• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, May 2, 2014

According to mobile app marketing platform Fiksu, programmatic is helping app marketers get their word out “without breaking the bank.” Fiksu has released its latest “Fiksu Indexes” with data from March 2014.

Programmatic ad buying is not the overarching theme of the report, but it plays a key role. 

“The March Indexes tell us that while the market is only getting bigger each month, it has also grown volumes in terms of maturity,” stated Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu. “With the addition of programmatic and optimization technologies, marketers have the tools to market their apps better and can do so without breaking the bank.”

In its report, Fiksu says month-over-month “Cost per App Launch” has decreased. Cost per Launch is the “cost of each repeat app launch over time.”

For iOS devices, Fiksu says the Cost per Launch decreased 10% month-over-month to $0.17, while it dropped 5% for Android devices to $0.10. Fiksu writes that “the decrease in Cost per Launch is not a result of more devices in the market, but of the dramatic increase in app usage.”

Looking at it from a year-over-year perspective, Cost per Launch has remained steady for iOS devices (up 2%) and has gone down for Android devices (down 37%).

When it comes to Cost per Install, programmatic doesn’t appear to have helped to keep costs down for iOS marketers, at least on a year-over-year basis. The Cost per Install on iOS devices in March was $0.97, up 20% from one year ago.

However, looking at the chart itself (inset), Cost per Install last March was at $0.86, which would mean it has only increased about 12% year-over-year, not 20%.

For Android devices, Cost per Install has been crashing ever since the December rush, checking in at $1.08 in March 2014. Fiksu says this is a 14% year-over-year decrease. However, looking again at the inset chart, we see Android Cost per Install marked at $1.07 last March, which would mean this March's price of $1.08 would be about a 1% year-over-year increase.

According to Fiksu, ad effectiveness has also seen a boost, which the company attributes to better targeting, formats, ads and apps in general. It says click-through rates on iOS devices are the highest they have ever been and five times what they were a year ago. Android devices are seeing nearly three times better click-through rates compared to a year ago.

In other words, marketers have seen a significant jump in clicks and ad effectiveness but haven’t had to spend too much more -- and in some cases, have spent even less -- which Fiksu attributes to better data targeting and programmatic buying.