Using Mobile App Engagement Data as an Indicator for Brand Loyalty

thank you all for joining us again for the next accelerant research virtual insights conference we are happy to have you with us today I know you all have heard these rules over and over but please just be respectful we are at the mercy of tech and you think we'd all have the zooming down by now but things always happen along the way so please just be patient and take the opportunity to connect with our speaker ask questions engage and interact as we go you can also find us on Twitter and Instagram if you want to see the recordings or see any of the materials that our speakers are using throughout our calls today and it is my pleasure to introduce Kendall McMahon she's the director measurement of insights and strategy at T-Mobile and we are excited to hear from her regarding using mobile app engagement data as an indicator for brand loyalty so I will hand it over to you Kendall yes thank you Maureen let me stop sharing my screen okay and you can go ahead and share awesome thank you let's see if I can do that without screwing it at me one minute does that look right Maureen I see it awesome all right well thank you guys so much for being here and big thanks to Bill McDowell and accelerant research and Marine for um inviting me I am very excited uh to get to share with you guys some of the things that we've been working on at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions um so I will just Jump Right In oops so first I thought I'd introduce myself um since most people don't know me so I'm Kendall McMahon and I live in the Pacific Northwest in Portland Oregon with my husband and cats and a daughter who's at the University of Washington um and my background is I am I've been at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions now for the last two years my role there is heading the measurement in insights business strategy so that's you know figuring out what direction we're gonna go our go to market plans um how we're going to position ourselves in the marketplace and partnering with the right you know other data Partners to make sure that we're building the best products we can and prior to that I was at comscore for about a decade um my last role there was running the cross-platform product teams and then I spent a lot of time as a research director at various TV stations and actually started off at Nielsen and I don't think you were in um the full mode right now the full presentation mode we still see the first page okay one moment let me fix that because you're missing out on my awesome pictures is that working Maureen yes snowy seed slide two of 14 if that's right yep yes I see the presentation mode not the um maybe the monitors need to switch swap displays Maybe did that work no I still see um presentation mode do you see in the top left where it says swap displays yeah I just did that oh you just did that okay yeah [Music] technical difficult too let's try it one more time well now let's just back to the can you go into full screen here like the full mode oh that goes into presentation there we go here we are yep okay that worked that was good yes okay thank you all right so that was me uh so today I thought we could cover white T-Mobile advertising solution is and what we do um our Mobility data and then jump into the value of the app engagement data which I'm the most excited about sharing and then a closer look into how that data can be applied and then we'll have some summary and questions all right so T-Mobile Advertising Solutions um back in Bound 2019 uh T-mobile acquired an audience Network called push spring they wanted to get into the advertising business there was all this great data that we have and we wanted to see how we could use it to help advertisers so the first step was acquiring in the Audience Network push spring from there we launched the Marketing Solutions Division and that was about the time that I joined and then we recently uh back in June uh rebranded to T-Mobile Advertising Solutions um we did that at made the announcement at the canned Lions festival and I was really glad we did because saying Marketing Solutions the division of T-Mobile was a lot to say when introducing yourself so T-Mobile Advertising Solutions uh so what do we do so we have um our Core Business which is the magenta audience platform and network so those are audiences that you can activate against it has both our coordinated the third party data that came from the push spring acquisition but also our T-Mobile Mobility data our first party data So within that platform you can build audiences create custom audiences combine first and third-party audiences and then activate against our our dsps we have our owned and operated media but we also have some curated inventory as well and then the other part of our business is our products and that's what I'm focusing on that's our measurement in insights products we launched app insights which we're going to be using today to show the data we launched that I think that was around April of this year and then we're working on measurement right now which would be our in-network campaign attribution for for campaigns that run through our Network and then some off-platform applift measurement that we can do for campaigns that don't run on our Network yep next slide there we go all right so what is Mobility data um we know everybody's very sensitive about privacy compliance these days um particularly T-Mobile being a telecom company and we are highly regulated so we have to be incredibly careful with what we do with our data we do have a subset of our subscribers who have not opted out of the data collection process which is something whenever you activate your