So, you have an app that more people than just your mom have downloaded (even though she still doesn’t know what to do with it). Not only a few more people, but a few hundred thousand more people. You’ve decided to seek some funding and your Series-A went well enough that you finally have room to breathe, what now? Ask almost any mobile marketer and their immediate answer will be “advertise on Facebook.” So, we asked a few for you. Some of the sharpest minds and most experienced User Acquisition Managers and Facebook Audience Network power-users are here to give their insights to app advertisers on what to do now to keep making mom proud!
Hear it out from our experts Rayne Yeh, Colette Nataf, and Carissa Gonzalez:
Setting Up a Facebook Campaign
Let’s start with the basics – setting up a campaign on Facebook. Being organized with your Facebook campaigns starts with the naming of the campaigns. Rayne Yeh, a UA expert at Nexon M, has a simple philosophy here: “Spend more time analyzing data rather than organizing it.” Proper naming conventions can give app advertisers that extra time to analyze instead of organizing in the post-collection phase. To give your future-self the least number of headaches, keep your naming conventions across all campaigns accurate, clear, and concise.
But what if you already set up a couple hundred Facebook campaigns before reading this article? Don’t worry, even if your naming conventions were predicated on your favorite 90’s cartoon villains and have no other rhyme or reason, there’s still hope. Colette Nataf, CEO and Co-Founder at StepOneGrowth has you covered: “When you read all the information in from Facebook, you don’t need to have specific naming conventions. [You] can literally name ad sets their IDs and it wouldn’t matter because [you’re] saving all of the targeting data along with the name[s]”. So breathe easy, it’s best to be organized at the start, but there are always other ways to compile your data and keep track of what’s going on in the series of tubes we call the internet.
Campaign Targeting
Once the naming is done, it’s time to setup some campaign targeting. Rayne’s first steps are to “use App Event Optimization on larger, more broad interest targets, while using MAI (Mobile App Install campaigns) on more specific, granular interest targeting.” He adds that “using exclusions properly can prevent cannibalism across campaigns. It’s best to keep things organized and segmented.” Once that’s all setup and running and the data starts coming in, you’ll see plenty of surprises. Carissa Gonzalez, Pixelberry’s Senior Marketing Manager, gives us one example of an often-made mistake: “Don’t assume that Android and iOS will show the same behavior. Let the data speak.” A lot of these types of OS difference assumptions are a few years old and don’t take into account the rise of high-end Android devices like the Google Pixel and Samsung S7 and S8 (which often meet or exceed the price point of an iPhone). Nexon M’s Rayne also notes that “different age range and gender targeting will be more effective for different types of apps. Most of the time, general learnings from one type of app in specific genre can be carried over to another in the same genre. However, it is important to continue testing, because the smallest difference in app content will allow you to market the game in new, innovative ways.”
Lookalike Audience
Beyond just a standard Facebook campaign, it is also important to utilize Facebook’s Lookalike audiences for initial user acquisition as well as retargeting to re-engage lapsed users. “Lookalike Audiences have long been a main focal point of every Facebook campaign strategy. Once a source audience is uploaded, Facebook can create larger sets of audiences that have similar interests to those sourced from the original seed audience. Based on his experience with Lookalikes, Rayne suggests having a “mix of broad and hyper targeted campaigns creates a healthy structure of campaigns.”
Colette makes various testing groups and breaks them down by each event in the app and number of days since the event took place. “This allows to understand what messaging is going to be interesting to users at different places within the funnel. For example, a new signup might like purple buttons, but a cart abandoner prefers green buttons. Imagine this at scale for every decision within your funnel,” she explains
Summary
There are myriads of possibilities throughout the entire process of campaign setup and data analysis which will depend heavily on you and your company’s KPIs and ROI goals. While there is not always a single “right way” to do things, there certainly are a few “wrong ways”. Carissa reminds us that “you should never forget to A/B test. If you are just pushing campaigns, you might be activating creatives, taglines or targeting that could hurt your overall KPIs.” Rayne offers another easy to avoid mistake in “making sure audience exclusions are in place, campaign bids/budget caps are accurate, and all attribution is functioning properly”. Speaking of attribution and tracking, Colette has an emphatic warning: “Try not to put off tracking. Please, please, please make sure that you’re set up with a mobile marketing partner to master attribution before you start spending money on paid advertising. And please actually take time to set this up and do it right.” There are plenty of great tracking and attribution providers to choose from depending on your needs.
Facebook is massive and will consume a lot of your time and a lot of your money, but by following the advice of some of our industry experts, you should see that investment pay dividends and give you new insights into your audiences that you never knew existed.
Learn more about the expert contributors from this post in our updated Industry Exposed section. Check out their profiles here!