SR-101-01012024-EN.docx Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation
Matching Mobile Applications for Cross Promotion
1. Matching Mobile Applications
for Cross Promotion
Gene Moo Lee!
Ph.D. candidate
University of Texas at Austin
!
Joint work with Joowon Lee and Andrew B. Whinston
2. Success of mobile app markets
# Apps (K)
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
Google Play
Apple App Store
Windows Phone
BlackBerry
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600
3. Success and challenges
• App diversity is a key success factor !
• Too many apps: visibility/search issue!
• Developers: difficult to gain visibility!
• Users: hard to search for the right apps!
• Going towards a “winner-takes-all” market, not
a long-tail market [Petsas et al. 2013], [Zhong
and Michahelles 2013]
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
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4. Mobile app ad channels
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
Mobile Display Ads
4
Cross Promotions
(Incentivized)
Social Network Ads
In this work, we study cross promotions!
• Incentivize app installs with rewards!
• It is a two-sided matching market
5. Our contributions
1. Evaluate ad effectiveness of cross promotion!
2. Model ad placements as matching problem!
3. Identify determinants of ad effectiveness:
Novel app similarity measure with machine
learning technique!
4. Design app matching mechanism
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
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6. Roadmap
• Data!
• Model!
• App Similarity!
• Empirical Analysis!
• Matching Mechanism
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7. IGAWorks data
• IGAWorks: Mobile ad platform company in Korea!
• 1011 cross promotions (Sept 2013 ~ May 2014)!
• 325 mobile apps (195K apps with meta info)!
• 1 million users
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8. Ad effectiveness
• We measure the ad effectiveness by the user engagement level: !
• Session duration!
• Number of app usages!
• Number of item purchases!
• Comparison by inflow channels: !
• Organic users, mobile display ads, cross promotions !
• Cross promotions: 10%, 1% best placements
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9. Ad effectiveness
• Bad news: free
riders don’t stay!
• Good news: good
matching can make
improvements!!
• Question: what
makes a good
match?
channel hour_avg
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20
15
10
5
0
total organic display cross cross_10% cross_1%
10. Model
• Source s: (established) app where ad is placed!
• Target t: (new) app to promote!
• Ad effectiveness of a match u(s, t) depends on !
• (1) Characteristics of source and target: X_s, X_t!
• (2) Similarity between source and target: P_s,t
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11. Individual app features
• Developer-given variables: !
• days_regist (age)!
• days_update (engagement)!
• file_size (functional complexity)!
• User-given variables: !
• num_rates (visibility)!
• avg_rate (user perceived app quality)!
• Both source and target
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12. App similarity
• Assumption: similar text descriptions -> similar apps!
• Our approach: Apply latent Dirichlet allocation [Blei et al. 2003]
algorithm on text descriptions of all apps!
• App market is described by “topics”!
• Each app is represented by a topic vector!
• Calculate Topic_Similarity with cosine similarity
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13. Topic models of app markets
• Input: 195,956 mobile apps in Korean market!
• Output: 100 topics (set of keywords related to a common theme)
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* Translated from Korean to English for readers
14. Empirical analysis
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Significantly positive:!
Topic_Similarity
Avg_Rate_Src,Tgt
File_Size_Tgt
Significantly negative:!
Days_Update_Tgt
Similar results with other
metrics
15. Matching in cross promotions
• Problem definition: Given S andT, ad platform should find
a stable matching m that maximizes expected utilities!
• Utility is transferable between s and t!
• Leverage our model to predict utility of a match (s, t)!
• One-to-one matching: one s promotes one t!
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
• Stability: !
• No matched pairs prefer to deviate from the resultant
matching !
• [Gale and Shapley 1962], [Roth 1984], [Hatfield et al.
2013]
15
s_1
s_2
s_3
s_n
t_1
t_2
t_3
t_m
16. Matching mechanism
• Linear Programming from
[Gale 1960] and [Shapley and
Shubik 1972]!
• Stable matching!
• Price suggestion!
• Improved utility: !
• 260% (predicted)
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17. Future Directions
• Extending matching model!
• Many-to-many matching!
• Pricing mechanism!
• Empirical analysis!
• Randomized field experiments
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19. References
• Mobile app stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distribution_platforms!
• Mobile app revenue by developers: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app-businesses-are-not-sustainable/ !
• Facebook Mobile App Ad: https://developers.facebook.com/products/ads/!
• Twitter mobile app promotion suite: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/a-new-way-to-promote-mobile-apps-to-1-billion-devices-both-on-and-
Big Data Marketing Analytics, Chicago, IL
off-twitter!
• IGAWorks: http://www.igaworks.com/en/ !
• Petsas T., Papadogiannakis A., Polychronakis M., Markatos E. P., and Karagiannis T. (2013). “Rise of the Planet of the Apps: A
Systematic Study of the Mobile App Ecosystem.” Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 277-290.!
• Zhong N. and Michahelles F. (2013). "Google Play Is Not A Long Tail Market: An Empirical Analysis of App Adoption on the Google
Play App Market." Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing: pp. 499-504.!
• Blei D. B., Ng A. Y., and Jordan M. I. (2003). “Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3: pp. 993-1022.!
• Shapley L. and Shubik M. (1972). “The Assignment Game 1: The Core.” International Journal of Game Theory, 1: pp. 111-130.!
• Roth A. E. (1984). “The Evolution of the Labor Market for Medical Interns and Residents: A Case Study in Game Theory.” Journal
of Political Economy, 92(6): pp. 991–1016.!
• Hatfield J.W., Kominers S. D., Nichifor A., Ostrovsky M., andWestkamp A. (2013). “Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading
Networks.” Journal of Political Economy, 12(5): pp. 966-1005.!
• Gale D. (1960). “The Theory of Linear Economic Models.” New York: McGraw-Hill.
21. Winner-takes-all market
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http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app-businesses-are-not-sustainable/