For Better Ad Targeting, Flurry Personas Reveal Mobile App Users’ Interests

App measurement and ad company Flurry is today releasing a new product which will allow developers to better identify and track various audience types using their apps, while also allowing advertisers to target those audience segments by interest. The product, called “Personas” (yes, like those long-ago Firefox themes), splits app users into over 20 different groups like “business travelers,” “parents,” and “fashion enthusiasts,” for example. By identifying these different groups, app publishers and advertisers alike can use the new feature to deliver better, more relevant ads to an app’s users or to better customize the app with a given group’s needs in mind.

The Personas feature identifies a total of 23 audience segments, which were generated using anonymized data from the over 200,000 apps on Flurry’s network, reaching over 600 million iOS and Android users. These newly identified audience groups include the following: Real Estate Follower, Business Professionals, Personal Finance Geeks, Business Travelers, Value Shoppers, Catalogue Shoppers, Entertainment Enthusiasts, Music Lovers, TV Lovers, Bookworms, News & Magazine Readers, Casual & Social Gamers, Hardcore Gamers, Social Influencer, Sports Fan, Health & Fitness Enthusiasts, Singles, Fashionistas, Parenting & Education, Photo & Video Enthusiasts, Home & Garden Pros, Food & Dining Lovers and Auto Enthusiasts.

In order to be categorized as one of these types of users, a person would have to spend more than 25 times the benchmark average across application clusters that demonstrate interest in that category. This info can be used in combination with the segmenting and targeting tools Flurry already had available, including the ability to target by age, gender, device, language, and geography.

Obviously, some users may fall into more than one of these categories – parents may be music lovers, e.g. The Personas aren’t mutually exclusive, though. So you can’t look at them and say, wow, 60% of my app’s users are business travelers and only 20% are into cars. It may very well be that all 20% of those auto enthusiasts are travelers, too! Instead, the figures are meant to used to learn more about the interests of the app’s users in general.

Personas are available to publishers on Flurry’s AppSpot who want to improve inventory quality, and to advertisers on Flurry’s AppCircle who want to run targeted campaigns. While ad targeting is a key reason to use something like this, the feature is available to developers on Flurry Analytics, too, as they may just want to create new features for their app’s users that are a better fit for their app’s core audience.