JetLib News

App developers are looking for ways to gain users and keep them in the fold through actionable data. There are a variety of ways to do this and several startups have popped up in the last couple of years to focus on particular elements of analytics, advertising, marketing and engagement layers. To this point most of these startups are focusing only on one or two of these problems.

Analytics and engagement startup Apsalar wants to change that. The company has been working all summer on products for analyzing data, engaging users across app platforms, optimizing the time spent in apps and helping developers monetize their users. It is a holistic approach that none of the other competitors have fully grasped yet.

What Apsalar Is Trying To Do

To understand Apsalar, you have to understand the ecosystem in which it is playing. The categories fit into the survey that Appcelerator and IDC released yesterday: reach, engagement, loyalty and monetization. Apsalar, and most of the other analytics/marketing tools available to mobile developers right now, focuses on the latter three categories while reach is more focused on developer frameworks and integrated developer environments (IDEs) like Appcelerator and Sencha.

The principle of re-engagement is what Apsalar is pinning its product offering on. It calls the environment it works in “mobile engagement management” (MEM) and is similar to what analytics company Flurry, likely Apsalar’s closest competitor, does with its analytics and AppCircle Re-Engagement tool. Localytics uses its data to help premium publishers push notifications to readers. Socialize and BeInToo have engagement layers based on social and gamification layers. To a certain extent, Apsalar is playing in all of these realms.

This is the way Apsalar CEO Michael Oiknine described Apsalar’s MEM offerings; ” … [It] bridges the gap between analytics and behavioral targeting by offering best-in-class analytics paired with an action engine that provides developers and publishers with concrete steps to take in their quest for greater engagement, retention, and revenue.”

The way Apsalar does that is by taking a “lifecycle management” approach. This approach is similar to what PlayHaven does with its real-time marketing tool for games and its engagement dashboard. Apsalar provides a ways and means to reach a user anywhere in the mobile ecosystem, either in the target application, another app from that publisher or a completely separate app that is tied to Apsalar through its partnership with advertising networks.

Apsalar calls this “re-engagement” and is based on segmenting the user base on common use behavior. Think of it as in-app dynamic targeting with the intent on maximizing the reach of the app by re-targeting a user that has a certain pattern of behavior, thus making them candidates for Apsalar’s notifications and messages across apps. The data from a user in one app informs the decisions that Apsalar can help make in another app.

The product of this approach is Apsalar’s integrated product suite that has three main components: analyze, optimize and monetize. Let’s take a closer look.

Three Pillars: Analyze, Optimize, Monetize

Analyze: Apsalar takes a sophisticated approach to data analytics. It is reminiscent of Sun Tzu’s Art Of War; “The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here is how Oiknine describes Apsalar’s approach to analytics; “The first imperative is to understand the lay of the land. Indeed, publishers must understand and segment their users. They need to answer the “how, why and what” questions from the data they collect. Ask themselves: How is my app doing? Why is it performing well or poorly in certain areas and with some type of users? And, what can be done to improve the user experience?”

Oiknine correctly identifies that “analytics are a means to an end,” not the end unto themselves. That leads us to the next points.

Optimize: Apsalar uses its customizable conversion funnels and flexible cohort analysis to then target the user behavior in such as way that the platform can then find them in a different app and bring them back to the fold with personalized messaging. This is the crux of “re-engagement.” This type of behavior analytics is akin to predictive analytics that a company like Sonamine does with its segmented behavioral analysis. Apsalar then takes the PlayHaven approach to acting upon this granular data.

Monetize: None of this means anything if nobody is getting paid in the end. “This is where the logic of engagement fades to allow a logic of conversion to come to the front,” Oiknine said. Basically, add up all the different points of integration mentioned above with the ability to find a user almost anywhere in the app ecosystem and you have a higher probability of converting that user behavior in to tangible dollars.

There is more coming from Apsalar in the first quarter of 2012. As of yet, this is one of the most comprehensive analytics and engagement platforms on the market. Publishers: are you likely to use or give it a spin? Let us know what you think about Apsalar’s approach in the comments.

Buffer, an app that stacks up your tweets and automatically publishes them at the best times for engagement, just launched its free Android app. The app allows you to add any Web page to your Buffer, which you can then edit, manage and view analytics. It supports multiple accounts, which you can navigate with a swipe.

