Employee appreciation is more than saying thank you. It’s about showing that you understand and empathize with the struggles your team faces every day. Appreciation reinforces employees’ understanding of their roles and expectations, which drives engagement and performance. It connects the team’s efforts back to a grand vision and mission.

As the number of apps continues to grow, competition between apps to acquire and retain high quality users intensifies and growing revenue becomes an uphill battle. As a result, the way app developers market their apps to users evolves to keep up with this maturing market.

The gender gap in tech is gradually decreasing, and the mobile tech industry is doing its part to offer more leadership roles to women.

As the seasons change, so do app users’ behavior and purchasing power—sometimes dramatically. Knowing how to take advantage of seasonal trends and tailor your marketing campaigns to different festive and seasonal periods is key if you want to grow your app. 

The gender gap in tech is gradually decreasing, and the mobile tech industry is doing its part to offer more leadership roles to women.

Aarki Nights, our series of global networking events, landed in the vibrant city of Bangalore, India, last week. We gathered industry experts to discuss different perspectives on programmatic related issues that are unique to the growing Indian market. We talked about trends, solutions, and growth opportunities for programmatic app marketing campaigns with our current clients, prospects, and partners. 

In the not-so-distant past, most app marketing campaigns were focused on driving a large volume of app installs at the lowest possible cost. Nowadays, marketers are increasingly interested in optimizing app campaigns directly on the return on investment (ROI).

The measure of mobile app success is much more than simply a high number of downloads. Monetization will always be the ultimate goal, and the number one factor in reaching monetization goals is maximizing the user base. 

For years, the industry has accepted the second-price auction model as the gold standard for auctioning inventory. Under this model, the buyer with the highest bid wins the auction but only pays slightly higher than the second-highest price (thus the second-price name). This often encourages aggressive bidding, given the likelihood that they will pay a lower price. While buyers often benefited from this strategy, publishers were not able to maximize the value of their inventory and sell it for the price advertisers in the market actually valued their campaigns.

2019 is coming to a close and it is a great time to look back and review Aarki’s year. This year was full of amazing events, opportunities, and achievements. We faced challenges that were an impetus for thinking bigger, acting smarter, and finding better, more comprehensive solutions. Now we’re excited to look ahead to 2020 for another year full of more innovative and creative ideas, since challenges are mere opportunities for new achievements.

We are excited to announce the expansion of our operations with a new office in Bangalore, India. This is an important step in increasing Aarki’s position in the mobile programmatic market and our strong operational and mobile leadership worldwide.

“We are thrilled to extend our international growth in the Asia-Pacific region”, said Naoki Kobayashi, Sr. Director of Sales - Asia at Aarki. “With the recent establishment of our new offices in Beijing, Jakarta, Seoul, and Singapore, and now the addition of our India office, we continue to expand our reach to support the growing demands in the region.“

Asia-Pacific, and India specifically, is a huge source of innovation and growth for the mobile advertising landscape. India is expected to be the fastest-growing regional market in the world in terms of mobile programmatic, with 33% and growing of digital inventory already running through programmatic.

Aarki aims to deliver mobile marketing performance at scale and support the growing demand of the Indian market. As digital activity is increasing across devices, consumers are becoming more and more mobile-oriented. By penetrating into new territories and sharing our knowledge of programmatic-related issues that are unique to specific markets, we aim to help our clients achieve the best return on investment.

The success of an effective workplace depends on staff who are loyal, motivated, and committed, all of which lead to more productivity.

The gender gap in tech is gradually decreasing, and the mobile tech industry is doing its part to offer more leadership roles to women.

The land of the rising sun continues to fascinate people from around the world. Japan is a nation known as a frontrunner in technology, from pocket calculators to robots. The country has adapted as industries have shifted, and right now there’s a big move towards programmatic advertising. 

Employee appreciation, praise, and recognition are directly tied to workplace happiness. When employees and their work are valued, their engagement and productivity rise, boosting motivation.

Grace Oabina, Senior Manager of Analytics at Aarki, who leads the retargeting campaign management team, continues to share her tips and tricks for a successful retargeting campaign. 

We’re excited to host G-star On Air - one of the most awaited G-star parties of the year with our co-sponsors: Mistplay, Remerge, and Singular. 

India has grown into one of the world’s largest tech hubs. That growth will continue as tech develops into even more of an economic driver for the country. In concert with this transformation, companies are changing their advertising from traditional to programmatic. With a market of this size, this signals a revolution in marketing—and a massive opportunity.  

Programmatic advertising continues to shift away from simply impressions to a more advanced audience-targeted approach. Ultimately, advertisers running programmatic app marketing campaigns are interested in acquiring users with a high lifetime value (LTV). The definition of LTV varies from advertiser to advertiser, but in most cases, it is expressed as the revenue the user generates through in-app purchases or in-app advertising.

Running a retargeting campaign shouldn’t be a burden if you develop relevant creative ads. To enhance the user experience and ensure that our target audience sees only the ad creatives relevant to them, Aarki is constantly advancing personalization strategies. Check out the infographic below to get tips on designing the best creative ads for your target audiences.

The gender gap in tech is gradually decreasing, and the mobile tech industry is doing its part to offer more leadership roles to women.

The tech gender gap gradually decreases, and the mobile tech industry nowadays creates more opportunities for women to lead the innovation of the future.

Ad creative can make or break your app marketing campaign. An ad creative that’s catchy, relevant, and based on the user experience will grab the user's attention and boost engagement. Otherwise, it will most likely be ignored, along with all the other ads they see every day. 

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

We are extremely excited to announce that Nicol Cseko, VP of Product at Aarki, was named the winner of a Bronze Stevie® Award in the Woman of the Year category in The 16th Annual International Business Awards® today.

Aarki is pleased that MGS Canada, held on August 15, was a great success. MGS Canada gave us the opportunity to mix and mingle with the leaders of the mobile app industry.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry.

Technological innovations have made information easier than ever to access. News now spreads around the world in seconds via various channels. One of those channels is mobile apps. Research on app usage and habits found that 88% of smartphone users have at least one news and weather app on their mobile phone, and smartphone users spend 41% of their total digital time on news apps.
 
As the app market continues to grow, mobile marketers need to know how to stand out to mobile users. One approach is to catch their attention with a distinctive creative strategy. A mobile marketer who knows the behavior, perceptions, and demographics of their users will have the upper hand on the creative strategy of their campaign, allowing them to design an ad that is specific to their target audience.

Mobile Growth Summit Canada 2019 is just around the corner and Aarki is one of the event’s platinum partners! 

Mobile advertising has come a long way since simple banner ads on mobile screens. With the latest creative strategies that aim to enhance the user experience, mobile ads have become more relevant to the audience's expectations. 

There have been many recent advancements in targeting capabilities, opening marketers to a new set of creative possibilities. Gone are the days when knowing only the demographics of your target audiences was enough to show them relevant creative ads. Users have become more demanding and ad creatives need granular-level personalization to be successful.

The possibilities for creative concepts are endless. With so many techiques to focus on, including audience segmentation, real-world events, app updates, current news, and trends, ad fatigue is certainly avoidable. Strategic and imaginative ads are the key to winning audiences’ attention. One creative concept that can benefit your campaigns is meta ads.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

June was all about drinks, hors d'oeuvre, and networking! The month was full of Aarki-hosted networking events with the goal of fostering discussions on all things programmatic in an informal setting. Here’s a brief recap of Aarki’s three June events, 

Responsive ad creative has changed the rules of the mobile advertising game by allowing a full-screen ad experience on all devices. But as phone screens have significantly changed during the past two years with newer phone models often being taller than older generation phones, it could occasionally be challenging to have pixel perfect creatives for new devices. With our latest update to responsive tools in our proprietary creative platform, Aarki Studio, that is no longer a problem. 

App Promotion Summit NYC is back and Aarki is excited to join as the lead partner.

We are kicking off this year’s App Promotion Summit event at the Sanctuary Hotel NYC with the event’s Official Welcome Party. Join us on the 26th of June, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM and grab the chance to network and learn from app executives. As the sun sets, we'll all gather at the rooftop for cocktails and canapés.

