Be smarter and measure more – app publishers urged

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We dropped in on adeven presentation @ Apps World

counting of Android v iOS sessions is insufficient - müller

GoMo News dropped in on the Apps World Europe at Earls’ Court London yesterday [October 23rd 2013]. At this busy and truly international fair, we bypassed the gaming and hackfest sessions to seek out those offering some new business insights. We caught a presentation by Christian Wellenbroch and Paul Müller of Adeven with the goal of making mobile marketing easier for publishers, a sentiment we could readily appreciate ourselves!

Their focus was on app publishing, which they emphasised was very different from web publishing.

The message was that, with sufficient care in ensuring you have truly comparable data and meaningful KPIs you can be confident of accurate decision-making.

They gave an example of how, using just the bare stats, you could be misled in believing you were comparing like-for-like when you actually weren’t.

[They used the term 'cohort analysis' for this strategy, a new one on us. ]

This was in tracking the frequency of app use by users: – the counting of Android versus iOS sessions is insufficient because they don’t amount to the same thing.

There are other good reasons for taking care in your approach. Data privacy is a publisher’s responsibility and is becoming more of a minefield.

As we see in Press coverage about Facebook on an almost-daily basis currently, with some publishers facing fines for violations in the USA.

You need to ensure you are compliant in every country you operate in. Adeven say their tools are audited for this purpose.

They also advocated a potentially contentious development approach: use an Open Source SDK. In a nutshell, the reason boils down to ‘so you know what’s going on’.

Many SDKs are black boxes over which you have no control over and hence no detailed knowledge of their workings, so Open Source usage counters this.

More details on Adeven’s app download tracking tool are available here.

  Geoff Dennis is a director with Insight Manufacturing and IT project manager, and has a background in software development and methodologies in office and telecommunications software.