Like many things in life, mobile marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

But too many Southeast Asian companies with mobile apps learned this the hard way. They spent millions generating installs, yet most of these installs didn’t result in usage or revenue.

Fortunately, today, Asian mobile marketers have access to more data points which, enable them to make smarter app install marketing decisions. Instead of focusing on installs, mobile marketers can instead analyse PIE or post-install events, the actions that users take after they install an app.

A focus on profitable users, and how to best acquire and recruit them

Post-install events can include user registration, usage metrics like pages viewed and time spent, levels reached, content views, making in-app purchases and buying products or services from within the app.

Then, by comparing PIE of users who generate revenue with the rest of their install base, mobile marketers are able to determine what makes a profitable user, and how best to recruit them.

For most mobile marketers, the PIE you’ll monitor will be your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). So for an e-commerce app, you’ll focus on user acquisition costs vs. the number and size of transactions generated and the Return on Investment (ROI). And for an entertainment app, you might look at the revenue generated from the first movie streamed and how quickly this revenue was generated.

Once an app marketing team has determined the post-install events to monitor based on their analysis of higher revenue users and their PIE, the next step is to assign a value to these events. This value might be the Rupiah value of a shopping cart purchase, the number of items purchased or even the number of visits or time-spent within a given period of time. Whatever the PIE selected, they will be the ones which correlate with high revenue app usage.

For some apps, the PIE which most closely correlate with high revenue users aren’t necessarily revenue-generating events. For example, for one e-commerce app, the number of visits to the app was the PIE used by the company and not the value of products bought or even the number of items placed in the shopping cart. Therefore it’s necessary to have data scientists run the numbers to make sure that the PIE selected are really the best ones for each app. Fortunately, we have many capable and qualified data scientists in Southeast Asia to run sophisticated mobile marketing optimization utilizing PIE analysis.

What is your acquisition cost?

Once the PIE(s) and values have been determined, it’s time for the app marketers to analyse all user acquisition campaigns according to the PIE to determine the relative profitability of each source. Some sources might be delivering few users, but those users might be very profitable, while other sources might be delivering many unprofitable users. By using PIE to determine user acquisition tactics and spending, app marketers can be sure to optimize their campaigns to deliver profitable users.

As with everything in digital marketing, app marketers need to constantly test the performance of their PIEs across mobile user acquisition channels because seasonality, competition and market dynamics could change the performance of a specific PIE in some channels.

In the race for users, mobile marketing has been a little chaotic over the last few years. Now, it’s time to turn to data science in order to bring more methodology to how app marketers allocate their marketing budgets and acquire new users. Post-install events analysis is a proven method for making order out of the chaos of mobile marketing in Southeast Asia while bringing revenue-driven discipline to mobile user acquisition.