Emotions form connections. In advertising, emotions can help humanize an ad’s message, which leads to more chances of resonating with viewers. Ads that appeal to emotions focus more on feelings of characters and strong imagery rather than providing a logical reason to believe the ad’s claim.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

Aspiring daters are open to making connections digitally, providing dating app advertisers with more reach. This is a continually-growing market that dating app advertisers can use to their advantage.

Despite your best efforts, sometimes users stop engaging with your app. This creates a dilemma: is it better to re-engage your lapsed users or to spend all your budget on acquiring new users? Read on to learn about the goals, similarities, differences, and creative strategies used for both User Acquisition and Retargeting strategies for a clear understanding of how to plan your next app marketing campaign.

As the mobile programmatic industry rapidly grows, so does the number of bidders, causing app marketers to pay more attention to auction dynamics. Bid optimization and bid landscape inferencing are increasingly becoming crucial parts of the bidder strategy.

We are excited to announce that Aarki was named the winner of a Bronze Stevie® Award in the Fastest Growing Tech Company of the Year category in The 17th Annual American Business Awards®.

Running your first retargeting campaign can seem daunting. On your journey to rekindling the interest of your app users, knowing the basic do’s and don’ts can go a long way. Here’s the rundown on effective retargeting:

The main goal of Aarki Programmatic Connect events is to create a casual atmosphere for interactive discussion on topics in machine learning and other technical fundamentals. While this is true for all Programmatic Connect events regardless of where they are held, no two events are the same. Programmatic Connect Seoul was like no other. It was a unique experience exchanging new insights with our guests and getting to know different perspectives on programmatic-related issues that are unique to the Korea market.

If you are in the mobile advertising industry, you have probably recently heard about audio ads. Compared with other ad formats sold through automation, programmatic audio has been slow to catch on but the trends are changing rapidly in mobile advertising. In this article, we will reveal the buzz around digital audio ads and the top three reasons to incorporate them into your 2019 strategy.

Aarki is sponsoring MAU 2019 and we’re excited to share the events we have prepared especially for you. Now is your chance to network with thought leaders and industry disruptors in a fun-filled evening - the Aarki way! 

The 2019 Internet Advertising Competition (IAC), hosted by Web Marketing Association honored Aarki with the “Best Advertising Rich Media Online Campaign” award for its User Onboarding for Huuuge Casino campaign.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

We’re delighted to end the first quarter of 2019 in Southeast Asia with Mobile Mixer Jakarta. We partnered with Adjust to bring together mobile executives and spark conversations about solutions and growth opportunities for their programmatic app marketing campaigns.

Bigger does not necessarily mean better. An ad format that takes up a big portion of the mobile screen may be easier to notice but may be viewed as simply intrusive. A banner ad, which is the cheapest mobile ad format with the lowest cost per mille (CPM), may yield better conversions and overall campaign performance when well-executed, despite its small size. Read on to learn how to creatively work your way around banner ads.

In any business, one of the most basic dilemmas is the trade-off between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. And so it is in mobile advertising. Mobile marketers are often torn between trying different ad creative approaches to explore the best ways to achieve their campaign goals, or sticking with accustomed tactics.

The rapid growth of the mobile app advertising market has led to a significant increase in mobile ad fraud and ad fraud sophistication. 

The mobile app ecosystem is growing towards acquiring high lifetime value (LTV) users. To keep up with the rapid pace of this change, app marketers need to find new and innovative solutions for solving new challenges.

An effective app marketing campaign always begins with a solid strategy. Whether your goal is to raise brand awareness, drive more installs, or retain high lifetime value users, it pays to step up your branding game.

Launching a new app is no easy feat. With over two million apps available in the app store, how can you ensure your app stands out? The process of acquiring new users that have high lifetime value potential must be approached strategically. Read on to learn how cross promotion can bit by bit make your new app a hit.

Last February 26, we gathered industry experts in the vibrant city of Tokyo for the first ever Programmatic Connect held in Asia. It was a casual afternoon filled with knowledge sharing about the applications of machine learning, real-time bidding, and creative optimization.

We are excited to announce that automated creative testing is now available in Aarki’s programmatic advertising platform, Aarki Encore.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

We continue our updates to Aarki Studio to simplify navigation and actions.

We ended the first month of the year in high spirits with Programmatic Connect San Francisco—the second in our Programmatic Connect series and the first in North America! The event happened last January 31^st at The Proper Hotel.

In 2019, retargeting is on the rise.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Measuring campaign performance is essential to track your distance from your marketing goals. As such, the ability to quickly analyze the impact of your campaign strategies on audience conversion should be given emphasis. Check out our infographic below to learn how running a PSA test campaign helps you achieve optimum campaign performance. 

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

We continue to make improvements to our proprietary platform Aarki Encore and are excited to announce that Encore now supports publisher app age rating targeting. This update enables us to check the App Store age rating and target apps that are age appropriate, such as 13+ rated apps for some games and apps that have age requirements.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

It’s the beginning of the year and a good time to reflect on what we've done in the past twelve months. With that in mind, here’s a look back at Aarki’s top achievements in 2018.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

By Igor Raush, Software Engineer

For the majority of its history, the programmatic advertising industry has accepted the second-price auction model as the gold standard for auctioning off inventory. Under this model, the bidder with the highest bid wins the auction but pays the second-highest price. This encourages each bidder to bid their break-even price, knowing that they are guaranteed to pay less.

We are excited to announce usability updates in our proprietary creative platform, Aarki Studio, which aim to simplify the process of creating engaging and catchy creative ads.

Aarki is delighted to receive the award for “Best Client Services Team” and a commendation for the “Best AdOps Team” categories at The Wires by Exchangewire. The awards ceremony happened on November 22, 2018, in London with leading advertising technology executives and professionals in attendance.

Display ads have the potential to increase brand awareness and return on investment (ROI) by serving users relevant ads, engaging with them, and making them realize the app’s value. For these things to happen, it is important to note that having a user-centered approach to the conceptualization of the ad is a must. Read on to find out what makes a display ad perform successfully and how you can ensure that your display ads help you hit your key performance indicators (KPIs) the best way possible.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Retargeting has been one of the most discussed topics in the mobile advertising industry in recent years. Although most advertisers have heard about this strategy, there are still a lot of misconceptions about how to better leverage programmatic for their retargeting needs.

Attributes 6,533 Percent Revenue Growth to advanced machine learning algorithms applied to mobile advertising.

The mobile programmatic industry has seen a lot of advancements in technology and targeting strategies in recent years. To keep up with the dynamically evolving market and to improve our product, we continuously make usability updates in Aarki DSP.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

With limited mobile storage space and millions of apps that users can choose from, the challenge of making your app stand out is ever present. It is one thing to get a user to download an app, and another to keep them engaged. So how can you face the challenge and keep your users engaged? The answer is having the right creative and retargeting strategy.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Data analytics and data management platforms have revolutionized the mobile advertising industry, allowing app marketers to deliver highly targeted messaging to their prospective users.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Mark your calendars for a full day of learning and networking on October 25 at the App Growth Summit SF. Aarki is delighted to be sponsoring this event, which gathering mobile app industry leaders to discuss the retrospective analysis of 2018’s learnings, and projections for where to optimize growth strategies for 2019.

Programmatic advertising continues to shift away from simply impressions to a more advanced audience-targeted approach. Adjust Audience Builder simplifies the process. We are excited to go deeper in our integration—automating Adjust audience delivery and audience updates to our buying platform. This allows advertisers to create customized user lists and push them directly to campaigns.

Calculating the top performing ad—the “champion”—is easier if the best ad elements are determined. In order to show the impact of a single element on the campaign’s performance, we analyzed a programmatic advertising campaign for a casual game app over a period of two months. The objective of the case study was to find out which variant for a specific ad element would outperform the others.

Every day, app users are exposed to many ads, which makes it harder for advertisers to develop relevant and memorable ads. Telling a story in the form of an ad has proven to be effective, but just as as advertisers should know what story to tell their audience, they must also know exactly when to tell it.

This is why sequential advertising is important in telling a relevant and engaging story.

With the rapid development of more advanced targeting capabilities for mobile programmatic media buying, marketers are now able to target users on an even more granular level. And thanks to the adoption of different strategies for audience segmentation, it’s now easier for marketers to reach more targeted users through their app marketing campaigns.  

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Aarki’s first Programmatic Connect event, in partnership with MoPub, gathered app marketers for an insightful afternoon discussing mobile programmatic. The event took place at The Ham Yard Hotel in London on the 20th of September.