phone with T-Mobile you have that option to opt out of it and then we when we started really using the data it's an anonymized of course but when we started using it for research we sent out notifications to all of our subscribers that had not opted out and said hey you know if if you want to get out now this is your chance and we actually had a really good retention rate of people who who are allowing us to collect data from their devices so the way that our Mobility data is collected is we have between three and five to five or six million devices daily where we're getting um a view of everything that's happening on the phone regarding usage so we have a proprietary SDK on the phone and it is collecting what we call Focus event data so Focus event data is when your app when you engage with an app either you launch it or um you had it in the background and now you bring it to the foreground and you're interacting with it that creates a focus event and says hey you know this app is now open and then it calculates or counts how long you are engaging with it we can't see what they're doing inside the app but we can tell how long they're actively engaging with the app and then we use uh we take that Focus data and then we combine it with our broadband data so the broadband data is much larger but less granular it's about 30 million devices where if you're a T-Mobile subscriber and you're not on Wi-Fi but you're using your device you're using the Broadband Network and we get signals that come through that data that tells us when app servers are called so we can see that what apps are being used on a device that way so it's less granular but it is much broader in that it's you know any type of device that's being used on our Network we can collect data so we take that Focus event data from the the smaller group of subscribers and then we scale it to the 30 million broadband data devices and that creates our pool and then from there we project that data out to the full U.S footprint footprint for mobile device usage or mobile device ownership uh both by um operating systems so you know the the Android versus iOS and then um by carrier as well and what comes out then is our T-Mobile Mobility data so since we've launched this data I've spent a lot of time digging through it um it's really interesting data as someone who's been in research a long time I haven't seen something that is as granular as the data that we're collecting and just you know full disclosure I'm not a salesperson so I'm not here to sell you the data but to share I mean you can buy if you want but to share with you what I'm discovering as I look through it so one of the reasons I think this data is so valuable is we spend so much time on our phones every day some figures out of 2021 was on average people spend about 4.2 hours a day using their smartphones that's on average across the whole population so like I know my daughter's three times higher than that um but then you have people who are using it less and that was an increase of 31 percent from the year over so we are just more and more doing more things on our mobile phone um and 88 of that time is spent in app so it's not phone calls um it's it actually in an app and engaging with the app on the device so we're spending all this time on mobile so because of that this app engagement data it's well first it's real time because it's being collected second by second um but it really gives you a great picture of how consumers are interacting with the different apps and brands on their phones because we can see the full snapshot we don't just see that an app is used you can see what other apps they have as well so you get this profile of the device owner that can really help you understand their consumer habits um and it has some really valuable information like when they install we can also see uninstalls which is really valuable when you want to get a full understanding of the footprint of an app and engagement frequency so how many times a week are they or a month or day are they engaging with the app and then the session duration that I mentioned that looks at how long people are spending in different apps and it has competitive data so that's what makes it really interesting is that a lot of um people so if your Target and you have an app you can see what's happening on your app right because you built it so you have that back end data coming through but you can't see what's happening on a Walmart's app we can see that we can see all of them at once so you can compare your brand your app with people in your competitive set um and we also have demographics so we get deterministic reporting of of age and gender um from people when they install on their devices and then we've also built out personas so as I mentioned a minute ago with the the fact that you can see everything on the device um we are able to say oh hey if this person has this app they are most likely also have this app and start seeing these correlations between um different personas for people who are using their mobile phone and then there's also retention after installation so that helps give Brands an understanding of after someone install my app how long do I retain them how long until they delete my app um and then from there you can break that into different demographic groups to understand who's not keeping your app like who's most likely to get rid of it and who's most likely to keep it which that that's where you get into like who's my core group take some tea and then jump in if anyone has questions during I don't know if that's against protocol but I'm happy to answer them okay so to help illustrate all the things I've been talking about but specifically brand loyalty um I thought we could look