Acquiring high LTV users for Entertainment Apps


Entertainment apps are the fifth most popular mobile app category in the Apple App Store as of May 2019. Revenue for iOS entertainment apps alone is projected to increase by a whopping 235% by 2023, according to a report by Sensor Tower. The biggest growth regions are Asia, which is predicted to hit $4 billion in revenue, and North American with $2.5 billion. This signals an opportunity for established entertainment apps to tap into new markets and for growing apps to increase audience awareness through programmatic advertising.

Campaign Setup

The goal for any user acquisition campaign is to obtain high lifetime value users. This is possible through data-informed planning, implementation, and decision making. Our machine learning algorithm utilizes lookalike audience discovery and targeting, as well as multi-objective optimization, allowing us to efficiently prioritize for multiple KPIs. First party data allows development of models that are optimized for return on investment (ROI) and run highly-engaging HTML5 ad creative.

The campaign setup also includes an option to enable impression attribution or the capability of attributing an install or in-app event to a specific impression. Enabling this can increase average install probability and lead to lower cost per install (CPI).

Creative

We aim to deliver effective ad creative using Aarki Studio, our proprietary creative suite. Testing different ad variants provides insights on elements that work and those that do not. For example, we found that an ad with a red CTA button outperformed those ads with a different color.

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Localization is another essential strategy in tapping into new markets. Professional translators translate up to 26 language variants and we dynamically serve the variant with the main language spoken in a specific country. We are able to target audiences in Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, Germany, and many more!

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In your quest to increase audience awareness, it can help to show features and usability of your app when crafting your ad creative. This will help ad viewers become familiar with using your app.

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Results

Applying the creative strategies above to a recent campaign we ran for an entertainment app resulted in a 45% decrease in CPI, a 35% increase in install rate (IR), and a doubling of the click-through rate (CTR).

In another entertainment app campaign, enabling impression attribution led to a 37% decrease in CPI, a 59% increase in conversion rate, and 5x better IR.

The Takeaway

One of our key takeaways from running user acquisition campaigns for entertainment apps is the value of impression attribution in conversion. More often than we think, ad viewers do not install an app immediately after seeing an engaging ad. Enabling impression attribution heightens the chances to convert high lifetime value users.

 

Topics: Marketplace Insights