4 methods and pain points of APP monetization!

If an app does not have a good commercial monetization model, it is just a rogue app. A good APP monetization method must be an efficient, sustainable and benign mechanism that drives the rapid growth and long-term development of the APP with commercial value. It can be said that for developers in the early stages of their business, finding the right monetization method is already half the battle.

So the question is, how do you find a business monetization model that suits you?

1. APP monetization methods

In the domestic application market, there are four mainstream APP monetization methods:

1. Provide value-added services within the app

This is the most traditional and ideal method in the industry, such as charging for props in game apps, charging for on-demand video apps, and charging for download apps by giving users more advanced privileges. However, this requires that the APP has strong user stickiness and the value-added services are quite irreplaceable. Otherwise, faced with paid options, many users will choose to switch to similar products, directly causing user loss.

2. Provide in-app purchases

This method can also be called "e-commerce monetization", and its application scope is no longer limited to e-commerce apps. After all, facing the booming e-commerce boom in China, especially driven by the trend of short videos + live broadcasts, various APPs have begun to test the waters. However, this "beautiful-looking" monetization method has a high threshold, requiring the APP that serves as the traffic entrance to have a sufficiently large user base, and the developer itself to have sufficient data mining and user portrait analysis capabilities to be able to make personalized product recommendations to users.

3. Application Distribution

Whoever controls the entrance controls the world. Currently, this monetization method is a patent of the top application market apps. As the preferred tool for users to quickly obtain the apps they need, its monetization potential is undoubtedly huge. However, it is not very friendly to other types of apps, especially growing apps.

4. Advertising monetization

If the previous three monetization methods are more suitable for specific types of apps, then advertising monetization is a method with a lower threshold and a wider range of applicability. After all, where there are users, there is traffic, where there is traffic, there are advertisements, and where there are advertisements, there are revenues. Moreover, advertising monetization does not require users to pay for using certain features of the app. Almost all free apps with traffic can access advertising.

2. Pain Points of Advertising Monetization

However, many developers are afraid of advertising monetization, which seems to be the most universal and feasible method. Because for them, the biggest concern is that embedded advertising will affect their own user experience, and where can they find high-quality advertisers? How can we technically implement the correct advertising placement method to achieve a dynamic balance among users, traffic, and revenue?

1. Advertising vs. User Experience

The first thing that needs to be made clear is that for those users who are interested in clicking on ads and ultimately make a purchase, ads do not cause a negative experience. Instead, they are a piece of valuable information that allows users to satisfy their consumption needs while using the APP, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

After breaking down this psychological barrier, the remaining question focuses on: How to balance users and profits, and achieve maximum profit while ensuring user experience?

1) Advertising style:

In recent years, the advertising styles in the industry have been constantly innovating, and the root cause of this is also due to concerns and explorations about user experience. Developers can reasonably configure the advertising style according to their own app type, try to keep the advertising style consistent with the overall style and content style of the application, and strive to highly integrate the implantation of advertising information with the APP usage environment. This will improve the click-through rate and conversion rate of ads while taking into account the user experience.

Here, taking incentive videos as an example, this is the advertising style with the highest CPM value and the most popular among developers in the past two years. It encourages users to watch ads to get rewards, such as watching ads in game apps to get props rewards, watching ads in tool apps to get temporary privileges, etc. This form can turn passivity into initiative and increase user stickiness and activity. In addition, developers can also use the user incentive system to develop more incentive video scenarios to achieve a win-win situation for user experience and advertising revenue.

2) Advertising management:

In terms of advertising management, we need to pay special attention to:

The first is the control of advertising quality.

In order to protect the user experience, developers can create "soft" restrictions to block some compliant but poorly produced content and advertising content that is completely inconsistent with their own user attributes.

The second is to set reasonable advertising display positions and display frequencies.

When it comes to the selection of ad placements, you can take small steps and run fast in the initial stage, and then increase your investment in a step-by-step manner. Developers can select 1-2 ad slots for preliminary observation and expand to other ad slots based on the results and user feedback. In terms of location, in the initial stage, you can choose locations with higher traffic and higher click volume to set up tracking points and collect more information data for the next step of judgment.

In addition, a reasonable display frequency is also an important part of maintaining user experience. Too high a frequency will not only harm the user experience, but also lower the CPM. The optimal number of impressions for different users and different ad types on different products is different. It is recommended that APP developers find the optimal number of impressions for their product through experiments.

2. Advertising access method

The more traditional way is for the media to expand advertisers by relying on the power of its own direct customers, but because the population is not accurately divided, there is no guarantee for the effectiveness of the advertising for performance advertisers. Of course, once you reach a certain scale and have a strong technical team, you can consider building your own programmatic advertising platform. However, because the advertising product system is large and complex, the investment in building it from scratch is high and the risks are relatively large. Developers at different stages of development can consider carefully based on their own circumstances.

Connecting to a third-party platform is currently a common method of advertising monetization. For developers, the time and technical costs are relatively low. Currently, the more mature domestic platforms such as Pangolin, Youlianghui and Kuaishou Alliance can basically meet the app advertising monetization needs of small and medium-sized developers. There are also professional mobile application commercialization and monetization platforms on the market, which connect to multiple advertising alliances. Not only is the connection efficient and convenient, but it can also optimize advertisements, greatly increasing developers' profits.

3. Final Thoughts

On the road to APP monetization, there is never a shortage of so-called "shortcuts" that can be accomplished in one go. However, how to realize profits while ensuring that users have a better experience and are not disturbed by commercial operations is absolutely inseparable from the determined pursuit and efforts of developers. Here, I wish every ideal APP developer can realize the glorious road of APP monetization as soon as possible.

Author: engfeifox

Source: engfeifox