Are you familiar with the K-Factor index in the marketing application? Stay with us in this article to learn about this concept.
Every day, millions of applications are published in various app stores. All app developers want their apps to be seen and downloaded by their target audience. App developers are always looking for a way to understand how users grow and increase the popularity of their products. One of the important indicators for measuring the development process of application users is called the K-Factor. But what is the k-Factor index and how can you use it to measure the growth rate of your application? What is the relationship between organic and paid application installation? Stay with us in this article to get answers to your questions.
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What is K-Factor?
In the world of mobile apps, there is a belief that there is a direct relationship between users who have installed your app with paid ads and organic users. The relationship between organic and inorganic installation in the marketing world is called the K-factor. The k-Factor index was initially defined as the ratio of new users that current users added to your customer base, but gradually this concept changed and now it is defined as the ratio of organic users to paid users (those who installed the application with paid ads). ) is defined. According to this definition, it is assumed that as the number of paid users increases, organic users will also increase. Maybe if you know that the term K-Factor entered digital marketing from medical science, you will understand its meaning better, because K-Factor for medical experts determines the speed of growth of a virus in the human body.
How to calculate the k-Factor index for your application?
Because it is impossible to determine for sure why an organic user installed your app, it is not possible to get the k-factor index accurately. But some ways can be used to increase the accuracy of calculations:
You can start paid campaigns in a specific geographic area where you have almost no organic installs and buy, for example, ten thousand users. After some time, you will see that the number of your users in that area has reached twelve thousand people. As a result, you will know that those two thousand people joined your application indirectly and under the influence of your current 10 thousand users. In this example, the calculated K-Factor will be 1.2.
If the K-Factor index is higher than one, it indicates that the application is concluding its paid campaigns, and the more this number improves, the better it will be for your business because it indicates that the users who come to your application with advertisements. They are constantly introducing you to their friends and this means increasing active users for free.
In order to make sure that our application has the ability to receive organic users through advertising, we must compare organic and non-organic installs and make sure that the installation due to ads has reached at least 65% of organic users. This means that for every 100 organic users, you should get 65 users through advertising to reach a suitable K-Factor index.
The more the number of organic users of an application increases, the more difficult it will be to attract organic users. In other words, applications that have a small number of users are not affected by K-Factor much and do not receive many organic users with ads. However, applications that have a lot of organic users will start attracting organic users again by applying paid advertising.
Research results on the K-factor index
From November 2016 to November 2017, research was conducted on 1,345 applications on Android and IOS platforms, and interesting results were obtained. The conditions of the applications that were considered for this research were as follows:
They must have continuously received users for at least 50 weeks from both paid and organic channels.
They should average more than 500 installs per week.
The rate of growth of paid and organic users should not be subject to seasonal conditions and different times.
The obtained results showed that although the k-Factor index is an undeniable fact, it does not apply to most of the applications in the market, which means that only 30% of the applications had a k-Factor and its amount was 1 on average. It was .45. The meaning of this fact is that, on average, out of every 100 paid installs, 45 organic installs are attributed to this category of applications. As mentioned, this number is average and there have been apps that have received hundreds and sometimes thousands of organic installs for every 100 installs using ads.
In this research, it has been determined that 22.5% of game apps are affected by k-Factor, while 33.6% of other apps such as stores are affected by it. Also, according to this research, there is not much difference between IOS and Android applications. Finally, it was found that the lifespan of the application has nothing to do with the k-Factor index.
Why is it important to measure the k-Factor index?
It can be argued that the k-factor is like the bank interest that you receive for your investment. In this case, you will do your best to increase the ratio of organic to non-organic users by upgrading your software or game. Also, by measuring this index in different geographical areas, you can target your marketing campaigns and increase your investment in areas with high k-Factor.
The more correctly your advertising campaigns are executed, the higher your chances of ranking in the app stores will be, and this in itself means getting more users organically. It is also important to mention that the higher your ranking is in Google Play or App Store, the more news about your application will be spread through word-of-mouth advertising, and this in itself will increase the K-Factor index and increase your profit from your investment. will be
If you learn more about your app’s K-Factor, you will be able to measure its shareability and understand the reasons that make it easier for users to share your app with others.
How to improve the k-Factor index for our application?
Simplify sharing your app:
Among these measures, it is possible to simplify the possibility of “inviting friends to play” or “sharing points” with others. Inviting a friend to the app should not be difficult.
Give your app invitees an incentive to do so.
By offering a discount to your current users or by giving game coins to players, invite them to invite their friends to your application. If this is done by sending a special code, you will find out which user has invited the most people.
Give your app invitees an incentive to sign up for your service.
If you rate the invitee, there is a high probability that your current users will invite other people to your application. When you decide on the reward, remember that this reward will be considered when they decide to download the app. For example, if their reward is three coins from a game that they don’t have experience with yet, they will probably not be attracted to your game. Everyone will understand the meaning of a 20 thousand tomans discount for the first purchase. Also, let new users know that they will reward their friends by joining the app.
Work on your product.
Now that you understand the K-Factor concept, you can improve it with the information you gain. Once you understand what kind of users will increase your K-Factor, you can adjust your ad campaign to target these types of people. For example, you may notice that female users living in Isfahan have a K-Factor of 1.8, and female users living in Shiraz have a K-Factor of 1.2. As a result, it is better to take your advertising more seriously in the geographical area of Isfahan. Remember that K-Factor is like your bank interest, so you should always measure and improve it.