Waiting for advertising: about future innovations on the App Store

In 2016, application developers for the iPhone and other Apple devices received important news, namely, the introduction of contextual advertising in the App Store. Opinions were divided into diametrically opposed, from harsh condemnation to violent joy about it.

One of the main tasks of Scorocode is to help Russian mobile developers. But the application life cycle does not end after creation. It still needs to be published, developed and maintained. To help at the most different stages of the existence of mobile applications and services, we will periodically publish various articles and notes. Stay tuned for blog updates.

The essence and role of contextual advertising

What is contextual advertising in general and in the market of mobile applications in particular?
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Often, by accessing a website, you can see advertisements related to the topics you have recently searched for on the net. Moreover, the ads may not correspond to the context of the page on which you looked. Often, such an advertisement annoys the user, so it may no longer be relevant. But sometimes a reminder of a previous search is very helpful, and you are surprised to find that advertising has hit the mark and it is this information that is needed now. You follow the link, and the owner of the site from which the transition occurred, and the advertising network will divide in half the profit from your visit. This is called themed advertising.

The second type of contextual advertising is search. It is shown to the user at the moment when he presses the "Find" button by entering his query in a service. Such advertising always clearly corresponds to the request and is placed either at the very top of the search results, or in the middle. As a rule, it is highlighted with color or other visual effects in order to highlight the advertised pages among others.

It is the second type of contextual advertising that is planned to be implemented in the App Store. Now the development of this service is engaged in a team of one hundred people, which indicates the seriousness of intentions. New advertising will work by analogy with other similar services. It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel: developers, paying a certain amount, will be able to broadcast their applications over the search results of users. At the same time, the product in the advertisement will correspond to the request according to certain criteria.

For example, we advertise a sports car racing simulator. The player drives in the search bar "race", "simulator", "sport car", etc. And, if the request falls into the prescribed keywords, then our game and several similar applications, the developers of which paid for advertising, will appear above other search results .

Planned Innovations on the App Store

Contextual advertising is a great tool for monetizing the search process. The only surprise is that Apple thought about it only now, because the App Store is a rather impressive item of their income. Also, contextual advertising is important for the development of the company, since the more applications are downloaded and installed, the higher the chance that users will continue to buy Apple products in the future.

In addition to introducing advertising, it is planned to adapt and improve the entire search process as a whole. This is the same development team. Accurate information about the changes waiting for us is not laid out, but the fact that work has begun in this direction indicates the seriousness of Apple’s intentions in improving the App Store's usability. To date, it has more than one and a half million different applications. Requests to improve the process of finding the right applications (without knowing the specific name) came to the company for a long time, both from users and developers. It is important for users to be able to quickly find among the impressive list exactly what they want to get, without installing and analyzing unnecessary applications. And developers need their products not to be lost among a large number of analogues. It seems that Apple finally decided to listen to the requests and took up the issue.

The second factor that prompted the company to enter contextual advertising, was the lost profit. Various research firms say that the number of downloads on Google Play (which, by the way, contextual advertising has long been used) in 2015 doubled the same figure on the App Store: 200 and 100 million downloads, respectively. And although the amount of revenue App Store overtakes Google Play, a significant increase in sales will not hurt them.

The launch of Search Ads (as Apple called the contextual advertising application) is planned for the fall of 2016 in the United States. Currently, beta testing is being launched, so there isn’t any specifics even on the official Apple forum. Even the official product announcement has very streamlined wording :

“Search Ads is an effective and easy way to promote your applications in the search results of the American App Store, helping people find your application or re-attract attention to it at any time when users are looking for an application similar to yours. Created for safe and comfortable search Search Ads sets a new standard in search advertising, presenting relevant ads while preserving users' privacy.

The news about this innovation has become the most discussed among developers and users. Opinions are divided into diametrically opposed. From harsh condemnation to violent joy about this. Unfortunately, there is very little information about the future service, we could not even find reviews of beta testers. Therefore, so far we can only guess about the possible implementation details.

In general, Apple's initiative was met very ambiguously. Users and developers are basically afraid of the same thing - thanks to advertising, poor-quality applications or copies will be able to occupy the first lines of the search, thereby taking time and money from users and direct income from developers. On the other hand, many rightly point out that the presence of contextual advertising on Google Play did not destroy the market for Android applications.

We can assume that Apple will take into account the concerns of the community and take concrete steps to moderate low-quality software products.

We are closely monitoring testing in the United States and will update the data as information becomes available, as well as add testers comments. In the meantime, pending the emergence of a new service, developers use other methods to promote applications.

First of all, it is worth noting that getting applications to the top depends on the following factors:

• the total number of installations and their dynamics in 48-96 hours,
• user rating and number of comments,
• the number of launches and deletions of the application.

Based on these factors and carried out promotion. It’s worth starting with acquaintance of users with the application; landing pages, separate sites, pages in social networks and topics on forums are created for this. Next, you need to bring full information about the application on all the above resources, as well as send press releases to specialized publications. Then you should ensure the possibility of authorization using social networks, which will also increase the number of discussions, and therefore downloads among users of social networks. As soon as the audience has already met with your product, a certain number of ratings, comments, downloads have accumulated - you can start contextual advertising in search services. An important point of the advertising campaign is the availability of clear and complete descriptions of the application, as well as timely updating of information and notification of updates.

Unfortunately, along with the above-mentioned methods of promotion, which take a lot of time and resources, there are extremely unethical ones, but at the same time they are very effective. For example, e-mail newsletter (in common spam), the use of paid comments and installations, persistent requests to the user to evaluate the application and some others.

We would like to hear your opinion on the following issues:

• Which of these methods do you consider most effective that you use yourself?
• How fair, in your opinion, today applications get to the top?
• And will the introduction of a new contextual advertising service improve the situation?