At some point of time, every mobile app publisher faces the challenge of unit economy management and marketing analytics management. While some publishers have not yet faced the problem (and thus, don’t think much about it), others try using tools like Excel or in-house BI platforms to battle the growing amount of data.
However, either approach usually brings a lot of challenges, takes too much time and can be too complex to handle. This is where Predicted.io steps in to save the day. Below, we’ll talk about the hardships that in-house marketing analytics platforms bring and why Predicted.io is a one-stop solution to your needs. Spoiler: it is that good.
The challenges that app publishers face and the challenges that readymade solutions bring
When you first publish an app, you optimistically expect thousands of users to immediately download it and make never-ending in-app purchases. Or, if you are a seasoned professional, you realistically estimate a certain number of conversions – and that’s okay.
The thing is, as your app and the number of users grow, it becomes harder to monitor and manage unit economy and analytics. It becomes especially relevant when the number of your marketing channels grows. So what many app publishers do is they start with a simple Excel spreadsheet where they try to keep all their data and calculate spendings vs earnings.
What happens next is that the data becomes messier as it grows. So the next most common step is assembling an in-house analytical team. Such a team usually involves marketing managers, data analysts, project managers, QA engineers, and developers – imagine how much time and effort its management requires. And then, many app publishers even develop their own in-house analytical platform in an attempt to regain control over the data.
Not the best decision and here is why.
Why in-house analytical solutions are not your best pals
At a first glance, it seems logical: to create an in-house platform that would 100% correspond to your individual business needs and would be fully managed by your team. However, such platforms are most often designed with short-term goals in mind and as a business grows, they cannot scale as needed. As well, you don’t really need to create your own analytical platform as all processes are pretty much standardized. An in-house custom platform might be of great value if you want to process such unique data as user behavior, A/B testing, or work with content. But if you need a solution to analyze your subscriptions or predict LTV, you will be reinventing the wheel.
The most common challenges of developing in-house analytical platforms are:
- Long development time: it takes on average 6 months minimum to design an efficient in-house solution and to properly process and cleanse all the available data;
- The need for a full-fledged development team: in addition to the analytical team that will be responsible for the data analysis, you will also need to assemble and manage a team of experts who will handle the development and launch of the platform as well as data processing;
- API risks: when the data changes a lot, it impacts pipelines and may even lead to them crumbling;
- The need for constant maintenance and support: once the platform is launched, the work does not end up here. You will need to regularly implement new updates, for example.
- Low scalability: when designing an in-house analytical platform, business owners usually tool it for a specific issue and thus, it becomes incredibly complex to add any new features to it or optimize existing ones.
As you can see, proper design and management of an analytical platform is as complex as design and launch of a mobile app. And instead of focusing on critical things such as advertising and promotion, business owners often find themselves stuck in mundane tasks such as fine-tuning of the platform. In this way, you end up running and maintaining two businesses instead of one
But what about readymade solutions out there in the market?
Okay, the in-house development indeed might be too tiresome and complex. But what about solutions that are already available in the market?
The thing is, most of these solutions are one-size-fits-all. It often happens that a readymade solution offers you one function only while you need 3 or 4 of them to successfully monitor and manage your marketing efforts. As well, there is no guarantee that a ready-made solution will support the needed integrations so you will eventually end up fine-tuning the platform yourself. Plus don’t forget about the cost of such solutions, be it a monthly fee or a fixed price.
How Predicted.io helps marketers and product owners take full control over their product
Predicted.io is a predictive analytics tool that helps subscription-based mobile publishers to scale effectively through smart predictions of key marketing and financial metrics. Our biggest feature and benefit is that we really (yes, really) answer the question:
“How profitable is my app and how can I make things better?”
We do so through two main features: LTV and ROI predictions and Subscription management and analytics. But let’s go into more detail so you fully comprehend what makes Predicted.io a truly innovative solution.
First, we take full care of the platform management and setup, including quick and painless migration from your in-house system on our platform.
In order to design a full-fledged analytical system, you’ll need a lot of time and money. It involves processes such as task assignment, team management and hiring, system testing, logic design, and many more. When you team up with Predicted.io, all you’ll have to do is make business decisions based on the insights we will provide you via the platform – it’s as easy as that. We can also boast an impressively short time needed to set up the platform and to start obtaining first results. And in the world of rapidly changing user behaviors and needs, time is as precious as user data.
Second, we are highly versatile and can offer the most suitable solution based on your app’s type. Throughout our work, we’ve collaborated with publishers of the most various apps so we have a really good understanding of how different apps function and what their unit economy is.
Third, the accuracy of Predicted.io forecasts is up to 90%. This is possible due to teaching our models on Big Data sets obtained from applications from similar domains.
And finally, Predicted.io costs much less than hiring a team of experts – but with less cost come much better results!
When do you need Predicted.io?
Even though Predicted.io is a great tool, it’s not for everyone. Sometimes, a business can do well enough with Excel only (if you just started your app publishing journey) or a business already has an in-house team of experts. But most often, Excel is not enough anymore but you can’t really define the tasks that require a full-fledged team.
So, when should you consider deploying Predicted.io?
Judging by our experience, a business would benefit the most from Predicted.io when:
- You plan on spending $10K+ on advertising
- You perform a lot of A/B tests
- You have many advertising channels
- You need LTV and ROI forecasts
- You need to quickly gather insights from independent external experts
As you can see, Predicted.io will suit you the best if your app has been in the market for a while and you plan on growing its popularity and revenue. In this case, our platform will become your best friend and will help you not only allocate your resources properly but obtain the maximal benefit from them.