Buffer analyzes social data and automatically publishes your updates at the times when most of your followers are awake and clicking. This summer, Buffer studied its user data and found that it increases clicks on Twitter links by 200% and doubles the amount of retweets.

Tweet scheduling has been shown to increase activity on shared content, but knowing when to schedule is a challenge. Buffer eliminates that guesswork by finding the best timing itself. You can just add your tweet to your Buffer and forget about it.

The Buffer team says its working on Buffer for iOS next. In the meantime, there’s an email workaround for adding links to Buffer. It’s also testing Buffer for Facebook.

Grab Buffer from the Android Market or by scanning the QR code here:

Do you schedule your social Web updates, or just post when you feel like it?

Buffer, an app that stacks up your tweets and automatically publishes them at the best times for engagement, just launched its free Android app. The app allows you to add any Web page to your Buffer, which you can then edit, manage and view analytics. It supports multiple accounts, which you can navigate with a swipe.

Buffer analyzes social data and automatically publishes your updates at the times when most of your followers are awake and clicking. This summer, Buffer studied its user data and found that it increases clicks on Twitter links by 200% and doubles the amount of retweets.

Tweet scheduling has been shown to increase activity on shared content, but knowing when to schedule is a challenge. Buffer eliminates that guesswork by finding the best timing itself. You can just add your tweet to your Buffer and forget about it.

The Buffer team says its working on Buffer for iOS next. In the meantime, there’s an email workaround for adding links to Buffer. It’s also testing Buffer for Facebook.

Grab Buffer from the Android Market or by scanning the QR code here:

Do you schedule your social Web updates, or just post when you feel like it?

Men outnumber women in the tech industry. This isn’t particularly newsworthy, although it continues to be quite disheartening.

Figures released today from web monitoring company Royal Pingdom highlight another repercussion of the skewed gender representation in tech – namely, the overwhelming predominance of male visitors to technology blogs.

Royal Pingdom looked a number of popular tech blogs, including ReadWriteWeb, and examined the ratio of male to female site visitors by using demographics data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Of the popular blogs that Royal Pingdom examined, only Mashable comes anywhere close to a 50-50 split between male and female visitors. Sites like Techmeme and Slashdot have closer to 90% male visitors. About 72% of ReadWriteWeb’s visitors, according to Royal Pingdom’s stats, are male.

In a survey from last summer, comScore found that women outnumber men on social networking sites and tend to spend more time on those sites as well. But that interest and engagement hasn’t seemed to spill over into the tech blogosphere.

What contributes to the difference? Is it a reflection of the tech industry at large? Is it the content on the sites? The authors’ gender? The editorial voice or tone? Is it the community that surrounds it?

Have you ever been using Facebook and randomly found that you were suddenly unable to do some very basic thing, like update your status? Or comment on and “like” your friends’ statuses? Maybe the design suddenly changed slightly and you were the only one seeing it?

Don’t worry, Facebook is a website and websites aren’t haunted, so there’s nothing supernatural at play. Rather, it could be that someone at Facebook is intentionally messing with you to see how you react…but in the end, it’s all for a better user experience.

Facebook product designer Adam Mosseri spoke earlier this week at a Design Drink Up at Yelp headquarters about how “design is ‘informed’ by data, and not the sole driver.” During his talk, Mosseri discussed a number of different ways that the world’s largest social network slightly tweaks certain settings for a small percentage of its users. The funny thing about having more than 600 million users, of course, is that even just 1% means 6 million people.

According to Mosseri, 2010 was a year of design focused on increasing user engagement. They knew that the number of friends a user had was related to their engagement with the site, but what other factors were driving this engagement?

To find out, Facebook’s design team began running different studies. One, informally dubbed the “Yo Momma” study, consisted of interviewing new mothers about their experience on Facebook. Just your garden variety user study, right? Another study, however, turned off the ability to like or comment on friends’ status updates for a “small percent of users.” That small percent accounted for “several million” users, said Mosseri.

Facebook ran the study for two weeks, before finally ending it early because users were getting so annoyed at their situation. The company found that the “bug” caused a 7% drop in sessions and a 10% drop in time on the site for affected users. These users did, however, find a way of expressing their grievances.

So, the next time something goes completely awry with Facebook and everyone looks at you like you’re crazy, worry not – it might not be you, your computer or the wires in-between. It might just be the friendly folks over at Facebook seeing how you react so they can try to make things better.