How to use ROI data to increase downloads and purchase conversions?

In the first half, traffic acquisition is used to obtain financing , while in the second half, traffic ROI determines success or failure.

For giant companies, there has never been a capital winter, and they don’t care much about traffic issues. They themselves are the traffic entrances and traffic hijackers . For entrepreneurs and emerging companies, a wave of people failed in the capital winter, their money was burned through, and they could no longer hold on while waiting for the first or second round of financing.

Another wave of people failed because of the high cost of traffic. They finally raised money, but missed out on traffic dividends again and again, and were finally dragged down by the high traffic costs.

It is said that everyone is talking about the second half of the mobile Internet . There is a group of people who spend investors ' money carefully and invest in traffic no matter how expensive it is. The user data looks pretty good, but even they feel guilty about it. Because they boasted too much at the beginning, it became more difficult to deal with later. When it came to actually doing the work and looking at growth, revenue, and profits, they found that the growth was weak and the revenue was sluggish. Investors want to harvest entrepreneurs , and entrepreneurs want to harvest traffic (users), but the traffic is too garbage and the conversion rate cannot be increased.

Why? Don’t forget that the channel operators and middlemen who provide you with traffic are not responsible for the quality of the traffic, they are only responsible for deceiving you. Fake traffic and low-quality traffic will not be converted no matter how you operate it . If you don’t have the ability to identify traffic, optimize high-quality traffic, and operate traffic in a refined manner, how long can you drag it out?

In the first half of the mobile Internet , some people said that the competition was about acquiring traffic and getting financing. In the second half, I believe that traffic ROI will determine success or failure.

Is the volume generated by promotion really valuable?

Take the App promotion that I am most familiar with as an example. Every product needs to gain and buy traffic through various channels. Gaining traffic through promotion is the first thing, and the second thing is to convert traffic. Customers either make purchases in the App, such as buying props or goods, or click on paid ads, or stay and be active.

Among them, gaining volume has always been considered the most important thing. Where does the traffic come from? Departments that spend money on promotion are actually under a lot of pressure. Money must be spent valuablel y, spent in different dimensions, and spent with reason and evidence.

• The first category is traditional offline advertising (outdoor, subway, bus, etc.). This type of data cannot be counted or quantified. All the effect feedback and data are determined by the channels. You may not believe it, but there is no better way to prove it.
• The second category is TV advertising. Although there are research institutions that provide ratings and other data, it is still not quantifiable, nor can it be counted and tracked in real time. We can only listen to the one-sided words of the agents and media platforms.
• The third category is advertising based on the Internet and mobile Internet. This part of the data can be scientifically quantified, which is what this article will discuss next.

Although data can be quantified through Internet-based delivery, how can we tell what is true and what is false, and what is good and bad? For the marketing department, spending money is a huge responsibility. You have to explain to your boss where the money was spent well and how to adjust other areas. We all need to explain these things to our bosses, especially now that the market is so transparent. In addition, we also need some scientific basis to evaluate the effectiveness and optimize and improve our own work.

Therefore, when promoting an App, we should not only consider the volume but also the ROI. "Is the volume generated by the promotion really valuable?" If you don't ask yourself this question, your boss will definitely ask you at some point.

ROI assessment depends on whether the user's decision-making behavior can be restored and scientifically attributed.

Some companies now claim to be able to perform media channel attribution data analysis , but the attribution done by most companies is last-click interaction attribution, attributing all the credit to the last-click channel, which is obviously unscientific.

When it comes to scientific attribution, we need to restore the user's decision-making behavior. Someone clicked on an ad on Toutiao and made a purchase, but perhaps the user had previously been impressed by a TV ad, and was further impressed by seeing an airport light box while on a business trip, or saw a picture forwarded by someone on WeChat Moments and thought about buying it to try. Only then did I click on the ad on Toutiao and purchase it. Obviously, all the credit cannot be attributed to the last media outlet.

Therefore, integrated attribution across multiple channels is difficult. Advertising information from different channels all have an effect on user purchase conversions, so why do most of them use last-click attribution? Because more scientific multi-touchpoint attribution is actually difficult to achieve, because data from multiple online channels is difficult to connect, and the impact of different channels on users, the distribution ratio is also difficult to define.

However, attribution within a specific channel is possible. For example, Apple's bidding advertising for IOS promotion is an emerging promotion channel . The reason why it is favored by advertisers, especially game advertisers , is not only because it is cost-effective, but also because it can be attributed. It can be known which downloads come from which keywords , thereby helping advertisers improve their keyword delivery plans.

(Same as ASO for AppStore marketing , whether it is keyword optimization or intervention methods such as point walls , it is impossible to achieve such detailed attribution, so this article will not discuss it in detail).

The most valuable aspect of attribution analysis of Apple's bidding ads is that it calculates the input-output ratio of keywords through data feedback. It can track a series of behaviors such as display volume, user clicks, user downloads, purchases and even repeat purchases triggered by the keyword launch.

Now some advertisers who want to place ads overseas come to ask how much the CPA can be reduced to? In fact, when it comes to bidding advertising, we cannot just look at CPA. Some keywords may be more expensive, but they also have better conversion rates, so they may actually be cheap.

