Mobile Ad Fraud Bots & Inefficient Marketing Campaigns

What is up AppNation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com and welcome to another amazing AppMasters virtual summit. And today I've got an awesome guest talking all about attribution. And I know a lot of the questions that I get from attribution is, "Hey, is this user that I'm spending on search ads, on Facebook ads, on Instagram stories, wherever the next marketing channel is going to be, what are they doing afterwards?" So many times we look at just the cost per install and not enough about cost per actual subscriber or person that's actually going to become a customer. So, I brought on today's guest to talk all about that. I'm super excited to have him on. His name is Michael Paxman. He is the Adjust product communication lead. Drawing on years of experience from account management and product research, Michael introduces the latest in attribution news and data-focused marketing strategies through his writing

and event speaking. So, without further ado, Michael, welcome to the summit. Thank you very much, Steve. Super excited to be here and um you could not have kicked it off better because I too have quite a visceral reaction when people say that they're still just looking at number of installs. So, I think we have a lot of common ground and a lot of stuff to cover today. So, I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait. wait, too. So, the cool thing about Zoom, Michael, if you need to share some stuff, feel free to do that. But, let's start off with a bang. Let's start off with the strategy. If you can give us a micro strategy cuz I like talking about macro and micro, but if you can get talk about a strategy that's working for maybe some of your clients without naming the clients, maybe something tactical that our audience can use.

Okay. This is really small but uh and it seems like such an obvious thing to do, but I see players of all sizes not doing it. Um if you're I I'll keep this real honest. If you're paying for attribution and you've set it up properly, right? You're going to be getting more data points than you can really possibly imagine. If something looks inefficient act on it. And even in even in mobile first super new companies, we see people saying, "Well, our marketing strategy changes every 3 months."

And I'm like, "Okay, cool. Well, that might work, but you also may end up with 2 months and 3 weeks of data showing you that that's not the right way." And I think and I think yes, later on we might get a bit into the future of the market, but I do think at this stage with the with the way prices are going up in on networks and so on, you cannot act that way anymore. The days of like buying a month's worth of ads or or you know, that let's look at our numbers at the end of the month like it's not good it's kind of not good enough anymore. And like you were saying, right? Like you've got to look at the value of these users and are they worth what I'm spending? And if you only do that once a month, I would hate to be in your office for the other 28 days or whatever it is, you know, because you're like you're turning a blind eye to data that you are paying for. So, you're almost doubling down on

your losses. And I really kind of apologize to everyone who's watching who's like, "Yeah, duh." But you'd be horrified at the number of companies. So, I won't say who, but definitely like really get into that data, understand how you want it visualized, understand where the where the kind of red flags are, and then act on those. I like it. Seems super simple like like my first step for sure. Do you have a best practice on how long we should wait, how much we should be spending, what's a good best practice to be like, "That's enough data significance for us to make a decision?"

Yeah, so with a new app, obviously everything's kind of up in the air and you won't really know for I would say a week at the minimum. And even then, you've got to take into account seasonality, competitors, things like this. So, it's all a little bit subjective. I'm going to give you like the kind of slightly weaselly sneaky out of the question answer and say it's going to be different for every app. But one very common strategy is to look at what you would expect a typical user's life cycle to be. So, if you're like, you know, a little if you're a hyper casual game, then you probably want to do that analysis relatively early because the average life cycle and the average single session usage of a of a user is pretty short. If you're selling houses, you need to wait for full a full rotation to understand what a a good user's life cycle looks like before you can really make drastic changes. Um so,

yeah, if you're a new app to the market, yeah, you've got to like maybe hop on the roller coaster and and go with it. But, I do think once you have once you understand what a good user is, you can start to understand what a good campaign is. And once you have both of those, you really have That's it. Like, that's all the tools you really we need to do relatively smart marketing in 2019. So, I would say, yeah, sit tight at the start, but once you know what you're looking for, start looking for it. Yeah, if I can sneak in one last thing, I want to talk about bots. Um we did another acquisition which we announced at the start of this year for Unbotify, a Tel Aviv-based um current very startup that um has built an SDK that will tell us or tell them at that point now us um if the interaction on the device itself is human or not, right? Now, it is insanely complicated, and I absolutely cannot explain it all to you uh in one

sit down. But, if we look at things like the pressure, the timing, um the the the movement of the phone, and so on, right? To ask the question, is this a user? Now, when we acquired them, we did that to protect ad spend, right? So, basically, were people getting a bot to install the app and maybe do an action in the app, right? Cuz then we could tell the user, "Hey, uh sorry, our client rather, "Oh, this user is a bot, right? You may want to make an action on that."

