The App Store has undergone the biggest revision in history. Is building an ASM service platform a new opportunity?

Since Apple launched ASM in October 2016, it has attracted widespread attention from domestic developers and operators . Since 2017, Apple has gradually opened up ASM services in four countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

At the same time, Apple will officially release iOS 11 in Q3, remove the best-selling list, and greatly weaken the free and paid lists. The previous method of brushing the list to increase traffic will no longer be applicable in the future. Apple's move is intended to move from being passive to being active and to carry out a complete reform of the current marketing ecosystem. In the future, traffic generation through ASM search will become the mainstream, while ASO will serve as a supplement.

It is generally believed in the industry that the iOS marketing ecosystem will undergo the biggest reshuffle in history by the end of this year, and the ranking manipulation business may completely die out and cease to exist. Search ads will become the “official and only” way to attract traffic to the App Store.

In this "reshuffle" process, mobile intelligent marketing platform Duomeng took the lead and officially launched the first domestic Apple official search advertising intelligent investment platform - ASMax during ChinaJoy.

"ASMax is an App Store integrated marketing platform with technology + service + data as its core, which can effectively improve customers' operational efficiency and advertising efficiency in the process of ASM delivery," said Deng Wei, vice president of technology at Duomeng. What exactly prompted Duomeng to build an ASM service platform? When Deng Wei was interviewed by Morketing, he discussed three aspects in detail.

Environment and opportunities

It is reported that the App Store currently has more than 2.5 million applications, and the number will continue to increase in the future. How to help developers promote their products in such a huge app store and how to help users discover and download new apps will become a difficult problem.

Given that up to 65% of app downloads in the App Store come from search, Apple, after the failure of its iAd mobile advertising business, saw the potential of paid search advertising and began to make a series of reforms to the App Store, the most notable of which was the addition of paid search advertising (ASM).

In the month when Apple bidding was opened, more than 973 APP products were launched. As of March 5, 2017, a total of 11,572 APP products have been put into bidding advertising , 5,023 APP products are currently being put into advertising, and the retention rate is 43.4%.

This year, domestic enterprises have developed rapidly overseas, and the demand for overseas investment has increased rapidly. Large demand and large investment do not necessarily mean achieving the desired results. Domestic developers usually encounter three pain points when launching overseas:

1. Obstacles to delivery. First of all, the ASM delivery backend is an all-English interface and does not support other languages, so it is a bit difficult for developers who have English reading difficulties. Finally, the payment method of the App Store is very limited, and only VISA payment, which is commonly used in the United States, can be used, which makes payment difficult for domestic developers.

2. The delivery operation is inefficient. Apple's ASM delivery backend is relatively rudimentary and lacks functions such as screening and batch operations, which brings many inconveniences to the delivery process.

3. There is an extreme lack of tuning methods. The word selection and bidding model in the background of Apple's ASM delivery is relatively simple, lacking core word selection/expansion strategies, pricing and price adjustment strategies, etc.

In order to diversify the media ecosystem, Apple opened the Open API for search ads in October last year, allowing third-party platforms to create and manage large numbers of advertisements in a programmatic way, obtain data reports in real time, and monitor advertising dynamics. Just like many years ago, Facebook launched the FMP (Facebook Marketing Partner) program to allow professional advertising platforms to develop value-added features for localized customers.

Duomeng seized this opportunity well, that is, when its own platform was ahead of the official platform in the bonus period of value-added tools , it started to develop the ASM delivery platform ASMax. After several versions of iterations, ASMax was finally officially launched in July.

Services and goals

"Since October last year, Duomeng has served more than 100 customers with cross-border ASM agency delivery services as its business entry point, and has accumulated a wealth of ASM delivery data and experience ," Deng Wei continued. "In addition, Duomeng's technical capabilities have been recognized by global media giants. The best evidence is that it has successively obtained the first Facebook Marketing Partner and Instagram Marketing Partner Ad Technology licenses in China in the past two years. Using the APIs opened by the giant media ecosystem to build value-added tools has become part of Duomeng's technical genes. The team is also very good at quickly establishing and continuously expanding its competitive advantages based on mature methodologies and leading technical services."

ASMax first solved the obstacles faced by advertisers in placing ads on Apple's ASM backend .

Secondly, in order to suit the operating habits of Chinese people, ASMax has added multi-dimensional cross-screening and batch operations, and the real-time statistics are more refined, optimizing the user operating experience.

Finally, ASMax's original intelligent word selection engine can help advertisers improve word selection efficiency ; the word expansion engine can help advertisers improve their ability to expand keywords ; and the intelligent bidding model can help advertisers perform refined pricing and price adjustments.

Overall, ASMax can help advertisers obtain maximum impressions and downloads with minimal bids and budgets, thereby reducing the average cost of advertising.

In addition, regarding the relationship between ASO and ASM, Duomeng believes that the two should complement each other. Continuous optimization of ASO can bring more exposure opportunities for keywords and improve the relevance between keywords and applications, thereby gaining an advantage in the next stage of ASM delivery. The results of ASM delivery can also provide effective strategic guidance for the next stage of ASO optimization methods . However, as of now, Apple has not, and is unlikely to, integrate the knowledge systems and data of ASO and ASM in its search advertising system.

The core of search advertising optimization capabilities lies in "keywords" and "bids". "ASMax deeply combines ASO and ASM delivery. It obtains the ranking of keyword results through the ASO data part, and then obtains the "relevance" of keywords and APPs based on the comprehensive advertising data performance. Through ASM monitoring data, the display number and proportion of all keyword bidding ads are captured, and finally the bidding strategy for the keyword is derived through complex system calculations. When enough data is accumulated, the bidding strategy for the global market can be finally fitted." Deng Wei said.

Its own bidding strategy combined with monitoring and insight into the global market bidding strategy provides Duomeng's optimizers with a sufficient decision-making basis to adjust keywords and bids in a timely manner and make better delivery choices.

When it comes to data collection, Duomeng has more ideas. Customers can use the Attribution API to make attribution decisions for search ads, connect advertising data and user data ( retention and payment), achieve a closed data loop, and extend the optimization endpoint from CPA to ROI.

Deng Wei continued: “Duomeng has also developed a statistics SDK that integrates the Attribution API and custom event statistics functions, providing an extremely convenient one-stop technical access solution for customers who do not have server-side R&D capabilities.”

Competition and space

Duomeng is not the only one who sees the market opportunity. It is particularly important to build strong industry barriers through technological capabilities. It is reported that ASMax's R&D team is composed of engineers with 5-6 years of R&D experience in the field of mobile advertising. The project leader is one of the core members. He led the architectural design of the early version of Baidu's "Phoenix Nest Advertising System" and participated in the entire R&D. In terms of system robustness, word selection strategy, word promotion strategy, dynamic bidding and other aspects, Duomeng is confident that ASMax will be ahead of all players in this market.

Secondly, it is very important to seize the market opportunity and attract users to participate after launching the product as early as possible. In this way, the user's data and usage habits will have a long-term accumulation effect on the supplementation and precipitation of the product. Even if there are other competing products in the future, the two-tier differentiation of delivery effects brought about by data accumulation will be very obvious.

"There is little discussion about ASM in China mainly because Apple has not opened up the Chinese market," said Deng Wei. "According to official reports, in the third quarter of 2016, China has become the market with the highest App Store revenue. It can be said that the Chinese market is the most important part of Apple's commercial layout. I guess Apple hopes to fully verify ASM in other markets before taking a bite of the big cake in China."