Key Takeaways from Mobile One Paris

Mobile Ads, Complementing User Acquisition with App Retargeting and other advertiser FAQs that came up in our conversations.

MobileOne, formerly known as AppDays, gathered a crowd of +2,000 attendees from the European mobile community earlier this month in Paris 🇫🇷.

We’ve become quite picky about what conferences we attend over the years, and we can attest that MobileOne did not disappoint!

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What makes or breaks a conference? It mostly comes down to the attendees and/or the content of the sessions. In this case, both the networking opportunities and the overall knowledge shared on stage proved worthy of a visit 🔖.

I’ve put together a quick synopsis of the best topics covered in Paris.

The Role of Creatives

Ads can be a real pain point for advertisers, specially for big brands where approval processes for Creative Assets can be quite lengthy. Most advertisers acknowledge that every ad (regardless of its format and design) will see a CTR drop over time, but keeping ads updated remains a challenge.

Still, as Mozoo Mobile said, “creative is an asset, not a cost”.

📌 Highlights

• Ad Rotation: Creatives should be updated at least once a month to avoid banner fatigue, no exceptions. We all know that, but surprisingly most marketers struggle to get new creatives that consistently from their design teams (another reason to use automated creatives from your DSPs).
• Ad Variations: When testing creatives, it’s best to run 3–4 variations at a time, (more than that will make it difficult to gather significant data within a reasonable time frame, more than that may delay your analysis and subsequent optimization). Small changes can create new variations — and this isn’t hard to do.
• Element Impact: Assume nothing, test everything. That said, our experiments show images and colors tend to have a bigger impact on performance than copy and text styles…

Complementing User Acquisition Strategies with Retargeting

This seems obvious to some, but not all: retargeting active users is just as important (in fact more important) than retargeting lapsed ones.

📌 Highlights

• It’s as incremental (often more): Marketers who wait till users have become inactive to consider engaging them are missing out on the main benefits of retargeting campaigns. Retargeting active users to drive further engagement has proven just as incremental as retargeting lapsed users or more, for marketers across different verticals.
• CRM connection: more and more app marketers are running their retargeting efforts alongside their CRM colleagues, building a complete “engagement” strategy, and minimizing cannibalization.

Social vs Display: Competing or Complementary?

Most brands run a mix of display and social ads to maximize their reach and user engagement, which can be tricky (or at least complex) to optimize across the broader marketing-mix.

📌 Highlights

• A/B testing each channel: Not all channels were created equal. Just because a certain group / ad is performing better on Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will convert as well on display. Testing each channel individually seems to be a recurring tip from marketers.
• Creatives: The same creative assets can be used for both social and display, as long as formats are adapted accordingly, or else it can really impact performance (some seem to have learnt this the hard way).
• Cross-Channel Tracking: Another year has gone by, and marketers continue to ask the same question: how can we accurately and reliably track across channels?

It was very insightful to hear marketers talk about their products, advertising campaigns, and how they’ve learnt to optimize their media spend despite all the challenges our industry still faces.

Ultimately, it is all about catering to each single user, both in terms of product and marketing/advertising. As Nicolas Oisel — Mobile Marketing Product & Innovation Manager at avendrealouer wisely put it, “Become the most appreciated app in your field by taking user-centric decisions”.

That’s a key learning we hear from marketers not just in Europe, but across the globe. Just as your product should be user-centric, so should your ads be. And you can only ever get that with programmatic.

and what changes we’ll see in the mobile space between now and then!