The company was looking to expand their mobile app user base
With the fall-winter season coming up in 2022, the company was looking to expand their mobile app’s audience and sales while maintaining their cost-revenue ratio.
They optimized their strategies for CPO at the beginning of the scale-up campaign, though experience showed that the app audience wasn’t growing. In December, Sportmaster decided it was time to build a wider audience with app installs.
They set up ads for their mobile app in Yandex Direct since it’s a solution Yandex is constantly improving to ensure the most effective audience targeting.
The company scaled up their mobile app ads
Stage 1. They reviewed their strategies and bids for brand awareness campaigns.
They adjusted the target CPA for their campaigns to the market average after analyzing comparative data from Yandex. That brought them in line with the competition and broadened their coverage. As a result, automatic strategies were trained faster.
For campaigns, the company set up autotargeting across the entire range and used generic ads with in-app-only promos.
Stage 2. Sportmaster focused on category targeting.
The company launched campaigns for high-reach product categories like clothing to achieve maximum coverage in a short time. Meanwhile, they set up product campaigns for second- and third-level categories (windbreakers, sweaters) and prepared unique creative content for each.
The resulting structure included generic campaigns for top-level categories such as clothing, footwear, and equipment. That covered a significant share of the online store’s product range and was complemented by narrowly focused campaigns for high-priority categories.
Stage 3. Sportmaster segmented campaigns by vendors.
Step 4. Sportmaster set up ads for non-product services.
Non-product services are an important part of the Sportmaster app. They provide our clients with a full range of intuitive services that foster athletic growth.
Users don’t usually feel a direct need to purchase sporting goods. With that in mind, we use unconventional targeting in Ads for Mobile Apps, which helps us attract the audience. For example, we leverage narrow interest-based targeting and non-commercial queries.
Within our services, we launch competitive and gamified mechanics, promoting them in ads to drive higher audience engagement.
As autostrategies were launched, we optimized them for CPI, adjusting the target value in the process. Once we accumulated statistics, we moved to authorization-based optimization.
If a campaign couldn’t learn, we merged it with related categories. Where that still didn’t do the trick, we shifted to a strategy optimized for installs, adopting a pay-per-conversion approach.
We targeted part of our campaigns at audience return, including Audiences from CRM and Abandoned cart.
We optimized our campaigns for both installs and CPI, taking into account all in-app and offline conversions. That allowed us to leverage a broader data set and evaluate campaign performance for more informed optimization choices.
The scale-up led to a 172% increase in mobile app downloads and purchases from it
As we planned to increase the number of paid app installs, we started looking around for new approaches and unconventional solutions to how we were managing our mobile ad campaigns.
The key growth drivers were:
- Transitioning to widespread use of the «Optimize conversions» automated strategy and discontinuing optimization for the «Order placement» goal with a CPO limit
- Launching the Campaign Wizard
- Making weekly adjustments to CPI and CPC goals on deviations from actual values
- Transitioning individual campaign optimization from the «Install» goal to the «In-app authorization» event
After scaling up, the share of mobile ad campaigns increased from 2% to 35% against other paid advertising sources.
During the fall-winter season, we plan to continue scaling the channel up by leveraging these three drivers:
- Using custom audiences based on CRM segments: segments of customers with a high purchase frequency, active mobile app users, churned users, and others.
- Using automated tools for building creative content to save time.
- Launching seasonal categories to reach users interested in winter sports.
On top of that, we will continue working with automated strategies to scale up placements within the target CPI and maintain our previous profitability level.
Ads for mobile apps have been a focal point for Yandex Advertising over the past several years. We’ve constantly evolved the tool to give our partners the broadest range of features possible for mobile advertising.
Our clients and partners play a crucial role in this process given that they’re companies open to innovation and ready for experimentation.
Sportmaster’s experience clearly demonstrates the scale of results that can be achieved through collaboration between the client, the agency, and Yandex Advertising.