A secret for friends: everything about promoting the VKontakte application. Mobile advertising in VKontakte Mobile application advertising on iOS and Android VKontakte

Mobile Apps Promotion Department Artox Media
So you have completed your project of creating mobile application and would like to run a successful advertising campaign for it using a popular social network, but don't know where to start? No problem, we will share with you personal experience. With this article, we begin a cycle of publications on testing the VKontakte platform for promoting mobile applications.

As many people know, most social networks such as Facebook, Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru have long had their own mobile advertising platforms. In early autumn, the social network has its own version of such a platform. The long-awaited test period for promoting mobile applications started in mid-September, and ARTOX media was lucky enough to be among the few who were given access to the beta version of the platform. This is the experience we want to share with you.

You will be the first to know about the results that can be obtained using this system, about all the technical aspects and conclusions about the advertising campaign(RK): all about efficiency, cost, all the most interesting figures and details, etc.

Today we will introduce you to the system itself: we will consider the stages of creating an advertisement, organizing statistics, and sharing our first impressions of working with VK.

But first things first.

In the initial test version, only ads for the Android app were available. Later, ads for iOS became available, but only on the mobile version of the site (not in the application). Now, if we want to create an ad targeting iOS users, we need to specify a link to the App Store (iOS installs are not considered yet, there is no division by device - iPhone / iPad - today).

Creating an advertisement

In our case, we select a mobile application:

Decor

VKontakte provides the following design option for an advertisement: it is proposed to fill in the title, description of the advertisement and add an image.

Title. The maximum number of characters is 25. The title is automatically pulled from Google Play, but it is possible to reduce it by deleting one word at a time:

Ad. We write the text of the ad ourselves, the maximum number of characters is 90.

Image. The image size is 600x336 pixels. Also, the application rating, the number of ratings and the "Install" button are automatically transferred to the ad:

Audience selection

Audience selection options remain the same as for advertisements with a link to a site or community, namely:

• Geography. It is possible to select the desired country and city. At the same time, we can exclude regions that are of no interest to us.
• Demographics and Interests. Here the form remains unchanged. We can choose gender, set age limits, mark the status of the user, his interests, etc.
• Education and work. Here, too, everything is standard. In most cases, this parameter can be left unconfigured at all.

Additional parameters, such as "Devices", "Operating systems" and "Internet browsers", are still left - inherited from advertisements with a link to a site or community, we do not touch them. In the full version, these fields will most likely be removed or improved taking into account the specifics of mobile applications.

Statistics

Unfortunately, VKontakte does not yet support track links, so it is currently impossible to see installs for all channels in one external tracking system. However, VKontakte technical support promised us that this option will be finalized in the near future.

Thus, to create an ad, you must provide a direct link to Google Play.

VKontakte can count installations on Android without external integrations. The VK application, after clicking on an ad, monitors whether the user has the application that he clicked on - in fact, this is the collection of information about installed packages on the user's device. This does not require specific rights, the implementation of the SDK for such a task is generally optional.

Installation data is displayed directly in the VK interface. They can be viewed in two ways:

The "Introductions" column temporarily remained from the statistics on advertising of VKontakte communities: application installations are displayed here ("Introductions" = application installations).

2. For the selected ad for the selected period:

Here, the developers have already managed to rename "Introductions" to "Settings" :).

Obviously, there is a flaw in the assessment of audience coverage. You need to be extremely careful here, because when creating an ad with a link to a mobile application, the same audience is shown as for regular targeting (for example, to a website). If we want to estimate the volume of the mobile audience specifically with the targetings that we ourselves have chosen, we should focus on data on Android devices (which, we recall, do not need to be selected for advertising a mobile application). Be that as it may, the problem is solved - let's hope that soon we will write about its elimination.

In general, the impressions from working with the system are favorable and positive. The interface is familiar to those who have already worked with targeted advertising on VKontakte, and besides, all the previous settings are available for the most accurate hit on target audience.

Well, we do not undertake empty predictions - we will tell about the first results of the advertising campaign in the next article.

If you find a typo - highlight it and press Ctrl + Enter! To contact us, you can use .

Mobile VKontakte

VKontakte is the largest social network in Russia and in the mobile space. Over the past year or two, network traffic with mobile devices has grown several times. Android has almost caught up with Windows 7, but iOS has just overtaken Windows XP.

In general, traffic per day from mobile is about 30%, most of the audience accesses VKontakte exclusively from mobile devices. About 30% more are people who mix devices:

If we take monthly attendance, then only 11% are using mobile, i.e. in a month, you can pull up a tenth of the 60 million VKontakte users who come from Russia.

In total, VKontakte has about 20 million Android users who access the social network daily, much fewer people use iOS - about 5 million people.

