Mobile User Acquisition: How to Get Started and What You Need

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how are you Steve I'm doing well a very good production I have to say I I really like the sounds it's a shame that I can know my face is not in there but I just wanted into some of the content from searchats.com and um super interesting all right Niels I'm gonna do you better okay how do I say your last name properly right well you can say being in in Dutch I'm from the Netherlands there's a banan but uh yeah right and that's already uh gold so well done all right here we go ready I'm gonna do you right okay we're gonna do it right all right here to break down your first steps in UA I've got meals I already screwed up been in who is the Strategic partnership Partnerships at singular if you're ready to get started in terms of growth and trying to really understand what happens on these marketing channels you need an MMP which is a mobile measurement partner and that's what singular does it tells you what are your

most effective marketing channels so without further Ado let's bring in Niels all right we're having too much fun here I am gonna try and share my screen I got you or maybe you can great thank you Steve okay let's Kickstart um to the next slide so uh just a couple of words about myself so like why am I here why am I here invited by Steve so I've been working in Performance Marketing now for about 15 years I started out working in London in the Ad Agency space generating flight bookings hotel bookings are some of the largest travel Brands and then I moved to Berlin um 10 years ago now and started working with mobile developers so I've been there pretty much from from the get-go where no one had an understanding of hey like how do you do mobile marketing and are mobile apps even going to be a thing which then turn into the revolution of free to play gaming and like all of these game developers launching the

Candy Crushers and The Clash Royale of this world and then that industry grew to a gazillion size uh worldwide uh phenomenon right um at singular like I'm overseeing Partnerships what does that mean um so my department works with a larger Tech platforms like meta Tick Tock and Google to really make sure that the products that we push out to our customer base work well with their advertising Solutions like Steve said like you know we're in the business of visualizing what is working for you and there's a lot of parameters that come into play like for example if you book like a search campaign importing keywords if you book like a video campaign making sure that you can name all the videos that you have live that there's a theme that you can like relate to as well and I also work with a lot of the the VCS and like the incubators and with people that speak to start on scale UPS all the time and really trying to guide

them a little bit into hey like what do you need to consider when you just start out when you want to grow your business what partners are available and what kind of tools do you need and then lastly also work as a growth consultant for those smbs that's like on a freelance basis and yeah that's enough about me that's go to the next slide Steve so there's like four points that I wanted to discuss today um I'll take about 15 to 20 minutes so we've got about 10 minutes as well for a q a like in the end first and foremost this might be a bit uh you know I mean b for dummies I'm sure there's people here that don't need an explanation but what is an m p and what do we actually do and I'll show you like a very very small peak of our dashboard as well so that really brings things to life um then we're looking to what is happening on iOS like if you ask some of the the biggest marketeers out there

right now and this can be for view chip companies it can be for your largest game developers like they've got a headache every day because the way that you can do UA on iOS has changed a lot in recent year um Google is rolling out something similar but I'll get into that as well then um UA like where do you start you know there's a lot of vendors out there and like if you have an app and if you go public with that you probably get bombarded by people every day that say Hey work with me I can get you a lot of like very good users etc etc first piece of advice do not reply to them choose your partners and reach out to them that always works better and then last in terms of UA um I've got a few best practices but I always I created a little list of resources that I use that you can use if you want to research in your vertical on a specific Channel specific ad format for example so let's put the next slide

so mobile attribution one zero one um let's look at the the definition of what an MMP is first on the next slide Steve so I'm going to read this out the process of connecting the install of a mobile app and the user's activities inside the app to the marketing campaign that led to the app installed let me put light on energy efficient but really bad for streaming last time we did this Chief my internet broke down so I booked a room at a weaver space for uh for this session um now what does that mean um of course you want to to track like the install of of your application that the user does you know if you run a marketing campaign but it doesn't end there depending on hey like you know what do you have like maybe you have a dating app so people actually like are they swiping are they actually purchasing a subscription for example within a mobile game are they doing iaps like kind of micro transactions right or

are they looking at a lot of ads um e-commerce like do people put things in that basket and not buy them there's like so many signals that you can get and that's the role of the MMP to get all the signals into one place so you understand hey how effective is my marketing span what is my Roi et cetera Etc and if you go to the next slide Steve um what you'll see is like really like dummy like how does this actually works like you see the the user on on the left and the user clicks on the net now what the MMP then does is then the link that collects data to the MMP servers right and then you get redirected to the app store which can put the Google Play Store it can be the the iOS store you open an app and then the app install is being recorded and we passed them back that piece of information to our server that you can then read into right like I said like there's like many more post installed events pi as we call it that

