Back in February, a simple forum post set in motion a steam train that has resulted in a 30% decline in downloads from the top 200 Apps on the App Store.

Most of you would already be aware of the changes Apple has made to the way it calculates its top apps as well as its crackdown on download bots. A practice that Apple has apparently been aware of for some time, download bots artificially inflate the number downloads for the purpose of getting the app in the top 25 chart. At this point, the app begins getting real downloads and can be monetized effectively.

Apart from breaking all sorts of marketplace rules, it makes the marketplaces really unfair for those trying to get in through legitimate means. It is great that Apple has taken some action and the decline in volume shows how many downloads were being driven by this method.

There has already been a lot written about the importance of getting your app ranked in the top 25 or 50 charts in the relevant market place. Whether by geography or category, it has been suggested that 70%+ of users do not look passed the top charts when searching for new apps.

So how do you get your app ranked?

Well obviously, CPC/CPI campaigns, SEO / keyword search optimization, PR, discounting and getting it reviewed by popular blogs or new sites are all effective strategies. Another one for better known brands or niche apps may be to time the release with Trade Shows where you can make a big announcement and splash.

But the numbers required can be mind boggling. 25,000 downloads per day to be top 50 in US on the app store. 10,000 in China. 5,000 in the UK and South Korea. A little less in Germany, France and Australia. Obviously, the numbers reduce significantly when looking at the top 50 in a particular category.

There is also what day you want to feature. Weekends are busier, so getting into the charts is even harder, but then the rewards are greater as download volumes are 20%+ higher.

The other really effective strategy is burst campaigns. Running an intensive CPI (cost per install) campaign for a few days to get huge downloads can push you into the top charts where the 70% of users are searching. This drives organic downloads, where your ongoing and slightly less aggressive marketing program (which may include all of the above), may be able to keep you up there. Combine this with an effective monetization strategy and your app will begin making real money.

While this approach may sound similar to the download bots, the real difference is that your downloads will be real. Real users, finding the app on their own (as they do not have to click on your advertisement and then don’t have to download the app) You are assured that those downloading your app are interesting in doing so. And if your app is valuable, this will lead to great ratings and reviews, being shared amongst friends and family etc and therefore ranking even higher.

Then you can focus on what should be the most important area for you – making the app even more awesome and launching your next app (or five).

Of course, Leadbolt can help you achieve all these objectives from sustained to burst campaigns, so if you are serious about being number 1, then start running your campaign with us today.

Are you like me with a habit of remembering the big ticket ad types of last year. Do you remember them launching to great fanfares with stories of super eCPMs?  No doubt all your friends and every developer forum told you to move on up to these ad types. After all, why would you run banners at $0.10 eCPM when you could be making hundreds of dollars with each thousand impressions instead?

But 6-12 months on, are you still achieving those dizzy heights? Was it all just hype? Is there a way to understand the trends and therefore maximize your returns?

Over 15 years ago, Gartner began using a Hype Cycle to analyze the introduction of new technology. The hype cycle was designed to not only show the inevitable hype (and fall) surrounding new concepts, but the subsequent stages, when they move beyond the hype into long term benefit and wide spread acceptance. The key to understanding this can ensure you benefit from this cycle.

The cycle can be displayed using a simple info-graphic.

So referring back to the topic of new and advanced ad formats, there’s no doubt the promoted $100 eCPM lies at the top of the hype cycle and even though many developers reached those heights initially, many a developer subsequently found their ad revenue results dipping into the ‘valley of despair’, before flattening out into a ‘production reality’.

This production reality (long term stats) for high performance ad types is averaging $5 to $15 eCPM. Obviously, the more targeted and qualified a publisher’s traffic then higher values can be achieved but that is a good basis for our discussion.

So what does this hype cycle tells us about ad type performance, beyond some sales cynicism. I am going to suggest it tells us some very important things about user acceptance, customer expectations and can provide an indication into user responsiveness.

Here’s what the hype cycle teaches us in relation to high performance ads:

1. A new ad type is launched. Its new, fresh and attention-grabbing. Users respond positively, driving up ad revenues. The stage may take months as it has for our example, or years for examples like robotics.
2. Due to its success, the ad type appears more often, making it more commonplace/ discussed negatively, users respond less and ad revenue falls.
3. The ad type is optimized / reaches a level of status and delivers a stable revenue return.
4. Finally, adoption becomes so widespread the ad type becomes an increasingly invisible commodity and revenue eventually declines to almost nothing eg banner ads

Understanding the connection between the hype dynamics and users acceptance across multiple ad types can be the real key to consistently high revenue returns for app developers and publishers.

