App developers are masters of analytics.

They know who installed their app, who went through the tutorial, how many hours users spend in their app, and they know who pays. Using this information, app developers and publishers can predict who are likely candidates for acquisition.

The way they do this is to aggregate users together and analyze common characteristics. These common characteristics are based on demographic parameters such as age, gender, location and interests.

The theory is that if the existing users share these characteristics, then the likelihood is that other users with the closest matching characteristics will make good targets for acquisition. So, if 75% of my user base is female, aged 20-35, primarily based in the USA, Germany and Brazil, then I will go out and look for more users with a similar profile.

This theory works well when it comes to luring users to install and try out your app. However, how many of those users will then go on to pay for something in your app? The industry average is that 5% or lower get converted to paying users.

These paying users contribute to more than 70% of the app developer’s revenue .

So how do you target the users more likely to pay? One way is to analyze your user base and identify which users are paying and look at their common characteristics. Does age, gender, location, interest, time spent in the app provide evidence that a user can pay?

Maybe, but it’s a shot in the dark. The only way to find out is to try it and see whether you get a better conversion rate to paying users from those you acquire. Using your user base to predict payment probability of new users to acquire is a tough task.

A safer bet to predict who is likely to pay is to target users who are proven to pay. If you were able to target users who have made a payment recently or make payments frequently, then there’s a higher chance that they will pay inside your app.

The smart way to do user acquisition is to look at evidence of who installs your app and combine that with proven payment behavior. This intelligent combination of analytics guides you to users who are more likely to install and increases the conversion rate to paying users.

The good news is that it is possible to identify users who are proven to pay.

bango.ai has been designed to address this very issue. Bango.ai is where app developers and publishers access audiences of users more likely to make an in-app purchase (IAP).

Bango analyzes detailed payment information from its global payment partners — Mobile Network Operators and other payment providers — to gain insights into the buying behavior of hundreds of millions of users. This information is used to create high lifetime value (LTV) audiences made available on advertising platforms such as Facebook Business Manager, Google Adwords, Snapchat and Twitter.

Sound too good to be true? It isn’t, come and take a look. It’s free to access and browse our audiences.