happen afterwards and also those you want to collect because like if you have those and you can start calculating the ROI of your campaigns um go to the next slide Steve um now what does that look like now this is a very condensed version of the apps of the singular dashboard and what you see on the left is your sources so say like hey like I am draftking Sportsbook and DraftKings those are my two applications and I'm running my advertising campaigns for example with a Snapchat or a Facebook and a Twitter at a very basic what you want to know are a couple of things in a specific period of Time how much marketing budget have I been spending with your specific partners and what has that been buying me right and then you can look at hey impressions for examples or you could look at clicks or you can look at installs most people in Performance Marketing will look at installs and then they're

going to be looking at hey what is my effective CPI my cost per install now if you have those and if you don't have a parameter that actually tells you how you can calculate Roi and that is something you need to determine like yourself or like any marketing person that you're looking to hire then we can calculate this you know it's a very clear sum like I said like this is a very like basic version so it doesn't really go into too many details but you can imagine okay I want to see this at a country level so I want to see this combined all of those patterns I want to see hey I'm running in Germany the UK US Russia wherever what is my Roi in those countries and where is my product being most effective and everyone want to reallocate budgets where do I do that um you can do that on the keyword level as well you can do a channel so say for example hey I just want to see how a video is doing it compared to social

pose or compared to uh search for example right like you can like combine and play around with this like wherever you see that and it goes Super granular um so that is like on the MMP side hey like you know what does mfp do like why do we need it um and how does it look like in in practice um if you ever want to talk about this or like want to demo of course you can you can reach out um I want to just pause here real quick because I think a lot of people you know especially starting off they they just look at the CPI and then when you just look at the CPI it doesn't tell the complete story now it tells part of it maybe you know like if it's Apple search ads I believe it's a high converting channel that leads to better pies but when you actually you need an MMP to actually see like in your nails I don't know if we can do this still but at a granular level like which ad Group which ASA campaign is driving the best Revenue

sometimes it's going to be your this can be your exact matching so that you need an MMP to see that type of granular detail because you might get very low cost per installs on the for example if you're running Apple search ads basic campaign Apple and to all the developers do not run a basic campaign it sucks because when you look at an MP the conversions the pies are going to be horrible when you're running an apple search ads basic campaign I have a YouTube video that says here here's something that matches the basic but way better and probably way more effective than Apple search Edge basic absolutely and I think you know like if you're on the basis of like you know sending things for example through your app or like if you have a subscription-based app then your CPI is in essence a completely irrelevant right because like what you're actually looking for is buying users that convert um so the CPI is just one indicator but

to have like the ROI data on multiple levels this is so I don't know why this is doing but why does this happening Steve but whatever you're going to see me bump around a few times um but yeah like having that Roi overview um it's not only like looking at hey where I can get like the cheapest CPI you know you can probably get like you know very cheap cpis and loads of channels but if you don't get converting users like what's the point in buying there in the first place that's where the upper body comes in yeah and you can get logs keep you know you're just gonna have to go like this for me to get the new slide you have to really like anything be action annoyed but you can get really low cost per installs like in India in Brazil markets but are they actually retaining and then again that's when you need I mean I can give you an example there like I used to work with uh with a fitness app which was completely

subscription based um and yeah like we could like installs in India for like one or two cents but like no one had money over there to actually buy the the specific subscription whereas if you don't look at markets like Australia or New Zealand right like you know it was actually going through the roof and then you can have another comparison if you look at these kind of tier one English-speaking countries you know Canada US New Zealand Australia say for example if you're a CPI is like eight dollars if you know that your app converts twice better in New Zealand for example then that is where you want to try and scale that's probably you can try and increase your CPI to actually have more effective media buys but that is really like maybe like step two and step three into like m p for dummies or Performance Marketing yeah but the fact of the matter is you want to have that data and you want to