For example, if a game advertiser places an order for the word "free game" at a very high price, should he increase or decrease the order? For example, if the price of a certain word is very cheap, should you increase or reduce the budget? It is not enough to rely on experience to make judgments. Evaluation and optimization must be combined with ROI data .

When bidding on Apple products , you need to answer these three questions with ROI in mind:

1. Do you know how many downloads each keyword you placed brought?
2. Which keywords generated purchase conversions?
3. What is the ROI of keywords and how to adjust the delivery according to ROI in real time?

According to the conventional routine, we know from the data how many impressions, clicks and downloads the keywords bring. For example, if the first word brings 100 downloads and the second word brings 20 downloads, we will often increase the first word and reduce the second word.

After adding ROI thinking, we will find that the word that brings 100 downloads has no conversion and no purchase, while the word that brings 20 downloads has higher conversion and purchase. On this basis, we can make a decision to maximize benefits: increase the investment in the second word and reduce the investment in the first word.

Through ROI, we can find out the keywords with high input-output ratio, increase the investment in these words, and thus continuously improve the conversion rate . This is ROI thinking.

It should be pointed out that the Apple bidding advertising ROI I am talking about here does not refer to the official attribution API of Apple Search Ads. Currently, Apple's attribution API can only trace which keyword each download comes from, and it still remains on the front-end surface. Advertisers not only want to know the source of downloads, but also the subsequent conversion behavior of users brought about by the keywords (purchase conversion, repeat purchase, etc.). Generally speaking, it is necessary to access the SDK of a third-party service provider to customize the tracking solution in order to obtain this valuable data.

To make it easier to understand, I will share a traffic ROI case of Apple bidding on a social app.

How to use ROI data to increase downloads and purchase conversions?

This is a high-end social app with a relatively vertical target user group. Because the App has in-app purchases, customers have higher requirements for user quality and pay more attention to users' subsequent payment conversions.

The product has long been ranked around 300-400 in the social category, and its ranking is relatively stable. Its main distribution channels are Facebook, Google and Apple SearchAds.

The client conducted a round of advertising in March, with the average CPA remaining at around 2-3 US dollars and the average daily download volume remaining at around 100. Since February, the data has remained basically unchanged and the advertising has entered a stable period. In other words, CPA customers are still satisfied, but the volume can never go up. His appeal is: he hopes to reduce the CPA price, especially to increase downloads and ROI.

We later connected to a third-party agency, and after three months of optimization, both download volume and purchase conversion increased significantly. How is this done? In fact, the key lies in: finding words with high volume and high ROI through attribution analysis.

1. Find the most popular words to increase download volume

At the beginning, the average daily downloads were about 100. Why the download volume did not increase was mainly because the keywords were not quantifiable. For ASM delivery , CPA is one aspect, but sometimes even if CPA is controlled, there is still no volume, so the keywords are critical.

After that, by expanding and screening words, and based on the attribution data obtained from SDK embedding, we continued to find high-volume words to increase the delivery, which significantly increased the number of downloads later.

What is the specific situation? Among the keywords that were initially launched, the better ones brought about 15 downloads, and most of the words brought about 1 download. There were hundreds of such words, and the quality was very poor. Although the CPA was very low, it was useless.

After continuous optimization based on ROI data, we found some high-precision words and the overall volume reached an average of about 200-260 downloads per day, which is indeed a significant improvement compared to the previous average of 100 downloads per day. In addition, the average CPA was previously 2-3 US dollars, and later it was controlled to 1.8-2 US dollars.

Finally, after accurately adjusting keywords and bids through ROI, we were able to continuously reduce CPA prices and increase downloads.

2. Find words with high ROI and increase the number of purchases.

If you don’t consider ROI when placing an ad, you won’t be able to optimize purchase conversions. This case has been connected to the attribution service since June. The number of purchases in June increased by 70. By continuously optimizing high-precision keywords, 45 purchases were added in the first week of July. This figure is still rising. Compared to when there was no attribution ROI optimization, the number of purchases per month through ASM delivery was only 3 or 5.

In general, it is through calculating the ROI of keywords, controlling the input-output ratio of keywords in real time, and optimizing and improving the delivery strategy based on ROI. The ultimate result is a double increase in both volume and purchase conversion.

Conclusion

In the second half of the mobile Internet, it has become difficult to quickly gain volume through App promotion. The way out is to conduct refined operations based on ROI and focus on real and high-quality user growth and revenue growth.

Therefore, service companies doing AppStore marketing are said to be doing quite well. When advertisers need traffic, a wave of companies that increase traffic emerge; when advertising is about ROI, another wave of data attribution companies emerge, such as AppsFlyer and Adjust, which monitor mobile advertising effectiveness, and DataJiangsu, which focuses on Apple bidding advertising and attribution ROI optimization.

With the rise of ROI thinking in mobile Internet and the changing ecosystem of Apple's App Store , companies that mainly rely on inflating traffic (especially the second and third generations) are gradually being beaten to death on the beach. The next wave of services that will be favored will definitely be companies that do high-quality traffic identification and operation optimization, and attribution ROI optimization, because they are right at the point where mobile Internet growth is weak.

Of course, entrepreneurs who ignore the ROI of traffic will definitely fail miserably. The literal numbers are shown to investors, and the underlying meaning determines how far you can go.