An app’s effectiveness is defined by its initial aims, because there’s a difference in for example apps whose aims are related to e-commerce to those whose aim is to boost a brand.
ROI is an indicator that allows us to know when our inversion in the app developmemnt and launching is recovered. This recovery can be measured either in striuctly economic terms or in more qualitative ones like visit conversions.
- M-commerce: Apps destined to M-commerce have the aim of using the M-commerce service the apps are directed to. In these cases the ROI is measured by the volume and value of the transactions.
- Return for advertising: This consists in recovering the initial investment in the app’s development and launching through the sale of advertising space inside the app.
- Payment per downloads: This ROI model is based in the recovery of the initial inversion through the money the user pays to download the app. In this case it’s harder to get downloads because the app is competing with free apps. So these apps should sure to offer an added value.
- Payment per content: Right now free apps tend to triumph over paying ones. In these cases developers can recover their investment by offering special contents or through paying updates in the app.
Other ways to measure an app’s ROI are how the brand is remembered, the shopping intention or how the brand is perceived.
Pandora’s Success
Pandora, the streaming radio service recently crossed its largest milestone ever with 200,000,000 users, bringing the app to almost every mobile platform, with Windows Phone 8 platform being added recently.
These figures mean that in just two years Pandora doubled its user base, after hitting 100,000,000 registered users in July 2011 and 150,000,000 in May 2012.
Just on iPhones, a new listener is added every 2 seconds and 3,300,000 tracks can be streamed in just one weekend.
The company started to “help people enjoy the music they love”, as well as helping artists reach their audience, but its success has been unimaginable even to its founder Tim Westergren who affirms Pandora streams more than 200,000,000 songs before 10 a.m every day.
Check out this graph to find out about Pandora’s revenue and gains and losses:
