Decisive

As a startup founder, there are a lot of things that will keep you up at night: product, marketing, employees, funding, the list goes on and on. A big part of your job will be to measure the health and growth of your business, not only for internal purposes, but for current and potential investors. If you don’t have a dedicated CFO, COO, and CMO, gathering all the right metrics and calculating them the right way will be a bit difficult if you’re new to the startup game. Luckily, we have a cheat sheet to help you out.

This cheat sheet will give you the twenty most important and actionable metrics for measuring the growth and health of your startup. The point of this is not to get lost in metrics, but to choose the ones that are most relevant to your business, from SaaS to e-commerce. Here are some of the metrics you will get:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Gross Profit Margin

Burn Rate

Customer Churn Rate

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR Churn Rate

Lifetime Value (LTV)

When it comes to apps, there is a such thing as having too many options. As of July 2015, there are 1.6 million apps in Google Play (Android’s app store) and 1.5 million apps in the Apple App Store. That’s a lot of apps to choose from going to waste considering the fact that most people don’t download any apps in any given month.

Either app discovery is super hard (validating the need for ASO) or people are just content with the few apps they have. Either way, many apps don’t succeed, but app developers can increase their chances of success by staying away from certain types of apps.

The last thing I want to do is discourage people from creating great apps. This is more of a post to help you make a better decision for a more successful app. Here are the four app categories that you should avoid.

Your manager has tasked you with finding the best platforms to start mobile user acquisition for your company. There’s a great paradox that you’ve just run into. Paid mobile user acquisition has become easier, yet more difficult at the same time. How is this so?

On the one hand, there is an abundance of options available for paid mobile user acquisition. There will always be places to test your ads and each platform has its differentiated capabilities that will supposedly get you to the mobile ROI mountain top.

What makes paid mobile user acquisition harder is, unfortunately, the abundance of options available. User acquisition managers spend most of their time A/B testing on different channels and trying to find the best channel on which to scale. Furthermore, setting up conversion tracking and attribution can get complicated if you’re advertising on multiple platforms. A user acquisition manager’s cocktail of tools usually consists of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and mobile DSPs.

So the question that needs to be asked is: which platform should be your primary platform for paid mobile user acquisition, a social platform or mobile DSP? Read more to find out.

Are you looking for some new tools to help grow your startup? Bookmark this page right now.

Last week, I covered 25 Great Resources For App Developers. This week I’m writing for our fellow startups who are trying to hit the ground running and need resources for fuel. Some of the resources below were also included in last week’s post. Most of the resources below we use here at Decisive to do a wide variety of things.

The resources are categorized by internal and external. “Internal” includes tools and services you would use for things like team communication, engineering, or customer service. “External” includes tools and services you would use for marketing and sales

Developing and promoting apps isn’t an easy endeavor, mainly because app markets are ridiculously crowded. As an app developer, you should only be concerned with improving your app(s) without having to worry about complicated tasks to do things like advertise or take payments.

Every app developer needs to have a great lineup of third-party go-to tools and services to help create, launch, monetize, and market their apps. Here are 25 great resources for app developers that you should try or bookmark right now. The tools and services below are categorized by stages, from development and prototyping to post-launch.

How many articles about ad blocking have you read in the past three weeks? Probably a lot. This isn’t mere coincidence. Companies like Apple are realizing that mobile users hate ads and always have, which is why they aren’t hesitating to give users ad-blocking abilities.

It’s clear that everyone cares more about user experience than advertiser dollars, and rightfully so. The creative shift in digital advertising is happening right before our eyes.

Ad fraud is a billion-dollar industry. Let me say that again. Ad fraud is a BILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY. Unfortunately, as programmatic ad buying becomes more prominent in digital advertising, ad fraud will grow with it.

Here are some stats from a 2014 study by the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps that should ring an alarm:

Up to 50 percent of publisher traffic is bot activity.

$6.3 billion of the digital advertising industry will be based on fraudulent activity in 2015.

Between 3 percent and 31 percent of programmatically bought ad impressions were found to be from bots, with an average of 17 percent.

