Webinar: Leverage driving data to improve mobile app user engagement

Mobile Growth Summit webinar

Changes in driving patterns due to COVID-19 have offered opportunities to use real-time driving data to create richer end-user connections and new data revenue streams now and into the future.

In this video, you’ll learn:

• How driving data can be used to improve user engagement

• How movement patterns are changing

• How leveraging driving data can generate new revenue streams

Speaker:

• Peter Levinson, VP of Product, Arity

Transcript

Host:
Alrighty. Welcome, everybody. We’ll just wait for some people to trickle in now. Welcome, everybody, to this session. The topic is how driving data can be better user engagement data, revenue streams during COVID and beyond. Speaking in this session will be Peter Levinson. He’s VP of product at Arity, one of our top sponsors, actually. So now I’ll turn the time over to you, Peter, and I’ll go ahead and mute and goes out.

Peter Levinson, Arity:
Awesome. Thanks, Evan. Good morning, everyone. At Arity, our mission is to make transportation smarter, safer, and more useful for everyone. And as a result of our work with a bunch of different mobile apps, we are able to see a large amount of driving data. And so when the world changes and driving patterns change, we’re able to provide insights with our partners on a real-time basis to get really granular as to what are the changes that are happening across the country in terms of movement patterns. And more recently, because of these insights and this data, we’ve seen the conversation change and evolve from simply trying to figure out what is happening to making predictions about what might be happening in the future, how might movement patterns change in the coming months and over the coming years as our situation continues to evolve. And those conversations then naturally lead into how might we use this data?

How might we use these insights to better provide for opportunities for engagement inside of an app and to extend an app’s value proposition. Traditionally in mobile, we tend to look at driving data and think of it as kind of an exclusive domain to navigation apps, but we think differently about it. We think that this kind of data represents the next evolution of location services and a new pathway to building engagement of all kinds across apps of all kinds. So access to movement data at a user level and at an audience level, all can hit a bunch of key metrics in driving app growth and app retention specifically using this data allows you to provide and gain greater insights onto specific users and to specific audiences that you might be able to understand from inside of your app. And within that, you can then find new ways to engage and new ways to take your value proposition and extend it beyond where it is into something new that boosts retention and, having boosted retention, of course that allows you to look at new opportunities for revenue.

So the initial set of insights that we can build from movement data give us several areas that we can expand and enhance value propositions. We’re all familiar around the knowledge and insights that we’ve gained around points of interest (POI) and we’ve spent as a community the last decade or more understanding the destination that people go to at arrive at and what insights we can derive from that. And we’re now able to add to that power of POI insights. We can understand a new variety of things. We can understand common routes and patterns of movement that people take. We can understand how many miles people travel during a month or a year. We can understand the different habits and the different events that happen along those routes, and we can understand modes of transportation and duration inside of those modes. And in particular, when we see critical types of events, we can build specific insights and experiences around those.

So let’s look at some specific concepts about how this might be leveraged. On the left, we’re looking at an experience that shows the details of a trip that was just taken. And with driving data, you can show different kinds of ways to build engagement. One way is on the bottom where we see a more passive way of representing data during a trip. And that shows the user gives them options to kind of view what happened during a trip and what sorts of information can be exposed there. Above that, we see a different kind of engagement where it becomes more active and we start to see affordances that are more around gamification and driving users through specific types of flows and specific types of funnels to boost engagement around specific paths. In the middle, we also see our ability to detect anomalous types of behaviors or anomalous types of events and build experiences around those.

So when activity and when movement starts to break beyond common expectations and common patterns, we can build experiences that bring intervention in and we can link those with specific services. A lot of partners look at this as an opportunity to build experiences around a premium experience such that there’s added costs, but there’s also added benefit. And of course we can provide affordances that allow you to say that this was an okay experience, that this was an anomaly detection that went wrong. And then finally, based on increased engagement, we can also build new types of revenue streams.

So generating revenue provides a couple of different angles with driving insights and driving data, we can build specific new types of engagement around performance-based advertising. So inside an app, if we have specific triggers or specific offers that we want to make based on specific insights about a user, those types of revenue streams can open up. We can also look at more brand-based advertising and build audiences that are more interesting inside of a native experience that allow us to have broader reach and broader campaigns that are less targeted than something specific around. And then we can also take those insights and publish them out into the wider web and capture revenue based on those audiences. Outside of an app’s native experience, we think there’s a bunch of different experiences that can be built that drive engagement and help drive growth for an app. So let’s look at some specific examples that we think are really interesting. Our partners [prior to 2024] at WeatherBug have really been at the forefront of building new kinds of experiences that integrate driving and movement data into their app’s core user experience and value proposition. And with this data, they’ve unlocked opportunities to engage an audience around a part of their app that’s already essential, which is the daily commute.

