Overlooking the city of Hamburg, we hosted 100 developers in Smaato’s headquarters last Thursday at the App Alliance’s first Hamburg App Strategy Workshop. Nine leading app experts sat down to share their insights for acquiring and monetising users, equipping attendees with top tips to overcome the challenge of making money from apps.
Evolving App Users Require Evolving Acquisition Strategies
Andrew Gilligan of Smaato, Moritz Daan of SoundCloud, Richard Downey of The Mobile House, & Michael Munn of Venticake
Andrew Gilligan, Director of Product Strategy at Smaato, kicked off the first panel — an exploration into the complicated world of acquiring users. With an emphasis on strategic timing, Richard Downey of The Mobile House highlighted the benefits of using specific events to gain large numbers of new users and rank higher in the app store at the most relevant times, while also steadily acquiring fewer, higher spending users year-round. In addition to targeting specific events, Moritz Dann of SoundCloud spoke about the importance of great keyword marketing from the moment an app is launched to ensure continuous ranking in the iOS app store. Listen to the podcast of this panel below.
Monetising with Advertising: An Exercise in Strategic Variety
Anders Lykke of Priori Data, Hannes Michelke of KissMyAds, Thomas Sommer of AppLift, Mohamed Ben Hiba of Smaato, & Sven Ossenbruggen of Xyrality
With these user acquisition strategies in mind, our second panel addressed the fundamental issue of monetisation. Anders Lykke of Priori Data maintained the theme of variety by asking the panel for monetisation strategies involving advertising. While Smaato’s Mohamed Ben Hiba outlined the value of real time bidding and its ability to get the best deal for both ad buyers and sellers, Applift’s Thomas Sommer discussed the rise in machine learning and the advances gained by having up-to-the-minute information on users. Anders Lykke and Hannes Michelke of KissMyAds warned against over-generalising consumer ad preferences, using the example of a male user playing Glu’s Kim Kardashian game receiving ads targeted predominantly at female users. The panelists agreed that having high quality analytics and user data is key to solving such problems. Listen to the podcast of this panel below.
See our favorite moments from the Hamburg App Strategy Workshop in our Facebook album!
Don’t miss the next installment to Europe’s App Strategy Workshop series, taking place in Paris on May the 21st. To see when we will be running an event near you, visit our upcoming events page here.
A big thank you to the Smaato team for hosting the workshop!
Pictured from left to right: Keir Hutton Ferris (Apps Alliance), Beverley Eve (Apps Alliance), Petra Vorsteher (Co-Founder & EVP, Strategic Alliances of Smaato), Claudia Trivilino (Apps Alliance), and Corentin Cremet (Apps Alliance).
Keir Hutton Ferris
Director of EU Membership
