User experience covers every aspect of the user’s interaction. The goal of a good user experience should be offering your customers what they want when they need when they are interacting with your app. Along with the 5Ps (Product, Place, Promotion, Price, People), you need to focus on user experience. UX is simply about improving the experience of users during their time using your app. In this article, we will focus on how the stories improve UX in your app.
What Storyly Solves?
Simply, Storyly solves discovery. It might be difficult to highlight many products at the same time with ensuring user-friendly app design. It became harder and harder to highlight different products or features in the apps. Storyly allows you to highlight your desired products and contents with different customization options. You can increase app interaction and retention rate with engaging stories. As an app owner, you can boost your revenue, keep the users in the app, and convert them to paying customers.
Onboarding
Onboarding gives the first impression to your users and the first impression last. According to Localytics, 1 of every 4 users does not come back to an app after their first use. Complex and long onboarding sessions can cause users to slip away. Storyly allows you to share engaging and interactive in-app stories unlike a traditional in-app page.
Social Media Experience
Stories are used in many different social media channels now. Users are getting used to the concept of stories. According to Jacob’s Law of Internet User Experience, when people get their cumulative experience of other websites, that adds to their understanding of how a website should work. Therefore, if your website looks similar to most other websites, then people are going to know how to use it. They are going to focus on your products, services, and offerings rather than focusing on how to use your website. If people are confused on the Web, they probably are going to leave! Stories will ensure the familiarity of the designs of your app with the best practices of Instagram.
Being Familiar
As well as familiar icons, symbols, buttons, or colors, you can also use features that users are already familiar with from other apps. One of the best examples of these formats is stories. Storyly allows you to use story format in your apps.
Banners vs. Stories
People are exposed to so much information and products on the internet, and they have a limited time. Therefore, they don’t want to dig into information so much. They are open to the information that comes from the easiest way. With Storyly, people have to scroll less and able to see more of your highlighted products or services.
Focusing on Mobile
Despite the similarity of web design and mobile app design, they differentiate in particular ways. Mobile apps use a static carousel, which is actually designed for websites. However, Storyly offers a design that is produced for mobile apps only.
Last Words
Storyly is an interactive, familiar, creative, and easy way to interact with your customers and improve user experience. You can add customized stories to your app with Storyly. Contact us for more detail.
As Instagram Stories are visited by more than 500 million users every day, there is an increasing trend of in-app stories. More apps like Twitter’s stories, Pinterest’s Story Pins, etc., are adding stories to their platforms.
In-app stories can be used for various promotional or advertising purposes on your mobile app. As an app owner, you can increase app interaction and retention rate. However, you wonder how Storyly will look in your app? Here is how to try Storyly in your app and how it will look like.
“How Storyly looks in my app” Page
Using this simple tool, “how Storyly looks in my app” page visitors can use preset Storyly bars to preview Storyly in their apps. They can easily upload a screenshot from the app (the page wherever they think Storyly is the best fit), drag & drop Storyly wherever they like, and customize its appearance. Hop on for a quick sneak peek of how Storyly makes your app beautiful than ever.
The customization of the Storyly bar includes story ring shapes (can be circle, square, landscape or portrait rectangular), the ring colors (can set multi-colors for the seen and unseen stories, the multi-color option is for elegant gradient effects), change the background, pinned icon and text colors. Moreover, depending on their preferences for the app, they can adjust the size of the story rings. Users can either replace some components on the app with Storyly, or a simple crop and fit option would make the Storyly bar sit in between components.
Why It Is Important to Try Out Stories:
Deciding to change an app’s appearance is difficult. There are many things to explore before anyone responsible can say, “Let’s do it!“. While Storyly creates great opportunities for app owners or marketers to showcase their content, boost their revenue with high-profit direct deals, keep the users in the app and convert them to paying customers, it is not always so straightforward to visualize how Storyly changes the look of their apps.
Via this quick preview tool, anyone interested in having Stories in their app can try it out before having to make such a drastic change. They can export the final result to show their managers and other decision-maker parties how Storyly brings a beautiful touch to their app.
How Storyly Preview Works:
Users of the page first upload a screenshot from their mobile application, then they can customize the Storyly bar and drag & drop to place it anywhere in the screenshot of the app.
Finally, when they are satisfied with the result, they can export the image as a png file.
