Recently W3i released a new service, Apperang.com, for incentivizing users to download mobile apps for their iPhone®, iPad®, and iPod touch® devices

W3i was able to create this service in a couple of months because of some great industry leading tools. Apperang.com was built using Microsoft’s .NET framework and ASP.NET web application framework. ASP.NET provides many out of the box features that make creating sites quick and simple. Things like Site Membership and Forms Authentication, Session State management, Master Pages and customizable controls provide the fundamental pieces needed to build a robust web application.

Site Membership

ASP.NET provides an out of the box solution to provide membership to your site. With a few simple configuration settings and the use of the Web Site Administration Tool you can setup users and roles for your site. There are also a series of controls that ship with ASP.NET that allow you to provide login, registration, and password recover functionality to your own site with no extra coding. Even if you don’t use the built in ASP.Net Membership, Forms Authentication provides a quick way to manage users throughout the page life cycle and most authorization can be handled by setting up configuration settings in the Web.config file. If a page needs to display content differently based on whether or not a user is logged in or based on a role, the LoginView control can handle this declaratively, meaning no extra code needs to be written. All of this out of the box functionality is extendable. So even if you need more control over certain behaviors you can write you own custom code using defined extension points.

Session State

ASP.NET has a built in session management system. It’s part of the page life cycle and handles the loading and persisting of session data. You can store just about any kind of Object in session making it very easy to store and retrieve data. You can choose from five different modes Off, InProc, StateServer, SQLServer, and Custom. Each one has an advantage and disadvantage, mostly dealing with a balance between performance and the durability of the data after the applications and servers are no longer running. The Custom mode allows you to build your own Data Provider if you have specific needs on where and how your session data is stored.

WCF

In the near future W3i will be releasing the Apperang Mobile App into the App Store. Another great advantage to using the .NET Framework is access to the Windows Communication Foundation or WCF. WCF provides the ability to expose functionality in a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) type fashion without being locked into a specific protocol for communication between systems. W3i has taken advantage of WCF by utilizing the RESTful services feature in order to expose key functionality to the Apperang Mobile App. In a matter of a few weeks we were able to expose a set of services with the same functionality that was built into the website by utilizing WCF. WCF also allows us to add or change protocols with simple configuration changes. So if at some point in the future we need to expose the service using SOAP we can do this by adding a new endpoint configuration. The other great advantage of WCF is that it is fully extendable and can be customized at about every point in the pipeline, though you probably won’t need to as it is full featured out of the box.

Expect to see W3i release some new sites and services in the upcoming months utilizing more of Microsoft’s .NET framework and ASP.NET.

W3i Improves Ad Revenues with the Yahoo! Toolbar 

W3i searched for a way to offer consumers more value and to increase revenues through its free and trial computer applications.  The Yahoo! Publisher Network helped it do both by adding the Yahoo! Toolbar to W3i’s application network to monetize search ads and by partnering with the company to optimize user experience. 

Yahoo’s Full Case Study

The Challenge
Going live with an advertiser’s offer is only the beginning when distributing through the W3i Application Network.  As with landing pages, the challenge is to optimize the critical elements so that ROI is optimized.      

The Solution
W3i provides consultative and testing services for advertisers to increase acceptance rates.  One of the first things we look at is the disclosure screen itself.  The disclosure screen is the screen shown to the user within the installation manager, InstallIQ, that discloses the required information about the application.  Ultimately the goal is to improve acceptance rates.  It works like this, W3i mocks up multiple disclosure screens based on the findings of previous tests.  W3i runs tests on the disclosure screen mocks showing the various screens to users to determine which one has the highest acceptance rate.  W3i replaces the original disclosure screen with the one that performs the best. 

The Results
An example of a disclosure screen test that W3i recently ran was for a security application.  There was a 6.45% gain in acceptance rate with one of the versions tested. Needless to say, that version was rolled out.

Here are some things that W3i found to perform better in terms of improved acceptance rates with disclosure screens, but ultimately testing can only determine what works best for each particular application:

• Illustrating what the software does instead of having multiple useless graphics
• Having the copy left aligned
• Showing the functionality of the applications simply
• Trying to limit the amount of information on the screen to avoid crowding

Following is an example of these tips at work on an internal W3i product disclosure screen:

The top image is a control disclosure screen for one of W3i’s internal products.  The bottom image is a test version that had a 2.48% improved acceptance rate.

Find Out More
To learn more about optimizing within the W3i Application Network, contact Nicole Przybilla at nicole.przybilla@w3i.com or call 320-257-7500 ext. 1020.

Nicole Przybilla, Account Executive, W3i, LLC
Nicole focuses on growing W3i business relationships, making sure the client has what they need to help them be successful. If they aren’t happy, she isn’t happy.