It’s well known that Apple exercises tight control over the apps in its App Store. Anything related to usability, user experience, and relevant content is carefully reviewed, and corrected or rejected if it fails to meet a guideline. This blog has already covered Apple’s app acceptance process, and this time we’ll look at another aspect Apple tries to control, with mixed success: the marketing and advertising of apps published on the App Store.
This article will lay out Apple’s guidelines for using its brand correctly. We won’t include all of them since there are many — we’ll just highlight the most notable ones.
Introduction
The introduction itself makes it clear, as if it were article 1 of the constitution:
“Important: Apple’s approval is required. Apple should approve all video, print, or other materials with any visibility before distribution or publication, for both marketing and advertising purposes. Send your initial concept or final version by email as described below. The response will take about seven business days; not receiving a response from Apple within this period does not mean the materials have been approved. You can send Apple materials that are still in development for review, but final versions must be approved by Apple before distribution or publication.
About the Apple and Apple Store badge. You must not use it in the following situations:
- Don’t use the App Store badge in general promotions for your company or for any other products you offer. The badge must be associated only with an app that is available on the App Store.
- Don’t use the badge if the medium it needs to appear on can’t reproduce it clearly and in high resolution.
- Don’t turn the badge into the main message or graphic of the design. It should take a secondary place relative to your main message and your app or company’s own badge.
- Don’t use the iTunes logo.
- Don’t use the Apple logo on its own.
- Don’t animate, rotate, or tilt the App Store badge.
- Don’t modify the badge’s design.
- Don’t refer to iOS. Use the correct product names.
- Don’t use graphics or images from Apple’s or the App Store’s website.
- Don’t use the App Store badge as part of a compatibility message. Include a list with the names of the products compatible with your app.
Product use. You must not use it in the following situations:
- Don’t crop, remove, overlap, or cover Apple product images.
- Don’t alter, distort, or modify product images. Don’t add or modify reflections. Don’t create buttons or icons using a product image.
- Don’t use white Apple products in place of the black products shown in the images provided by Apple.
- Don’t group Apple products together with those of other brands. Always show Apple product images on their own.
- Don’t place an Apple product image on a cluttered background.
- Don’t show an Apple product with a blank screen.
- Don’t tilt or change the angle of product images.
- Don’t animate, flip, or rotate product images.
- Don’t create die-cut printed materials shaped like an Apple product image.
- Don’t use graphics or images from Apple’s or the App Store’s website. Don’t imitate Apple’s designs.
- Don’t cover any part of an Apple product image with violator badges, callout messages, or promotional text. Don’t add any highlighting around the product.
- Don’t place one Apple product on top of another.
- Don’t add cases or covers to Apple products.
- Don’t depict any Apple product in 3D or create any simulation.
- Don’t use an illustration to represent an Apple product except in an instruction manual. If you show generic handheld devices, don’t include details exclusive to Apple products, such as the Home button.
About the App Store icon. You must not use it in the following situations
- App Store icon
- Only use the App Store icon when including a group of media icons of the same shape and size.
- Never use the icon in place of the App Store badge in marketing communications, even when the available space is limited.
Conclusion
Apple wants to convey a sense of control, not only over the mobile app business, but also over how its brand is presented in each and every one of them — even when that’s next to impossible. Either way, these serve more as recommendations when designing a marketing campaign for a new mobile app. Mobile marketing is something that will be talked about a lot in the coming months.
Nowadays, nobody doubts the usefulness of Google Analytics in the world of Online Marketing. Website administrators have been able to better understand the profile of the users visiting them, segment, monitor traffic, and even improve their website’s usability. Many professions have emerged around this tool, such as SEO manager and UI engineering. In the offline world, gathering this kind of data costs millions of euros and is almost always based on distant approximations or statistics.
Google Analytics was born in 2005, revolutionizing the world of web statistics. For unknown reasons, Marketing departments in Spain and Latin America took many years to adopt this powerful tool, even though, by then, the web was already an essential element for marketing products and services.
Today, exactly the same thing is happening: the mobile applications are an extremely important element in many companies’ marketing, their commercial potential is almost unlimited, and nothing is done to monitor user interactions or how they handle information. The options offered on mobile are very similar to those offered on the web.
Indeed, Google Analytics for mobile applications has existed since 2011, for both iOS and Android. It’s an extremely powerful tool that Sozpic integrates into applications where understanding the customer, their preferences, and how they interact is essential. Google Analytics for mobile applications shouldn’t be confused with the Google Analytics mobile app, which was released a few months ago and simply lets you check the data obtained from Analytics, whether web or mobile. Nor should it be confused with the statistics offered by Google Play in the developer console, since these only refer to downloaded applications.
New Mobile App Analytics
The new Mobile App Analytics is designed to measure the entire lifecycle of the mobile application (from the moment the user discovers the app until they uninstall it). This allows for the creation of more useful and engaging user experiences through decisions based on data gathered at each stage of the application’s lifecycle:
Below we’ll see the sections that will be available in the new reports, but they will only be available for applications using SDK v2.0.
New and active users: Shows the number of new and active users the app has, as well as the number of people who delete it.
Traffic Sources: Shows visitors coming from Google Play, other parallel app marketplaces, or advertising campaigns like AdMob, with which there’s a close relationship (I’ll write about the new AdMob another day)
Different information about the mobile device: You’ll be able to get data such as the device model they use, the operating system version, the screen resolution they use, and the language it’s set to. As well as how often it’s used. Data that lets you get to know your potential user better.
User behavior: Just like web-oriented Analytics, you can check the new user-to-returning user ratio, as well as how often the application is used and the engagement level of each segmented group. This new visualization is very interesting and useful, since it shows at a glance visitor loyalty and how to interact with the application.
Flow : Shows the screens and paths users take when using applications. There are differences from web Analytics; for example, different colors are used to represent different interactions.
Bugs: You’ll be able to detect bugs and when they occur. This is very useful for developers since it lets them know exactly where the problem is.
App ecommerce : Shows the number of purchases and the revenue generated by purchases in the app. A useful feature that will give a boost to online stores in mobile applications. Unfortunately, although AdMob is integrated for advertisers (meaning they can see the traffic that results from their ads), it still isn’t integrated for publishers (meaning a website that shows ads in its mobile app can’t tell when an ad was clicked).
In summary, this is a major change in what Google Analytics offers. Google is betting heavily on mobile. Steps are being taken toward optimizing the mobile experience. Google has already published its “mobile style guide” anticipating what mobile SEO will become.