Mobile App Engagement: Stop Them from Dropping with App Retargeting

Updated on September 26, 2023

Criteo data shows that almost half (49%) of app users abandon an app after one day.

Yet, retailers who promote their apps see a 30% year-over-year increase in the share of in-app transactions.

Not surprisingly, fully engaged customers provide a 23% boost to profitability compared to average ones. This is important in an era when 40% of a company’s business is driven by 40% of a company’s business is driven by 8 percent of visitors – returning customers.

But app retargeting can drive engagement and conversations that help stop users from abandoning your app.

Ultimate Guide to Retargeting

Learn Everything You Need to Know About Retargeting.

What is App Retargeting?

Your mobile app marketing strategy largely remains dependent on one thing: getting people to actually use your app. The challenge? High abandonment rates for app users after initial installs and getting users to come back.

App retargeting can help. By targeting people who have downloaded your app across devices, browsers, apps, and social media channels and prompting them to engage with your app again, you can ensure that usage remains steady. For retailers and brands, that’s critical because apps are increasingly driving conversions.

App Retargeting in APAC: Personalized, Engaging, and Dynamic

The highest rates of retargeting are seen in APAC, whose share of global conversions increased by 12% in the second half of 2019. The second half of 2019 also showed a 20% increase in the number of apps running retargeting campaigns compared to H1.

App retargeting has two advantages. You’ll be able to target users who may have opted out of push notifications and emails and high-quality users who are most likely to convert and engage across the app.

Here’s what app retargeting can do for your app re-engagement program:

  • Personalized Recommendations. App retargeting taps into a consumer data set to understand each user’s previous behavior. This allows marketers to deliver personalized recommendations in each ad.
  • Viewability & Engagement. Retargeting ads appear when users are actively engaged, like when they’re reading a news article or shopping online.
  • Deep Linking. With app retargeting, when users click on an ad, they are taken directly into the relevant product page in the app, delivering a seamless experience.

Lower-funnel App Retargeting

The final phase of the user journey is critical to the mobile marketer: increasing in-app conversions. By understanding the real-time behavior of your app users, you can reach them with personalized ads after they leave your app and bring them back to convert.

Dynamic, hyper-personalized app retargeting ads maximize conversions. Given up to 28% of purchases are of products that weren’t previously viewed, machine learning (ML) can predict items of interest and show shoppers products they might like, in addition to those previously viewed.

An engine that takes into account cross-device behavior is also key, as it will base recommendations on activity across desktop, mobile web, and app, for a more accurate experience.

How App Retargeting Works – A Real-World Example from APAC

Let’s look at a real-world example of how app retargeting works.

Imagine a shopper named Linh Nguyen is searching for shoes in Vietnam.

As Linh browses your app, intent data is captured at each event level. Linh gets distracted and starts playing a gaming app. If the gaming app is part of your retargeting partner’s publisher network, the retargeting process continues in real-time.

Linh’s purchasing intent is calculated, the impression is purchased, product recommendation determined, and the design of the ad occurs, all in real-time. The ad is displayed reflecting shoes that Linh viewed, plus new discoveries based on items such as availability and pricing.

Linh clicks on the ad and is deep-linked back into your app to complete the purchase.

Takeaway: Mobile app retargeting helps you reengage your app audience and keep you connected to your most valuable users from installation to conversion.

To learn more, download our full guide, The Ultimate Guide to App Retention or visit Criteo’s mobile app advertising platform page.

In this series of articles on mobile app engagement in Asia Pacific, we’ve examined the power of app retargeting to bring users back to your app. You can also read more about the app abandonment issue and the pros and cons of push notifications and email as tools for app reengagement.

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