Staying profitable in the age of privacy
Spendings:
Snapchat
$18K
$58K
$16K
Description
- Account takeover date: Feb 20,2021
- Goal: Making Money back instead of just App Installs
- App Type: Realtime Multiplayer PVP (Game)
Revenu Generated (All Platforms)
Revenue Generated
$818K+
Spending (total)
$90K
Starting Platform: IOS (Later Android campaigns too)
ISSUES:
- Agency was not expert in IOS App Ad Campaigns (According to them)
- Client was not making money back
- Tracking Issues
- Agency was not using IOS 14 campaigns
It was that time when Apple was rolling IOS 14 (that tracking mess) and changes were being made in Facebook and Other platforms w.r.t App Campaigns (and overall too)
Facebook rolled out two options for IOS app campaigns IOS 13.7 something and Above (Basically IOS 14 campaigns for IOS 14 users) And Non IOS 14 campaigns
The reason why the campaigns were not performing great was that everyone was running Non IOS 14 campaigns because they were able to see the results in NON IOS 14 campaigns while in IOS 14 campaigns they were unable to see any results even after 2 days.
The Data was not reporting back in IOS 14 campaigns but when tried I was able to see a great lift from the other side of app.
But in reality with IOS 14 campaigns , people were installing the app, the CPI was super lower due to low competition but People were afraid to test them due to the unavailability of data in the Facebook ads manager.
I seized the opportunity and allocated some budget to IOS 14 campaigns and meanwhile I was running Non IOS 14 campaigns too because we were getting responses from there too. (Some people were testing IOS 14 update at that time and some were using old software)
For Tracking since the Facebook ads manager was not helpful , my client did some effort and he managed to setup some tracking on Data Studio in which i was able to see the number of installs and Revenue earned from each campaign.
Things were going smooth and we’re enjoying ton of cheap installs from IOS 14 campaigns. With the passage of time NON IOS 14 campaigns started to perform worse and we only shifted to IOS 14 campaigns.
Major Challenge:
- Serious and Consistent Growth
- Current campaigns were for Lead Generation and CPI at that time was around $18. With just-right structuring, I was able to keep it under $10 starting from $6 per lead in the first few days too.
- It was quite easy, but the real test was not this, it was consistent growth, the client is aggressive (we’re still working together) and they wanted more and more down funnel events so their backend teams can remain busy. (Thanks to the growth, they have doubled their backend team)
- Lead is a good event but for serious performance increase and to solve quality issues I worked with their tech head and we managed to create deep funnel events that were more valuable to us so I can directly optimize for them.
- For your understanding. It goes something like this
- Lead
- Potential Qualified lead
- Step 3
- Step 4
- Interview
- Offer
- Conversion
We were able to create events till step 4 (we’re working on going more deep funnel to better understand results in ads manager)
The First thing this new event creation changed is how I was optimizing the ads. Because there were cases that ADS that were giving better CPI had a poor conversion rate on step 2-4.
I started optimizing for step 3 instead of leads and this helped us optimize for growth and serious students instead of Leads who were not qualified.
Again I was able to see the step 3 and step 4 conversion rate and was facing the same issue. Some ads had better Cost per step 3 results but their conversion rate for step 4 was poor.
So the next step was to move the campaigns to step 4. It was a test and proved that we’re going in the right direction. Due to this, we saw an increase of 60% in conversion rate on step 6-7.
I directly worked with Designers, Developers, copywriters , head of product for 2 months and we’re able to triple the volume and had to reduce budgets.
I was super busy with all the chanes in FB and once things started to settle down I moved to their Google account. Google was not audited before and to my surprise, they were spending 1-2k a day and the Internal team didn’t have any clear answer about those spending.
1st thing: fixed tracking and same events just like Facebook
NOTE:
- For tracking, we’re using Airtable
- Campaigns fall under special category