So, what are the practical learnings?

One, new ad types do deliver well in their first releases and early adopters can gain a lot. These developers exploit our natural curiosity to new things, so seeking out and testing new ad types is surely a way to revenue performance.

Two, beware of fighting against the curve. As the new technology moves beyond stage two, ad networks will continuously optimize the ad type to reignite the hype revenue and move it into stage three. However, it is at this stage that less than desirable practices are also likely to emerge as ad type implementer attempts to prolong the hype instead of moving the technology into productivity stage.

For the bigger picture, we can become much more sophisticated with our ad technology usage in several ways.

Savvy developers can recognizing the connection of the hype cycle with user acceptance, and in stage two introduce user friendly options with their ad type integrations to ensure the long term relationships with users and ride the hype wave successfully to the ‘production reality’.

In the final stage of the ad type lifecycle recognizing the emerging commodity effect gives you time to ensure you have a new strategy already in play. We can liken it to surfing a set of waves rather than crashing with the first wave’s drop.

Finally, the hype cycle/user acceptance connection teaches us that ad technologies are not immune to the hype curve and that an effective strategy is to combine different ad types at different phases in the hype cycle. This way you can benefit from the hype, not be too affected by the inevitable crash, and continue to maximizing your returns through the (hopefully) long productivity stage.

I am happy to announce the launch of LeadBolt’s new and improved website. With a clean and fresh new look, the website also features easy to navigate functions together with quick links to areas of interest to dramatically improve your LeadBolt online experience. Some areas you may want to check out include:

• Information and videos about our ad units
• Our Affiliate program
• The Support Forum

Feel free to browse around and let us know what you think about our new website as your feedback is truly important to us! Please email any comments and feedback to your assigned account manager and we will be sure to take note of them.

Much has already been written about the amazing amount Facebook is paying for Instagram. As a single app company with minimal monetization, $1 billion may seem extreme, especially given that the company had valued itself at about $500m. I am not, however, going to focus on the merits of Facebook’s decision, but rather the volumes that the decision tells us regarding Facebook’s current state of play, its strategy and vision for mobile – and what we can infer it believes is the future for www.

Let’s start with what we know.

Apps usage has surpassed web consumption in the past 12 month. According to a recent report, time spent on apps per day increased by almost 90% in the 12 months to June ’11 to 81 minutes per day in the US. In the same time, web consumption increased by 15% to 74 minutes per day.

So apps, and definitely mobile, are important to Facebook’s future strategy. No rocket science there.

It has also been heavily reported that Facebook is desperately trying to find its feet in the mobile market. Its revenue model has been heavily (if not exclusively) geared towards web, and, while its immense popularity has been keeping it relevant in the mobile space, it has not yet found the strategic advantage on mobile that it has on web.

One area that it has, now obviously, tried to change that is with photo sharing. Much of Facebook’s popularity has been as the leader in the massive growth trend of photo sharing. It has become a category killer on web against the incumbents like flickr and picasa. Buying Instagram is effectively killing off the major competitor to its future success on mobile and at the same time cementing it position as the #1 photo sharing community on all forms of digital media.

But the huge amount, $1 billion, tells us a little more.

It is interesting to note that in the same week that Facebook made its announcement, Google for the second consecutive quarter, reported a decline in “Cost Per Click” rates. The fact that this shift is due to the shift in traffic from desktop to mobile is obvious.

Interestingly, George Colony from Forrester Research, in his presentation at LeWeb 2011, place Google really low in its analysis of the strength of the company’s current strategy and offering versus where it sees the market heading. Its ad formats still based on what worked on the web and will diminish in appeal on mobile where the technology allows for more innovation and sophistication (as we at LeadBolt are offering). It recognized Google has Android, but only 3% of its revenue is derived from it.

So where are Forrester and Facebook seeing the market heading?

Well, Colony titled part of his presentation “Death of the Web” and the magnitude of Facebook’s outlay would indicate that they agree.