We have answered the question of how to try Storyly and how stories look in your app. You can increase app engagement with interactive stories with Storyly, like many other app owners use stories on their apps. Ever wondered how stories would look in your app? You can try it now! Hop on for a quick sneak peak of how Storyly will look on your app.
There is an increasing trend of in-app stories for various promotional or advertising purposes on social media mobile platforms. Today, this extension leads to massive improvements. In particular, Instagram stories are visited by more than 500 million users every day. Surprisingly, a third of the content of Instagram stories is commercial. According to experts, if the trend continues like this, the need for story SDKs will increase.
In-app stories play one of the most critical roles in increasing app interaction.
In-app stories are a short storytelling element for your app. It is content that promotes your products or services to your users within the app. These contents are the content of your app created to be displayed to your users. To communicate with your users through your app, you can add the following to your in-app stories; Images, Polls, GIFs, Emojis, and more.
– App Engagement
Your app’s user engagement is one of the essential things for an App. If we take a mobile app as a basis, we can say that app engagement is a set of metrics that track how many users interact with your mobile app. It gives detailed information about how many people use your app according to functionality and user types. Besides, you can learn about how active users are in your mobile app. App engagement can enable you to analyze the performance of apps in terms of long-term App sustainability. It would be best if you had lots of app engagements for your app to be successful. App engagement aims to keep the user interested in your app. To increase your app engagement, you can use app engagement tools and story SDKs. To learn more detailed information about app engagement, check out the blog post.
– App Session
App session; is the time an app user interacts with the app. It records the session to show how much time users spent in an app when the mobile app is opened. For example, session data can be used to determine the average time users spend in an app and the time of day when users are most likely to interact with a particular app. In-app stories will improve your app session.
– App Revenue
Adding interactive and social features to your app, such as live stories interactive stories, is one of the most effective ways to increase app revenue. How many users you interact with affects your conversion rate, which allows you to earn app revenue. Retaining the old customer costs less than acquiring a new customer. If you want to generate app revenue, focus on your existing customers, and focus on engaging with them. You can consider days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas.
– Branding & Creativity
Showing your brand at least once a day during the 24-hour story period increases users’ chance to remember your product on their next visit. To not bore your potential customers, you should produce lots of creative creatives for your branding ads and use them regularly in rotation. Users want to see new designs and messages. You should provide creative branding activities that will keep their interest alive and increase their appeal. Live stories and interactive stories are a rich resource for Branding and Creativity. Stories SDKs will be very useful for you in this regard.
– Targeting
Thanks to the in-app stories, the mobile app can provide user segmentation and be changed by geographic location, demographic factors, interests, etc. You can adjust the target audience settings. Instead of showing an advertisement to all users or followers that exist for your app, you can identify target audiences based on their demographics, geographic location, and other pre-determined relevant criteria. Mobile app targeting is one of the best methods to gather valuable information about mobile app campaigns and target users in a much more specific way. In this way, marketers and advertising professionals will personalize their products and services to users.
Storyly is a story SDK where you can monitor and evaluate your in-app stories’ performance that provides this level of story integration with your app. It can be integrated with recommended engines. Integrate our Storyly SDK into your mobile app to interact with your app’s users and deliver in-app stories. You can check out our step-by-step guide on how to integrate! Find out how to integrate with:
iOS
React Native
Android
Flutter
You can reach detailed information here about creating and editing a story!
For quite some time, visual information matters more than any other information or content type. As you know and many of you probably use; billions of users post videos, pictures, stories, live broadcast every month. Moreover, there is an important user behavior dynamic right here. People use social media not only to share something about themselves or take a look at other people’s (friends, celebrities, or influencers) sharings; but also to learn more about brands and their products or services.
The necessity to exist in social media channels and share updates actively are clearly known by brands for a long time. Then, why are we talking about particularly Stories and contents which are using Stories format? The answer is quite simple: Today, people use Stories intensively, and other mobile-native vertical content as well!
Number of daily active Instagram Stories users from October 2016 to January 2019 (in millions)
That’s more than enough for being on Stories as a brand!
Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/
Besides, we don’t want to pass behavioral factors over! Of course, this intensive usage of Stories affects the user’s behaviors, the habit of use, and expectations. Let’s talk about the fundamental behavioral reasons which should trigger your brand to be on Stories and your app to have stories right away.
