The set-up process of an app install campaign is crucial to the success of your app user acquisition strategy. It’s the moment when you have to carefully choose the goal you want to achieve and your overall app install campaign strategy, which consists of budget, targeting options, creative assets and whether you want to run the campaign on a CPI or CPA basis. However, the app campaign optimization is as important as the set-up in order to hit your target and achieve success. Indeed, once the app install campaign has started, the next two essential steps are monitoring the performance and optimizing the campaign. By monitoring the results you have a better understanding on what is working and what is not based on your initial goals and KPIs. And this is the moment when you have to use all the data collected so far to improve your app campaign optimization. Here we list 3 tips which can help your app campaign optimization and the overall success of your app install campaign.
Optimize Towards Your CPA
Based on the goal you want to achieve, be it to grow your app user base or to increase your in-app revenues, you can decide to run app install campaigns on a CPI (Cost-Per-Install) basis or on a CPA (Cost-Per-Action) basis. The main optimization will be of course focused on the goal you chose before the launch. However, you can always improve your performance by optimizing every step of the user funnel towards the post-install events more relevant to your business. Even though you decide to run an app install campaign with a CPI model, you can identify one or more post-install events that would be your ideal payable events in a CPA app campaign and focus the app campaign optimization on those. Once you have your CPI, by keeping track of the post-install events best aligned with your business KPIs, you can compute your eCPA, which stands for effective or equivalent CPA. This metric will tell you how much you are paying for the post-install events that generate in-app revenues and you can optimize your app install campaign in order to decrease this CPA.
Run Creative A/B Testing
The second tip to follow in order to run an effective app campaign optimization is to make the most out of your creative assets. The best way to do this is to run creative A/B testing, which helps you to assess the performance of your creatives implemented in the app campaign. It is possible to run creative A/B testing from the start of your campaign in order to collect as much data as possible. The basic process of creative A/B testing is to show two different creatives randomly to two different audiences with similar demographics. With a statistically significant sample you will be able to evaluate the performance of both creatives and then decide how to use this insight to improve your app campaign optimization. For instance, you could allocate the budget only on the top performing creatives or produce more similar variations of it to rotate in the app install campaign. Many DSPs, which run programmatic app campaigns for advertisers, can run creative A/B testing for you and provide a powerful tool for your app campaign optimization.
Optimize Your ROAS
Finally, the last suggestion we give to help your app campaign optimization is to focus on your ROAS, a.k.a Return On Ad Spend. This metric is often used to measure the performance of an app install campaign because it tells you the revenue generated from each dollar spent on the app campaign. Monitoring the ROAS is essential to evaluate your performance but it can also help the app campaign optimization. Indeed, app campaigns can be optimized towards improving the ROAS, by acquiring more high-quality users, who carry out post-install events and generate revenues. In addition, it is also possible to follow our first tip mentioned in this article in order to improve the ROAS and optimize the app campaign. By lowering the CPA, advertisers can decrease their spend and improve the ROAS, optimizing the overall performance of the app campaign.