at uh music apps so earlier this year brand Keys every year they release his top 100 Customer Loyalty leader list uh so the 2021 list came out and it only had one music app on it which I thought was really interesting um and that was Spotify and it was coming in at number 58 and these are not like within a category this is all brands ranked for customer loyalty based off of the research that branches performs so as I was thinking of how I could validate my assumptions that you would be able to see this in the data um well first I I selected Spotify because I thought that was really interesting that it was the only one on there and then I started digging through the data to see if I could prove that out through what I was seeing in the engagement data prove out that their customers were more loyal so there I compared Spotify to Pandora and Sirius I selected those two specifically because they are the operating system agnostic so I didn't want to include Apple music or YouTube because those come pre-installed on a device so I was looking for apps where someone has to actively go out and add that app to their device so Spotify Pandora Sirius XM are the top three so in looking at that data which I'm going to show you in a minute I saw that Spotify has a much larger ownership base but also and kind of more importantly what I'm talking about its users spends a lot their users spent a lot more time in the app every week and they log in more often so whatever it is about how Spotify builds out their app and we know they're really big on algorithms for music selection and recommendations it's ringing with a customer base they like it um and they also reach a younger user base which is probably one of the reasons they're so successful because we know that younger people are spending more time listening to music during the day or at least I assume that um based off of my observations uh and there are demographic characteristics reflect that a more young population so if we look at the ownership you can see this is for the month of September which I need to add here but for the month of September Spotify had 84 million devices in the U.S that uh and that's mobile devices so just to make sure um and clarify all the data I'm talking about is mobile device only so this will not include iPads or smart TVs or any other devices mobile phones so 84 million devices had the Spotify app and the way that we calculate that is for the period selected the person has to have owned uh the app during the start of the period and still own it at the end so we take uninstalls into account as well if that happens during the period then they're out so 84 million compared to Pandora's 51 million and serious not doing as well at 10 million what's more interesting though is the average weekly minutes so oops I just went back just kidding um so 39.2 Spotify uh users are on average spending 10 minutes more per week than their closest competition pantora that might not sound like a lot but something to consider it actually it sounds like a lot to me but something to consider is that uh that is time spent in actively engaging with the app so it's not they went in selected something you know put their headphones on and then went and did something else or then started playing a game that would not count as being engaged with the app this is time spent directly in the app using the app so 10 more minutes per week than their closest competitor um focus events is a number of times that they use or engage with unique times that they engage oops not a little oh there it goes engage with the app um during the week so for Focus events they have a 38 higher Focus frequency than their closest competition Pandora um so that is 38 more times that people during the week go into the Spotify app so people are using it more frequently and engaging with it longer from a demographic perspective you can see this young audience SKU that I was talking about Spotify skews much younger than any of their competition um was a 67 of their users are adults 35 and under um if you compare that to sirius only eight percent of the their users are under 34 and under um and then what is that 38 of uh Pandora's so a much younger audience is listening to Spotify and they have a slight mail skew it's not um very pronounced I would say that Sirius has the highest meal skew of 66 percent of their listeners being male Spotify and Pandora uh kind of a little bit Pandora's a little more female Spotify is a little more male but nothing significant more interesting though is the personas of the people that like listening to or using these different apps so we build our own personas with the Mobility data by looking at again as I mentioned earlier since we have a snapshot of the mobile device and we can see all of the apps that are installed on a device we can start to create groups of people that have similar characteristics that share the same like profile for which apps are on their phones and then our data science team uses that to create personas so these are personas that they've created if we look at Spotify you can see that this is a oops my back there you go um this is a very tech savvy audience Esports fans um online education students uh concert goers average Runners so these guys are younger they're tech savvy um they are also really into concerts and discovering new music and that discovering new music is um probably one of the main reasons they like Spotify because it has that very rich and robust opportunity to in the algorithms that suggest all types of new music that you can listen to and their personas look very different from Pandora and Sirius Pandora looks like it's skewing more towards families um daily deal consumers expected parents contest