We told that today’s social media user’s habits and behaviors show a tendency to consume short and attractive visual contents. They want to get too much in a tick. Stories give chance to be attractive to brands in a short communication point with many tools like surveys, tests, GIFs, special filters, swipe-up options, music, gamification, etc. Accordingly, they love sharing and watching Stories. If you have proper stories format in your app, it means that you are very close to your users and retention of them.
Brands are becoming more transparent day by day. Actually, it is a requirement rather than a desire; because the information is spreading so fast and transparently. So, if you want to build a strong relationship with your users or potential users, first you have to be always one step ahead of them. You should analyze what they need or what they want to know about you and show them it in a practical and their own way. Don’t forget that the more your audience is familiar with you, the more quickly they’ll establish a connection and they will purchase from you or advocate the brand easily. You can talk about them the benefits of your product or services, awards, acknowledgments, maybe your daily office routines, and your team on Stories.
When you are a consistent content creator on Stories, the platform recognizes it and will surface your content to more followers and also your audience. It will increase your impressions and potential engagements. When you go Live video on Stories, your followers will get a notification at every turn. You will be basically more distinguishable. On top of it, imagine that you have interactive stories in your app, it is an undeniable competitive advantage that differentiates your app from rivals!
Stories provide a playground for you! As we mentioned above, especially IG Stories have many features to interact with users enjoyably. You can use these features also in your mobile app and improve special concepts and language to communicate with your audience as well as inspire them. For instance, you can create a campaign on stories to spread by your users and keep them active. Follow the successful brands at this job and get takeaways for your own app.
The last but not the least, most of your competitors started to do it. They share frequently or rarely; attractive or ordinary but being here means being one step ahead according to ceteris paribus assumption. They might use Stories to launch new products, lifestyle content, ask anything to their customer, share a campaign, etc. in their app as well. If you still don’t use story content to engage your customers, you should start from the right point as soon as possible to compete with your rivals.
In brief, users’ behaviors are evolving rapidly in the mobile world. You should follow the research and observe your audience closely. In light of today’s attitude, Stories are desirable options for impatient and willing to communicate with users. If you are at zero points, you can examine the successful examples to generate your first content. It would be helpful if you follow your mobile marketing plan and specialized it for the use of this channel as well.
Moreover, taking into account all of these user behaviors and tendencies about using stories, just think about having a stories section on your mobile app! It would be a very huge opportunity to increase your mobile app engagement and retention rate. The brilliant team of Storyly is waiting for your questions and requests to increase your app engagement with smart, interactive Stories solutions.
Since the past few years, there has been a growing trend of in-app stories on numerous social media mobile platforms that are used for various promotional or advertising purposes. What was initially believed to be just an addition in the overall user experience – has today transformed into something much bigger and profitable than that.
If we talk about the numbers, a report shows that Instagram stories are used by more than 500 million user accounts each day. Moreover, one-third of the most viewed Instagram stories are from business organizations. And according to experts, if the trend goes on like this, within a short time period, Instagram stories content sharing will surpass content sharing via the Instagram feed. Keeping this into consideration, let us dig deep into the world of in-app stories and how they can impact your app.
Here are some of the renowned mobile apps that give you the option to put up stories:
It is imperative to note that any in-app additional feature or modification in the structural architecture of an app is never an easy task to execute. The stories that you see on your social media app, is a product of hundreds and thousands of human resource hours during the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) that includes requirement gathering, design, coding, testing, deployment and maintenance.
Developing and launching an in-app story to your existing or an upcoming mobile app can slow down your entire project and can cost you a lot of unwanted overheads.
We’ve decided to flip-the-switch on this common development barrier and bring in-app stories to your mobile app, in under 1 hour, with a simple and light SDK integration. But first, what are stories!?
An in-app story is a short storytelling element of your app. It is a short-form content that promotes or advertises your product or service to your app users, within the app. This is not user-generated content, this is your app’s content showed to your users in your app. But this doesn’t mean that influencers can’t get involved (more on influencer collaboration later)! With Storyly, you can communicate with your app users with the following features added to your in-app stories:
These stories are viewed by the user of the app based on certain parameters and rules. This includes target audience settings in terms of geographical location (area, city, country, etc.), demographic factors (age, gender, etc.), interests or hobbies, educational background, etc. When a user views an in-app story, they can click on any clickable link within the app that could redirect within the app (deeplinks), for example, to your shopping cart, product page or event page.