We are excited to announce new navigation and design updates in our proprietary creative platform, Aarki Studio, which aim to simplify the campaign management process.  

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry. 

Mobile Growth Summit Canada is calling marketing professionals to discuss user acquisition, monetization, retention, and re-engagement! Aarki is pleased to be sponsoring the final MGS event this year. Join us and other experts on September 20 for a full day of conferencing, followed by networking, food and drinks.

Aarki is excited to welcome Naoki Kobayashi, Sr. Director of Sales – Japan, who will lead sales in Asia-Pacific region.

The best ads are ads which are visually appealing and are relevant to users. Running personalized ads that resonate with audiences’ interests is a big step towards your app marketing success.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry.

Acquiring app users is only half the job. To convert your app users into paying customers, app marketers need to show relevant content. One of the most effective methods to achieve this is through deep linking.

Aarki announces its cost integration with AppsFlyer to bring campaign transparency to the next level. Marketers should have complete visibility and control over their campaigns in real-time and in a single dashboard with all the necessary information for calculating return on investment (ROI).

Aarki was excited to contribute to the King team initiative to help make the lives of people with physical disabilities more fun.

The third Mobile Growth Summit is a few weeks away and Aarki is yet again sponsoring this Berlin event! Join us to connect with the mobile industry’s best brains and share your insights on mobile user acquisition, monetization, retention, and engagement.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry.

An important part of running a successful app marketing campaign is knowing when to refresh your ad creative. If you show the same ad in a high frequency, your message may get lost and, as a result, users will abandon the app sooner than expected. One of the most effective strategies marketers leverage for fighting ad fatigue is ad creative refresh.

Marketers are used to the fact that audience preferences are constantly changing. As users are swamped with more digital content, their expectations rapidly rise when selecting brands to engage with. The days of “one size fits all” or, in this case, “one ad fits all,” have ended. This challenges the mobile advertising industry to adapt methods, like multivariate testing, to target users with ads that align with their interests.

Many women are now building a strong industry presence and taking leadership roles as the gender gap in tech industry leadership roles decreases.

To acknowledge and recognize their contribution and get to know them better, we continue our blog series featuring women game changers in the mobile industry.

The second quarter of 2018 was full of the kinds of insightful conferences the Aarki team enjoys. By attending these conferences, we were able to learn from and to network with other companies and industry experts. Below are the highlights of two events Aarki attended during the last two months.

If you’ve been in the mobile industry for at least a couple of years, you’ll remember when the number of app users was considered the strongest pillar of success. But app marketing success goes beyond just a quantitative measurement. The real success in performance lies in measuring the long-term value of users over a lifetime and in the methods of keeping these users engaged.

Gone are the days when advertisers were relying only on the install volume in analyzing campaign performance. As the mobile programmatic marketing industry continues to mature and develop, engaging and retaining users with high lifetime value (LTV) has emerged as a more critical challenge.

Aarki is pleased to announce and welcome Kim Carlson as VP of Sales, Americas who will lead sales and strategic partnerships across Aarki’s growing global business.

We might associate mobile tech with male executives and engineers, but there are many women in tech and executive-level roles who are now leading the industry.

With the aim of creating a more transparent mobile ecosystem where marketers pay only for the ads that are verified and drive real value, Aarki is investing in fraud detection and protection initiatives such as joining Adjust’s Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF). Aarki’s VP of Product, Nicol Cseko, spoke to Adjust about ad fraud and our membership in CAAF.

Mobile Growth Summit New York is calling marketing professionals specializing in the areas of user acquisition, monetization, retention/engagement, re-engagement, data science, and analytics! Aarki is pleased to be sponsoring the event this year. Join us and other experts on June 7th for a full day conference of learning and networking.

Aarki is pleased to be sponsoring Casual Connect London on May 29-31 and we’d love meet you there! This conference will bring together over a hundred leaders in established and emerging markets of the game industry to explore how the combination of innovation and creativity enables creating outstanding games.

Have you heard of GDPR? If you haven’t, chances are you will soon.

The role of the ad creative in running mobile advertising campaigns cannot be overlooked. With the mission to keep creativity at the core of advertising, Aarki is sharing its knowledge and experiences to show how the right ad with the right creative can bring you high LTV users. Here are some of the processes that Aarki’s creative team undertakes for campaigns:

We might associate mobile tech with male executives and engineers, but there are many women in tech and executive-level roles who are now leading the industry.

We might associate mobile tech with male executives and engineers, but there are many women in tech and executive-level roles who are now leading the industry.

The Horizon Interactive Awards honored Aarki with the “Best in Category” award for Online Ads for its Gardenscapes Interactive Ad on April 2, 2018.  

User experience, one of the most important factors of a successful mobile advertising campaign, should never be underestimated by app marketers. We’re all tired of the static banner ads that pop up in the middle of the game and say nothing interesting and relevant. But mobile technology does not stand still and with the rapid development of app marketing strategies, new and more appealing ad formats are evolving. The choice between various formats depends on the target users and the campaign’s objective.

Programmatic offers multiple ways for mobile app advertisers to find the right media inventory for their ads, one of which is Private Marketplaces (PMP).

In today’s digital world, app marketers need to be savvy using every possible means to grab their target audiences attention and knowing each element in the creative ad that catches user’s interest leads the app marketing campaigns to success. In this article, we are going to determine the real value of the creative ad per audio type for retargeting campaigns. We analyzed the MRAID performance in Chartboost to know whether the creative ads with audio perform better than the creative ads without audio.

Mobile advertising continues to grow at a rapid pace, thus, industry leading companies are adopting more innovative technologies and new strategies for acquiring and retaining high LTV users.

See how Aarki redefines mobile programmatic app marketing.

Aarki is attending Game Developers Conference (GDC) and we’d love to see you there! GDC is the world’s largest professional game industry event which allows industry professionals such as programmers, game designers, industry decision-makers, to join
for five days of lectures, expos, panels, and round-table discussions to talk on game development and to shape the industry’s future.

We might associate mobile tech with male executives and engineers, but there are many women in tech and executive-level roles who are now leading the industry.

International Women’s Day has developed into a truly global celebration of gender equality and women’s empowerment. It’s a day when women are recognized for their achievements and contributions to society without regard to nationality, ethnicity, culture, economic status, or political views.

Along with the mobile industry’s rapid growth has come a proliferation of conferences that aim to help the sector learn, network, and thrive. Here are the highlights from two events Aarki attended in February - we loved and enjoyed both and both were worth every penny.

Acquiring high LTV users is a big challenge, and retaining and keeping them engaged is yet another. In fact, many apps are failing to maintain user interests and keep them interested for a long duration. Which has led to the increased use of retargeting strategies by many app marketers.

Aarki is pleased to announce its integration with Unity Technologies, creator of the world’s leading real-time development platform. Advertisers now have access to Unity’s massive in-app ads platform.

We have seen a major shift to programmatic buying with a focus on creative optimization over the last few years. Marketers are beginning to notice the impact of creative on ROI and on the overall success of an app marketing campaign. Keeping up with the dynamic changes in the industry, Aarki helps advertisers deliver superior app marketing performance through the unification of dynamic creative optimization and programmatic media buying via its proprietary creative platform, Aarki Studio.

By Sergey Yengoyan, Software Engineer 

As the number of mobile apps continues to grow at a rapid pace, any dimensionality reduction method that helps decrease the size of a prediction model can improve performance.

The rapid development of more advanced targeting capabilities for mobile programmatic media buying has enabled marketers to target users on an even more granular level and AppsFlyer’s Audiences is among these advancements. It has made running data-driven mobile app marketing campaigns easier.

We might associate mobile tech with male executives and engineers, but there are many women in tech and executive-level roles who are now leading the industry.

It’s the beginning of the year, a great time to look back at what happened in 2017 and look ahead to what 2018 may have in store for us.

The mobile programmatic industry was a fast growing sector in 2017 and we saw a lot of advancements in technology and strategies for acquiring and retaining high LTV users. Nevertheless, we faced challenges which were an impetus for thinking wider, acting smarter, and finding better, more comprehensive solutions.

Aarki is pleased to announce the expansion of its data center footprint with the addition of a new facility in Virginia, which is the company’s third data center in the US and its fifth globally.