Source: Adweek

If we’re not careful, digital advertising could just be a great waste of money, and mobile advertising, which has been largely ignored by fraudsters in the past, will be overrun with malicious activity. Even though 100% fraud prevention is nearly impossible, fraud detection and transparency should be instituted on every advertising platform that exists.

Let’s dive into different fraud techniques and some ways the ad tech industry can tackle ad fraud.

San Diego, Calif — Red Herring on Thursday announced its Top 100 North America award winners in recognition of the leading private companies from the region, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

Red Herring Top 100 America enlists outstanding entrepreneurs and promising companies. It selects the award winners from approximately 1,200 privately financed companies each year in the US and Canada. Since 1996, Red Herring has kept tabs on these up-and-comers. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, Palo Alto Networks and eBay would change the way we live and work.

It takes a while before your content marketing and SEO efforts start to show real results. We’re talking months or even years. If you’re an impatient marketer like me, this is unacceptable. I want to see results now…or at least tomorrow. Unfortunately, growing Decisive’s B2B marketing took longer than I personally wanted, with some highlights along the way.

But in the past three weeks, something interesting happened.

All of our blog traffic came flowing in organically (mostly from Google and direct sources). All of it. Besides posting on social media per usual, not one single cent was spent promoting our posts, which wasn’t the case a few months ago.

Here’s a little background on why this is such a big deal and how we did it.

Your mobile advertising campaigns can only be successful if you reach the right audience. We previously gave you the ability to target your precise audience with over ten targeting parameters in our super-easy ad creation interface. We’ve gathered feedback from folks who wanted to see us improve the performance of our platform, make it easier to scale app install campaigns, and provide open access to our API so everyone can experience the uniqueness of our data and take full control of their mobile marketing.

Now advertising on Decisive and driving app installs is about to become more powerful. We’re excited to announce that keyword targeting, retargeting, device ID targeting, store category targeting, and our advertising API are now available to everyone on Decisive.

Try and think of the times during the day when you’re not using a mobile device.

If you’re a sane person, you can probably think of at least 6 hours when you’re not using a mobile device. This may sound crazy, but people don’t use their mobile devices all day. So is it smart for mobile advertisers to target their customers at all times of the day? Probably not. There’s a reason why you see different types of TV ads according to the time of day. Coors Light probably doesn’t want to advertise to moms while they’re preparing their children for school in the morning, neither do you want to advertise your latest hot app to the mobile user who’s counting sheep at 4am.

Luckily, dayparting features help you target your customers when they’re using their mobile devices the most. In other words, it’s essentially time targeting and isn’t some revolutionary technology that’s going to drastically grow your mobile advertising campaigns. However, it’s needed for precision and contextual targeting and can help you increase your ROI as you progress deeper into mobile advertising. Here’s why.

1.2 billion.

That’s the current population of India, the world’s second most populated country. Despite that massive number, India has never been at the forefront of new technology and has a long way to go before it becomes an economic superpower. However, the times are changing, and India is finally catching up with the rest of the developed world in mobile technology.

If you’re looking for a new market for your mobile advertising budget, here’s why India should be at the top of your list.

Is it just me or does having a whole bunch of e-commerce apps on your smartphone make you want to spend more money? Luckily, I’ve been able to refrain from splurging through e-commerce apps. However, it’s really impressive how far e-commerce has come. It’s now easier than ever to make purchases and find out what deals are happening around you. One app that has become a must-have for shoppers is RetailMeNot.

There’s a frenzy going on in the segment of marketing we call content marketing. Content marketers are, in many ways, growth hackers who use content and SEO tricks to pull in customers. It’s an inbound approach that’s worked well for a lot of companies. Content marketers are as hungry as ever for more content ideas to feed their customers and search engines. However, there’s increasing competition for the attention of customers.

There’s a lot of content online, and sometimes you’ll find yourself running out of fresh topics and writing about topics that have already been written about fifty million times. It’s becoming increasingly important to keep your content ideas fresh. Here are five ways you can come up with content ideas for your content marketing: