LIVE FROM APPS WORLD 2015: Belinda Langer, product manager at Google, has a message for developers: app indexing encourages organic discovery and helps surface content.

Cookpad, a Japanese recipe app, saw a 15 per cent increase in re-engagement by dormant users and an increase of 10 per cent in weekly sessions per active user when it did this.

According to Langer, more Google searches now take place on mobile than desktop in 10 countries including US and Japan, and this trend will only increase with time.

However, the apps market is very competitive. While an average American has 36 apps on their mobile, a quarter of them are never opened and developers need to make an effort to make their apps as visible as possible.

Search is one of the biggest drivers of app installs in the Play Store and advertisers can reach users “with high intent” via search ads.

The executive also talked up Google’s universal app advertising, which allows users to create app install ads that will run across all of Google’s platforms, including YouTube, Google Play and Google.com in a “fully automated campaign”.

Developers will need to write ad text, set a target cost per install and daily budget and select a target audience to get started.

Mobile at heart
Thierry Bedos (pictured), CTO of Hotels.com, agreed with Langer about the importance of apps, saying that any brand’s omni-channel strategy must have “mobile at its heart”.

He also cleared up some misconceptions he thinks exist around such a strategy.

One is that customers who engage with a brand on several fronts – apps, mobile, website, desktop – are fickle, and not loyal or valuable, but this is untrue, he said.

According to him, a customer’s “lifetime value will increase by 30 per cent” when they engage with a brand on multiple channels.

Another misconception is that an app is only good for encouraging online transactions, and has nothing to do with a customer visiting an actual store.

However, Bedos believes a customer being able to check if a product of interest is in stock at a near-by location via an app will be more likely to visit the store.

Seamlessness between all channels is essential – for instance remembering what a user has searched for via desktop should be available to them even when they log in from an app, he said.