Gone are the days when holiday season sales were associated only with ringing cash registers. Digital clicks are becoming new signs of holiday shopping.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we’ll feature a new team member every month.

Who’s in this month's spotlight?

Aarki announces its integration with Verizon: Mobile platform, which helps publishers monetize their content while enabling advertisers to reach audiences at scale.

Mobile advertising continues to be an evolving industry with the rise of different ad formats. While app marketers across the world focus their KPIs on acquiring high-quality users, as opposed to prioritizing scale, playable ads are starting to take momentum on both acquiring high-quality users and scaling campaign performance.

In the last few years, the rapid development of more advanced targeting capabilities for mobile programmatic media buying has paved the way to creating a new set of creative possibilities. Thanks to location data, mobile devices now allow marketers to target users on an even more granular level.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we’ll feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

By Kass Yboa, Associate Creative Director 

Retargeting has become a buzzword since app marketers realized that engaging and retaining users with high lifetime value (LTV) is more efficient than having new users install their apps. As mobile advertising develops, so do retargeting strategies.

Running a data-driven mobile app marketing campaign doesn’t have to be difficult. The integration of data management and programmatic advertising platforms makes it easy for marketers to transfer and leverage data for their campaigns through a single API in seconds.

Proper advertising is crucial for the success of any app marketing campaign. A wrong ad creative can drive potential high lifetime value (LTV) users away. Moreover, ad creatives also help app marketers grab users’ attention and drive them to take action, whether it’s installing an app, registering for an account, or making a purchase.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we will feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

Transparency is the key to a programmatic advertising campaign success. Aarki Encore, our proprietary mobile advertising platform, takes campaign transparency to the next level by letting advertisers track campaign performance, creative variants, and media placement in real-time, and make real-time decisions to help their campaign drive stronger ROI.

By Michael De Dios, Client Services Associate

The smartphone was once only science fiction. Today, it’s become a medium for content and information to develop. While the smartphone industry continues to grow, so do the amount of ads being launched online that it caught itself in a state of a perfect advertising chaos. We could argue that mobile advertising is dead, and it has become a wasteland of interstitials, banners, animations, and videos. However, there are still a lot of mobile ads that work and serve their purpose on a very rewarding level –– and they benefit from a good creative.

Aarki announces its integration with Chartboost, one of the largest mobile games-based growth and ad monetization platforms.

App marketers used to focus on getting users to install their apps. As the industry continues to mature, engaging and retaining users with high lifetime value (LTV) has emerged as a more critical challenge.

Aarki announces its integration with AdColony to offer full-screen HD quality video ads to app marketers. Advertisers can access AdColony’s premium Instant-Play™ video SDK-based supply at scale via programmatic buying. AdColony’s Instant-Play™ technology delivers a better user experience by virtually eliminating video ad load time. Aarki has seen good ROI performance from this premium video supply.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we will feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

We are excited to announce this new feature, added to Aarki Encore, our proprietary mobile advertising platform that aims to simplify the process of creating engaging and catchy creatives.

Aarki Encore includes a visual timeline interface for managing animations. The new scrubbing feature allows advertisers to review the timeline at any point and see all animation elements, without needing to preview the animation. Scrubbing removes that extra step and makes it much easier to review and fine-tune animation without leaving the editor interface.

The mobile app ecosystem has always been dynamic. The app marketers’ key performance indicators (KPIs) for ad campaigns used to be measured by ad clicks and install volumes. As the industry continues to develop, LTV user acquisitions are now the measurement of campaign performance.

Programmatic has grown to become a popular media-buying channel for advertisers across the globe. The diversified interests and behaviors of mobile users make it more difficult for app advertisers who are using traditional advertising ways to select, negotiate, and buy media that better optimizes ad performance.

Aarki announces its integration with Smaato, a leading global real-time advertising platform for mobile publishers and app developers.

“We are very pleased with the great service Smaato provides to their DSP partners and are looking forward to scaling our partnership,” said Nicol Cseko, Director of Product at Aarki.

Gone are the days when advertisers were relying on the install volume and post-install events in analyzing campaign performance. Though app install remains as one of the most common key performance indicators (KPI), nowadays in an app marketing campaign, app marketers are increasingly becoming interested in optimizing campaigns directly on the return on investment (ROI).

By Igor Raush, Software Engineer 

Advertisers are increasingly interested in optimizing their campaigns directly on the return on investment (ROI) or the return on ad spend (ROAS). In a real-time bidding setting, it becomes crucial to predict the expected revenue from a particular ad impression, which, in combination with the KPI, will determine the amount we are willing to bid.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we will feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

An effective mobile app marketing strategy to acquire high lifetime value (LTV) users is cross-promotion. This allows app marketers to take advantage of their already existing or lapsed high LTV user base by promoting a new app to them. For example, an app developer has an existing app and has just launched a new app. Considering that both apps fall into the same category, the advertiser can promote the new app to the high LTV users of the old app. The theory behind this is if the users are driving the return on investment (ROI) of the old app, they are highly likely to do the same for the new app since the two are in the same category.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we will feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

Mobile advertising and attribution are based on click-through conversions rather than impression (view-through) conversions. The direct correlation between the click and the app install is a stronger attribution than the indirect correlation between the impression (ad view) and the install. Despite the fact that the real value of impressions is difficult to quantify, the value gained from the impression measurement should not be overlooked.

Mobile video - powered by programmatic - is expected to rock the digital world in the coming years. Recently reported video growth numbers show that the consumption of video content on mobile will not slow down anytime soon.

Aarki is excited to announce the cost integration with Kochava which aims to simplify the complexity of mobile ad campaign analytics and optimization. With this integration, Kochava brings all the data into a single dashboard and gives the advertisers the capability to correctly compute ROI, as the missing part of the puzzle, i.e., cost data is now available with other measurement metrics such as revenue data, impressions, clicks, installs and events.

The trade-off between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties is one of the most basic dilemmas just as in any business so in mobile advertising.

Aarki announces the expansion of its data center in Amsterdam, further widening its access to local programmatic media in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Not long ago vertical videos were attributed to people that didn’t know how to hold their phones correctly when pushing the record button. Lots of funny tutorials were done to “teach” people to use their phone while filming. But today, vertical video turns out to be a content format that’s more captivating than all the others. As the old saying goes: "Who laughs last, laughs the best".

By Igor Raush, Software Engineer

The focus of app marketing is shifting from driving installs and minimizing cost per install to acquiring users who will become paying customers, effectively maximizing the ROI. Unfortunately, high-LTV users who can be attributed to an ad campaign are extremely rare in comparison to the number of impressions served, and it is difficult to accurately capture the profile of a quality user.

We continue the blog series by our creative director, Noel Perlas that we believe will give you a clear understanding on how Aarki understands the importance of creatives in mobile app marketing. In the previous part of this blog series we drilled deep into the process of building and optimising the creatives. The last, third part of the blog series, will zoom out the best techniques that work across all strategies.

With the recent expansion of our data center in APAC, Aarki is becoming a dominant force in app marketing. This data center gives Aarki customers greater access to local programmatic media in Asia. Based on positive campaign results, our engineering is scaling this end point to meet the growing demand from customers.

A very effective approach to solve the ad fatigue problem is frequency management. Knowing when and with what frequency to show the ad proves to be an important factor in running a successful app marketing campaign. With frequency capping, you can limit the maximum number of impressions a user can see within a given period of time.

CTR is loosely correlated with the quality of users. As a result, training models to optimize for clicks can lead to achieving high CTR but poor ROI. Transfer learning is one approach to optimize for quality users.

We continue the blog series by our creative director Noel Perlas that we believe will give you a clear understanding on how Aarki understands the importance of creatives in mobile app marketing. In Part 1 of the blog series we discussed broadly how our process works in optimization of creatives. In Part 2, we will dive into the details of how our creative team tests and optimizes creatives.

Source: AppsFlyer

If you haven’t heard about the latest acronym drawing increased attention in the mobile advertising space, now would be a good time to surface it. I’m talking about DCO, or Dynamic Creative Optimization, and its role in the mobile programmatic marketplace. DCO has been around for quite a while on desktop, but mush less so on mobile. With improved HTML5 rich media and multivariate testing capabilities, this reality is changing.

