Localytics’ Remarketing product shows Facebook is king for mobile user acquisition

Localytics, an analytics and marketing platform for mobile and web apps, is announcing its new Remarketing product, which helps marketers track users around the Web and deliver personalized ads on platforms like Facebook and other ad networks.

Localytics is among a handful of players in a growing category offering mobile marketing tools — in this case, deep, user-level analytics and app engagement tracking, as well as marketing features such as in-app messaging, personalized emails, personalized app content, and even personalized UI experiences in apps.

This category of marketing tech is growing in volume and velocity in the market. Popular mobile apps offer up extremely granular customer data at scale, which is hugely valuable to publishers and ad networks.  Localytics is tapping into the value of that data through its latest Remarketing product.

“Remarketing” or “retargeting” — following users around the Web and hitting them with relevant ads — is not a novel growth marketing tactic. But doing it well without being “spammy” in an incredibly cutthroat mobile-user acquisition industry is a considerable task.

Localytics customers can now create highly targeted ‘lookalike’ advertising audiences to drive personalized remarketing campaigns with their integrated partners on mobile ad platforms such as Facebook. This means mobile marketers can get ads in front of people who share characteristics with their current app users (based on thousands of behavioral attributes).

Marketers can attribute performance metrics such as engagement and conversion back to remarketing campaigns with a high degree of accuracy — Localytics is currently the only mobile marketing platform to be a Mobile Measurement partner in Facebook’s marketing partner program.

This is particularly relevant given Facebook’s dominance in mobile user acquisition.

According to VB Insight’s latest report on mobile user acquisition, Facebook is outpacing every other available platform in user acquisition (UA), and not by a little. Mobile publishers say that Facebook is 7X better at UA than its closest rivals (there’s a reason Facebook earnings were up by 40 percent in the last quarter, and why about 75 percent of its revenue is from mobile).

Zipcar, one of the customers participating in Localytic’s beta of the Remarketing product, noticed that over 50 percent of its reservations took place within the app this past year, so calling mobile user acquisition and retention important to ifs long-term success is a serious understatement.

Zipcar is using Localytics to help run highly successful UA campaigns on Facebook. With Localytics attribution dashboards, Zipcar can see all of its campaign data in one place, regardless of source. It also allows Zipcar to connect its users’ post-download activity back to the campaign source for an accurate picture of ROI from each UA source.

It sounds like a lot of marketing-speak, but the results speak for themselves. Zipcar UA campaigns through Remarketing increased app downloads 15 percent and increased app engagement from those new users by 30 percent. This means the tool works at approaching the modern marketing silver bullet — by achieving peak relevance.

With products like Remarketing available to app marketers, mobile marketing companies will continue to drive more value across the app life cycle by deepening engagement with active users, winning back lost users, and acquiring valuable new users.