The Challenge
Every wedding requires a long list of to-do items with a lot of things that need to be done on-the-go. To help brides-to-be manage this, one wedding vertical client needed to help consumers find and download their app.
To increase app installs and visibility, Rakuten Marketing Search worked with this client utilizing Universal App Campaigns (UAC), which leverage new technology from Google to easily manage and expand ad testing capabilities. Under a test and learn approach, Rakuten Marketing and the client launched their first UAC in October 2017 with a specific cost per install (CPI) goal.
Strategy to How UACs Work
In a UAC, Google uses ad text ideas and assets from the brand’s app store listing to design a variety of ads across several formats and networks once the brand provides text, creative assets, a starting bid, budget, language and locations for the ads. AdWords then tests different combinations and serves ads that perform the best most often. Once the target cost per install (tCPI) is set, AdWords automates the bidding and placement across various Google properties to get the best value from each download. In each campaign, the client can optimize targeting to find valuable users based on actions the client cares about, like app installs.
To make the test and learn strategy most effective, Rakuten Marketing ensured that, at any given time, the campaign met Google best practices, including:
- +5 image assets.
- At least 1 video creative.
- Staying within +/- 20% of incremental budget and tCPI adjustments.
- Setting budgets to spend 50x the tCPI.
- Continually refreshing the creatives for best performance.
Results to Performance Results
“UAC simply processes more information than any human could take proper action on, ensuring all considered signals enable your campaign to run efficiently and effectively,” said Fernanda Jackson, a Rakuten Marketing Search account manager. The results of this were clear in this test, accomplishing the advertiser’s goals of increasing installs and visibility of their app while staying close to their CPI goal. AdWords also leveraged consumer journey and behavior information to easily and accurately make adjustments appropriate for each auction, saving time with more automated bidding.
From the UAC and compared to previous search app install campaigns, this advertiser experienced:
- 134% more app installs while maintaining a CPI only 4% higher than previous campaigns.
- 42% lower cost-per-click.
- Dramatic reach increase.
