The Value of the Long Term Value of App Users

The long-term value of mobile gamers is the most meaningful metric a developer can employ to determine if your app has real profitability. It is a game changing metric for those that are paying attention. Standard model metrics that determine the overall profitability of your app that have been used up until this point fail to take into account future revenue. From a business stand point this has not always been a go-to technique, as it feels like counting your chickens before they are hatched. But the industry has had a long enough time-line now that future revenues are a reliable metric. As with anything new and shiny in an industry, paying attention to this metric can have profound effects on your income.

To take advantage of this metric we first have to figure out how to calculate it. To do this you first calculate three metrics that more than likely you are probably already obsessed with.

Monetization (how much cash revenue you are pulling in). This is determined mainly by calculating three things: The amount of revenue each user will bring in, the amount of revenue that paid users bring in, and the average daily revenue of each active user. This may seem like a lot of calculation of different overlapping areas of revenue but trust me this number is literally gold.

• Retention (people coming back to your app). You get this metric by breaking it down into three areas just like we do with Monetization. The first is how often people come back to your game, be-it daily, weekly, or longer. 

• The second is how many people return to the game overall, and the third is how long they stay logged into the app. (the last is very important for targeted ad revenue which we will get into later).

• Vectoring (how viral your app is). Much like the CDC tracks the path of an outbreak of the flu, you can track the viral potential of your app by calculating the ephemeral quantity of free users that “infected” users will bring in with word of mouth and personal interaction media.

Congratulations! With these macro-metrics in hand you can determine what the LTV of your app users are. You have gained a magic ability that is much sought after in the business world. You can see the future!

Now before you plotting to take over the world there are a few things you need to do first to get the most out of your newfound super powers. The biggest thing and probably the elephant in the room is targeted marketing. Once you know how many customers you will retain over a quarter you can stop wasting advertising dollars on customers you know wont be coming back and focus them like a precision laser at those customers you are going to retain. For app developers the correct balancing act of how much advertising dollars to spend and where is the life and death difference between success and the herd.

With the metrics you now have you can also see where you lose retention of your customers. If everyone is leaving your app after 4 months of regular play, then you now know where your app needs improvement or alteration. You can objectively address the use of your app and make targeted changes to keep your audience coming back for more. The more they come back the better the rest of your metrics will do as a byproduct. Which as we all know is the name of the app developing game.

There are potentially dozens of ways that this metric can help the app developer in ways that standard model metrics cant begin to touch. I only described some of the big umbrella effects that are readily apparent. If you want to maximize your income potential then any information is power when planning for the future. Calculating the LTV of your users is an iceberg disguised as a sundae cone and it can mean the difference between following your own dreams in creating a real foothold in the industry or sinking like the Titanic.


Other posts that might be of interest:
Are Apps Really Money Makers

Using Yahoo Answers for Free Advertising and Backlinks

One of the main activities of any blog or website is, wherever possible, to take advantage of free targeted traffic; this is why webmasters spend so much time trying to find ways of improving their position in the Google search results. However, there is one very simple method of getting free traffic which is often overlooked by webmasters: Yahoo Answers. The bottom line is that Yahoo Answers is the largest community of knowledge sharing on the Web and getting some of this huge audience interested in your products or services can yield huge benefits.

Not only is Yahoo Answers a great method of generating targeted traffic, it is also a terrific source of free advertising. If you add this free publicity technique to your marketing strategies, you will soon discover how incredibly powerful it is.

One of the key aspects of this strategy is that it is all about participation; so, the first step you need to take is to sign up (by visiting answers.yahoo.com) and to complete your profile, adding as much information to it as you are happy to share. It is also a good idea to upload an avatar; probably not your logo; perhaps your photo; or some other friendly graphic associated with your brand.

Next, you need to familiarize yourself with the Yahoo Answers platform: browse through the categories of question which are relevant to your niche; and decide which types of question you are interested in answering.

Before you begin to answer any questions, however, you should have a clear idea of what you want to promote. This way you can home in on those topics that will be relevant to the site you want to promote via Yahoo Answers.

Your first public activity will be to answer lots and lots of questions; try and aim for the maximum allowed, which is twenty questions per day. The reason for this is that Yahoo operate a system of points and levels: when you sign up, you are a level one user and Yahoo allocates you 100 points; in order to reach level 2, you need 250 points; and, until you reach level 2, you will not be able to include backlinks in your answers.

You are assigned 2 points for every question you answer; so, if you answer the maximum of 20 questions, you will earn 40 points daily; and, in four days, you will have reached level 2 status. However, if any of your answers is picked as the best answer, you are awarded an extra 10 points; and also, every time you yourself vote for answer, you are awarded an extra point. So, as you can see, achieving level 2 status is not a tall order, and it is definitely worth the effort.

Once you have reached level 2, whenever you reply to a question, you have the possibility of including a website link in the "Source" box accompanying your answer. This is an easy way to get some free advertising and to encourage visitors to find more information on the subject discussed in the question.

Even after you have reached the coveted level 2, it is still beneficial to supply the best answers you can. Answers which are picked as best answers will achieve a higher rating in the Yahoo search results and will inevitably bring more traffic to your website or to your affiliate offer. So spend some time studying those answers, which have been picked as best answers and try to analyze what made them appeal to the person asking the question.

Due to the large number of people who may reply to questions, it is also important to be the quickest to respond to questions, which are still open for answer. You should also do your best to answer each question as thoroughly as possible and be sure to address the person who sent the question by his or her first name (if possible). This will increase your chances of being chosen as provider of the best answer.

Yahoo Answers includes a spell checker; so be sure to use it whenever possible to minimize errors; or type your answer in Microsoft Word, check the grammar there and copy and paste into Yahoo Answers when you are happy with it. Take your time to get it right; do not forget that your ultimate goal is to be selected as the best answer.

Once you are up and running with Yahoo Answers, it simply becomes a question of optimizing your efforts to ensure you get the best results possible.  Here are the key points you should keep in mind.

• When choosing which questions to answer, look for recently posted questions with either no answers or only one or two.
• Ensure that the URL you post in the source box contains the topic mentioned in the question: for example, if the question was about "acne cures", your URL might be something like "mysite.com/acne-cures.html".
• Try to include your niche keyword within the body of your answer; this is useful for search engine optimization.
• You can even include a backlink within the body of the answer (using an HTML a tag with an href attribute); but do this sparingly and make sure that it appears totally relevant to the topic being discussed.

Compared with many advertising techniques, using Yahoo Answers may seem like hard work. However, the rewards can be huge: it is not only the Yahoo search engine, which will pick up your answers (and links). Google can also index your answers; so be sure to answer as many questions as you can every day.