What are the action items that will increase the odds in that battle to improve your monetization?

This is one of the most challenging aspect for every startups. After you build your application (or service) you need to measure all the actions that the users take. This is a learning mechanism that will let you iterate (hopefully quickly) and improve your product. Once you feel that you have a good product market fit and you are out of the alpha (or beta) modes it’s time to put efforts in the ‘Grow’ and ‘Earn’ parts.

Let’s see what are some of the tools that we can use.

Branding

• Today, it’s a common practice to let users invite their friends. You can grow brand awareness by letting existing users invite friends with Firebase Invites: This invites is a cross-platform solution for sending personalized email and SMS invitations, on-boarding users, and measuring the impact of invitations. In a recent study of thousands of smartphone users, researchers found that the #1 reason people discovered an app is because they heard about it from a friend or colleague. Firebase Invites makes it easy to turn your app’s users into your app’s strongest advocates. 
• Leverage the Universal App Campaigns to reach more users. You campaign will run on YouTube and/or Display App Install campaigns. The power of this solution is that you don’t need to create Ads, but rather, AdWords will use your ad text ideas and assets from the Google Play Store to design a variety of ads across several formats and networks.
  You can also do demographic targeting:

• Target potentially qualified users with Search App Install Campaigns, Installed App Categories and App Remarketing. 
• Drive initial direct engagement with App Promotion Ads (image, text, video) and Target CPA bidding 
• Track initial engagement with App Download Conversion Tracking

Making money

• AdMob by Google is a mobile advertising platform that you can use to generate revenue from your app. Using AdMob with Firebase Analytics provides you with additional app usage data and analytics capabilities.
• Drive revenue with App Indexing, Deep Linking and App Conversion Tracking (Download and In-App)

Retention

• Re-engage existing customers through Search and Display App Engagement Campaigns 
• Use AdMob IAP House Ads to present deals and simplify complex conversion flows.