Have you heard of Universal App Campaigns or UAC? If you are interested in digital marketing or have an app to promote in Google Ads, this article interests you. Since the arrival of the new Adwords or Google Ads, we have had more than one surprise from Google, and I have already told you that it is better than it was before …

Discover what the Universal Applications Campaigns are, how to configure them and know the different objectives and formats available in 2019. In another article I will tell you an alternative to the UAC, for the moment I am testing it …

What are the Universal App Campaigns or UAC?
The Universal Applications Campaigns are the new Google Adwords format to carry out application-oriented campaigns in general manager email list. Formerly the application campaigns worked like the rest, that is, the campaigns were configured (Search, Display, YouTube, …) but oriented to the installation of an application. Since the end of 2017 this can not be done in Spain.

Adwords recommends us to use this new type of campaign to unite all our advertising efforts related to applications. Here is the official explanation from Google about these campaigns:

From my experience with UACs, I can say that they are much worse than the old application-oriented formats. Now Google optimizes with its algorithm, through machine learning, and automatically chooses important aspects such as the platform (Display, YouTube, …) the creative combinations (image and copy), the keywords …

Maybe we know that our business does not work on YouTube or we are able to lower the CPI on other platforms … How do we know that Google is not cheating us?

What if our app is showing in places with sexual content or betting? How does this affect our brand?

How do I configure UAC?
Configure Universal App Campaigns is very simple, too much I would say.

Once the UAC option has been chosen within Adwords or Google Ads, we must select the operating system and the app to which the campaign will be oriented.

Once inside, we will configure the following fields:

 Campaign name
Ad elements (copy, images and video (if you have)
Geographic location
Available languages
Objective of the Campaign
Daily Budget
Target CPI (Cost per Objective Facility)
Start / end date.
Advanced location options (people who are in the location of the segmentation, who search in that place, zone exclusion, …)
If you have already used Google Adwords before you ask yourself, where do I select the keywords? Well … You can not! Google is so smart that it will go through your app tab and will select the ones it deems convenient. All the more reason to have an optimized ASO (App Store Optimization).

Optimization objectives
With UAC we have two types of optimization objectives available. As we have seen, it is the little that we will be able to choose, it is important to do it correctly.

1) Target downloads
Adwords will optimize your bids, creatives and segmentations to get the highest number of users that download the app. I advise to use this objective at least during the first week, so that Adwords has more data and can optimize with its algorithm. We have two options within this objective:

Orient only to downloads, reaching all types of users (lower quality of these).
Get more volume of user installations with the possibility of performing an action within the app, such as registering or logging in.
2) Objective actions in the app
If you need quality users who perform very specific actions within the app, you should use this option. It is necessary to define the actions of the app as conversion events and then be able to select them (this is for another whole article, so I will publish it later).

If we are good marketers we will know our CPA for each action, which will allow us to adjust to bid that makes us improve the ROAS of the campaigns.

Formats for UAC
The formats for the Universal App Campaigns bring an important novelty compared to what was before. Now our app can appear in the Google Play store. Very cool!