In the past few months ROAS (return on ad spend) has been replacing CPI (cost per install) as the preferred KPI.
CPI has long been the most popular metric chosen by marketers with the aim of measuring the cost of acquiring new installs. After noticing some of its limitations, marketers have started abandoning CPI and its popularity has severely decreased over the past months, thus leading to an increased interest towards other KPIs as valuable alternatives.
There are a few reasons why CPI is losing its appeal to marketers, who are deciding to turn to ROAS for their UA campaigns to obtain high-quality users and enhance their campaign optimization.
Here are a few cons of CPI influencing this decision:
- Short-term user engagement
- Lack of revenue insight
- Higher churn rate
- Short-term cost-efficiency
Here are a few important and effective features of ROAS that have led to this crucial shift:
- Action-oriented measurement
- Quality over quantity
- Revenue alignment
- Enhanced campaign optimization
These factors have led Mapendo to switch from CPI to ROAS and decide to leverage ROAS for UA campaign optimization.
What strategies do we implement to optimize ROAS?
- Contextual targeting
- User segmentation based on:
- The app category
- The operating system (iOS/Android)
- The user’s location (country, state, city)
- Dynamic creative optimization:
- Multi-page ads
- Combining different ad formats
- Automatically optimizing them based on ROAS
Lastly, here’s a practical example from one of our clients to show you how a dating app has managed to achieve good results thanks to ROAS as KPI:
With behavioral and technological segmentation, we can optimize every channel towards the desired ROAS, leveraging data either from MMPs or from clients’ platforms.