have it like you know in one report where you can see in one or two seconds what is happening with your campaigns all right um I know we're gonna probably create a video about scan in a little bit but yeah let's talk about it now um so yeah like you know looking at scan and it's a framework created by Apple for privacy preserving mobile app attribution now what does that mean um attribution used to be done on an IDF a level which is like the um unique identifier for your mobile device now what Apple said it's like hey like you know there's too much information that App Partners can collect on that idfa level that users may not be comfortable with to be used for targeting and for tracking so to introduce was something that we call ATT framework let's call it ascat Network for now for Simplicity but basically what it what it does is it asks the users consent um to be tracked for advertising

purposes and about 75 of users do not actually do that and when they do not do that they default to being tracked through SK at Network if you go to the next slide Steve you see how that works in in practice um so here like you've got like the the user Journey which is roughly the same but the event gets pinged to to Apple itself and apple then in a way anonymizes what we actually can see as an MMP and what we can see as a performance marketeer and the performance marketeer needs to First select what type of one event that they actually want to see to do their optimizations now apple is doing updates to this continuously and just also added the amount of signals that you can receive also like the time frame in which you can receive them if you if if you kind of put it in in plain text but there's a couple of issues that you have that you will run into when you do iOS Performance Marketing which you can see

on on the next slide I really love this slide feel free to share it um the first is like this postback collection and February doesn't know like what a postback is is basically those signals right that give you that indicator of like you know what people are doing uh within an application and teams may actually struggle with even collecting them in the first place because they are different than what they were used to collecting and that means that you might require additional engineering resources and like you know for the for the Indies out here and the people that actually don't have like a large team I can already imagine like you know they're scratching their head and go like hey like this is gonna you know cost me money this is gonna cost me time resource but it is an unfortunate reality then the second is you know Apple makes you choose a specific conversion scheme and there's about seven eight I think

available that that we support with singular as well but the information that you get back from Apple need to be decoded for you to be able to read them now this is not a data science but it does imply that you need to build your own methodology to be able to read what apple is actually sending you um we as a singer like we we took this two years ago very serious on the start and have been working with apple to come up with Solutions there and it means that like we take away that exact work from the developer so like if you go to your reporting you can actually see hey my light is out what is uh you know what am I seeing here like what am I measuring what is my what about what is my kpi um and then the last part and this is really interesting as well um Apple works with so-called privacy thresholds now I don't want to go too much into like the nitty-gritty here but what it actually means is that some of

the data on your campaigns is going to be censored by Apple um to make sure that you can't relay that information back to a specific campaign and maybe to like a specific device and what that then means is that on average about 20 of the data that you get from Apple is not reported in your in your overviews and your reporting so that means that if you calculate your Roi if you look at like the profitability of your campaigns it is most likely being um not as good as you would expect but that is because apple is not sending you everything right and this is about data science come in because you can model that um you can have a conversation with everyone that's interested but just bear that in mind especially if you are on on smaller budgets and especially if you have like campaigns and spread out it might be that you simply do not get the data um if you go to the next slide Steve so we can probably skip at this one

because this is really going into like the singular solution uh but like in a nutshell so what we can do is model the the missing uh scan data so that 20 that we currently don't have you know we can do that with an accuracy of about 98 which means that we can also present you with with cohorts but no chords mean like hey what is my day 7 Roi what about day 330 Roi for example right that means that you can do um optimizations more quickly and also if you look at like the other solutions that we have like looking at the conversion models that you may select like from Apple um our solution is done a bit more comprehensive than like what you see in Market because like we can then also apply that data science piece that we have to the schema that you have selected let's go to the next slide Steve so what about Android um so on a nutshell there's like a lot of noise already in the market on Google

privacy sandbox which is also Google's I wouldn't say answer to SK ad Network because that would actually devalue like what what Google are doing um but Google also wants to roll out um its own program that really takes more into account user privacy um I think looking at the iOS opt outrage like how many people actually do not want to be tracked um I understand it's completely like you know the kind of side guys is definitely um in favor of of user privacy um we have a lot of resources already on hey like what do those things mean like what can we expect in the next one or two years in a nutshell what is the good message is that Google has been working very closely with developers and with ad Partners to really try and minimize the disruption um that uh you know these kind of privacy changes could could cause one of the things for example that we see at singular is SK ad network does not allow