On average, in Moscow, a person spends 18 days a month on VKontakte. Everyone spends about 18 sessions a day - first people go online in the morning, then in the afternoon, then at lunch, for a smoke break, for coffee, answering messages to friends. If you compress everything, it turns out that on average a person spends half an hour a day on VKontakte - this is quite a lot.

Mobile devices are now mainly used by people aged 12 to 24, due to the fact that they are more mobile. At the same time, there is a fairly large core of people from 24 years old who can be attracted. Basically, it is interesting for advertisers and important for some commercial projects. There are also quite a lot of these users, if summed up - about 6 million per day.

What does VKontakte advertising look like?

A banner will appear in the feed in the Android app. In the future, it will be available both in the mobile version of the site and on iOS (for iPad and iPhone). A small block that contains information about how you can put this application, its rating, etc.

Within this new format, only mobile applications based on Android and iOS can be promoted. The payment is based on the CPC model, where you pay per click, on the auction model.

The hotter the option, the higher the CPC.

In this format, targeting is available, regular VKontakte targeting. You can target by gender, by age, by geography, by behavioral targeting. For example, you can choose travelers who travel abroad and the CIS more than twice a year. There is device targeting.

A small block consists of a header and short description, banner - picture. You can’t use those that violate the rights of VKontakte, for example, you can’t use the VKontakte interface, words from the series “Click right now!” and other annoying things.

The rating of the application is also shown, sucked from iTunes and Play. And, accordingly, the number of installations is shown. The user can click on the banner, go to the store and start the installation. Together with the picture, it is important to make a button. VKontakte found out a curious thing that if in Moscow everyone is “advanced” - they know “click anywhere and you’ll go somewhere,” then this topic does not work in the regions. People diligently press the button to go, and for them this button is extremely important.

If the application is already installed by the user, then ads are not shown to him.

Now installations on Android are considered by VKontakte on their own - several times a knock, the application polls the device for installed apps. Install tracking on iOS requires an in-app SDK.

results

The other day on VKontakte, we selectively looked at several offices in order to make some kind of cut - what came out of this story.

It turned out to be a pretty good picture. According to the advertising campaign of the free application of the payment service utilities, those people who are 25-34 years old took advantage of it:

The company selected for analysis worked with an amount of 80-85,000 rubles. Out of 41,000 clicks, almost 8,000 installs were received.

The average CTR of the 5 selected companies was 3%. The average installation price is approximately 18 rubles. Everything was mixed in the campaigns - from services that are popular to applications for a very limited audience through targeting. All applications for Android.

When will the ad network be launched

It will most likely be launched for Android devices and the mobile version of the site. In the future, iOS will launch and a link tracker will be added. Now, unfortunately, it is not available (so far there is no way to transfer a person through the page to calculate everything).

It is planned to increase the number of impressions more, because now banners exist only as part of the test.

A retargeting feature is planned for those users who already have the app installed.

Likely to appear and pay for impressions.

We also ask you to answer a series of questions about the past breakfast: https://docs.google.com/forms/ .

If you find a typo - highlight it and press Ctrl + Enter! To contact us, you can use .

Subject: Bulletin board.

Promotion region: Ukraine.

Platforms: iPhone (OS 7+), android phone(OS 4+).

Not so long ago, the mobile application was beautiful addition website. But already today, 86% of mobile device users in the US make purchases from applications (6 times more often than from mobile search). By the way, every day Americans download 4,000 paid (72,000 free) applications. The app market in the CIS countries is gradually heating up: according to GoGlobe, Russian Federation with $1.30, it ranks ninth among countries with the highest average revenue per install. Every month more clients appear in Netpeak with clear goals to promote their mobile apps in iOS and Android.

Specialists of the Paid Traffic Department achieve these goals using the focal point for us Google Ads and other tools.

Goals

1. New app downloads (iOS, Android).
2. Increasing conversions to postings from a unique user.
3. Increase in audience activity.

Work plan

Due to the fact that the client is interested in project success and ready to provide necessary materials(various banner formats, videos), we have the opportunity to experiment, analyze, optimize and identify the most converting formats. It is very important that the client was ready to work on the project together with specialists, which, as we know, is the key to a successful campaign. As a result, we developed the following campaign launch plan:

1. Launching ads for a mobile application on iOS and Android in Google Ads.
2. YouTube iOS and Android video ads in Google Ads.
3. Advertising mobile application on iOS and Android VKontakte.
4. Video ads for a mobile app on iOS and Android on Facebook.

Featured(demonstration of the product and its advantages) provides for the demonstration of the application in the promotional block of the application store. It can be horizontal or vertical ribbons of icons. For example, in the AppStore, featuring is possible in the banner carousel, best new apps, and best new games feeds.

At the moment, distribution channels continue to expand, we enrich advertising campaigns with new ad formats, for example, Video app install ads from Google and soon Search Ads in Google Play. To analyze the effectiveness of the channels, we used Google Analytics (for a mobile application), Ad-X, and internal statistics of advertising systems.

