While App discovery and downloads keep growing, retention rates are still a challenge for App Marketers.
User Acquisition and Retargeting should be a combined strategy if you are willing to keep your users engaged and active. Let’s deep dive into the best practices for an app campaign:
Define which KPI correctly tracks your app campaign performance
User acquisition and Retargeting campaigns looks after to drive growth, but their pricing, metrics and results are different:
- User Acquisition cost could be 5 or 10 higher than a Retargeting cost
- Retargeting users an overall 152% higher engagement rate than User Acquisition ones
- Retargeted users retain 5% more than User Acquisition users
Define the best message of each journey step
The message on a User Acquisition Ad should and must be different from a Retargeting Ad. The obvious difference would be the CTA, between Install and an specific key event, such as “order a meal”. But that’s not all. Visually they need to look different as well; different images, colors and themes.
Take few additional advantages from data
- Organic Data
Knowing who already has your app downloaded avoids spending the User Acquisition budget on pre-existing customers. Retargeting is the opposite. You will use this data to predict the bid and impact the correct user, which already has your app downloaded. Also, knowing the user behavior through organic data will help you to define many steps.
- Impressions
Transparency is a safety tool and helps you to have full visibility of the best performing placements.
- Uninstall
Tracking the users that uninstalled your App will help you to only track the ones that still have it. Users that uninstalled the app are less likely to engage and will probably increase your bid cost.
Special Dates
Traditional dates are very obvious and every App Marketer is on it, but try to work on different ones. It may work really well for specific verticals and regions
- Create Themed Ads for both campaigns; User Acquisition and Retargeting
- Add discounts
- Retarget the user after a while to keep them coming back
View-Through Attribution
Many users convert without clicking on an Ad, that’s why you rely on VTA for a better understanding of user behavior. It also prevents the cannibalization of organics and helps you to take better decisions.
Take your chance and combine both strategies. There is no full cycle of healthiness without both efforts!