And to that experience, they can now add really granular and really rich information with specific insights about how people moved throughout their daily life. In this case, we’re looking at a rich push notification that integrates data that’s specific to that user’s movement patterns. Now we’ve all used rich push notifications to really increase the quality and level of engagement over the past five years. And this data now adds us, adds a new capability that allows us to use push in an even more integrated way and expand those value props.

If we look inside of an app, we can see a new way to recommend actions to users. Now when we move around our daily lives, we all have favorite spots that we like to go to, maybe for coffee or for groceries or for gas. But what if there’s a new opportunity along our path that we just haven’t had the time to discover? Well, how long it might take to get there and what’s the value in that? How good is that place to go? All of that information can now be provided proactively and recommend actions to a specific person that’s native to how they actually move throughout the world. And if we expand this idea out to a travel use case, we can see that there are opportunities now to recommend how to get there, what to eat, and what to buy in an entirely new way that’s integrated into an app’s experience and doesn’t require the user to bounce from app to app to app to try to knit together what should be a common and seamless experience inside of an existing value proposition. And then as we looked at, we think this way to bring people in provides a really interesting new way to leverage push to pull people back in based on triggers that are event-based and time-based, but that integrate this data into a completely different way to offer services and products to people on a daily basis.

So here’s my obligatory pitch slide at Arity. We think we are excited to see what is possible based on this data. And if some of these use cases are things that you’ve thought about or talked about and just haven’t had the time or the ability to build, please let us know. We’re excited to work together and see how far we can take this.

Host:
Alrighty

Peter Levinson, Arity:
Now we’ve got time for Q&A.

Host:
Yeah, so there’s a question from Dave. He said, has driving behavior changed in age, COVID changed, become more, hold on. It’s saying, has driving behavior changed in COVID become more destination-based versus leisure?

Peter Levinson, Arity:
I think we’d have to, Dave, we can talk a little bit more details depending on the specific types of POIs, but I would say at a kind of coarse grain level, it tends to be more essential based rather than leisure-based. The leisure types of driving we have seen really go down now. I think if we can look at specific locations and see where that might change, but in a general case, it’s that type of driving that has really, as far as we can tell, really been driven out of the ecosystem.

Host:
I hope that answered your question, Dave, not seeing any other questions, feel free to pop them in. Guys, we still have just a couple more minutes left.

Peter Levinson, Arity:
From ad units, we have seen really great performance really with standard. I mean, it kind of depends on the advertiser, but we’ve seen pretty great performance from standard IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) units and we are prototyping with more native effects right now. But so far the standard IAB units have done just fine. It’s really about the ability to target the right message inside of the experience to the person.

Host:
Alright, let’s see. Rebecca Lowe has a question. Are you finding there is less concern about location privacy than previous years?

Peter Levinson, Arity:
I think our view on this is that the link between privacy and willingness to share data really connects with the value proposition. And so where this request for data is linked to what the app already does for a user, there’s very little conflict and friction and making sure that there are affordances inside of the app to expose all of the data that’s been collected and allow users to see it and modify it and edit it is all really essential and a part of what we provide. And so when you have those two things put together, you really don’t have an issue around it. If someone is given an offer to share additional data and they don’t quite understand how it fits with the value proposition, that’s where you see the most conflict. People are just saying, I don’t have a problem sharing data, but I got to know why I would share it with you. And that’s really the core of the question.

Host:
Yeah, absolutely. So one last question. So how are you able to contextually serve the correct ad at the right time? Are you integrating with other big data sources?

Peter Levinson, Arity:
We are. Yeah. So we have integrations with several of the big DSPs (demand side platforms) and we’re continuing to expand those. And from that we’re able to provide the connective tissue into different audiences and different campaigns that advertisers are launching. We also have our own private marketplace so we can build and manage campaigns exclusively through a private network that way.

Host:
Yeah. Awesome. And so I know that you guys have actually partnered with WeatherBug [prior to 2024], like you had mentioned. I mean if you have any experiences or highlights that you’re able to share from working with them, I think that’d be awesome.

Peter Levinson, Arity:
I mean, I think Mike and team are here as well, and so I didn’t want to steal any of their thunder, but I guess I’ll leave it at that. I think working with them has really helped us to expand and expand our thinking around where people see value and how we can use this data to try to build some of those experiences in their team is incredibly focused on who are our people and what are even the subgroups within their user base, what do they care about and what do they come to the app for? And based on that understanding, you can build a variety of different types of engaging experiences. It’s just a matter of putting together the teams that have joint technology capabilities to bring it to life.

Host:
Yeah, sounds like an amazing partnership. Well, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining in on this. Thank you again to you, Peter, and to Arity for being one of our top partners. Just wanted to let you guys know that we do have a user engagement and acquisition chat in our networking center. We can certainly take more questions there as this one is coming to a close. But thank you again, guys, and looking forward to seeing you at the next session.

Peter Levinson, Arity:
Thanks, all. It was a pleasure.

Host:
Take care. Thank you.