>> Also, I would think in-app purchase pricing would be relatively inexpensive. I guess I don't see who they're targeting... the target company would need substantially-priced in-app purchases to justify the cost of even traditional advertising.
Not sure what you mean. Why does in-app purchase pricing have to be inexpensive? Why does it matter if it does? Traditional advertising is substantially more expensive than mobile advertising.
The reason a company would be interested in this is because someone who has your app installed (say Uber, to take one of the apps that enables transactions on my phone as an example) is one of the highest value customers you can reach in terms of likelihood to make a purchase (they installed your app, so it's akin to someone entering your store).
Uber's a good use case that I had not considered. The pricing of their in-app purchases are outside of what I think about when thinking about in-app purchases (extra game levels, etc). Thanks for framing their target customer for me.
No problem, I think their biggest value add will come in mobile commerce, where they can push people towards a "buy now" page within an app that has already been installed.
Exactly - we figure that our biggest strengths as a team (given a combination of Machine Learning/Data Mining/Information Retrieval backgrounds and a strong Design/Mobile contingent) will be in indexing deep app content (which obviously is a much richer dataset in commerce apps than it is in, say, mobile games).
It seems like Facebook sees the same thing happening.
Of course, I am curious to see how this affects game developers - I've encountered a few who have rolled their own retargeting solutions on top of house ads. It seems like game developers are especially reluctant to pay for anything except to pump up their install count in order to reach the top of app store rankings (seems like using SEM to boost your SEO).
Facebook definitely sees it happening. Their account reps are constantly raving about mobile ads with Facebook, and in our limited tests, they haven't been over-promising. It probably wouldn't be a bad strategy to base a significant amount of predictions about the larger mobile market on decisions made by Facebook, since they have the best data on it.
As far as game developers, the SEM for SEO strategy is the TapJoy model and it sucks for people who play. One thing I think deep linking could start to do for developers is allow them to cannibalize each other (say Angry Birds started advertising in Candy Crush Saga to people who spent over $X/week and had Angry Birds installed, I know this probably isn't the best example, but it is descriptive at least). Does that push game devs away from allowing in app ads from other game companies?
Not sure what you mean. Why does in-app purchase pricing have to be inexpensive? Why does it matter if it does? Traditional advertising is substantially more expensive than mobile advertising.
The reason a company would be interested in this is because someone who has your app installed (say Uber, to take one of the apps that enables transactions on my phone as an example) is one of the highest value customers you can reach in terms of likelihood to make a purchase (they installed your app, so it's akin to someone entering your store).