Google App Campaign Optimization | Consumer Acquisition

To date, there are 2.1 million Android apps on app compa Play and 1.8 million iOS apps available on the Apple App Store. If your app is one of them, you need a streamlined way to advertise across Google Ads’ various properties if you want to succeed. That’s where a Google App Campaign-launched in 2015 as Google Universal App Campaign and now rebranded to Google App Campaigns -come in.

The Basics of Google Ads App Campaigns

App Campaign Objectives

• Cost per install (CPI): This tells Google Ads to drive as many installs as possible given the constraints of your budget. Your bid should be the amount of money you’re willing to pay for each install.
• Cost per action (CPA): This tells Google Ads to drive as many installs as possible from the people who are most likely to take valuable (revenue-generating) in-app actions given the constraints of your budget.

Your bid should be the amount of money you’re willing to pay for each in-app conversion action. If you choose this campaign objective, you first need to set up conversion tracking so Google Ads can collect data on the users who complete particular in-app conversion actions.

Then, select your app’s platform (Android or iOS), enter your app’s name, and select it from the list that Google Ads generates.

After you’ve named your app campaign, submit your ad copy. You’ll need four independent lines of text that can be rotated in any order. These lines should be 25 characters or shorter, and at least one of them should be 20 characters or shorter to account for smaller device screen sizes.

If you don’t have any assets to upload, Google Ads will pull some from within your app and use them for your ads. Once that’s taken care of, select the languages and geographic regions you want to target.

Finally, select either Install Volume (CPI) or In-App Actions (CPA). Note that the latter campaign goal is only available to advertisers who’ve set up in-app conversion tracking.

Set your target bid, click Save & Continue, and you’re ready to go!

Optimizing Your Campaigns

1. Increase Bid to Budget Ratios

Setting Up Bid to Budget Ratios

In terms of tCPA bidding campaigns, 10X is the minimum that you will want to set so that you can ramp up your campaigns quickly. This being said, for these bid-to-budget ratios, using 20X will often show stronger performance.

When it’s not possible to increase the daily budget, you can cluster your budgets together into one single campaign. To get the best out of this campaign, you’ll want to make sure your tCPA campaign bids start around 20–30% higher than your ultimate goal.

On the other hand, when running a CPI (cost-per-install) campaign, budget caps should be 50X the target to your CPI, which bids starting around $4-$5. This should be the case even when CPI goals are lower.

General Best Practices for Bid-to-Budget Ratios

• Make sure your daily budget caps at least 50X target CPI or 10X target CPA.
• Don’t change target CPI/CPA bids > 20% in 24 hours until the campaign is generating 20–30 targeted in-app events per day.
• Target CPI campaigns’ bid starts at least $4–5, even if CPI goal is lower.
• Target CPA campaigns’ bid starts at least 20–30% higher than the goal.

Additional Consideration: Geo Expansions

2. Market Clustering and Bidding Strategy

Market Clustering for Small Budgets: Markets, tiers, languages, and other factors should all be aspects of your campaign structuring strategy. This being said, it will be helpful to combine ad campaigns if they are in one language and have low bids. This will give you a higher bid-to-budget ratio, as well as more events firing every day. This also allows you to control the delivery a little better-it is best to consolidate until there are larger budgets where you can separate campaigns by market.

Make Small Bid Changes: Another important thing to note is that when you have a smaller budget, you will want to also make small CPA/CPI bid changes. It is recommended to change by less than 20% per day until you are consistently getting about 40–50 targeted in-app events every day.

Set Bids Early in the Day: It is best to set bids during the beginning of the day-it allows you to be competitive. With that being said, you can then begin tapering the bid down once you begin generating enough event volume each day.

Google’s algorithms can optimize the best placements for your ads across multiple channels. You can feed your campaigns by maximizing your asset coverage. For instance, provide all sizes for videos: Landscape, Portrait, Square Video. Similarly, provide all size options for still images: Landscape, Portrait, 300×50, 320×50, HTML5 assets.

Once your ad creative assets have been running for around 10–14 days, it is easy to identify the highest performing assets. You can then have your team start building new iterations of high-performing assets and ultimately delete the low-performing ones.

4. Maximize App Campaign Performance

According to Google, there are three ways to really improve app campaign performance. When advertisers follow these golden rules, it’s possible to achieve creative excellence and maximize app campaign results. The three rules are to continually run multiple formats of each creative for the greatest reach: Landscape image, Landscape Video, and Portrait Video.

Conclusion

Constantly testing creative is crucial to achieve and sustain the return on advertising spend (ROAS). The fact of the matter is, creative rapidly fatigues with increased spend and audience reach. In addition, 95% of creatives fail to outperform a media buying portfolio’s best ads. So, even when you have a high-performing creative, you need to think about replacing it. This year, advertisers need to rapidly develop new creatives and leverage best practices to drive positive outcomes with Google App Campaigns.

Originally published at https://www.consumeracquisition.com.