Paid user acquisition campaigns are essential in an effective mobile growth strategy because they help increase both apps’ user base and in-app revenues. There are several indicators that advertisers can use to measure the success of these efforts, such as the volume of installs, CPI, retention rate and so on. They all provide useful insights but at the end of the day it is the ROAS which determines whether a campaign is profitable or not. ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) measures the revenues generated from each dollar spent on app install campaigns. It can be computed as the ratio between the total revenues of an ad campaign and the total cost and it is believed to be good as long as it is positive. Once defined the revenues, the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and KPIs, there are many ways to drive ROAS in user acquisition campaigns, including the use of A.I. and machine learning algorithms. Here are three effective actions advertisers can take in order to boost this metric.
1. Acquire High-Quality Users
The first step is to acquire high-quality users, who make purchases in-app and hold a high lifetime value for the business. Therefore, it is necessary to define the key post-install event inside the app that generates revenues and then analyse all the funnel from the install to that event. By keeping track of these events and the conversion rates between them, you can identify the most valuable users for your app and optimize the ad spend towards them. As a result, you can increase your ROAS by investing your budget to acquire only users who will spend money in-app. In addition, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is another useful metric that tells you how much money you are earning from each user in a selected time period.
2. Create Engaging And Targeted Ads
When running programmatic app install campaigns, especially through DSPs, advertisers can assess their ad creatives performance, in order to understand which ads drive more conversions and more quality users. They can run A/B tests rotating different creatives and ad formats, gathering lots of data and evaluating the results. Thus, app developers can optimize the campaigns showing the top performing formats and even work with the creative team in order to design new ones. Indeed, it is possible to maximize the ROAS by engaging users with more relevant ads, targeted to the specific post-install event that generates in-app revenues.
3. Select Different Geos
To improve the performance of user acquisition campaigns, it is important to monitor the results in different countries/states, because audiences behave differently and there may be other factors affecting the final outcome. Therefore, it is possible to make data-driven decisions such as splitting the budget per countries/states and adjusting the ad spend based on the results observed. This optimization can help increase the ROAS by avoiding wasting money on the geos that don’t generate revenues and focusing user acquisition efforts on the ones that bring high-LTV users.
In conclusion, there are countless ways to measure the performance of your app install campaigns, but the ROAS is the one that tells you if your efforts are generating more revenues than the money you are spending on acquiring new users. By combining these three simple solutions you can make your marketing actions extremely profitable and keep experimenting with new optimization strategies.
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