The refund policies and the fact people can download your apps without paying are also hard realities that developers should factor into their app sales and distribution strategies. The verdict: in both app stores the audience is restricted and the payment process is tedious. So, don’t rely solely on app sores to sell your apps. Another piece of advice: “If you’re finding that you’re not getting a very good yield on paying apps, then by all means get non-paying apps out. A lot of people still download non-paying apps and use them as an on-ramp to your methods of monetization later.”
Bango road test results: Nokia Ovi app store payment experience
CONVERSION: “The payment experience is the biggest impact on conversion rate and we have effectively a gold standard at Bango, we call the 91 percent level, which is the sort of yield you get when you have a good, straightforward payment experience that’s usually one click.” To date Bango is achieving it “on a lot of European operators and on Sprint in the U.S.” The more complex the payment experience, the more likely conversion will drop. “The payment experience is absolutely profound and getting a few more percent of yield can make the difference between a business model that’s profitable or loss-making, or it can make a difference between a business that can actually grow or is going to shrink.”
FREEMIUM: It’s early days, but the outlook for freemium is positive (particularly since it’s a model proven to be effective on the PC). “A lot of things are driving freemium. We know that the app stores are very driven to get out lots of apps. They’re more driven by volumes of apps and download numbers and the availability of apps than they are by making profit for the content providers at the moment, so that’s one reason why freemium is becoming very popular.”
SUPERMARKETS AREN’T SELLING: A provocative point the white paper makes: huge app stores are not really good for developers (or for consumers, for that matter). Why does Ray believe this? “First, the majority of these app stores, especially the device-based app stores, often run on the handsets and therefore they’re not well integrated with the way the Web works. So, it’s very difficult for social marketing systems and social links and so on to cross-link into pages of the store.” Another shortcoming: mobile device hypermarkets are not run to make the app vendors [developers] more successful or as successful as they could be. And they’re not really run to encourage consumer choice and let the consumers have what they want. They’re normally run with a sort of single-minded approach to making those devices more successful.”
WHAT’S NEXT AT BANGO?: Ray offers us a scoop. “One of the things we’ve discovered through deployment of our payment systems worldwide is that, while we’ve managed to connect dozens of mobile operators’ payment systems and we’ve managed to connect credit cards, there is a huge opportunity in markets where the operator isn’t offering payment to their consumers.” Against this backdrop, Bango has a project in the works that is aimed at “enabling another way of collecting payments to help content providers collect money and to help consumers pay money for the content they like, especially in areas , such as the emerging markets, where mobile operators aren’t yet collecting payments for consumers.
Listen to the podcast here.
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Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.
July 6th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
[...] VisionMobile explains this could be due to platform-specific issues such as payment and refund policy. Android Market supports paid apps in only 13 of the 46 countries where it is available to users. What’s more, Android allows users to return an app for refund after 24 hours, a policy that Bango CEO Ray Anderson says spells trouble for developers wanting to track customers and calculate sales. [Listen to this no-holds-barred podcast here.] [...]