In the ever-competitive digital marketing landscape, mobile app markets are becoming increasingly cutthroat,—especially for reading apps carving out their niche. The importance of each user acquisition cannot be overstated in the context of
Apple Search Ads, especially given the highly competitive nature of the space.
The client of this case study is a reading app grappling with growing market pressures and advertising costs. Our team devised and implemented a series of strategies aimed at reducing the cost per acquisition (CPA), and increasing the number of in-app purchase (IAP) orders, enabling the app to stand out in a competitive field.
Client Story
Our client launched a reading app in the US market with a mission to cater to the diverse reading preferences of its users by offering a wide selection of books. To date, the app boasts an impressive 160,000 registered users, a commendable feat for a startup.
Despite a stable user base, the client faced dual challenges of efficiency and cost in their ad campaigns. They sought to refine their marketing strategies to reduce advertising expenses, enhance the conversion rate of new users, and ultimately expand their market share.
Challenges
As market competition intensified, our challenge was to make our client's app stand out among similar products and effectively improve user conversion.
"We urgently needed to address the cost and efficiency issues caused by the improper setup of our previous Apple ad campaigns," said Grace Leon, the Marketing Manager of Reading App.
Due to suboptimal campaign settings, the client suffered from a high rate of ineffective clicks, which not only drained a significant portion of the advertising budget but also failed to convert clicks into active users.
Thus, our task was to enhance ad quality and more accurately target potential users to achieve higher advertising efficiency while maintaining ad exposure
Solutions
To ensure that our advertising strategy remained adaptable to the ever-changing market and user behavior, we took proactive steps to optimize the client's Apple Ads account during the project. Here are the key steps we took, along with a detailed explanation.
Comprehensive Account Analysis
We began with an in-depth analysis of the client's existing ad account, which included the structure of the campaigns, keyword selection, bidding strategies, budget allocation, and the performance of ad creatives.
We conducted a multi-dimensional evaluation of the campaigns. By comparing conversion rates and costs across different campaigns and keyword combinations, we identified and paused low-performing ad elements. Meanwhile, we spotted some underutilized keywords with the potential for good conversion rates, despite limited data, and decided to retain and monitor them.
Specific Campaign-Level Adjustments
Based on comprehensive analysis, we significantly restructured the campaign architecture to more precisely respond to users' search intents.
- Brand Campaigns: We strengthened brand campaigns by optimizing bids for brand-specific keywords, ensuring a leading position in brand-related searches. These keywords typically yield the highest conversion rates and ROI due to high brand relevance and lower maintenance costs due to brand loyalty.
- Discovery Campaigns: Leveraging FoxData's analytical insights into competitors and industry-related keywords, we experimentally introduced new keywords into discovery campaigns and closely monitored their performance. High-quality traffic-generating keywords were incorporated into longer-term brand or category campaigns, while underperforming ones were promptly excluded and converted into negative keywords to optimize ad spending.
- Competitor/Category Campaigns: In these campaigns, we focused on increasing brand awareness and attracting potential users interested in competitors' products. We used precise keyword filtering, especially those highly relevant to the book categories offered by our client, to attract users more likely to convert.
Enhancing Ad Creatives
Ad creatives are crucial for capturing user attention and sparking interest. We collaborated with the creative team to design and test a series of compelling CPP creatives that resonated with the visual and textual elements of the target audience, encouraging them to click and download the app.
We conducted A/B testing to determine which creatives performed best among different user segments and adjusted our ad creatives based on the results.
Results
The optimization of the ad campaigns not only successfully reduced the CPA by 28% but also achieved an astounding 232% increase in the number of in-app purchase orders.
"FoxAdvert has accelerated our pace in mobile app marketing: especially in attribution and paid channels."
- Marketing Manager of Reading App, Grace Leon
Perhaps you would prefer to find a professional ASA expert to help you formulate your strategy, plan your advertising account structure, and ultimately achieve results such as a
28% reduction in CPA and a
232% increase in IPA.
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contact us. We are committed to customizing and managing effective
advertising strategies for you, to maximize the achievement of your marketing objectives.
