As we’ve grown and scaled numerous growth marketing campaigns on mobile, we’ve seen a dizzying array of tactics emerge over the last couple of years – be it with bidding & optimization formats going from CPC to CPI to purchase optimization; or with creatives going from banners to videos to native videos, story ads & playables.
There’s always a new channel or creative format that is available – and it’s often easy to be swept away in the excitement of a shiny new tactic. This can often seem easier than to understand the true fundamentals of what truly can drive scale. We’ve always focused on the fundamentals (as, for instance, in this post about the key pillars of user acquisition strategy – because in our experience tactics change day in and day out(and it’s hard to be fully on top of 100% of tactics) – but the fundamentals stay unchanged.
As we’ve thought about this, it struck us that conceptually there are only two key strategies that can help scale user acquisition campaigns. We’ve found that an awareness of these two can help us adapt individual tactics to these broad strategies.
If you have user acquisition campaigns that are active or profitable for a specific audience, the only two ways to scale you are spending or traffic are:
1) Scale the audience(s) you are already targeting.
2) Target new audiences.
-> Scaling existing audiences
If you’re targeting a specific audience(let’s assume this audience is the 2 million-odd users in the US that form the 1% lookalike of your most active users – or perhaps the rewarded video inventory of an ad network) – and you’re reaching a portion of this audience with your current campaigns(say you are attaining about 5000 impressions and $100 in spend per day).
One key approach to scaling your user acquisition activity would be to get a greater share of the 2 million users than the 5000 impressions that you are currently getting. You could get more impressions(and by extension installs and purchases/subscribers) by some of all of these tactics:
-> increasing bids
-> increasing budgets(assuming you’re hitting your spend cap)
-> targeting different placements (if you aren’t targeting them all already)
-> customizing your assets for different placements(so you can get more bang for your buck from more efficient performance).
-> improving creatives’ performance so that your creatives drive installs and purchases more efficiently.
You can continue to scale your 5000 impressions a day until your audience starts to get saturated – or your campaigns are no longer profitable.
-> Target new audiences
The other key strategic direction you can head in is to target altogether new audiences. If you’ve targeted 1% lookalikes of most active users in the US and are profitable with the 5000 impressions a day that you’re getting, you can begin to explore a completely new audience – to test it and hopefully attain an incremental 5000 impressions a day or more from this new audience.
You could get more impressions(and by extension installs and purchases/subscribers) by targeting some of all of these:
- A wider lookalike of the same behavioral actions (eg – a 5% lookalike of most active users)
- A lookalike of a different behavioral action (eg – a 1% lookalike of repeat purchasers, or the most active users)
- Different interests
- A broad audience
- A different geo
- A different OS
- Altogether new channels
Each of these allows you to dip into a new pool of users with different characteristics – and helps you unlock incremental scale on top of your current audiences.
Which strategy should you pick?
What you should pick is a function of where your current campaigns lie with respect to your profitability or unit economics goals.
Scaling current audiences by continuing to go deeper into your current pool of users can be effective if you’re profitable with some room or margin to spare in your current campaigns – and opening up new audiences can be effective if you dont have much room or margin to spare in your current campaigns.
The key value that we find in this framework is the simplicity of this way of thinking – which allows us to adapt the numerous tactics available to us, and zero in on what will truly help us scale.
ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ:
Mobile User Acquisition Show | How Things Grow | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
