A few weeks ago I was talking about the Universal App Campaigns or UAC and its disappointing (or questionable) performance for certain applications. Today I come to tell you an alternative to the Universal App Campaigns that I have tried for a few weeks and that skips a bit the Google recommendation guide.
Google Ads recommends us to use the last option (UAC) for everything related to installations and registers in co owner email list. Already in itself is suspect that we lose control of the keywords or platforms where our ad will appear. That is why I question your recommendation …
Alternative campaign to UAC
What I propose as an alternative to the UAC is to use the search campaigns as if they were not a mobile application. In this way we make sure to go out in the search options for the keywords that we decide.
A priori is a risky option since the user will do a search that you will find a type of results that move away from the “tedious” download of an app.
In the case of the example, we were focused on professional categories, so that user looking for “plumber Madrid” would be difficult to have just downloaded an app …
What do we need?
To carry out search campaigns aimed at downloading an app we do not need many things, I will focus on the landing page, the configuration of the campaign and the different marketing goals and bids.
Landing page mobile
The first, the most basic, is to have a mobile landing page. If you do not know how to easily design an optimized landing page, I’ll tell you in this article. ?
We need a VERY optimized page for mobile capture that makes it clear that to get the service we have to download an app.
If we are going to “force” the user to download an app to get this service, we have to transmit the advantages of our app (free, fast, simple, …). In the example below, links were included in all the images to facilitate the arrival of the user to the store.
Campaign settings
The configuration of the campaign will have to be ad hoc to each project, but there are a series of obvious sections that we have to take into account.
DEVICES: The campaign should only be mobile-oriented (and tablet if applicable).
KEYWORDS: The selected keywords can not be redundant and we will have to fine tune those that we will be able to download and subsequent registration (if this is our goal). This means getting less results, but gaining in quality.
LOCATION: It depends on the app and the project, but in many cases we are interested in focusing this effort on big cities and forgetting the less populated nuclei. I repeat: this is something that depends on lot in the app, but in my test the installations of sparsely populated areas were much more expensive.
Marketing objective and bid strategy
The marketing objective and the bid strategy are included within the configuration of the campaign, but I think it is a delicate point and that is why I want to treat it separately.
First of all we must decide the main objective of the campaign:
Sales: Our campaign will be focused on the most likely users to make a purchase in our app. If the goal of our campaign is to generate a download that later informs us of a sale, we may be facing the best selection.
Sales opportunities: If we are looking for leads that will give us a profit in the form of a sale later, this is our goal. We could say that it is one level less than the previous objective, since they would be “potential sales”.
Traffic to the website: In the case of wanting to optimize our campaign to gain more traffic to a website where we will interact with the user, it would be our option.
Remove the recommendations of objective: What has been not put to goal to the campaign.
Based on my experience, and taking into account that is based on campaigns oriented only to one type of application, I have not found differences between the objectives. Perhaps the “Traffic to the website” function has worked better for the use of a landing page, but certainly nothing significant.
If you have a budget, it is best to do tests to find the best optimization objective, but otherwise, I advise you to use any and take advantage of the strategy to better define the strategy.
Second, we must choose the strategy that will give us the best results:
CPA Objective: If we are clear about our CPA (or CPL in the case that a record is a lead) we can try this option. This strategy ensures that you have a target cost and will not be exceeded. We run the risk of not getting any results
ROAS objective: I honestly find it hard to see the difference with respect to the first one. At the theoretical level it is clear, optimize for rentabi.