Puzzle games have proved that very simple repetitive mechanics can be hugely profitable. A search for “puzzle” games in the App Store reveals over 2,000 results with the likes of Candy Crush Saga and Candy Crush Soda Saga at the top. Due to the immense popularity enjoyed by this genre, puzzle games have gone mainstream.

By Igor Raush, Software Engineer

An advertisement's click-through rate (CTR) is often used as an early indicator of its effectiveness; however, the ultimate goal of any campaign is to reach and acquire prospective customers. Unfortunately, the CTR is often weakly, or even inversely correlated with the quality of a user segment, as measured by the retention rate or ROI. As a result, training models to optimize for clicks can lead to wasting impressions on low-quality users, achieving high CTR but poor ROI.

In a world where mobile app marketers can't rely only on clicks to accurately measure the impact and effectiveness of their advertising campaigns, a different method of attribution needs to be employed. This is where impression attribution comes into play.

What makes working at Aarki so special is being part of a team of exceptionally brilliant, ingeniously creative, and friendly people. To get to know more about our colleagues, we will feature a new team member every month.

Who’s on this month's spotlight? 

Mobile advertising continues to be a fluid industry with evolving ad formats. The top performance driven ad formats on mobile are rich media and video. Along with Native, Rewarded Video is the fastest growing ad format in programmatic advertising.

In today’s digital world, ads are everywhere. Using the right creative is crucial for running a successful app marketing campaign. In fact, creatives can make or break your campaign. If they are catchy, relevant and based on the user experience, they will grab the user's attention and drive installs. Otherwise, they will most likely get ignored by the users, together with all the other ads they see every day.  

2016 has been an exciting year for the mobile industry. We have seen major shifts from the usual CPI campaigns to programmatic buying. With volume and ROI in focus, app marketers are beginning to notice the impact of higher LTV and ROI from programmatic campaigns. A solution that unifies data, creative, and technology will deliver the best results. So, what do we look forward to in the coming year?

The mobile advertising industry has matured over the past few years. We can look at its brief history in three main stages. Let’s take a deeper dive into the evolution of mobile app marketing to understand today’s current strategies.

The mobile app marketing industry has made some incredible advancements since its early years. At first, app marketers were only paying for the ad clicks. Then the focus shifted to the installs that were being generated. Now app marketers have bigger challenges: Engaging and retaining users with high lifetime value (LTV). Thus, many have began to optimize their app marketing campaigns around retargeting concept with its two key strategies being cross-promotion and re-engagement.

The success of each mobile app advertising campaign can be narrowed down to a single point - the value that the acquired user will bring to the app. The user lifetime value (LTV) metric can help mobile app marketers in figuring this out and optimizing for it. It is one of the most powerful and most enigmatic metrics in the app marketing toolbox.

Programmatic advertising has become one of the fastest growing channels of digital marketing due to its inherent abundance of media inventory and buying efficiency. It offers multiple ways for mobile app advertisers to find the right media inventory for their ads. But with a few different ways to acquire media inventory programmatically, app advertisers are sometimes confused about which is the best way. To lessen the confusion, let’s shed some light on the differences between three different ways: open auction, private auction, and preferred deal.

The mobile advertising industry continues to grow and innovate at a fast pace. One of the newest mobile ad formats to emerge in the recent year is playable ad. Since its emergent, playable ad has quickly become a popular ad format amongst mobile app marketers.

Do you associate native advertising with content marketing? If so, you are not alone. In fact, many people associate the two terms or think that they’re the same. However, there are differences between the two.

In recent years, programmatic has grown to become a popular media-buying channel for advertisers across the globe. As the mobile industry grows, it’s not difficult to see why app marketers are looking to programmatic media as the solution. Mobile users have diversified interests and behavior, making it much more difficult for app advertisers using traditional ways to select, negotiate, and buy the media that will optimize ad performance toward the target users.

The mobile app industry has come a long way since almost a decade ago. Back in 2007, Apple released the first generation of iPhone with preloaded apps. Shortly after, the first Android smartphone hit the market in 2008. Back then, mobile apps were simply deemed as useful, nice-to-have tools that people could live without.

Mobile app advertising can make or break your app. Too many mobile ads, or even the wrong kinds of mobile ads, can drive potential high lifetime value (LTV) users away. Proper advertising is crucial for the success of any app marketing campaign. 

Mobile device usage has skyrocketed during the past decade. Likewise, mobile devices themselves have taken big steps in evolving. From the birth of the first generation of iPhone in 2007 and first Android smartphone in 2008 to the recent debut of iPhone 7 and other Android models, we’ve seen several different screens sizes and upgrades.

Over the year, mobile devices have become more of a necessity rather than an accessory. There was a time when we used mobile devices only for communication. Nowadays, mobile devices are everywhere and are used for variety of purposes. From finding transportation to doing taxes, mobile app solutions have quickly been growing at an exponential rate. One of the fastest growing mobile app verticals is ecommerce.

In today's device-driven age of texts, tweets, and social media, it can be hard to grab user’s attention. To keep up with these trends, brands looking to build customer loyalty should consider one of developing mobile app strategies. Mobile devices provide the type of rich contextual data and personal connections brands could only once dream about. The value of a loyalty program is visibly more important on mobile because everything is in real-time. 

As the mobile app industry continues to evolve, app marketers are beginning to look beyond app installs to measure the campaign success. Instead, they are choosing to focus on the quality of users and consequently, the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. The theory is that the more high-quality users they can acquire, the more likely it is that the campaign will achieve stronger ROI. This can be attributed to the believe that ROI is driven by the amount and value of in-app purchases high-quality users will make.

Twenty years ago, smartphones didn’t exist. Since then, a lot of things have changed. Now most of us can’t even remember the last time we actually didn’t use our smartphones on a daily basis. Mobile devices and the Internet are changing the way we do things and how we connect with other people. 

Mobile app install has been and still is an important key performance indicator (KPI) of mobile app marketing campaigns. However, as mobile usage skyrockets and apps flood the app stores, it’s hard to deny the growing changes in the ecosystem. With heavy competition in the app stores, install - or the primary conversion - is no longer the only way app marketers should be measuring the success of a campaign. While install is still important, app marketers should also be focusing on driving user engagement - or secondary conversion - on top of install.

The mobile app ecosystem has always been quick to change. App marketing success used to be measured by the number of ad clicks. Then the focus moved to how many people installed the app. Now the industry is starting to realize that engagement and retaining valuable users is the key to success.

In the early days of the mobile apps phenomenon, the number one goal for most app marketers was to acquire as many users as possible. The more users they can get, the higher their apps rose in rank in the Apple iOS or Google Play app store’s’ charts. In turn, the visibility that the top chart apps get leads to a significant organic lift of installs. However, as the mobile industry continues to mature - many app marketers’ focus have also shifted. From focusing on just the quantity of users, app marketers are also focusing on the quality of those users as well. If you are an app marketer and have not already shifted your strategy to target quality users, now is the time to do so.

The mobile web vs. mobile app dilemma is perhaps one of the most common conflicts in marketers’ minds. If mobile advertising effectiveness is the goal, then there are prominent factors that need to be taken into account when making the decision between mobile web and app.

Today, there are more people than ever who are on mobile devices and now is the right time to think over the methods you are using to get your ads seen. Your understanding of mobile app marketing has to go beyond the general app marketing campaign — you have to get the campaign on different channels and in different forms. This means you also need to decide what form your ad will take on each channel. Here are a couple of important mobile marketing methods that will benefit your app marketing campaign.

Back in the early days, app marketers’ biggest challenge was getting users to install their apps. Today, app install is still one of the most common key performance indicators (KPI) in an app marketing campaign. However, as the mobile app industry continues to mature, app marketers are faced with an even bigger challenge.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could predict the performance of our next mobile app marketing campaign even before it starts?

More importantly, it would definitely be useful if we could identify the key aspects of a campaign that are most likely to drive its performance.

The traditional concept of advertising comes with a close relationship between advertisers and publishers. Many advertisers value this relationship. However, traditional direct deals cannot offer the scale, speed and efficiency of programmatic. This is due to the fact that traditional direct deals rely on human negotiations and manually inserting the orders which makes the process slow and inefficient, especially when dealing with hundreds of thousands of orders at a time.