Seekers home financial planners impulse buyers some more kind of generalized population and then if you look at serious um you can definitely see that that that older SKU there their service provider streamers means they use uh apps that are through their service provider so that could be like their DirecTV app and that's how they're watching their content they like baseball they tend to lean towards the right politically they they like concerts and basketball but not as much uh Tech focused then what you're looking for or what you're seeing with the Spotify people so Spotify has this very very unique audience when compared to everyone else and then the retention the retention is fascinating these so this is looking at from the point this is just for the month of September but we can look at this for any month and I actually looked at a couple and they're pretty much the same from the point that somebody installs the app when you look a week later how many of those people have they retained um and then for anyone who thinks that this might look a little low this is actually pretty common uh for all the different apps that we've looked at over time um that once an app is installed if you drop off a good portion um this is in line with the qsr apps and and the other shopping apps so Spotify is retaining more than half of the people that installed them in the first week Pandora's not doing as well and Sirius is really not doing great they're losing a large portion of people only retaining 28 percent um and then by the time you look all the way out to week five Spotify still has about 19 a little more 19 of the people um who had installed the app five weeks ago compared to 14 14 15 for Pandora and only four percent for Sirius um so going back to that you know uh the customer loyalty they have more not only do they have people spending more time but just once somebody installs the app they're more interested in what they're seeing and so they're retaining a lot more of those people okay I went through that a lot faster than I thought I would so to summarize all of that um we know that consumers are spending more times on their phone I know I spend way too much time on my phone um and just understanding what is on a person's device is going to give you a lot of insight into where they like to shop uh what their preferences are their um what music they like I mean there's all sorts of things you can learn about someone from their phone um but more importantly these predictors these things that we're seeing in the data itself correlate highly to Brands like heavy usage and engagement equals brand loyalty and it's like if we use Spotify as an example you can see that they created a platform that speaks to a core audience and because they were able to tap into that unique audience they have people engaging more with them they have not just more but spending more time they're more interested in what they're doing within the app and that's how you build and keep that loyalty base so what makes this data cool is that if you're not someone like Spotify let's say you have an app and it's not performing as well you're not really keeping people you can use this data to look at what demographic groups are most likely not keeping your app once they've installed and which ones are so if you know who's most likely uninstalling then you know you need to Target them differently and if you know who is keeping your app after installation you can start to find who your core base is and those are the people that you want to Target and re-engage with and nurture that relationship um so there you go using uh the app engagement data to predict brand loyalty that's that wonderful thank you sure super interesting I don't see any actual questions coming in in the chat but I was just curious in your particular role what would be your next actionable step once you're looking at these types of data where would you go do you actually consult with individual Brands and how to improve their apps or where do you go from here um so there's a broad application for it there's uh definitely we have some clients that are already using this data to help both measure the impact of their campaigns in in driving installations um among different Target groups but also figuring out where they need to refocus their efforts um we're also building out more of the measurement aspect so you can use these insights to help figure out how to Target but then the measurement can tell you real world impacts of that targeting so because it is our own proprietary database we can actually see if someone got served an ad did they then go and install or re-engage with your app so so the there's different applications depending on on the groups you're looking at I also feel that you know we've really just hit the tip of the iceberg with digging into this data we hope to be able to build out more things like case studies on applications for the data and also interesting findings um rankers we're building out benchmarks so the benchmarks will help um advertisers and Brands compare how they're doing into their whole category so a lot of work still to be done but we're going to have a lot of really cool things coming out with it yeah super rich yeah very interesting okay well I'll give everybody back some time if we don't have any other questions coming in I don't see any awesome and if anyone does have questions my email's there and they can follow up perfect well thank you so much for your time it was really fascinating I liked listening and um that's it for right now so thank you very much Kendall thank you have a good day you too we will be back at 2 30 with our next discussion so just take a few minutes and sit tight thank you very much for being here