Regrets, we have a few!
It’s common to hear people croaking on about the fast pace of the mobile industry, but we hear less frequently what that means for the marketers themselves. They are tasked with not only keeping up with the rapid advancements of the industry but required often to pave the way themselves into new territory.
The modern tech job today is a perfect example of the Dewey and Montessori principles of “Learning by doing” and require high capacities of self-teaching and experimenting. Many brave marketers march into the unknown and launch their first campaigns armed with only research, guesses, and a lucky pair of underwear. But constantly “building the parachute after having jumped out of the plane” means that inevitably, there are some hard lessons learned along the path to perfecting your marketing strategies.
These lessons make us better marketers in the long run, but inarguably would have been great to have learned another way. So we asked our Mobile Masterminds to build 5 tips for starting new campaigns, based on the insight they wish they hadn’t learned the hard way. Enjoy!
5 tips for launching new campaigns:
Marc Pelejá, Glovo
“Don’t leave it with the first conversion, take a look at your retention. We tend to convert users towards our main KPIs (Installs, Sign-ups or First Orders). However, we should take into account the retention rate that every channel brings us. This is especially important for strategies that use promo codes and incentives: the bigger the incentive is, the lower possible retention rates.
On the other hand, if the user has to make some kind of economic effort to get something, we usually see much better retention. So, I’d recommend starting to look at your cost per 2nd, 3rd, and 4th conversion in order to better understand the entire funnel, that should extend past first conversion and end only when users are totally engaged with your product.”-Marc Pelejá Vicente, CRM and Retargeting Manager at Glovo.
Felipe Costa, Recarga Pay
“Learn how to work the entire user conversion funnel. When starting out I zeroed my strategy zeroed in on CPA conversions, with no focus on the user’s previous actions (AppOpen, Registration, ShoppingCart, among others) which are all very important to achieving better results. Now I make different campaigns for each group of users that drop off at each different event, working with a more intelligent strategy and improving performance.
I also wish I had known how important it is to take more time to build relationships with Ad Networks earlier on. Having closer relationships with the people and networks who will help you reach your goals is fundamental to coming up with better strategies, planning new campaigns, and defining next steps. Especially when they are one of the channels that bring in high conversion volumes.” -Felipe Costa, Senior Marketing Analyst at Recarga Pay.
Michael Jessen, eCooltra
“Don’t sacrifice personalization in order to rush expansion. In our case, we made a small misstep with our app promotion creatives. We expanded quickly into Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome, but found that users were not happy if we used image content from the other cities the user was not in when the ad was served. This caused some possibly foreseeable friction, but with tight deadlines, some minor details get overlooked. Make sure to expand at a pace that your team can keep up with…or at least be quick to fix things if you mess up!“-Michael Jessen, Mobile Marketing Manager at eCooltra.
Rocío Pérez, Liligo
“Don’t get so focused on install quantity, you overlook install quality. User acquisition is easy, but finding quality users is a challenge. The first app promotion campaign you run, you are focused on high volumes and good prices. At launch, you might think any users are better than nothing, but what you don’t realize is, once you start down the path of paying for unprofitable users, it’s very hard to turn back. Starting out from the beginning with an understanding of what qualifies as quality users of your app, and optimizing your tactics to target those users from the beginning, will protect your acquisition budgets early on and ensure your UA strategy is always optimizing.”-Rocío Pérez, Acquisition Manager at Liligo.
Etienne de Guébriant, Etermax
“Don’t be naive, there’s a lot of fraud out there… Veterans in the industry might remember the days of launching campaigns without giving a second thought to securing campaigns against fraud, but today, it needs to be a top concern.” -Etienne de Guébriant, UA Team Lead at Etermax.