Essentially, think of in-app stories as your way to communicate with your users in a familiar, yet fresh way. Through short-form content that is both informative, yet quick and engaging.
In order to take the hassle away from you for your in-app story needs, Storyly brings the story format to your mobile apps in a unique and stylish way. Storyly is a lightweight SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows you to create, integrate or import stories.
Using the stories’ bite-sized structure and mechanism, you can import stories from social media accounts like Instagram, and display them live on your existing mobile app to your users.
Additionally, you can create customized stories that are entirely based on your users’ feed. You can also portray the features and benefits of your products or services to your targeted users. By labelling specific story groups, you can target a particular segment or group of users and only deliver your stories to them instead of the rest of the users that might not be your target customers.
Storyly is the only third-party mobile app that allows you this level of story integration with your app. It has the ability to integrate with recommended engines. Also, you, as an app owner or developer can monitor and assess the performance of your in-app stories via the Storyly dashboard. You can check out our step-by-step guide on how to integrate our Storyly SDK with your mobile app, to get started on delivering in-app stories to your users! Learn how to integrate with:
It is time for a humble-brag! We’re going to be taking you through some of our favourite product features and how they can really make your app sing! Starting with two-way communication, enhanced by in-app stories!
Your users don’t just want you to talk-at them, they want to put in their two-cents as well! We have seen the rise of two-way communication marked by apps such as Twitter. The image above is using an ’emoji reaction bar’ to be able to have a dialogue, or two-way communication with their users via app stories. The potential benefits of this is increased loyalty, positive brand recognition, and of course, invaluable user feedback and information.
Instead of showing an ad or a story to all the users or followers of your app, you can select targeted audiences according to their demographics, geographical location and other relevant factors, which are predetermined in your CRM. In this example, the travel app has targeted users based on location, and is giving personalised travel recommendations.
Ahhhh, it looks like Positano in Spiaggia awaits your users near Italy’s Amalfi Coast 😍 😍 😍
App stories are viewed by your existing or potential users who give value to your brand, product or service in particular. If they don’t, it’s pretty easy to mute a story or unfollow an account altogether across any platform. So it is always a good idea to add a bit of personalization in order to convey your message or your product’s benefits to your target audience more effectively. You can also create a personalized feeling through 2-way communication via interactive stories.
The example of the fitness app above is providing their app users with personalized workout plans and recommendations! Pilates anyone?
For those who are addicted to their social media or even any other type of apps, they are the ones who do the heavy-lifting in terms of user engagement. If your brand name is popping up in their 24-hour story time period at least once a day, there is a higher chance of them remembering your product the next time they visit your online store, physical store or retail outlet.
The above image is an example of how a potential tarot and astrology app can differentiate itself among competitors by positioning itself as a premium lifestyle app, through the use of sleek in-app stories.
We love Instagram, and certainly you should continue your trending Instagram account! We think, why stop at Instagram, why not bring those engaging, modern story formats to your own app? It is clear that users love communicating in this style, it makes sense to continue this new communication format with your users in your app. We make this even easier with our Instagram social media import! With a click of a button, you can directly import and start showing your Instagram stories LIVE on your app!
We’re glad you noticed! We think stories are pretty as well, and they’re certainly vertical! However, they’re so much more! Check out some of our favourite Storyly features:
This is not an exam, you’re simply engaging with your users in a communication-loop style.
Why write into words, what can be expressed through emoji? Said the Gen-zer! 🦄 🦄🦄 With our emoji reactions, you can communicate with your users through our emoji slider and emoji reaction bar (below).
What is the purpose of all of these stories? Usually you’ll want to direct your users to a particular page, action or event. To facilitate this, Storyly’s stories can direct users with deeplinks, buttons/CTAs and swipe-up options (below).
Here is something you probably never imagined, a news app with a direct social media import of journalist’s stories. As consumer appetite has moved away from one-to-many communication towards a many-to-many model, you can leverage numerous voices all within your app via stories.
We’ve got some exciting feature’s which we’re busy working on. To give you a sneak preview, here are some of the features on our upcoming product roadmap:
Ok, so this one is going to be big, and is probably the feature we are most pumped about! Live streaming shopping is pegged to be a game-changer for the eCommerce industry, and we want our customers to be able to get the most out of this up-and-coming technology.