Then, once we got hold of Unbotify's database and looked at it, we were like, "Oh, wow, this it's totally like tip of the iceberg. The amount of abuse that goes on in apps by bots is unreal. It is unreal. You look at gaming, right? You go into a PvP game and you just get the you get wiped instantly by a person who's making the perfect moves, that is a bot and that is a horrendous user experience, right? Another really good example of this is like concert tickets or Yeezys, right? If you want to buy Yeezys now, you have to like uh you probably have to send them like your your password and you're like your uh you know, your social security number or something. But on apps, when was the last time you did a CAPTCHA on an app?

When was the last time you proved that you're a not a bot on an app? They don't exist. And bots have been like a decade plus. You could uh go, you could pay a bot to buy tickets for events that you could then scalp, right? This is not a new thing, but for some reason, it seems like some people feel like all of the bot developers got together and said, all right guys, we've made millions of dollars robbing websites, but we're going to leave apps alone. It is unreal how bad it is.

And on Botify, and I I don't want to go into the whole sales spiel here, but on Botify now, we can finally protect our clients acquisition-wise of users and and advertising, but also all the way through the um through the experience. And just because I had this question yesterday, I think it's a really good question. Do we test the user every single time? The answer is yes, because sometimes people will play a game for a couple of days and be like, I'm going to get a bot to win for me.

We'll catch them. And I just think that's a really cool ex- I think it's a really good example of like how the I feel this market is maturing and like people are taking now that we've kind of dealt with click spam and dealt with all these other things, it is really time to go deep and like fix issues that are that I I can't give you any numbers, I'm not allowed to, but like it's so much worse than you think it is. Like I don't I can't even give you a percentage. A lot of shopping apps out there have bots buying things from them.

Wow. Just statistically. Yeah. That's amazing. I had no idea. And I had no idea people would actually get a bot to finish a game for them. Exactly. But when like this is the thing, when was the last time an app asked you to prove that you're human? Yeah. Right? Yeah. They People seem to just think, "Oh, on a computer, you can get a bot to you have to like fill in the the capture or like on Google you have to like press which box has a traffic light in it." And you never know if it's a bot. But then on on mobile, like no one is being tested and bot developers are extremely smart people. So, the next time you get your like you get destroyed in a game because like, you know, they have a 100% aim or whatever, just let me know and I'll talk to the app. Yeah, and I'll get rid of those bots.

I love it. Michael, that's awesome. Well, Michael, the website for you guys listening is adjust.com. Look, they are the all-in-one solution. They got the attribution, they got the analytics that's going to give you all the data that you need to make intelligent decisions. Michael, do you want to end with anything else that you want to add about Adjust? Oh, no, I think you nailed it with that description. Thanks. Um just yeah, thanks for having me and um I'm available. You can Google my name on LinkedIn or whatever. Um always happy to talk to people uh if they have any problems or any questions. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, we'll link up your name with your LinkedIn profile so people can easily adjust Yeah, adjust it there. Well, but once again, the website is adjust adjust.com. Go check them out. Let them know you heard it on this very interview. Michael, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. Thanks for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure. Thank you all for watching. I'll see you on the next interview. All right, guys. That was just a snippet from the full interview from the full 30-minute interview that we have in store for you. And this is just one of the 10 amazing speakers that we have in store for you for our next AppMasters virtual summit where we've rounded up 10 awesome experts to really reveal the hacks, the growth hacks that they've used to increase downloads, retention, and monetization. Three pillars of a successful app business. The virtual summit is happening August 5th to the

16th, one speaker, one day, available to you for absolutely free. Just go to appmasters.com/summit and to all the future people who are watching this, if you go to that website appmasters.com/summit, you'll be able to access all our archives, no matter how many virtual summits we've actually done, you'll be able to access all of that just by going to appmasters.com/summit. And I'll see you on the next video. Peace. Check out the videos on the side.

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