Forrester’s prediction is centered around the fact that processing power and storage are growing at faster rates than the network. So in other words, the power of the device is increasing at a faster rate than we are able to utilize through the web. An example cited is Xbox. Its technology is too advanced to access in the cloud so it uses native technology while providing connectivity through the internet (which is different to the web).

Let’s be clear, Internet and web are not the same thing. The web is the current pervasive technology layer connecting us to the internet. Just as other technologies preceded the web, Apps are gearing up to replace it as they allow us to fully utilize the advancements in power and technology. Facebook is clearly betting on this change.

I recently read with great astonishment, that Apple’s website is not optimized for mobile browsing. Not one to believe anything I read, I quickly pulled out my iPhone and low and behold – the irony!

I will admit, while being a little surprised that Apple does not have a mobile optimized site, I am not the least bit surprised when other websites don’t (some of our competitors in the Mobile Advertising market do not). In fact the opposite is true – I am pleasantly surprised when they do.

According to a recent report, only 20% of the FTSE100 corporate websites currently provide support for mobile devices. How can this be acceptable?

Mobiles and smartphones in particular, are quickly becoming our primary content consumption devices. Research shows that accessing the web through mobile devices has consistently doubled every year since 2009 and by 2014, will overtake desktop internet usage. Morgan Stanley predicts that in the next five years more people will connect to the Internet via mobile than on a PC.

So not only are the majority of companies not catering to the habits of their users and not keeping up with changing trends, they are also causing their business to under perform.

Research by Aberdeen Group shows that companies that provide mobile-optimized content outperform those that don’t by 80% in terms of year-over-year increase in web traffic and achieve a 55% greater year-over year increase in the number of repeat visitors. And different research predicts that companies with properly mobile-optimized sites, can increase sales by 12%.

Now days, most companies have adopted digital marketing into their overall marketing strategy – from sending out email newsletters to online search campaigns. However, the market has moved so quickly, that companies without mobile sites, are again behind the trend.

Between 15 – 25% (and in some industries up to 50%) of people read their emails on a mobile device. That means that if you have links to offers or news within those emails, your customers are being taken to sites that are not optimized for the device they are viewing them on.

And mobile search already accounts for over 12% of total search and more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device. Just imagine the lost opportunity that this represents with so few companies able to fully utilize this traffic.

So why have companies been so slow at implementing mobile sites?

Fears of additional cost or the management of multiple sites are often quoted as reasons for not implementing mobile sites. However, mobile sites are not meant to be identical to an existing website. They are meant to be “slimmed down” versions that are easy to navigate on the smaller format while still be a great showcase for the business.

And the cost of implementing these sites can be small, especially relative to the lost opportunity of not having a mobile site. And for companies that don’t have the in-house resources, there are a multitude of companies and software solutions to turn existing sites into a mobile optimized site.

The reality is, with so many companies still struggling to implement effective web strategies, this is just another area of digital marketing where they are going to lag even further behind the market. For those that have begun or have already implemented their mobile strategies – the market will be their oyster.

Last October, LeadBolt unveiled the latest in its innovative new features for advertisers on its mobile ad network, the new Visitor Match tracking function, which provides a method for the tracking of mobile conversions quickly, conveniently and automatically.

This Visitor Match feature was designed to work across a broad spectrum of platforms including the popular Android and iTunes application stores, allowing LeadBolt advertisers to enjoy highly accurate tracking reports on conversion rates and match them directly to the campaign that prompted the click-thru.

Its ability to accurately track conversions even if the device ID or UDID is not present has turned out to be one of its greatest features with Apple’s stance on deprecating the UDID.

When advertisers track traffic through the Visitor Match feature, the proprietary visitor matching function identifies the source of the traffic by matching platforms, devices and a range of other non-personal information to match up the conversion with the original ad impression.

For iOS, Visitor matching is becoming increasingly almost mandatory as the mobile ad community wrestles with problems of marketplace restrictions and emerging updates to privacy policies. Present day proposals to switch to other single ID based solutions, or third party ID stores and likely to be similarly restrictive.  Our new visitor matching algorithms will be leading the way.

The Visitor Match algorithms produce an impressive 98.7% accuracy rate for the server-side and other conversion pixel events as a result of their combined technologies.

We have today made available our iPhone advertiser SDK in a non-UDID version to further assist advertisers in making the change. In this regard, LeadBolt again demonstrates its commitment to providing the best possible customer experience and most innovative high performance mobile advertising platform available today.