Ad-X system specializes in tracking mobile app installs. The creators of the system have found a solution on how to implement tracking in real time without collecting personal user data. In August 2015, the service stops its work. Therefore, now we are already using the functionality of another tracking system - Adjust .

Launching ads for a mobile application on iOS and Android in Google Ads

Campaigns were created for each of the platforms (iOS and Android) in display network with different types and formats of ads available in campaigns of the type "Ads in mobile applications" (examples here and below as illustrations):

After the necessary data for analysis was collected, inefficient types of targeting were excluded, the target audience was determined, as well as the most converting ad formats, which made it possible to manage bids more flexibly. More details about fine-tuning ads on mobile can be found. Next, we connected search campaigns like “Mobile app installs”.

To launch them, the most converting keywords which we divided into groups.

An example of displaying banners on mobile and tablets.

We launched Mobile App Install campaigns on the Display Network in all available formats (similar to the Mobile App Ads campaign). Connected extensions like "Mobile app installation" to all campaigns.

We were only interested in new users, so we used the Target CPA bidding strategy, connected the Google Ads conversion optimizer, and targeted new devices.

The most popular banner formats are: 300x250, 320x50. Google Ads covers not only the Google Display and Search Networks, but also the AdMob Network. At the moment it is the largest source of traffic.

YouTube iOS and Android Video Ads in Google Ads

We've launched YouTube video campaigns for iOS and Android in test mode. After advertising the app for a month, we decided to turn off video campaigns on iOS due to high CPI (almost 6 times higher than Google Ads search and display campaigns).

Mobile App Advertising on iOS and Android VKontakte

After the social network announced the possibility of launching mobile advertising, we immediately decided to test it, especially since there was the possibility of integration with the Ad-X system. After a month and a half of cooperation, VKonakte announced that advertising of the mobile application will be carried out through the myTarget system: it provides greater coverage for social networks and is highly flexible.

All campaigns were divided into three categories:

1. Tablet users.
2. New mobile users.
3. Smartphone users.

When the client made a video to advertise a mobile app, they launched video ads and started testing ads based on the custom audiences they created. It's too early to talk about effectiveness, since the video was launched just a week ago. Remarketing was also launched for users who visited the site or the mobile version of the site for 30 days, but do not use the application.

In addition to the main systems, we were actively looking for new opportunities for advertising. For example, we were interested in the Apple advertising platform.

This system has several ad formats available and a template-based banner generator built in, which can greatly speed up the launch of an advertising campaign. We started working with the system with standard banners, after which we decided to include Full-Page and MREC (Medium Rectangle) ads as well.

As an additional promotion channel, Yandex Store attracted our attention. YaStore has some pretty interesting features, namely the mobile app ad format – featuring on the main page. True, there is a significant disadvantage. The system does not yet integrate with any analytics systems, and downloads can only be tracked on the developers page.

conclusions

Practical notes:

1. When testing various kinds targeting achieves a lower cost per CPI.
2. New sources do not always give a large number of downloads, but usually the price is lower.
3. Despite the fact that Google recommends grouping all ad formats into one group, this gave us negative feedback.
4. For more flexible bid management, it is necessary to identify the most converting sites in the GDN. For analysis it is worth taking a large period of time.

AT YouTube video campaigns it is worth initially excluding cartoon placements and excluding similar keywords, a lot of traffic from this kind of sites, which means a large percentage of accidental downloads by children.

5. You should not limit targeting by language, because the user's store can be configured in any language.
6. It is worth carefully studying where your ad was shown, so you can see that on one site there was one click, but 30 installs. Google Ads cancels spam clicks and does not withdraw money for them - this is a plus, but the quality of such installs is very doubtful.

To evaluate the results, it is better to rely on several at once - internal statistics, Google Analytics and a third-party tracking system, since Facebook, for example, counts the conversion if the download occurred within 28 days after viewing the ad, but the tracking system can only count the actual installation.

7. The unwillingness or unwillingness of developers/clients to implement SDKs or conversion codes into an app can throw you back into the distant past, because one banner is no longer enough in such a dynamically developing area as mobile app advertising.

According to the agreement with the client, we cannot disclose the order of prices and the exact number of installations in this case. But it is worth noting that in March we received 28.64% of installs from paid traffic (of the total number of downloads) with an average CPI significantly less than a dollar.

KPI table in various systems:

In this case, we used a combination of standard and specialized contextual advertising tools for mobile applications. Classic sites like Google Ads, Facebook are still relevant. The fact is that in emerging markets (in Ukraine, for example), the audience of many narrowly focused sites is limited, so only a popular product campaign can be successful. Will it be effective contextual advertising on the specified sites for your application? If you want to know this for sure, leave a request on our website. We are happy to take on more projects.