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Meditation app
Driving profitable UA growth post App Tracking Transparency changes
Overview:
This case study is for a leading meditation app(referred to as X for the rest of the case study to honor a request for confidentiality) that incorporates elements of mindfulness and neuroscience.
The Challenge:
X had experienced initial success in scaling after its launch, but as their UA budgets grew, their performance began to decline. This was due to two main factors:
a. The rapid saturation of early creatives, making it difficult to maintain scale
b. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, which disrupted tracking and optimization across the mobile marketing industry.
After thorough research and analysis of multiple options, the app engaged RocketShip HQ to help restore efficiencies and scale their acquisition efforts, while effectively navigating and mitigating the impact of the App Tracking Transparency changes.
“Rocketship HQ brought rigorous data analysis and performance tracking to our process, which helped us optimize marginal spend/ad channel efficiency, allowing us to maximize efficient growth at scale. They also brought a very clear understanding of the dynamics of the post-ATT privacy policies to help us kickstart growth. They married this understanding of data limitations with a rigorous and carefully thought out system of creative testing, as also the unique idiosyncrasies of subscription apps that unlocked massive growth for us. I highly recommend their work.”
The Approach:
RocketShip HQ tackled the impact of the iOS14 changes by establishing a SKAdNetwork conversion value schema and implementing key strategies to accurately gauge the efficacy of the campaigns in the absence of detailed, granular data
a. App Store Connect (ASC) proceeds into reporting, broken down by geo level
b. Leveraging Media Mix Modeling (MMM) through Facebook Robyn to determine the effective cost per action (CPA) for each marketing channel and allocate budgets accordingly.
c. Reviewing downstream retention data to model out year 1 LTVs to understand true unit economics – not just upstream metrics.
d. Reviewing retention data to separate out unit economics for new users alone, excluding returning users.
Rocketship HQ optimized the advertising efforts by implementing a rigorous creative testing process that involved testing over 300+ creatives as of date. This involved testing new creatives in tier-3 ad sets before moving on to tier-2 ad sets, using metrics such as IPM, CPI, and CTR to determine which ones to advance to the core US ad sets.
This approach reduced risk by avoiding having core ad sets enter a learning phase whenever a new creative was introduced and led to the discovery of more winning creatives.
The creatives were developed using a problem-solution framework that shed light on common challenges and behavioral issues faced by the target audience. Also, RocketShip HQ did a deep dive into understanding user motivations and used these insights to build out highly performant creatives. The combination of the deep research process and rigorous testing framework was a substantial improvement in cost per install and ROAS – and a consistent stream of new creatives to pre-empt creative saturation.
As a result, Rocketship HQ successfully drove significant growth and scale for the app with >120% ROAS on new users, and >150% ROAS on 1 year LTV of new users. This enabled the team to increase their spending & profitability despite the tracking difficulties posed by iOS privacy policy changes.
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