The Storyly Creative Studio is where (you guessed it) you can create your in-app stories directly on our dashboard! Stay tuned for our latest updates and new features. 🤫
Hurry, only 08:39 hours left until the ColdPlay Exclusive Tour Tickets go on Sale – said Spotify! Add a sense of urgency and excitement to your app with a countdown timer. Remind your users of when new features will be live or a trending products will go on sale!
Your storytelling journey is more powerful when you work in teams. Storyly offers a team structure with different roles and authorization for you to manage your dashboard more effectively. You can assign roles to your internal and external teammates and grant full or partial access to specific features. So we wanted you to delegate tasks between your teammates in a seamless and secure way.
The team structure has three different roles:
Story Creator (see only own story groups) | App Owner (assigned to specific apps) | Account Owner (overview all the apps in the account) | |
Create story groups | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Create stories | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
View analytics of her story groups and stories | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Sees all story groups and analytics | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
Publish story groups | ❌ | ✅. | ✅ |
Order and pin story groups | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
Add new app | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
You can monetize the story places as premium placement in your app. You can increase your revenue via direct deals without compromising your users’ experience by selling your story groups with view and/or click limit if you wish. In that case, you can invite external partners as story creators enabling them to create story groups. The content of those story groups will be created by your external partner. Once they are ready, you will be notified and able to review them before going live. Your external partners cannot see your other story groups and track their metrics.
If your apps are managed by an agency you can grant access as an App Owner to your agencies. In that context, as the account owner you will have access to the whole account to review your apps and see their analytics.
If you are an agency and manage multiple apps you can delegate apps to the related team members. You can create a hierarchy within the app in terms of access level as well while providing account level access to your customers.
Your team might consist of multiple departments including social media, digital marketing or product. You can invite your colleagues or employees to Storyly and assign different types of roles to your internal team members with varying degrees of authorization. Within the team structure, once a story creator creates a story group, the Account Owners and App Owners are notified to activate the story groups. This allows you to review the stories before going live.
How can you use and personalize in-app deep links for maximine impact and conversion? Check out our 5+ easy tips!
Congratulations app maker! You have successfully attained your first user from the app store. ‘Tis a day to rejoice! Though maker beware – bringing a user into your app is only half the ‘story’. If one is to aim their efforts at user acquisition only, they’ll find themselves with a high user turnover rate because the second part of the game is:
Not to be neglected, user engagement encompasses the part of the app’s user experience that is aimed at keeping users enthralled and thus retaining them. For instance, a game at its core is an application that is made up of finite possibilities and experiences, but in order to not make this experience a repetitive one, games use live events to keep users coming back for more, for instance, Live Raids in Raid Shadow Legends or Special Events in Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. Each app category uses its own quirks or gimmicks to keep users engaged and retained, it’s a simple construct: Would you be inclined to use an online shopping app that has sales on its products or one that keeps static prices across the board? E-commerce apps tend to use discounts as an in-app engagement mechanism to keep their customers close and their wallets closer still. Though, as aforementioned, just having discounts or ‘better’ app content is only half the game, the question is: How do you present it to your users and that too, in a way that keeps them coming back?
Talking about the presentation, Instagram learned that users attached too much prestige to their ‘gram posts, it was all about the glamour and gloss of the photo: Which filter to use? Which hashtags to add? What caption goes with the picture? What time should one post in order to gain maximum likes? (If you really want to know, Tuesday mid-day is the best time and Saturday is the worst day, you’re welcome!) This leads us to the question: How can an app known for its lavish and high maintenance nature make itself more accessible for casual users to upload more content and (hence) engage with the app?
In October 2013, Snapchat brought user engagement to a whole new level when it introduced Stories to the mix; it was simple, casual, and social. Instagram shamelessly picked up on this model, seeing it as the answer to its “too posh for the masses” problem and perfected it for its audience (and now Instagram Stories is nearly twice as popular than all of Snapchat together in terms of daily active users). In addition to Stories, Instagram also resorted to hiding users like counts in order to allow them to focus more on their content and less on their like counts (but that’s a conversation for another time).
Users were uploading and creating their content for others to see and react to on a much more frequent basis, since that they would disappear after 24 hours and not as permanent as the normal posts you would see on Instagram.
