User acquisition is always a central focus of an app growth strategy, as it directly impacts profitability and long-term success, becoming the essence of every sustainable corporation project.
Developing strong user acquisition helps you to effectively attract high-quality users, maximise marketing efficiency, create and maintain a competitive advantage.
In this article, we are gonna explore the key tools to have an effective user acquisition strategy and what elements it must include to fully leverage the benefits this process can offer you.
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Let’s now have a closer look at the concrete steps you must follow to successfully structure a strong user growth strategy:
- Goals Setting, to understand what you want to achieve
- Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Integrate with Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs)
- Choosing Multiple UA Platforms to work with
- Assess your strategy, Results Evaluation and Optimization
Every profitable strategy begins with clear and measurable goals, crucial to define the method of your approach, the budget you intend to set, and subsequently the overall performance evaluation.
In the digital marketing market, there are several kinds of goals to increase your app success, let me first begin with the one which is strictly related to the key concept behind user acquisition: User Growth. It is in fact possible that you created the most interesting and effective app, but if you do not know how to increase the number of your active users, what could have been a worldwide winning will get lost in the crowd.
Another key goal is Increasing Brand Awearness ,especially in the early stages of marketing campaigns. This aspect is fundamental to expand visibility of apps, to increase engagement of targeted people, transmitting them core values and features of the work you created.
Revenue Growth is basically the main goal of every business strategy. Revenues are achievable through in-app actions like purchases, subscriptions or even ads. It is fundamental to develop an effective user funnel, which does not take too long before generating effective profits.
Finally, yet importantly, the Profitability that a good strategy can achieve is the goal that enables your app to increase the company’s returns ensuring sustainable acquisition costs and guaranteeing in this way high returns.
Now that you have set clear goals, the next step is to monitor the performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These metrics enable you to track and measure efficiency, costs, and the overall effects of your decisions.
Let’s have a look at some essential types of KPI to fully understand their meaning and make proficient use of them:
- Cost Per Install (CPI), which is the cost for every install made by new users, is an indicator that surely enables you to increase the volume of downloads.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), definable as the company’s expenditure aimed at gaining new engaged and high-quality users, is surely safer for advertisers than CPI because it enables you to have a concrete cost just when real revenues are generated.
- Return On Advertisement Spend (ROAS), indicators showing the relation between the revenues generated for every dollar expenditure on advertisement.
- Return on Investment (ROI), basically definable as the overall profitability generated by your marketing campaigns.
- Retention Rate, measures the percentage of active users who open the app for several days after the install, as opposed to users who don’t open it anymore.
- LTV: strictly related to retention rate indicators, and which consists of the long-term value that each user brings to the app.
Keeping track of indicators is crucial for your company to have an objective overall view on the economic situation and growth process of the app, as it is based on real performance representation data.
Before moving to the next step, it is vital to integrate with a platform that measures and attributes your user acquisition activity carried out through external partners.
Some concrete examples that come to my mind writing about MMPs are certainly Appsflyer, Singular, Adjust , Branch or Koachava. Thanks to this tracker you will be able to give the right credits. Thanks to this tracker, you will be able to give the install and post-install events, also preventing fraud by your marketing partners: in this way you are gonna have a database filled by information that you collect based on their real performance.
Surely this covers a crucial aspect also for budget allocation, as in this way you will understand which are the most profitable partners, and which ones are just making you waste a lot of money. This consequently enables you to minimize useless expenditures, maximising in this way the company’s efficiency.
Once you have a platform to double check the proficiency of your partners, you can now choose the one which is more adapted to work with your business.
Considering and investing only in the major Self-Reporting Networks (SRNs), example Google, TikTok, and Meta surely limits your audience reach. The diversification of your User Acquisition partners, in fact, enables you to strengthen your strategy increasing your app visibility with multiple varieties of media mix.
By choosing multiple different partners, you can access different inventories and, additionally, you can leverage different technologies to grow your business (rewarded campaigns, CTV traffic, programmatic, etc.) which ultimately adds more value to your media mix and strengthens your overall user acquisition strategy.
Investing in multiple UA partners boosts the efficiency of your marketing campaign and notably reduces the additional cost related to algorithm or policy changes, often adopted by the major ad platforms.
As user acquisition is a multi-step process, it will take some time to see concretely the first revenue results: this does not mean that you need to wait years and years after your investment start to get profitable, but it is just a reminder that if you are not at least a bit patient, you will waste your money on changes that won’t bring any benefit to your company.
Analyzing the key metrics evaluated over time, combined with regular A/B testing and experimentation, will help you achieve the desired success and eventually refine your strategies.
Conclusion
To briefly sum up, it is crucial for the profitability of your business to follow those steps:
- Goals setting
- Performance monitoring
- Use of MMPs
- Choice of UA partners
- Strategy Evaluation and Adaptation
By following this process you will be able to make a significant difference- and remember, increasing your user acquisition means increasing your success too!
