In this day and age, programmatic advertising has easily become the key for any app user acquisition strategy. According to IAB’s latest report about mobile app marketing, advertisers will allocate half of their entire advertising budget on programmatic advertising. Running app install campaigns on programmatic platforms brings countless benefits such as full transparency, real time app campaign optimization and sophisticated targeting options. The process of programmatic advertising campaigns involves Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), which automatically buy ad placements on behalf of advertisers, and Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), which sell the ad inventory of publishers. Nevertheless, not everything is as easy as it sounds: in fact, there are several aspects to look at if you want your app install campaign to be successful and ROAS positive.
Check out here our best practices for an effective programmatic app campaign:
- Design a coherent app user acquisition strategy
- Capitalize on your creative assets
- Improve your app campaign optimization
App User Acquisition Strategy
Although it may sound obvious, any app install campaign needs a good app user acquisition strategy to be effective. This means deciding in advance the major goals you want to achieve and how to do that. Based on the goal of your strategy, you may choose a payout model, be it CPI (Cost-Per-Install) or CPA (Cost-Per-Action), a budget and geographic locations and operating system to target. Any of these options serve different purposes and have different consequences. For example, a large budget allows DSPs to collect more data and improve their app campaign optimization capabilities. Or, a CPA app campaign, which rewards DSPs every time new users generate a post-install event, may take more time to optimize and scale volumes of in-app events. Thus, the development of a coherent app user acquisition strategy is essential for programmatic advertising activities.
Creative Assets
Creatives are a crucial part of an app install campaign, but uploading them and letting programmatic advertising do the magic is not a thing. Indeed, some creatives may not be attractive to users or engaging enough to make them download your app. In addition, users often become blind to the creatives if they are shown the same ad multiple times. That’s why you should refresh your creative assets frequently, and rotate different ad formats based on the goal you want to achieve. Finally, you can also run creative A/B tests in order to assess the performance of your creative assets and optimize the app install campaigns with the best performing ones.
App Campaign Optimization
As mentioned in the introduction, programmatic advertising allows real time optimization and sophisticated targeting options. These two advantages are complementary, because testing as many targeting settings as possible is necessary to collect data for the app campaign optimization. For instance, you can target users based on operating system, internet service provider, internet connection type, and even age and gender. Programmatic advertising allows combining these options with data about publishers for a real time app campaign optimization which can significantly improve your app install campaign performance.
These tips are not the only secrets behind successful app install campaigns but any good app user acquisition strategy will take them into account. Programmatic advertising is a fully automated process which offers plenty of advantages, but it also needs an effective set-up and constant monitoring in order to deliver its full potential.