“When I thought I was out…they pulled me back in!”. The famous quote from Al Pacino in the final installment of the Godfather trilogy has since become universal and resonant anywhere. Well, it applies also to the mobile app ecosystem and especially to what is known as mobile app marketing.
Indeed, mobile app developers can’t rest after they’ve launched their products, but they need to market it properly in order to achieve success. So their job will then focus on user acquisition strategies and on making money out of those new users. Easy to say, but far more difficult to put into practice. How can advertisers run effective mobile app marketing campaigns to grow their user base and maximize in-app revenues ?
While there’s no single answer to the billion dollar question, we’ll show here 5 app marketing campaigns examples. Each of them describes how Mapendo has helped advertisers to scale their apps’ user base and to increase their app marketing ROI.
Omada
Omada is the latest hit from French publisher Luni, already known for Fitness Coach and Period Tracker. Omada allows users to predict sport events by placing virtual bets and competing with other users. Luni reached out to Mapendo in order to run app marketing campaigns in Europe and US, focusing on increasing user retention rate and in-app event rate.
Mapendo’s team set up CPI app marketing campaigns, targeting and acquiring high-quality users through their mobile DSP. Their A.I. - powered platform was then able to optimize the traffic acquisition identifying the best pockets of traffic based on more than 20 contextual signals.
Thus, acquiring high-quality users, Omada kept the in-app event rate above 70% and decreased their CPA (the cost per unique in-app event generated) by 26% since the beginning of their mobile app marketing campaigns.
Paysend
Paysend is a remittance app which allows card-to-card transfers and currently operates in more than 150 countries around the world. Like Omada, they wanted to focus their user acquisition efforts on targeting high-LTV iOS users for their app, generating more in-app events and revenues.
The key for this app marketing campaign was the proper set-up between Paysend, Mapendo and the MMP Appsflyer. Indeed, tracking not only installs and registrations, but also other subsequent in-app events such as money transfers proved to be crucial during the optimization process. Mapendo’s ML algorithms identified a strong correlation between registration and money transfer, allowing the team to optimize the campaigns towards registrations.
Targeting registrations was faster than targeting money transfers because they are earlier position within the user funnel. Then, adding state targeting in the US to the targeting process led to scale app growth, increasing app install rate by 200% with an eCPI 10% lower compared to the early stage of the app marketing campaign.
Simulation Game
The third example of a successful mobile app marketing campaign in our list comes from a simulation mobile game. As it usually happens with mobile games, the main goal here was to maximize user acquisition ROAS. The game in question monetizes mostly through in-app purchases (IAPs), which are then essential to increase revenue.
Based on previous experience with app marketing campaigns for mobile games, Mapendo devoted its attention to creatives. Different ad formats such as banners, interstitials, videos and playable ads were rotated and tested. Based on data collected, Mapendo let its DSP find the right balance between banners, the cheapest ad placements, and videos and playables. The latter had higher costs than banners when bidding in ad exchanges, but were more rewarding in terms of high-LTV users and in-app purchases generated.
By increasing the number of in-app purchases by 10x since the start of the app install campaign, Mapendo helped this app developer reach a ROAS higher by 30% than their target KPI for their simulation game.
Hyper-casual game
Staying in the mobile games category, Mapendo helped a hyper-casual game increase its ROI in Brazil, a country where CPIs are usually lower than tier-1 and tier-2 countries. Low payouts and a fierce competition make it extremely difficult to boost ROI in such geos.
When dealing with hyper-casual games, it’s worth knowing that they monetize almost exclusively through in-app ads rather than in-app purchases. That’s because of the such games, which require very little efforts from users, who are not supposed to spend money in-app.
Therefore, volumes of new users are the solution to maximize in-app revenues and user acquisition ROI. Mapendo leveraged its knowledge from previous app marketing campaigns for hyper-casual games, especially in terms of where to buy ad placements. Indeed, by optimizing the media buying towards the best app categories in terms of install rate, and by leveraging private deals with specific apps, new users skyrocketed with a 138% increase in Day 30 - ROI.
Ride-hailing app
Last but not least, ride-hailing apps could benefit from app marketing campaigns too. Our example is about a well-known ride-hailing app from a major global mobility company. Their goal was to run app marketing campaigns gradually decreasing their cost per install (CPI).
Mapendo’s solution was to run CPA app campaigns, thus aiming at scaling first-rides too and not only installs. Then, after gathering enough data, Mapendo’s ML algorithms started the optimization process aimed at reducing eCPI, which is measured by dividing the total cost of app marketing campaigns by the number of new users acquired.
Creatives’ optimization proved to be essential to the eCPI’s decrease. Especially, an internal tool was employed to generate native ads by dynamically combining assets from the app store page, such as logo, name, description, etc. Saving the app developer’s money to produce new creatives, a 40% decrease in CPI was achieved in less than 2 months.
Wrapping it up, we’ve listed 5 mobile app marketing campaigns, which successfully helped 5 mobile apps increase their user base while also driving in-app revenue and profitability. Indeed, five different goals were achieved in the campaigns mentioned above:
- In-app event rate growth;
- Install volumes growth;
- ROAS increase;
- Day-30 ROI increase
- CPI decrease.
To learn more about Mapendo and how our solutions help mobile apps acquire new users profitably with A.I., don’t miss our website’s resources about case studies!