As ad technology evolves, so do mobile users and their interests. In order to drive user acquisition campaign performance, app marketers should align their strategies with the interests of target users. Ad creative can helps app marketers pique users’ interest and drive them to take action, whether it is installing an app, registering for an account, or making a purchase.

With mobile devices becoming a staple of modern society and the preferred way of accessing digital content, today’s app marketers need to understand how to connect successfully with mobile users. Proximity marketing can help with just that. 

What Is Proximity-Based Marketing?

Proximity-based marketing or proximity marketing is a catch-all term used to describe any use of location technologies to directly communicate with users through their mobile devices.

In the recent years, programmatic techniques have brought speed and efficiency to media buying. Now, it’s time for the creative side of the ad business to follow suit and become more efficient, nimble and innovative.  A new era of digital advertising is dawning - an era where programmatic and creative combine to create far-reaching and captivating campaigns. We call it “Programmatic Creative,” and it is a buzz among digital marketers.

Creative often lives in the shadow of media in mobile programmatic advertising as many app marketers put the majority of their focus on media placement. However, media is only one aspect of an app marketing campaign. Creative can have an equally, if not more, powerful impact on the ad performance. Even if the ad has been placed in the optimal location, the target audience most likely will not give it a second glance or engage with it if what they see isn’t up to par. Often times, audiences click and engage with an ad because of how it looks. Therefore, to take the performances of mobile ads to the next level, creative should also be focused on alongside media placement.

As the mobile app ecosystem continues to grow rapidly, user base expansion is the apparent key to short-term success. For many app developers, the initial goal is to acquire as many users as possible in order to climb up the Apple’s iTune’s or Google Play’s top charts. The idea is that being more visible in the app stores will result in organic lift.

Most app marketing campaigns are focused on driving a large volume of app installs at the lowest possible cost. While this may be a good initial strategy, it must give way to more downstream focused strategies as the campaign matures. More savvy app advertisers are increasingly recognizing the folly of an install-focused approach and are instead exploring mechanisms for optimization of post-install events.

Today, everywhere we look, there’s bound to be an ad. With an onslaught of obnoxious pop-ups, subtle product placements, and everything in between - it’s a rare moment when we aren’t being told to buy this or download that. It’s no different in mobile advertising. However, ads don’t always have to be annoying. There’s a better way for app developers to communicate to the target audience, a way that engages them on their terms and breaks through the clutter: personalized app marketing. This means delivering the right message, to the right audience, via the right medium, at the right place and time.

Attribution plays an important role in mobile advertising. It allows app developers to track and measure both conversion and post-conversion events. All events can be tracked, including app install, app opening, in-app purchases, level completion, registration, booking, listing, etc. By analyzing various attributions, app developers can gain large volume of valuable campaign insights. In turn, these insights will help them make better campaign decisions regarding investments, creative variants, and media placement.

Mobile advertising has come a long way from its rather simple beginning. Despite being a relatively new technology, it seems as if ads have been popping up on our mobile devices much longer than they actually have. The causes of this illusion are the rapid growth of the advertising industry and the constant innovations in mobile advertising.

An ad can be deemed successful if it piques audience interest enough to incite them to interact with the call-to-action. To measure how well the ad does in capturing interest, ad click-through rate (CTR) is typically used. The higher the CTR, the more successful the ad is in generating interest amongst the target audience. In addition, predicting the CTR can be helpful in setting campaign goals. The more accurate the prediction is, the better it can help advertisers set realistic expectations. This prediction can also be used to make better media buying decisions. Thus, the ability to accurately predict ad CTR is essential in mobile app advertising.

The term “Private Marketplace” has become one of the most widely used buzzwords in mobile advertising - and for good reasons. A Private Marketplace (PMP) is an invite-only marketplace where high caliber publishers offer their media inventory to a selected group of advertisers. Unlike the open real-time bidding (RTB) auctions, a private deal gives a select group of advertisers priority to inventory before it becomes available in the open marketplace.

Adoption of programmatic advertising has been growing rapidly over the past few years - and it’s not too difficult to see why. By automating the process of buying and selling media, it provides access to large amounts of audience data (for better audience targeting) as well as a large inventory for media placement.

However, programmatic advertising is notwithout its flaws. Facebook’s decision to nix the Atlas Demand-Side Platform (DSP) last month puts the spotlight on one of the biggest concerns facing programmatic advertisers: quality of inventory.

An important part of running a successful app marketing campaign is knowing when to refresh your ad creative. Doing so will not only help you acquire more users, but it will also help you get the most return from your investment.

Every mobile app is unique. It is designed to satisfy its user’s needs in a way that is better than all other apps. And yet, some apps boast of a healthy ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users while others can barely get off the ground. What makes one app achieve user glory while another app falters?

Over the years, mobile apps have infiltrated themselves into the lives of almost everyone in China. Smartphones and tablets are used practically everywhere and work as integral parts in the users’ daily lives thanks to the fact that its usage is often unrestricted by time, location or occasion.

With the recent heated debates around ad blocking since the release of Apple’s iOS 9, it’s not hard to see why many app marketers are buzzing about native ads. So far, ad blockers have only been able to block ads in the mobile web browser but none have released a version that actually allows users to block in-app ads. This makes native advertising the more attractive to app marketers.

Ad fraud has become a big topic in the ad tech industry with many choosing to dishonestly boost the numbers of impressions or clicks to gain more dollars. This can generally be done by either humans and nonhumans, also known as bots or botnets, to generate inflation of traffic. The result is companies overpaying publishers or advertisers for ads that don’t actually get seen by actual audiences.

For a long time, creative has been the holy grail of advertising. Something that is a pure art and cannot be quantified or optimized. Even with the proliferation of digital media and cheap computational power, optimization was something that was done after the ad creative was finalized. But this basic premise is being increasingly challenged.

As the end of 2015 nears, it’s time to look forward and see what’s in store for the future. I’ve had the chance to sit down with Dr. Yumio Saneyoshi, who has over 15 years of industry experience, and chat about his predictions on what we can expect in 2016.

What do you think will be the three emerging trends in ad tech next year?

First, the era where advertisers just spam users with quantity is wrapping up because of the release of Apple’s iOS 9 and flood of ad blockers. Next year, relevant ad will become a trend. Second, the war between Google and Apple will intensify. While Google is trying many different methods to revive the mobile web, Apple is trying to make it less and less relevant. Third, app developers will discover

The arrival of big data a few years ago had unleashed new capabilities into the app marketing industry. It allowed app marketers to develop precision in managing user acquisition campaigns, make better predictions, and improve decision making. Where do all of these lead to? Better overall ad performance.

Once again, we are participating in one of the biggest mobile conferences in the world. This time, it is taking place in Tel Aviv, Israel, a city easily accessible to attendees from both the East and West. This is a home to some of the biggest names in the mobile gaming industry.  It’s no surprise how this place is rapidly leading it’s way to the forefront of the mobile industry.

Let’s take a peek into the world of venture capital (VC) and startups in Japan! Last Wednesday, many VC firms gathered to network with startups at the Scrum Ventures CEO Summit 2015 at Tech Lab Paak in Shibuya, Japan. Our Sr. Manager of Business Development, Hiro Kurata, had the chance to attend the event as Aarki’s representative.

Maps, like dynamic distance, leverage proximity as a creative element, however maps can be used across a much larger geographic area. Therefore, the use of maps can also be a strong fit for campaigns not heavily dependent on immediate proximity as a qualification for conversion.

In our experience, maps are especially complementary in mobile ad creative if goaled to drive traffic or awareness for events such as a new store opening.

Creative for mobile ads is becoming more complex and video continues to prove effective. From an engineering perspective, what is one of the biggest challenges faced with this brand of engaging creative?

Mobile advertisers spend days building out plans and creative, but all of that is for naught if the ad doesn’t perform. Mobile advertisements should consistently provide the end-user with a smooth and engaging experience through faster ad loading speeds and quick, seamless rendering. Faster loading speeds and rendering translate to higher engagement and conversion rates. If the creative doesn’t load or render fast enough, watch the mobile advertising campaign get sucked into a black hole, where the end-user will never find it and ad performance tanks. There is a reason campaigns still end up in this black hole, faster ad loading and rendering comes with a few hurdles to clear. 