us to tell a customer what the ROI on a specific creative this um Google will allow that and that is a massive win for for performance marketeers um let's go to the next slide so UA where to start right so one of the things that I can share with you which is also ready for you to download um is the singular Roi index and like what is that so we in a year measure about 20 billion dollars in ad span we do that for more than 5 000 apps and we do it across 300 ad networks um and if you go to the next slide Steve you will actually see who who are these Partners right and like Hey Ho like no surprise like the biggest like you know advertising networks partners are people like Google and facebook slash meta um but then there's like quite a comprehensive list of partners that you might not think about right away like when you are new to this field and like I said like you know most likely you're

going to be you know getting a lot of emails from partners that are not on that list and those are the kind of like long tail that really I'm trying to Vibe for your budget but probably not like the best base uh to start um now anything else what's what's this 12 mean too like number of rankings what's that mean so like this is not like only based on number frankly so this is like a a combination right so that's like the power that we see and then the number of rankings that we see um in the individual list that we have so we break this down for example per vertical um what what is interesting is this is from um February 2022 and I was just listening to uh to search at.com what are the consequences of Apple rolling out ATT is that its own advertising Network search ads has increased dramatically in in what we call share of voice right it's become a much bigger player in the ad Market surprise surprise but like you said it's

definitely a channel that we see extremely good results with and there are agencies like search ads.com that can really help you in in navigating uh um ASA uh you know having you know creative strategies for your keywords for example um so my God is also like hey like if you look at this list look at the resources that you have like what can you actually test how many partners do you want to work with our experiences that like most of the uh if we can say start and scale up start with about three to five uh Partners but I also want to highlight on the next slide like a couple of you know um considerations there as well so on the best practices one is like soft launch like so if you want to go commercial with your app maybe you've got some funding maybe you've got like a big QA budget uh secured then you do want to actually have a period in which you're going to test your ads and what does that mean

testing ads you want to see what has the highest conversion rate you want to see what has the highest click-through rate when you do media advice but it's very important on the publisher side is to also see how much money they're generating for the medium that you're buying your ads from this is something that you can see in in something we call on ecpm then there's some messaging you know like what kind of like um folders work well you know what kind of male female like whatever like there's so many variables that you that you can choose um then the partner selection so hey that I want to have like you know three to five a different partners that we're going to be working with but it doesn't mean that in a soft launch you can't like test more than those and then like make a decision based on what you get in terms of data and last minute Channel mix search social video see what works for

you but also try and get that combined overview right like if you've around in multiple search channels can you then the system between the ones that actually are driving the best Roi can you combine the data so many things that you want to look out for then optimization and here like what we see like I work a lot uh with customers that have done a lot of iterations try different kpis right because like you know in the long term what is going to be really driving those most valuable users one early indicator that you're using might actually not give you the best indicator of like you know who these people are like depending on the targeting depending on the channel that you're using you also may want to change those so it could be for example that you're looking for someone say for example you're you're a fintech right then okay like are you looking for someone that just like signs up or

doesn't open an account or what other steps could you have like in in the middle then don't put your eggs in one basket and we do see sometimes that you know the the smaller companies get stuck with you know some of the larger Partners try at least three way partners and if you don't have to resources to do it then look for a consultant or look for an agency there is a lot of very legit people out there that have done this for you know God knows many years and that can really help you and then lastly focus on the effectiveness of your creatives so very often like when and this was also when I was working on the platform side um the the start and scales which would come with a you know beautifully designed set of creators and the harsh reality is for Performance Marketing it needs to click it needs to engage and it needs to convert so sometimes most of times it are the ugly you're looking creators that do this

they want to get the attention of the user and anything that is like oh I want to have like a Christmas theme creative or like I want to do anything special just just forget about it in most cases you will find something that's effective something in the messaging something maybe in the color scheme and the text that you're communicating or anything that you see happening in a video that is actually going to be driving the installs isn't going to be driving and you know down the road and conversions so smiley asks for help I like it you know Voodoo still does those videos that are like meme-like I bet you can't beat this I think they still do that you do very well very well game development there's people that you know have a fake uh videos not the gameplay has nothing to do with the app that you're installing uh but but it works that's crazy yeah I've seen that that Trend go up too all right

so one or two more slides like before we uh you know go to q a 2023 does a couple of things I think people should really look out for but you can do like you know your research into uh first is media mix modeling and what does that mean like what it does is really looking at hey like what like at the bottom has been driving the effectiveness of what has been driving conversion so let's take into a consideration like all of like you know your media mix um if you go to the singular blog there's going to be a post out there um where we talk for example with the lies of meta in hey explaining what does video makes welding do for who is it relevant it is more relevant right now for Big Spenders I have to say but I would really urge you to have a look at the core principles because it really goes into how do I actually measure effectiveness of AD spend um the second is connected TV um so connective TV say anything that

