Mobile e-commerce, more commonly known as m-commerce, has been making waves for a while now. It is forecasted to reach revenues of $2.3 trillion by the end of 2019. The majority of m-commerce sales come from shopping apps, which are the fastest growing mobile app category with a 54% YOY growth. However, shopping apps also lose users quickly, with 86% abandoning within a month post-download. No wonder shopping apps are getting a lot of attention when it comes to retargeting.
Retargeting campaigns for shopping apps result in one of the highest rates of conversion and revenue growth. In 2019, the app vertical experienced the highest growth rates with a 2.7x greater average rate of conversion and 2.3x more apps running a retargeting campaign.
There are two retargeting campaign strategies: static and dynamic. Static retargeting is where ads differ based on the groupings of users, while dynamic retargeting uses each users’ preceding engagement to personalize an ad specific to their previous actions. Although dynamic retargeting performs the best for shopping apps, here are recommendations for both strategies.
Static Retargeting
Audience
Unlike the gaming category, where most retargeting campaigns focus on inactive app users, active shopping app users are also retargeted since the main goal is to convince them to purchase. The audience can be divided into segments, like those who haven’t made a purchase for a certain period, who will then be clustered based on their lifetime spend. Consider retargeting users that haven’t made a purchase but have shown great engagement with your app. When doing this, try presenting an engaging creative to attract this audience.
A shopping app campaign we recently ran utilizing this strategy was able to deliver a 1427.21% incremental return on investment, proving the effectiveness of this strategy.
Creative
In terms of creative design, a carousel of top purchased products and/or categories is often an effective approach for this retargeting strategy. Be aware that frequent creative iteration or refresh is necessary to avoid ad fatigue. Make use of your product feed to show the availability of products to be promoted when creating ads.
Dynamic Retargeting
Audience
Dynamic retargeting gives you the opportunity for a more personalized or granular optimization. Segmenting audiences will be more specific as well. It’s possible to divide them into three (3) major user clusters:
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- users who searched for a product but didn’t view it,
- users who viewed a product but didn’t add it to their cart; and
- users who added an item to their cart but didn’t make a purchase.
This can further be tiered based on their lifetime spend so that a more personalized ad creative can be designed for each user segment.
Creative
For a more personalized creative, you will need a product feed, user attributes, and all necessary event postback. Postbacks and attributes are used to determine the previous engagement information of users, such as spend, products that have been searched, viewed, added to cart, or purchased. The information from postback events and user attributes will determine a user’s preferred products. It will be utilized for the product feed, which will promote all available and relevant products based on users’ previous engagement. With the use of our Audience API, you can easily provide user attributes to us for a more personalized ad experience.
There isn’t a perfect strategy when it comes to re-engaging users to your app. Sometimes static retargeting works, though for others dynamic retargeting will lead to better engagement. Whichever strategy you prefer, the right algorithms, optimization, and creative will take your app’s reengagement to new levels.
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