Multivariate optimization in mobile advertising is set to take the world by storm. As digital advertising continues its journey toward consumer-first creative, an executive’s final world may as well be silence. In the future, creative teams will have one audience to convince – the target consumer. Even though we are in the early stages of evolving the ad ecosystem for this mindset, consumers are already building expectations for ads that “get” them.

Media SaaS platforms are springing up everywhere, crowding the space. From start-ups to established players, sellers evangelize the centralization all of media planning, buying, reporting and first party data management, across premium, programmatic and native buys. Whether it’s mobile, tablet, desktop, programmatic TV, display, video or search, each platform touts a secret sauce to better media targeting and performance.

Why mobile advertising is just like trying to get a date. It may seem a bit far-fetched, but hold your judgement and read on.

In my last article, “Designing Joyful Experiences,” I talked about the “Do” and how you should take care in crafting your interfaces on mobile. In this article, I focus on the framework that helps us design these interactions.

There is a strong link between performance and creative. The ways in which the two interplay is constantly evolving, creative teams and analyst teams are brought closer and closer together for real-time optimization. Aarki Analytics Manager Casey McKnight and Software Engineer Igor Raush walk us through their latest project to link creative closer to performance.

If 2014 was the year of mobile, than 2015 is the year to set yourself apart and transform your mobile content into joyful creative. Our Creative Director, Noel Perlas, comes to Aarki with years of digital marketing and interactive design experience. Below he shares ways in which your brand or agency can keep your creative fresh for mobile.

It is essential that mobile ads include a clear objective for users, and a clear way to complete the objective – a clear call to action (CTA). CTAs come in all shapes and sizes: drive traffic to a site, generate leads, sign up for a newsletter, redeem a coupon, locate the nearest store or download an app.

In the past ten years we have seen massive leaps in the way users are interacting and consuming content through mobile devices. Let’s walk through some of the larger mobile marketing trends and challenges.

As the holiday dust settles, we reflect back on the biggest digital advertising trends in 2014 and predict where the industry is headed in 2015.

User acquisition performance marketing has seen a lot of changes in the past year and we predict there are many more to come in 2015. To help advertisers think through how to invest new budgets for the best ROI, see below for my thoughts on three key 2015 trends.

The widely accepted notion is that software engineers type code into a computer. In reality, while typing code is an obvious necessity, much of software engineering happens during long strolls, while grilling a steak, or over a couple of beers. There is a significant aspect of software development that happens without writing a single line of code.

In anticipation of the Digital Publishers Summit next week, I wanted to reflect back on top trends in 2014 and make some predictions on where publishers will be shifting their focus in the new year.

This weekend, the U.S. will kick-off the holiday shopping season with Black Friday. Too many hours of planning, approvals and mocks have preceded this very important weekend for numerous creative teams. Smart marketers understand there is still much more work to be done, the best digital campaigns bank as much on real-time optimization as they do on pre-work. Here are five proven ideas that can help you (or your marketing team) optimize your holiday ads and connect online advertising to offline sales.

The funny thing about working in advertising is that you are often the final consumer of your own work. There is an unexplained sense of joy when you come across a well-made and delivered video ad. With more marketers assigning dollars to the power of video, technical requirements and standards are evolving.

Next week, I’ll represent Aarki at the Interactive Advertising Bureau forum in Milan where industry experts and members will gather to reaffirm their commitment to digital in Italy. Digital ad spending in Italy fell in early fall, although we expect it to increase by the end of year. The majority of advertisers spent their budgets on the World Cup activities in June/July, causing a drop in early fall spend. To see the forest through the trees, overall, Italy is making significant strides in digital communication, but in order to pick up the pace of growth Italy needs to overcome three major hurdles.

Happy Halloween everyone! We hope your office is decorated as wonderfully as ours and your stomach as full of sweets. Today we reflect on the lessons Hallow’s Eve can teach advertisers, besides watching out for haunted agencies and amazing agency-themed costumes.

Our in-house creative guru Justin Kim shares his top five tips for executing a flawless creative process. Designers, working in shops of all shapes and sizes, should find these tips useful as they design their next advertising masterpiece.

Video advertisements outperform all other digital ad formats. Mobile video is the fastest growing digital ad format. Videos drive higher engagement, which results in heightened brand awareness and higher click-through rates. Make sure your creative suite contains tools that maximize video engagement by optimizing the creative for completion rate.

Jet setting once again to the land of baguettes and the Mona Lisa for Paris Games Week at Porte de Versailles October 29 – 31. We are excited at the opportunity to mingle with top European mobile gaming development, publishing, funding, production, marketing and distribution professionals. And we are predicting more than some empty glasses and full stomachs. Here are a few trends that we believe will take center stage.

Building interactive cross-screen ads can prove daunting for even the most experienced creative team. Dependent on the level of complexity, the process of storyboarding, attaining client assets and finalizing an ad unit can take between one day and four weeks. Through the use of cloning and templates you can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on each ad unit without compromising performance. In this article, we outline three ways you can use cloning and templates to scale ad creation and optimize performance.

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the next hotspot for mobile advertising. With more than 500 million people, MENA is demanding some attention from its mobile advertising older siblings: U.S., China and LATAM. In the last year alone, the region brought in more than $100 million in revenue from the online gaming industry, up from $70 million the year before. The increase in revenue parallels the 57% increase in digital marketing spend. MENA continues to go up, up, up, and here’s why.

Confirming the growth of the Japanese interactive advertising market, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced its partnership with the Japan Internet Advertising Association (JIAA) a few weeks ago. With the IAB’s influence, Japan will begin to standardize native, rich media and video advertisements. The standardization will allow companies to adopt a universal set of tools from which to do business, increasing the opportunity for interactive and video advertising.

Advertising Week has come and gone. And while there is consensus mobile is the “next big thing” in the advertising industry, chronic problems persist. Last week in New York, we heard Google’s Jason Bigler speak to a few solutions to these problems: rich media, cross-screen ads, and reusability. Other Ad Week speakers, such as PepsiCo’s Frank Cooper, believe Bigler’s solutions are resolving the chronic problems and predict 2015 as the year interesting mobile creative is unlocked. Now the pressure is on you as the creative director to deliver against these elevated expectations.

As the Spring/Summer 2015 fashion weeks come to a close, one true digital winner is rising to the top. Although London fashion week is not as established as its European rivals, it has certainly become the leader for tech-savvy innovation. From Google’s designer digital bootcamp to Twitter’s new “Buy" button for runway nail polish colors, London’s digital success is proving the fashion world can bridge the digital divide.

The bags are packed, devices charged and meetings scheduled – we’re ready for Advertising Week 2014. The annual week of New York City advertising madness commences Monday, and we are excited. Regardless of the events you choose to attend, IAB MIXX, Ad Week or SM2, advertising week is known for shedding light on powerful innovators and launching grand ideas.

From the creative suite to the analytics dashboard – Aarki Studio – our interactive advertising platform is built for ease of use. Publishers, brands, advertisers, developers and ad networks look to us to simplify ad creation and measurement.

Three days of Red Bulls, great conversations and impressive after-parties mark another great year at Casual Connect San Francisco. This year we manned a booth in the usual hustle and bustle of the exhibit floor and caught a few really insightful sessions. Read below for a quick review of three key session themes by Aarki Account Executive Titania Tran.

In the past few weeks, there has been a wealth of new data presented from various industries on connected living. That data takes the form of the number of times you look at your phone each day, how many people are using more than one screen, or the percent of people watching mobile video. These stories of our new way of life all end the same way; today’s consumers are looking past the rectangles of their individual devices, and toward the ways in which those devices connect them to their day-to-day.

Our love affair with interactive went public in March at ad:tech San Francisco 2014 with our launch of Aarki Studio, and since then we’ve been busy professing our love around to the ad world. See below for a quick round up of recently published articles and releases.

This year is all about multiscreen data. In recent weeks, a multitude of articles and reports have been published arguing multiscreen is not a fad; it is shaping how we will continue to live our lives in the coming years. The screens will surely evolve, from handheld devices to wearable technology, but multiscreen is here to stay. We need the data phase to visualize and prove multiscreen interactive advertising needs to move past the rectangles of our tablets, phones and laptops, and focus on people. Here are a few examples of what we've been seeing.

