The gaming industry is dominated by several well-known giants who get the biggest piece of the pie. The most important question for the rest of the industry is: How large is the remainder? This informative talk by Tal Jacobson, Chief Revenue Officer at Similar Web, dove deep into the mobile app economy, looking past download rankings to truly understand usage, engagement and retention trends. During his talk at Casual Connect Tel Aviv, Tal expressed, “Getting featured has nothing to do with luck. You really need to build a relationship with the guys that choose the games that get featured. Ask them, ‘What do I need to do to get featured?’. There are companies that are built on this.”
SimilarWeb is a leading digital intelligence providers with the ability to track traffic and engagement for any website, mobile website or mobile app. One the key issues plaguing the world of mobile apps is that market measurement has typically be done using app store rankings and/or the number of downloads. Both of these metrics skew the visibility of the market because they don’t show the actually activity of an app rather its momentum in gaining buzz (app store ranking) or its historical downloads which can be misleading (imagine an app from 2013 that fizzled out after a few months might be registering hundreds of millions of downloads as of 2015).
Tal Jacobson is aiming to revolutionize the industry as SimilarWeb powers to a new future by measure the app market based on engagement and usage. At the heart of this disruption is the SimilarWeb app index a measurement that combines the number of current active users for an app with engagement metrics and the number of sessions per user. Think of it like a TV program rating system, the SimilarWeb App Usage Index is a ranking of the screen time that an app can control across its market.
Tal Jacobson, Chief Revenue Officer at SimilarWeb, is responsible for their business development and leads the data operation. To ensure that SimilarWeb has all the data that is requires, he is involved with different techniques, including mergers and acquisitions and very complex partnerships, as well as building hundreds of products and distributing them.
Tal has been in the online business for more than eighteen years and in that time has done many different things in the web and mobile space. Before joining SimilarWeb, he founded Monotizer, providing technology for generating traffic to online retailers. Prior to that, he was VP of Business at McCann Erickson, CEO of Watchitoo, a video collaboration platform, and Director of Business Development at AOL as part of the IM division. He began his executive career at Macromedia Israel as VP of Marketing and Business Development.
Engage with Your Players
To survive in the every increasing more competitive app world Tal recommends focusing on the engagement metrics. “Without question, mobile developers and ad buyers will find the most value in comparing the app download ranking with the app usage ranking. Some games have extremely high download rates but shockingly low engagement rates, or vice versa. When the numbers are side by side, sometimes what you thought you knew (or what you were lead to believe) is surprisingly inaccurate. Our aim is to bring greater business transparency to mobile.” Said Mr. Jacobson.During his career he has experienced great gratification many times. He reiterates, “Solving problems and finding creative solutions is always fulfilling.”
Don’t Do App Marketing Blind, the Data is Out There
SimilarWeb lists the top in-store keyword searches, and top search engine keywords for the apps. Tal reminds us that “The world is a multi-device world. App are discovered by many places and looking just inside the app store is a very short-sighted strategy.” These keywords are essential for knowing how to optimize app page visibility in the app store and for being discoverable on the web. At SimilarWeb all of these metrics are country-specific; what catches on in the United States is different than what British users want or need. SimilarWeb parsed out the data by country so that developers and marketers can see what works where. Users of SimilarWeb can glean a competitive advantage over the competition with this data and give themselves the ability to work with all of the information out there, not just with fuzzy ideas of the ecosystem.
Continuing the Connection to Games
As a child, Tal dreamt of a career playing video games, and today he still enjoys playing video games with his two children. Although his work is not strictly a part of the games industry, he enjoys the connection with it, particularly meeting so many people with many creative ideas.
From Consuming to Engagement
Tal believes the next important trend coming to the games industry is Smart TVs and connectivity between devices. He claims, “TV is shifting from a consuming mode to an engagement mode.”
Comments
