Pending Advertising: Upcoming App Store Innovations

In 2016, developers of applications for the iPhone and other Apple devices received important news, namely the introduction of contextual advertising in the App Store. Opinions were divided into diametrically opposed, from a sharp condemnation to violent joy in this regard.

One of the main tasks of Scorocode is to help Russian mobile developers. But the application life cycle does not end after creation. It still needs to be published, developed and maintained. To help at the most different stages of the existence of mobile applications and services, we will periodically publish various articles and notes. Stay tuned for blog updates.

The nature and role of contextual advertising

What is contextual advertising in general and in the mobile application market in particular?

Often, when you go to a website, you can see advertisements related to topics that you recently searched online for information about. Moreover, the ads may not correspond at all to the context of the page on which you looked. Often such advertising annoys the user, so it may no longer be relevant. But sometimes a reminder of a previous search is very handy, and you are surprised to find that advertising has hit the mark and that this information is now needed. You follow the link, and the owner of the site from which the transition occurred, and the advertising network will halve the profit from your visit. This is called thematic advertising.

The second type of contextual advertising is search. It is shown to the user at the moment when he presses the "Find" button by entering his request in any service. Such advertising always clearly matches the request and is placed either at the very top of the search results, or in the middle. As a rule, it is emphasized with color or other visual effects to highlight advertised pages among others.

It is the second type of contextual advertising that is planned to be implemented in the App Store. Now a team of one hundred people is developing this service, which indicates the seriousness of intentions. New advertising will work by analogy with other similar services. It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel: developers, having paid a certain amount, will be able to broadcast their applications over user search results. In this case, the product in the advertisement will meet the request according to certain criteria.

For example, we advertise a sports car racing simulator. The player drives “races”, “simulator”, “sports car” into the search bar. And, if the request falls into the prescribed keywords, then our game and several similar applications, the developers of which paid for the advertisement, will be displayed above other search results .

Upcoming App Store innovations

Contextual advertising is an excellent tool for "monetizing" the search process. The only surprise is that Apple thought about it only now, because the App Store is a pretty impressive article of their income. Contextual advertising is also important for the development of the company, as the more applications are downloaded and installed, the higher the chance that users will continue to buy Apple products in the future.

In addition to the introduction of advertising, it is planned to adapt and improve the entire search process as a whole. This is the same team of developers. The exact information about the changes awaiting us is not laid out, but the fact that work has begun in this direction indicates the seriousness of Apple's intentions to improve the usability of the App Store. Currently, it has more than one and a half million different applications. Requests to improve the process of finding the right applications (without knowing a specific name) have been received by the company for a long time, both from users and from developers. It is important for users to be able to quickly find among the impressive list exactly what they want to get, without installing and analyzing unnecessary applications. And developers need their products not to be lost among a large number of analogues. Seem to be,

The second factor that prompted the company to introduce contextual advertising was the lost profit. Various analytical firms claim that the number of downloads on Google Play (which, by the way, contextual advertising has been used for a long time) in 2015 doubled the same indicator in the App Store: 200 and 100 million downloads, respectively. Although the App Store is ahead of Google Play in terms of revenue, it will not hurt them to significantly increase sales.

The launch of Search Ads (as Apple called the application for contextual advertising) is planned in the fall of 2016 in the United States. Beta testing is currently running, so there is no specifics even on the official Apple forum. Even the official announcement of the product has very streamlined formulations :

“Search Ads is an effective and easy way to promote your applications in the search results of the American App Store, helping people find your application or rediscover it at any time when users are looking for an application similar to yours. Designed for Safe and Comfortable Search, Search Ads sets a new standard in search advertising by delivering relevant ads while maintaining user privacy. ”

The news of this innovation has become the most talked about among developers and users. Opinions were divided into diametrically opposed. From sharp condemnation to violent joy in this regard. Unfortunately, there is very little information about the future service, we were unable to find even beta tester reviews. Therefore, for now, one can only speculate about the possible implementation details.

In general, the initiative of Apple is met very ambiguously. Users and developers fear basically the same thing - thanks to advertising, poor-quality applications or copies will be able to occupy the first lines of the search, thereby taking time and money from users and direct revenue from developers. On the other hand, many rightly point out that the presence of contextual advertising on Google Play did not ruin the Android application market.

We can assume that Apple will take into account the concerns of the community and take concrete steps to moderate low-quality software products.

We closely monitor testing in the USA and will update the data as information becomes available, as well as add testers' comments. In the meantime, in anticipation of the emergence of a new service, developers are using other methods of promoting applications.

First of all, it is worth noting that getting applications in the top depends on the following factors:

• the total number of installations and their dynamics in 48-96 hours,
• user rating and number of comments,
• the number of starts and uninstalls of the application.

Based on these factors, the promotion is carried out. You should start by introducing users to the application; for this, landing pages, individual sites, pages on social networks and forum topics are created. Next, you need to bring complete information about the application on all of the above resources, as well as send press releases to specialized publications. Then, it should be possible to authorize using social networks, which will also increase the number of discussions, and therefore downloads among users of social networks. As soon as the audience has already got acquainted with your product, a certain amount of ratings, comments, downloads has accumulated - you can begin contextual advertising in search services. An important point of the advertising campaign is the availability of clear and complete descriptions of the application,

Unfortunately, along with the above promotion methods, which take a lot of time and resources, there are also extremely unethical, but very effective ones. For example, an e-mail newsletter (commonplace spam), the use of paid comments and installations, persistent requests to the user to evaluate the application and some others.

We would like to hear your opinion on the following issues:

• Which of these methods do you consider the most effective that you use yourself?
• How fair do you think apps get to the top today?
• And will the introduction of a new contextual advertising service improve the situation?