The epidemic of killed pitches is rampant, as detailed last week in Ad Week’s “Creative Review Shortlists Are No Longer All That Short." Tasked with concepting, creative types are finding themselves falling asleep with a computer in their lap and post happy hour quality time with Photoshop. To put a spring back in your step, a sparkle in your eye and a light in your light bulb, here are five amazing non-rich media ads to inspire your creativity for your next multiscreen, multichannel advertising pitch.

Aarki Studio Launches at ad:tech – First Multiscreen Creative Ad Platform Built for Ease of Use

Aarki Study Reveals that Interactive, Multiscreen Mini-Game Ads Provide Highest Engagement and Performance

When faced with the creation of rich media ads, many companies find themselves stuck with few options and the daunting task of creating an ad that performs.

Multiscreen has been a buzzword for a lot of marketers with the explosion of ad sizes across smartphones, tablets and desktops. With the mobile landscape growing, marketers need to be smart and are forced to cater to the demand of users who access content across multiple devices each day. For this, marketers who care about branding, want consistent look-and-feel no matter where a user hangs out--whether that's on a tablet, mobile device or desktop.

Multi-channel marketing campaigns combine the best of all worlds. Utilization of multiple channels allows marketers to have multiple touch points with their brand’s consumers, and allow consumers to choose how they will interact with their favorite brands. By utilizing TV, print, digital, mobile, and other types of media, marketers can achieve comprehensive consumer reach and brand immersion.

This year’s Advertising Week brought together the world’s leading brands and ad agencies to discuss all things mobile, digital and cross-platform.

The automotive mobile advertising market nearly quadrupled in size in 2012, and continues to be the most competitive mobile advertising vertical worldwide. When viewing auto ads, comparing different cars’ features, or searching for auto dealers, mobile consumers’ high purchase intent, disposable incomes, and willingness to click on relevant ads all contribute to the dominance of this vertical.

Mobile’s ability to connect consumers everywhere has revolutionized the advertising space. Video is an especially natural advertising format for mobile advertisers, who can easily engage consumers with valuable brand and product information. With mobile at the forefront of advertisers minds, it’s no question that mobile video ads will continue to pop up across smartphones and tablets, engaging consumers with entertaining commercials and compelling offers.

In the second post in our "Developer Insights" series, Esther Kuperman, a highly regarded UI/UX designer with a background in marketing, gives her perspective on app design.

The Chinese mobile market is markedly different from the United States’. China’s huge population, urban-rural divide, and geographic spread all contribute to the proliferation of a wide variety of different mobile technologies, platforms, and consumer preferences. Understanding consumers’ mobile adoption and behavior in China is critical for any firm hoping to do business in China. Brands and their agencies must comprehend how to reach Chinese consumers most effectively; mobile game developers must identify Chinese gamer preferences; and mobile publishers must navigate China’s vast advertising landscape.

We’re kicking off a monthly blog series called ‘Developer Insights’ where we’ll feature content written by today’s modern app developer- covering all things in the mobile app space from a developer’s perspective. Our first post comes from Alex Genadinik, a mobile developer and creator of some of the most helpful business plan apps across iOS and Android. Take it away Alex!

Brands are becoming increasingly focused on engaging their mobile consumers. More and more, marketers are focusing on campaigns that deliver long-term engagement and monetization on mobile. Campaigns designed specifically to drive deeper mobile engagement have been proven to be effective at converting audiences into avid purchasers by leveraging community generated content, social sharing, and consumer interaction.

On their commutes, at work, at home, and while watching TV, consumers are constantly engaged with their mobile devices. Like the newspaper, radio, television, and desktop before it, mobile has become the key to reaching and engaging consumers worldwide. The extent of mobile's dominance as a media consumption platform, however, has proven to be difficult to measure for many, varying widely according to different consumer segments’ preferences. How exactly can one measure the impact of mobile engagement among consumers?

The mobile advertising ecosystem is constantly growing. With real-time campaign tracking and optimization, advertisers are able to measure their performance and ROI across operating systems, geographies, publishers, and campaigns. Tracking such performance across these channels represents an opportunity to gain insight into the latest market trends and consumer behavior shifts, but requires a great deal of data analysis and knowledge.

The mobile gaming industry is no longer in its infancy. While the App Store and Google Play offered only a few hundred apps when they first launched, they now collectively host more than 1.5 million apps, with games being the most popular and largest app category.

We’ve previously written about the need for standardized metrics in mobile advertising, and that the industry would need to implement consistent and reliable metrics in order to earn advertising spend. In order for mobile to truly emerge as a dominant advertising channel along with print, TV, and desktop, advertisers have to know what they’re paying for, how effective their campaigns and reach are, and how to measure success.

If you’re an app developer lucky enough to have millions of VC dollars lying around then choosing the right monetization model may not be top priority. The reality is that there are thousands of app developers that do not, and are looking to find ways to generate revenue from their freemium apps. There are a few monetization options available to developers to help them generate revenue. Whether deciding to offer in-app purchases (IAPs), serve ads through mobile ad networks, or charge users up front for the download, developers’ monetization strategy has a huge impact on their apps’ future. Choosing the right model can directly impact your growth, affecting both revenue and user adoption.

For mobile publishers, delivering in-app advertisements have often been viewed as a last resort, raising concern around jeopardizing their users’ experience. However, in today’s competitive app markets the shift to in-app advertising has taken on a new light. As technology evolves and more creative approaches drive innovation in the mobile ad space, advertising can be an effective way to monetize freemium apps while enhancing the user experience with interactive rich media mini-games. These types of ads allow publishers to monetize their non-IAP users while providing a valuable engagement channel for brands. The belief that in-app advertising is disruptive comes from the past, and current, state of mobile advertising.

We just rolled out a suite of updates to our self-serve portal to better enable our publisher and advertiser partners to create, manage and track their ad campaigns. It's now easier than ever to determine bid price, integrate ad creatives and seamlessly manage targeting. You can still access all of the great features previously offered but with a more streamlined and intuitive look. We applied the new purple color scheme we rolled out earlier this Spring to keep inline with Aarki's new brand, including our new logo and a more stylized workspace.

As traditional marketing and advertising mediums continue to fragment: from print and billboards, to online and email, and now mobile and tablets, brands are forced to reevaluate how they connect with their mobile consumers. The average consumer is inundated with brand messages across platforms and have quickly adapted to the noise finding more ways to silence it, with DVR to fast forward through TV commercials and passively flipping through their favorite magazines chock full of finely tailored ads. Consumers are immune to traditional advertising methods and its time for brands, and the agencies that represent them, to take notice. By the end of 2013 there will be more devices on earth than people, with 3 out of 5 users on a smartphone. This presents a tremendous channel to reach and engage their consumers on mobile. New form factors means new ways to deliver relevant, targeted content in innovative ways. As we move into this mobile and app centric world there is new opportunity for brands to connect with their mobile users while on-the-go and leverage real-time interactivity.

There's such an emphasis on user growth these days- for your app, SEO, Twitter followers, blog traffic- you can even have a career in user growth, tracking cohorts and leveraging user behaviors. But, growth really goes beyond just an quantitative measurement. True growth lies in measuring the long-term value of users over a lifetime.

It seems like everyone is talking about it but nobody knows what it actually means. It's one of those commonly used terms in mobile, right along with monetization, user acquisition and the infamous 'cloud'. But how do you define mobile engagement? In order to effectively answer this question, I want to breakdown the meaning of engagement, how you can measure it, and ultimately how to increase engagement on mobile.

There's been quite a bit of chatter around the office about how mobile developers can effectively compete and be successful in today's marketplace. In a world with over-crowded apps stores, copycats, and an audience with acute ADD, its hard to stand out. So we thought, let's put together a series on 'How to Succeed as an App Developer' in today's mobile market.

As the mobile gaming industry heats up with the summer weather, San Francisco was front and center last week as the "Smartphone & Tablet" games summit and the "SF Game Monetization Meetup" event attracted some of the biggest players in this space.

What’s the real benefit and cost of signing an exclusive agreement for monetization?

After ending 2011 with a successful Series A round of venture financing, we began the first quarter of 2012 by attending several conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. The conferences included the Silicon Valley International Game Developer’s Association (SV IGDA), Game Developers Conference (GDC), Pycon, and Ignition West. By attending these conferences, we were able to learn from and to network with other cutting edge companies and other industry experts. In addition, we were able to convey its value as a mobile ad network that helps app publishers monetize while also showing how it drives revenue for advertisers.