Click once to forward, respond and/or move between Stories, swipe sideways to move between story groups and swipe up to view a link within the story; the minimal effort required in viewing a myriad of visual content made them into the fool-proof answer to the complicated question of how to make content presentable in a way that boosts in-app engagement.
The shorter intervals between users uploading stories means they get to know each other and learn what the people they follow are all about. Instagram is a social app after all, and through Stories, we ‘engage’ with the lifestyles of the accounts we follow. App creators quickly started to catch up with the fact that Stories were leading to a surge in in-app user activity.
Having introduced Instagram Stories in 2016, Instagram saw a sharp increase in their MAU (Monthly Active User) count by 400M within just a year!
With some 31% of Instagram users posting them every month and 47% of users viewing them every week, Stories became a new trendsetter as the leading in-app engagement tool for apps. Business accounts on Instagram also began to notice this trend, which brings us to our next point of discussion.
Businesses on Instagram learned that Stories are one of the best methods of promoting visual content within apps; they could promote their own content with context by presenting them in the same fashion and build their audiences and engagements.
Stories led to the birth of Carousel Ads, an interactive form of advertisement that combines images and videos in a more appealing way that blends right into the user experience of swiping through ads; it’s almost like you are swiping through the story of an account you would be following on Instagram. The more seamlessly integrated the ad – the more interactions users will have with it. Now with Stories really taking off as a bonafide in-app engagement technique, is it necessary for businesses to use Instagram, Snapchat, and/or Facebook just to put out their content?
Given Instagram and Snapchat’s success with Stories, one could argue that there are many new ways we can play with their functions. What if an app creator could use the same model to provide their own content to users to view with more ease in their own app?
Businesses are using Stories because it’s simply more easy and appealing for users to view. So much so, that an array of different Story-editing tools have arisen like VSCO or InShot just to make their content stand out. If this is a positive way of promoting engagement with your end-users, why not employ the same tactic within your app as well to show users your content? This is now possible with thanks to the geniuses behind Storyly.
Storyly is a very simple tool that brings the familiar Stories format that we all have come to cherish to every app that wants to create and publish their very own Stories in their apps.
With the help of a one-step integration process, developers can create and edit spectacular content into Story form and also integrate Stories they’ve already posted on other social media, like Instagram or Snapchat for instance, into their own app.
I suppose you’d like to know more about how Storyly is useful for different kinds of apps?
Thought you’d never ask! We’ve already gone over the correlation between stories and in-app engagement but let’s delve just a little deeper into specifics with some different kinds of apps so that you can get a better picture.
These are just some of the many different creative ways that app developers can make use of Stories within their apps to promote user engagement. If you’d like to learn more about how Storyly can suit your vertical, do check out the website for more information!
If you’d like to give Storyly a shot, it’s free for apps that have up to 25K Monthly Active Users, and for bigger apps there’s a free trial to test Storyly’s premium features. I’ll leave a link here in case you’d like to check out the integration page and then bring the joy of Stories to your app.
Stories have almost become an extension of our lives. If it wasn’t captured on social media, then did it really happen? But when did stories become the norm?
From Homer’s Odyssey, to Instagram stories – are in-app stories a modern invention or modern reinvention?
Content is king. Does this sentiment ring true even during the times of the COVID-19 pandemic? We take a look at how content consumption has changes during these trying times.
The idea glowed in the second half of 2019. It evolved magically and finally, we have Storyly. This is our story, introducing App Samurai’s youngest product.
I talked a bit about what we do in App Samurai in my previous post, where I discussed our design processes in the company. In a few words, I can describe our business as helping app owners and marketers reach masses to acquire users for their mobile apps. Putting what we do in one sentence is pretty easy, doing what we do is not 🙂 We aim the cleanest ad traffic, we even built Interceptd to fight ad fraud. App Samurai and Interceptd together are handling billions of units of mobile ad data with a strong and passionate team of developers, product people, customer success specialists, etc.
Having years of experience in ad tech, we are always in the search for solutions to democratize the marketing ecosystem. I expressed what we do in this context because it’s of course what shaped Storyly into its form today.
It all started with the need for a better ad unit.
After standing side-by-side with the advertisers for quite some time, we decided to change our perspectives to care for the publishers as well. Monetization has always been a challenge for app owners, and the main reason for that is the end-users’ precious experience.
