Interview with Guy Uziely from AppsFlyer
Get to know more about him!
Quick quiz Guy Uziely – AppsFlyer
Guy will join us on Friday 1st of June at the W Barcelona Hotel. Do not miss the chance to learn from him!
1. How and when did you arrive to the mobile industry? Why did you decide to stay and work on this sector?
After a few years in the business side of the e-learning industry, I decided to move into online marketing with a focus on mobile. As a marketer, mobile is a once in a generation opportunity, providing the perfect mix of creative potential, disruptive innovation, customer/user intimacy, unbelievable scale and measurability.
2. What project are you working on now?
I’m working on a very exciting project, scaling a customer appreciation initiative we piloted in the Spanish market. I am now working with colleagues across our offices around the world, helping to bring this innovative, relationship-centric platform to our clients globally.
3. What is the most important professional quality an app marketer can have?
Data-centered creativity. There is so much opportunity in this space. Creative opportunities can easily distract performance marketers, and the overwhelming volume of data available can lead marketers to lose sight of the end user. Finding that balance, whether as an individual or a team, is critical to long term success.
4. What KPIs do you control every day? Which ones are the most important?
We have a broad range of customers across different verticals. Each vertical and stage in the product life cycle has different objectives, but engagement KPIs are always crucial. If your retention rates are low for example, you can forget about scaling revenue.
5. What problem do you face in your everyday as an app marketer?
By speaking to many marketers everyday, there are 2 main problems I see repeating frequently across verticals. First, there is fierce competition every way you look which makes efficient media buying and user retention very challenging. Second, there is still a lot of fraud going on in the mobile marketing space.
6. What is the best option to monetize a mobile app?
There is no golden bullet or golden rule of app monetization. Because monetization is such a challenge, app developers should consider every suitable revenue stream beyond in-app purchases: Paid for apps (if content is truly unique), subscriptions (if content is exclusive and is regularly updated) and especially in-app advertising. Either way, measuring and optimizing LTV is absolutely key as we have found in several data studies that solid ROI is usually correlated with high revenue rather than low cost.
7. What advice would you give to a company or startup before launching a mobile app?
Define your true MVP (minimum viable product) and define what you need to know and learn in order to validate your idea. Get your basic marketing tech stack in place – your attribution, your in-app metrics, etc, so that you can understand your funnels and user journeys from day 1. Start with the right foundation, but don’t wait until your app is 100% “cooked” before releasing it as speed and user feedback is key.
8. What are the biggest challenges facing the mobile app industry?
The pursuit of quality. Quality inventory, quality users, quality content and of course quality data. As an industry, we need to not only advance our understanding of omnichannel and other next-level concepts, but to go back to the basics of user-centric thinking, automation, LTV, ROI and fraud and ensure they are being handled with the goal of providing top quality to our stakeholders and users. As we are scaling up and growing up as an industry, quality will separate the acceptable from the exceptional, and exceptional is with no doubt where you want to be.
9. What trends will mark 2018?
2018 is on one hand the year of GDPR , but also a year in which marketers keep focusing more and more on looking at the user in context and serving personalized content. This means that app developers should have at their disposal a framework of APIs which enables to efficiently protect users’ privacy and data rights as per the provisions of the GDPR. Together with mParticle, Amplitude and Braze we have actually developed an open-source framework that aisists app developer in doing just that (we call it OpenGDPR).
Another important trend to take into account is the increasing importance of paid media. Our data shows that year-over-year, non-organic activity is on the rise (+84% jump between 2015 and 2017), while the share of organic installs is dropping (-11% decline in the same time frame).
10. How do you keep up to date with all the news in the app marketing industry? What sources do you consult?
Personally, I rely quite a lot on my industry feeds in LinkedIn and Facebook. For the overall industry, I also recommend taking a look at Mobile Dev Memo and Techmeme – both provide a nice high level overview of the mobile space, and the tech industry, respectively.
11. What will you talk about in Applause 2018? Why the attendees shouldn’t miss your keynote or workshop?
The Spanish mobile market is interestingly positioned, driving innovation around the world while attracting global investment and having one of the world’s highest smartphone penetration rates. In our keynote, we will share exclusive insights into the state of Spain’s app economy and will be joined on stage by the Tuenti/Telefonica marketing team which will share their global mobile growth journey, taking the audience through their marketing tech stack and lessons learned.
12. To finish, what apps or games have surprised you in the last year?
I continue to be amazed at the number of great apps coming out of Barcelona. 2 recent examples are 21 Buttons and eCooltra.
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