you look like on Hulu or like anything you watch on your your Samsung Smart uh TV we can of course like track every user has been on a specific device and if they've done an app install and if we can then read for example the IP address of that user that's called probabilistic attribution um there's a ton of these CTV Partners out there and I would say they really increased in a share of voice but also in the quality results I've been driving for advertisers and we do think that in 2023 that's definitely a channel that will grow even more and for them you don't really need that much of a massive budget to to get started um and the last user privacy so we release the blog post on scan 4.0 uh we release like some first thoughts on Google privacy sandbox and just know that these user privacy initiatives are not going to go away even some of the more seasoned performance marketeers out there still

hope with all the heart that you know at one point we're going to be using idfa again but it is most likely or actually it is simply not going to happen um and then last which is like the last slide like of course on top of you know your podcast uh Steve and your channel there's there's resources out there um so these are some of the ones that that I really uh like to use um is of course our singular block some Shameless self-promotion there uh but mate like characters a consultant feature was an agency base here in Berlin liftoff were a big uh Network and an ad Tech platform uh through extremely good articles interviews performance marketeers Eric stupid who's a bit like you know a legend of the mobile marketing industry he really goes more to the nitty-gritty of like the ecosystem as a whole but like I like writing his uh reading his articles but also like Google um Google has some very very good visas

out there like really like showing you hey like what kind of tools are are available to you and tips and tricks this list of course can be exhaustive to the point that you can have like a thousand but if you simply want to start somewhere have a look at these people and these companies and I think it will benefit you yeah we had Andy feature on last Friday on our live stream let me test as well so it's a small circle cool yeah feel free to reach out um if you maybe need an m p if you want to talk about user privacy I'm very happy to help I love it all right I want to go back to this real quick because these are the acronyms that I feel like I've been to a couple of events already and these consistently come up and I don't know meals if it's just for The Big Spenders out there because you know my audience tends to be more of the small business if you want to think about that the small business owners of the app space

yeah right so do you think these still these principles these acronyms for 2023 still apply for some of the smaller businesses on a functional level I wouldn't say media makes modeling in place um I do think though if your business is an app and if you want to grow an app you need to keep like you know one finger on the pulse of what's happening in the industry and I think there it's where I say hey do your reading just so you know and understand you know what an industry is is moving to connect to TV is a different scenario you can actually do it on a performance basis you can do that on a CPI basis yeah you probably need like you know some initial um investment but you're not looking at like hundreds of thousands um of dollars and again like what we see in terms of the performance and by performance I don't mean hey what is the CPI that they're driving like but what are the engaged users or paying users

um you are dealing with a channel that really can bring your ads to the big screen and we do see the effectiveness of that and lastly yeah user privacy does affect you know every size developer because you know guess what the way that you can actually reach Target user has been impacted heavily By changes that we see I like it yeah I think you know back to our earlier point with Palin we talked about how do you increase your brand you know I had a client asked me this how do you create your brand search volume because you know that's one of the things I like calm or headspace there's search volume for those terms are really big and sometimes they outperform like especially on the dating side hinge Bumble they outperform online dating or dating right and so maybe that is the connected TV is the channel that you're like hey they obviously can't interact there's no direct performance indicators

there but like they're gonna see your brand they're gonna look in the App Stores search for your brand and then eventually your brand search volume starts going up yeah so like so you just mentioned like a very interesting feeling here because like you know the tracking of connected TV is something of course that can be done based on like the the the the the the TV idea or like the model whatever you want to call it based on the um IP address sorry um now that we have that use case like hey like hey I've seen this TV like on this uh on this screen but I'm gonna look like you know in in the App Store and I'm going to install that who is actually going to be attributed with that user and that install that is where the m p comes into place right to actually make sure that like people don't claim the same install twice because this happens um logically as well I love it all right once again it is if

you want to learn more about mmps and check out an MMP as well it is singular.net singular.net it's right there and then Neil's LinkedIn is linked up in the YouTube description as well so go reach out to them and you can talk to them and he can show you all about the cool things that you can do with an MMP deals thank you so much for coming on doing this thank you Steve have a great rest of the afternoon and evening it's gonna be a long day for me