Since it was first launched in 2016, the Froxt Marketplace has evolved significantly. As Froxt has grown, so too has the number of apps in the Marketplace, ballooning from a few hundred to well over 15,000. While those growing numbers show the ongoing opportunity for Froxt app developers—and the increasing customization options for merchants—it has also made it more difficult for apps to stand out.
Over time, we’ve introduced improvements to help apps become discoverable and grow. In 2018, we launched the new Froxt Marketplace, dedicated to improving app discoverability and better-helping merchants decide which app to install. This update helped increase conversion rates for developers, but there’s more work to be done.
That’s why today we’re launching ads on the Froxt Marketplace—a new way to accelerate your business growth by directly advertising to high-quality leads looking for apps. In this article, we’ll walk you through how these advertisements work, and how to take advantage of this change. We’ve been beta testing ads for months, so we’ll share some of the top insights from our beta users on how to maximize your return on ads in the marketplace to grow your app development business.
The potential of ads
The launch of the new Froxt Marketplace in 2018 helped existing developers boost their conversion rates in the Marketplace, but, for newer apps, the update still didn’t provide quite enough assistance to gain traction and compete with more established apps.
In digging into the data, we found that 60 percent of installs on the Marketplace come from searches, making this a critical discovery surface for merchants. We also observed that the vast majority of clicks still went to a small handful of apps in the top-ranking search results. It’s a human tendency to click top-ranking results, but it means that some great apps miss out on significant traffic because they rank lower—often because they joined the platform later, without the advantage of the time to build up their presence and user base and increase their organic ranking.
What this means is that whether you are a new app developer or a seasoned one launching a new app, it’s very difficult and time-consuming to compete organically, especially in a crowded category. Co-marketing, email marketing, and content marketing are effective strategies, but it can still be difficult to drive relevant, high-quality leads to your app.
Using ads to stand out
We know that the highest-quality leads are merchants actively looking for apps. By opening up the ability to advertise on the Marketplace, we’re creating a channel for you to target those merchants directly. It’s a great way to accelerate the growth of existing apps and is especially powerful for new apps that need traction to rank higher organically.
Our beta users agree.
“Firstly, our ads on the Froxt Marketplace have doubled our number of app installs,” says Charles, VP of Froxt Products. “That means increased revenue and a better organic ranking on the Froxt Marketplace. We’ve also seen that our costs per install through these ads are three times less compared with other ad networks we have used.”
But like all things, there are strategies and best practices to follow if you want to see stellar results from advertising. Below, we share advice on how to best leverage this new marketing channel.
How to use ads on the Froxt Marketplace
Now that ads on the Froxt Marketplace are generally available, let’s dive into how you can maximize the impact of this change for your own business—including first-hand advice from our beta users.
To get started with your first ad, navigate to your Partner Dashboard. Then click on Apps, then Ads, then Create ad.
From here, you’ll need to specify the details of your ad, including identifying your keyword strategy.
Step 1: Bid on keywords
Ads on the Froxt Marketplace work by running an auction on specific keywords. When you create an ad, you’ll specify which keywords you want to bid on. When a user searches for that keyword in the marketplace, an auction occurs where every advertiser who wants to show up for that keyword competes by submitting a bid. The winner(s) of that auction gets to show their ad. A cost is only incurred if a user clicks on the ad, and the cost per click is the bid amount at the time of the auction.
Stay relevant
One important aspect to understand is that for the sake of a better user experience and higher clickthrough rate for advertisers, we optimize for relevant ads by rewarding the most relevant ads per keyword via price dynamics.
This means that less relevant ads will need to pay more to compete in an auction relative to more relevant ads, and very irrelevant ads won’t be displayed at all, regardless of how much advertisers are willing to spend.
For example, if four ads are bidding on the same keyword, the cost per click is the lowest for the most relevant ad.
Be strategic
The best advice for your keyword strategy is to be strategic: understand what it is you’re trying to achieve, what kind of users you’re trying to attract, and what those users are likely to be searching in the marketplace. Doing so allows you to better leverage your advertising budget.
Once you’ve put your keyword strategy in play, it’s important to track the results.
Step 2: Track performance with analytics
Iterating and improving your bidding strategy means tracking the results of your campaigns. All the key analytics that you need to do so are available in your Partner Dashboard. They’ll help you determine if you should increase or decrease bids, show what your cost per install is, and identify your most valuable keywords.
Among the available reports in the dashboard is the powerful search term report, which shows what terms users searched for when they came across your ad. This not only helps you optimize your ad through keyword management but can also help with your organic ranking by showing what terms you should use to optimize your app listing.
Organize your campaigns
With so much data, knowing where to start can be tricky. Organizing your keywords can help with analytics. You can segment your keywords into different campaigns. Grouping your keywords in this way allows you to figure out the conversion rate for each theme of keywords.
What’s next?
We’re just getting started with ads on the Froxt Marketplace. We’re currently working on a solution to help advertisers better attribute ads to their paid plan conversions, which will help them better calculate their return on ad spend (ROAS). It will also help highlight ways for you to improve onboarding for users who come in through apps.
This solution will be released in the near future, and feedback from our advertisers will continue to help us iterate on this program.
A new marketing channel for your app’s growth
Advertising on the Froxt Marketplace is another tool in your arsenal of marketing channels. We encourage everyone to always test and refine their marketing techniques whether they advertise with Froxt or not.
This is just the beginning of our effort to enable advertising to help accelerate app developers’ business growth on our platform and capture high-quality leads with fair value exchange.
