Paid user acquisition: the good, the bad and the ugly

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Advertising across any medium is always fluid and ever a delicate mix. Nowhere is this truer than in the mobile app space. Paid user acquisition is necessary and can be highly effective, but the path to a good acquisition strategy can be fraught with challenges – and misinformation.

Here are four key points to keep in mind when looking at how to maximize valuable ad dollars.

1. Traffic blenders—think transparency  

Transparency might be the one most important factor when analyzing/designing your user acquisition budget.

Buying media from an ad network that doesn’t provide a breakdown of the publishers they use to supplement their own inventory is dangerous.

Incentivized installs where users get an incentive (think iTunes or currency credit) for an app install can quickly drive a high number of installs, but usually means gamers just want the incentive. So the volume of users gained might be high, but the quality is low. And while the publisher might well have also delivered credible users, the metrics are blended, so there’s no way to know true users from invalid ones.

With a transparent source, you can you can check out the app, view the ad units, and directly see who the users are that are using the app. And critically, you only pay for media that is driving high engagement levels and not for a blend of the good and the bad.

2. Bots—hazards of the non-human kind

Beware the bots. A bot is software that is designed to automate the kinds of tasks you would usually do on your own.

There are companies that are abusing the ecosystem by operating bots that actually install and use apps. These “un-real” users are sometimes systems sophisticated enough to actually use the apps, making it past the first session activity criteria to camouflage that fact that they’re not human.

To prevent this sort of activity, developers/advertisers can work to identify suspicious pre-install activity – such as the use of known problematic proxies or multiple clicks at the same time or from the same WI-FI IP, etc. – and look beyond initial activity metrics after the install.

For instance, analyze what percent of the users who installed use the app seven days later and look at the total number of sessions.

Again, knowing exactly where you’re running eliminates this issue.

3. Beware organic install hijackers

Just as there are companies abusing the ecosystem by operating bots, some publishers/affiliates misuse the common attribution system, which tracks the marketing channel to attribute payment on a cost per install basis.

They take advantage of the attribution method of the last click to attribute a lot of users to them, although the user in many cases didn’t even see an ad on their media.

4. Knowledge is everything