The Technical Support Team at LeadBolt prides itself on its fast and thorough responses to all technical queries relating to the integration of LeadBolt ad types. In addition, the next best sources of information made available are the FAQs and Video Tutorials obtainable on the LeadBolt portal.

However, we understand that our Publishers sometimes need answers instantly and to assist them even further, we have released a Technical Q&A Knowledge Based Community available at http://qa.leadboltads.com to provide a suite of immediate answers to their app ad integration related questions.

This Q&A community focuses only on finding answers to technical questions relating to the integration of LeadBolt ad formats to apps. This helpful source gives members the opportunity to ask and answer technical questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers.

Join our new Technical Q&A Knowledge Based Community today and gain access to immediate answers to your technical queries relating to the integration of our ad types to your apps!

AnDevCon III claims itself to be the biggest, info-packed, most practical Android technical conference in the world. The LeadBolt Team will be exhibiting at this highly anticipated event in May and we would love for you to join us there as well!

Use our special discount code – “leadbolt” to save $200 on your conference pass! Simply visit their registration page, get yourself registered and apply this discount code at checkout to get $200 off your attendee pass to the event.

We look forward to meeting you at booth #306! For more information about AnDevCon III, please visit their website -http://www.andevcon.com.

It was fantastic meeting so many enthusiastic gaming professionals at the Game Developers Conference last week. It was an amazing three days with reportedly a record-breaking 22,500 people attending the conference this time around! We had hundreds of people visiting our stand and chatting to the LeadBolt team.

With the LeadBolt Team hard at work at our stand, once again we successfully established valuable new partnerships and alliances which are going to benefit our current publishers and advertisers. If you didn’t make it this time around or missed our stand, I am sure we will see you at the next event venue very soon.

Check out comprehensive coverage of the GDC 2012 event here.

Most internet ad professionals quickly learn to get their heads around the key metrics that drive their industry and get them so much kudos at dinner parties and the like. I am of course talking about cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), and percentage conversions rates.

As the industry has matured, we are able to benchmark performance against the increasing amount of statistics that are now available in the display advertising industry…

Google, in their online report portal, show that the best performing click through rate across all ad sizes 0.26% (that is one click for every 385 people who view the ad). For banner sizes that generally appear in mobile campaigns the click through rates are much lower. Google quotes that 300×250 banners have a 0.1% CTR and  468×60 banners have a 0.05% CTR (1 click for every 2,000 views). Admob also a Google company is on the record as clarifying their click through rate as 0.5 -1% average.

Now what gets me all fired up is that these appalling click through rates are accepted as industry standard. Can you manage organizing a party and only 1 of your 385 guest turned up. You wouldn’t be telling yourself that the invite process produced a great result. Yet, we accept these results for traditional display advertising. It is akin to inviting people to your party via smoke signals when newer and better methods are already available.

Surely we should be doing something smarter?

I’m pleased to note that things are moving and mindsets are moving as well.

It’s common sense. What’s the point of an advertising campaign that broadcasts to people who aren’t particularly interested? The advent of digital advertising was supposed to be able take us away from the mass media wastage of TV and the like, where you blast millions of people with your message and hope it appeals to a handful. It is the interactive nature of digital media that is supposed to help advertisers target, entertain and most importantly, engage the consumer with meaningful and welcome messages.

So where is traditional display advertising going wrong? Click through rates tell us a lot about user interest and engagement. The current rates tell us that this traditional form of advertising is ignoring a major aspect of digital advertising,  the user experience.

“Smart advertising” is the next stage in display advertising. It is integrated in its placement, in that it appears in accordance with user need or action. It is directly addressing the user experience – and the results are dramatic.

Great examples include overlays or functionally integrated app searches(such as our App Wall) that are available when users need them and don’t crowd the app experience as traditional display advertising does. Rich media is coming of age and provides an immersive experience that will further enhance and re-captivate advertising audiences.

At LeadBolt we have been promoting high performance ad types for some time and I see that other innovative mobile advertising companies are getting traction doing the same.

The rewards are there, in this world, savvy advertisers are achieving click through rates that are a 15 – 30 times improvement on Google’s display statistics.

I’m sure the industry can be smarter and users will be the winners.