With costs rising and attention spans falling, finding ways to jumpstart your app campaigns’ performance can unlock significant revenue for brands. From top-of-funnel ad strategies to adding new features to enhance your app’s stickiness, we’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks to unlock performance for your mobile app retention campaigns when you’re in a performance slump.
Performance plateaus are common as apps mature, but they're not insurmountable. Seasonality also plays a critical role, with certain times of the year offering unique opportunities for engagement and growth. For example, performance often dips during major holidays and on the weekends when users are less engaged with their mobile devices. Recognizing these patterns can help distinguish between performance plateaus and natural campaign progressions. It’s also helpful in making the most of seasonal peaks.
As mentioned above, there’s a difference between a performance plateau and natural campaign progression. Before jumping to conclusions that your campaign might be slowing down, it’s vital to collect enough conversion data and let your partner’s machine learning algorithms stabilize. Here's how to recognize when your campaign is hitting a plateau and that it might be time to make some strategic optimizations.
If you want to jumpstart your campaigns, you need to understand where the stagnation is occurring. This requires data. With that said, create a robust feedback loop with your DSP partner by passing back revenue data. This will enable them to identify segments, creatives, targeting parameters, etc. that are not driving performance.
One of the quickest ways to jumpstart your app retention is to optimize bids. For example, if your campaign starts slowing, a good first step is to drill down on what channel or segmenting is underperforming. From there, dropping bids on that source can enhance your conversion rate and positively impact ROI. Keep in mind that changing bids too frequently can lead to campaign fluctuations. Instead, when changing bids, make sure to give your campaign the time to actualize to see the result of your optimization.
Sometimes campaign slowdowns are due to the basic fact that your app or product has not changed in years. In these cases, introducing new features and organizing special events can significantly enhance your app’s appeal and stickiness. What’s more, limited time eventscan create buzz, encourage community participation, and attract new users while re-engaging lapsed ones.
As noted by YouAppi’s Chief of Strategic Growth, Hilit Mioduser, “It’s great to go after the whales but it’s even better to get to these users at an earlier stage of the user flow. Why? It’s more cost effective.” Segmenting your top users and delivering personalized messaging and offers should not just be occurring at the top of the funnel in a retargeted ad. Instead, cater to these customers from the moment they’re acquired. This will save costs down the line.
As Mioduser says: “Don’t do anything that you’re not able to measure and evaluate.” We’ve found that more and more app developers are looking for transparent solutions like incremental uplift testing to drill down on the parts of their funnel that are driving results.
For more information on incrementality and how to undertake an uplift test, read our blog here.
Are you ready to break free from the performance plateau and propel your app's growth and retention to new heights? From optimizing your campaigns based on uplift testing to reinventing your app with new features, our team can help you. Schedule a meeting with us today!