Introducing Mobile Retargeting: The easiest way to re-engage high-value mobile users across smartphone and tablet apps

July 28, 2015

Congratulations! You got your app in the app store, but now how do you keep people coming back to use it?
Today we’re excited to offer Mobile Retargeting to all SharpSpring Ads customers.  SharpSpring Ads Mobile Retargeting is a suite of powerful features designed for app developers looking to re-engage high value mobile users with in-app ads across the world’s greatest smartphone and tablet apps.  We’re launching new audience types to let you segment and onboard mobile users you want to target.  We’re launching an iOS SDK that builds in-app audiences seamlessly.  We’re launching a new campaign type so you can connect to the world’s best app inventory.  We’re launching cross-device retargeting so you can use web audiences to serve mobile ads…
It’s a lot, but it’s important!  The average mobile app loses 80% of its users within a month of them installing.  With SharpSpring Ads Mobile Retargeting, app developers get a complete solution for this problem that lets them re-engage those lost users where they spend their time, in other apps!
Let’s walk through the new pieces going live today:

New Audience Types: App Action Audiences and Customer Audiences

Starting today, your Audience Manager has two powerful new audience types.
App Action Audiences:  These are audiences of mobile users who have performed a specific action within your app, like making an in-app purchase.  With App Action audiences you can identify high-value users to target and low-value users to exclude.  These audiences are created by adding our iOS SDK to your mobile app and using it to send data to your dashboard anytime users perform actions you care about in your app.  These audiences are built seamlessly and automatically in the background, in real-time as users engage with your app, unlike web audiences which require a customer to set them up by hand.  If you want to build evergreen campaigns targeting users based on their interactions with your app, you’ll want to use App Action Audiences.
Today the iOS SDK is the only way to create App Action Audiences but very soon customers will be able to build these audiences using event data from popular mobile install tracking solutions as well.  We’re also working on support for Android.

Customer Audiences: These are audiences created by uploading lists of Device IDs (Apple IDFAs or Android Advertising IDs).  Customer audiences are designed for one-off use cases where you have a big batch of users you want to serve a message to.  To create a Customer Audience, you upload a .csv file containing the device IDs you’re interested in.  We process these and make them available as a new audience in a minute or two.  Customer Audiences can be updated by making later data uploads into a list, but if you have a mobile audience that requires ongoing updating, try to stick to App Action Audiences.

iOS SDK

Today we’re excited to launch our iOS SDK for building mobile audiences and tracking in-app conversions.  The SDK is designed to be lightweight and easy to install in any iOS application.  App developers can use it to seamlessly send event data back to their SharpSpring Ads accounts for audience building but also for conversion tracking.
Once the SDK is installed and the events you want to track have been defined, App Action Audiences will be building automatically in your SharpSpring Ads account and will update in real-time as users engage with your app.  Also, any events that you track with the SharpSpring Ads iOS SDK can be used for conversion tracking.  For instance, you might want to build a mobile app retargeting campaign designed to bring a user back to complete an in-app purchase.  If the in-app purchase has been defined as an event with the iOS SDK, an app action audience will be built and users who complete that action will be added to it.  That event can also be used to create a Conversion Goal that can be attached to the campaign, complete with revenue tracking.
You learn more about our iOS SDK in our new Developer Center.

New Campaign Type: “Mobile App Retargeting”

Starting today, any customer can build campaigns targeting mobile app inventory.
Inventory: We’ve teamed up with the leading ad exchanges to put all the best mobile app ad impressions at your fingertips. As of today customers can serve ads on smartphones and tablets via MoPub, Nexage, and Smaato.  We have 3 more major exchange partners launching in a few weeks as well.
Targeting Available: These campaigns can be targeted using App Action Audiences, Customer Audiences, as well as Web Audiences (see below).  You can also target users by device OS (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Blackberry) and device Type (Tablet or Smartphone). Standard geotargeting and dayparting is available too, of course.
Ad formats supported: Mobile App Retargeting campaigns support two types of ads at launch: mobile banners and mobile interstitial ads.  Mobile banners come in all shapes and sizes but the most common size is 320px X 50px.  Mobile interstitials can be 480px X 320px or 320px X 480px depending on the layout of the app.

New Functionality: Cross-Device Retargeting


The final piece to make note of today is the wide release of cross-device retargeting.  While it’s great to build audiences of mobile users using our SDK and Customer audiences, today thousands of marketers have built massive audiences on our platform of users who visited their web sites.  Over the last year, we’ve developed a way to match web-based cookies to mobile device IDs so that these audiences can be used for mobile app advertising as well.
So when you go to make a mobile app retargeting campaign, you might notice that your web audiences are available for targeting.  Many marketers are finding that mobile app retargeting is becoming a crucial way to stay in front of their lost customers as consumers and business users alike spend more and more time engaged with mobile apps.  After 5 months of beta testing, we’ve seen marketers boost their engagement with lost customers and drive more conversions through this.  If you’ve got a large web audience, now you can serve mobile ads to them as well across both iOS and Android devices!

Getting Started

It’s easy to get started with mobile retargeting.  If you already have our tracking tag installed on your web site, try a cross-device campaign targeting visitors to your web site on mobile.  If you have an app already, export a list of lost user device IDs and upload that to create a Customer Audience you can target.  It should just take a few minutes!
If you want to install our SDK, check out the developer center for instructions.

Questions?

Bringing seamless, transparent, easy-to-try mobile retargeting to marketers has been a goal of ours for some time.  We’re really excited to push these features live and help app developers re-engage lost users just like we’ve been helping marketers on desktop for years now.  If you have any questions about these new features, please don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter or by writing us directly at ads@sharpspring.com.  We’d love to hear from you and help you get set up!

Scott Danielson

Scott Danielson

Scott is the Customer Success Manager at Perfect Audience. He holds a degree from Illinois State University and has over 13 years experience working in the customer service/tech support field.
Post categories: Articles
Post tagged with: In App Ads, Mobile, Mobile Retargeting

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