Five things you need to know about measurement of social app marketing

1. Page view can be completely irrelevant

Almost all social gaming apps and most interactive non-gaming social apps in China and throughout the world use flash technologies, meaning the whole social app is in one stand-alone flash file or a series of related Flash files. 

All the interactions within the app, be it between user and the app or between users, are achieved within the flash files, which means users do not need to load the webpage again for new contents/functions or go from one page to another throughout the process of their usage of the social app. This makes page view completely irrelevant as a measurement yardstick.

2. Unique visitor IPs can be misleading too

When it comes to social gaming or social apps, users do not necessarily need to come to play them by themselves in order to know their existence and therefore get the marketing messages embedded in them.

For example, during Magnum’s latest social app campaign “Magnum Happy Party” on KaiXin001, users can produce and then send their Magnum ice-cream bars as virtual gifts to their friends also on the social network, even if the latter have not installed the gaming app at all. Those users will see branded marketing messages from their friends both in their internal mailbox and on their and their friends’ activity walls. Simple unique visitor IP counting is bound to miss this key while highly effective viral marketing part of the campaign.

3. Installation number alone is key, but still not enough

One of the solidest figures to measure the success of social app advertising is of course the installation number, meaning how many people have installed the ad-sponsored social app.

However, due to the same logic explained above regarding tracking unique visitor IPs of the campaign, installation number alone is not enough also because it completely fails to tell the marketers lots of golden insights which can be and can only be acquired by tracking and then analyzing data about how users have interacted with marketing elements and messages within the game play or the social app setup.

4. The key is to capture the Interaction and viral parts

The key targets to measure and analyze are the interaction part and viral part of a social app campaign. Interaction refers to how exactly the marketing messages embedded within the app are being perceived and then absorbed by users. 

Viral part refers to how exactly users do after they experience and interact with those marketing messages. Do they like it so much as to share it with their friends, maybe even invite or challenge their friends to play together with them? Tracking means need to be in place to record such critical interactive and viral data.

5. Plan ahead

Before you are able to record and track any data, you really need to know what kind of data can and should be captured for any given social app campaign. Otherwise, you will not even know what you have missed.

It usually takes a marketing partner that truly understands how social apps work in general and how exactly the proposed social ad app will be working to do such planning right. 

However, this is crucial. If such planning is not done before a campaign or done appropriately, those key interactive and viral data will by no means be recorded by using the traditional online campaign tracking methods and you will lose the chance to see the truth forever as the campaign unfolds itself.