Why is UX that important and so fragile? Imagine being a user of a health & fitness app, you just want to spend some time on the newest trends in yoga, get rid of your daily stress and have a sip of your green tea. While scrolling through the content, le wild interstitial ad (the full-sized ads that we see on our mobile devices) appears. You have to wait for the cross button on the upper right corner to show up so that you can close the ad and continue reading “How to nail Baby Grasshopper Pose?” article. See? Your green tea is cold already.
A significant portion of digital marketing budgets is spent in the mobile world, where users spend most of their time. However, most of their digital media budgets go to waste in the stony road of “acquiring real users”. Yes, there’s fraud everywhere in the mobile advertising world, but fraudsters are not the only ones to blame. There’s something wrong and insufficient with the commonly used ad units like traditional banners and interstitials. They spoil the enjoyment of the user, they get in the way of the yogi and learning the trendy yoga pose. But when it’s a case of a content-dense app, they usually use these ad units because it’s so hard to earn revenue from these apps; there’s a tradeoff between sacrificing the end-user experience and making money from ads.
In the light of what we knew so far, we came up with the in-app story idea for monetization. One meeting followed another and one publisher interview followed another, we agreed on implementing Instagram-like stories in an SDK for Android and iOS apps to be used for advertising, which could be a game-changer. Because of the following reasons:
So, we started building Storyly, a lightweight SDK, with the thought of a better mobile app ad experience hence more ad revenue for apps in our minds.
While we were developing an MVP for Storyly, we conducted many customer interviews and inter-team workshops. We wanted to validate or kill the idea before it’s too late. Among the interviewees, there were app owners with less than 1k of daily active users (DAU), marketing managers and product managers working for apps with more than 500k of DAU. And almost every size of apps in between. Especially in the case of the big companies’ apps, one thing hit our faces:
Monetization with ads is not their main concern, keeping their hardly acquired users in the app is.
Think about a pizza brand’s app with about 200k DAU. There are digital marketers, content creators, and product people to make this app reach thousands of people and they want the users to consume the content they create. This is important to them because it’s how they compete with their competitors. The content can be about promotions, maybe some influencer stuff, seasonal campaigns, hot deals, basically anything about pizza. It doesn’t mean much when their users come to the app, do nothing and leave in 30 seconds and therefore make the whole content go useless. They need more session time, they need engagement. And finally, they want their users to order pizza (it’s fair enough to name this as their core action). They don’t need ad networks to put some ads on their app, they need their acquired users to enjoy the app.
Core action conversion is the most important metric for these apps, the most reasonable way to reach the maximum is ensuring in-app engagement.
So we decided to shift our focus on engagement instead of monetization. User engagement is Storyly’s top priority, when you engage users you can easily make them come back to your app. You can also put stories in your app to show your direct deals with your business partners or featured content. Let’s say you own that health & fitness app this time, a yoga studio comes to you and wants to build a partnership through sponsored stories. And there you go, making extra money with Storyly. So we haven’t killed the monetization idea, it’s safe and sound in direct deals 🙂
Storyly has great features that we’re proud of already. You can add custom CTA buttons to your stories, import stories from your business’ social media accounts, edit your content and everything about your stories from our Story editor, and track all the important stats from our dashboard.
What is ahead is even more impressive; we’re bringing interactivity to stories from polls to Q&As, creating Storyly Network as a community of Storyly owners to create a marketplace to help them make direct deals with each other, implementing personalization of stories by making tailored stories for each end-user, and the roadmap goes on.
Storyly is live on Tarif Küpü — a food & drink app (both on iOS and Android), and we have many apps in the pipeline from real estate apps to flight booking apps. We’re getting incredible attention from many mobile app development companies as well, because it’s never easy building fully functional SDKs (Storyly operates on native iOS, Android, and React-Native apps) and a smooth dashboard from scratch, monitoring every single issue, collecting all the metrics that matter and delivering a great experience. The conversion rates are very satisfying for Tarif Küpü, hence the live success supports our courageous words:
Our dream is to be the number one in-app engagement tool, and we crave to make Storyly irreplaceable for our customers.
We will launch Storyly in Product Hunt on January 28th. While we are super enthusiastic about the launch, we’ve released our beloved product on the Upcoming Page.
We’d appreciate any comment, subscription, and support on this journey! Feel free to check our webpage and contact us at these email addresses:
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Storyly brings the power of stories to your mobile app to deliver relevant and meaningful stories.
