Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2021 EB Mobile Growth Handbook
2021 EB Mobile Growth Handbook
Growth Handbook
Over 120 pages of mobile growth tips
Strategy 3: Virality 58
3 Factors of Virality 59
Incentives 60
Ego 65
Emotion 66
Strategy 4: Activation 74
Strategy 5: Retention 86
Conclusion 121
The State of Mobile in 2021
If 2020 was a time of confusion and navigating uncharted waters, 2021 is about using the learnings from last
year’s pivoting, testing, and iterating to uncover opportunities for further growth and innovation. As the most
damaging effects of the pandemic slow down, refining strategies to capitalize on our current new normal and
shifts in user behavior will be increasingly important in order to sustain growth.
Let’s take a look at some of the events that have defined and will continue to shape the mobile landscape
in 2021:
The deprecation of IDFAs and other device-level data diminished marketers’ ability to effectively measure,
optimize, and run personalized ad campaigns. Detailed campaign insights, retargeting, personalization, and
frequency capping became a thing of the past. This left the mobile industry in a frenzy as marketers worried
how they would be able to run and measure their ad campaigns without the detailed data the industry relied
on for the past decade.
With the announcement of iOS 15 at this summer’s WWDC, Apple introduced multiple new privacy changes,
including the removal of access to IPs with Private Relay, signaling a continuing trend of removing tracking
identifiers even further.
When iOS 14.5 released in the spring of 2021, most of the industry expected major shifts in advertising spend,
efficacy, and very low ATT opt-in rates. And we believe iOS 15 will continue those shifts in both spending and
measurement trends.
• App Privacy Report - This provides users with more granular info on how apps and SDKs are accessing
their data in a new section under a user’s device’s privacy settings. Users will be able to see how often
and when apps use permissions (e.g. accessing location, camera, and microphone) and which domains
apps are calling out to (e.g. api.branch.io).
• SKAdNetwork Enhancements - Brands (and MMPs) now can get SKAdNetwork postbacks directly.
That means that Facebook, Google and other SANs can no longer simply say “trust us to report how
many SKAdNetwork installs Apple sent us.” Brands can configure these postbacks to be sent to MMPs
to enhance their measurement and compare with other channels. The direct postbacks are limited for
winning claims, while all postbacks (including non-winning ones) are still being sent to ad networks.
• Hide My Email - Apple introduced the ability to easily generate single-use email addresses that can be
used as an alternative to traditional email addresses. This is a natural extension of “Sign in with Apple,”
which allows users who need an email address to sign up for a service to generate a “fake” email
address that Apple forwards to the real email address.
• Misc changes related to "tracking" - For non-paying customers, there are some small but still
meaningful changes to enhance privacy, including IP addresses masked for domains counted as
trackers in Safari, and IP addresses masked for pixels in emails.
• iCloud+ Private Relay - Apple is providing a “private VPN” in the Safari browser, with IP address
masked for Safari traffic for users who pay for iCloud+.
While various factors like app category, user base geography, and the app’s ATT strategy could impact an
app’s ATT opt-in rate, a major contributor to the confusion is differences in how these opt-in metrics are
being calculated. According to AdExchanger, ATT opt-in numbers are wildly inconsistent because of lack of
consistency in deciding which events qualify for the opt-in rate calculation (authorized / (authorized + denied)),
and in the method used to collect these events. This is why many observers are confused by the different “opt-
in rates” they're seeing, which makes it easy to draw incorrect conclusions.
The explosion of QR codes shows no signs of slowing down, and is here to stay even after the world slowly
returns to pre-pandemic times. Their ease of use from the end-user perspective, ability to measure offline to
online journeys, and their ability to convert existing offline users into the app make QR codes a must in a savvy
mobile marketer’s growth strategy. We cover more on QR codes below in the Organic App Growth section.
Coby Berman
COO
“Winning brands will exceed new consumer expectations by seamlessly bridging digital
experiences and the physical world. As consumers move through the physical world again,
give them a reason to download your app with on-premise app experiences, engage them
with location-triggered and location-targeted messaging, and exceed expectations with
arrival detection and seamless pickup and check-in experiences.”
However, a big portion of this growth — 69% — came from unusual demand that analysts expect to cool down
as the pandemic subsides. This implies wealth transfer from restaurants to delivery apps that could potentially
swing the other way once restrictions lift even further and vaccination rates increase. One example: according
to the Wall Street Journal, daily users of restaurant reservation app OpenTable more than doubled in mid-April
from the same time a year prior, as restrictions on indoor dining and drinking were lifted. During the first week
of April, 45% of Americans said they had dined out, up from 29% in early February, according to the pollster
Ipsos. We are likely to see these numbers further increase as more vaccinations roll out and restrictions ease.
These apps show no signs of slowing down, implying that users have grown accustomed to the convenience of
grocery delivery and plan to continue using grocery delivery apps even as the pandemic subsides.
Hotplay Games reports that many mobile gamers who started playing after the beginning of COVID-19
outbreak were still playing in July 2020, with more than half saying they plan to continue mobile gaming. These
new mobile game players are likely to spend money in-game on average $10.51 higher than those being spent
by the existing gamers. What does this mean for mobile marketers? Now is the time for advertisers to capitalize
on this audience.
Retail
The retail industry saw a huge increase in app downloads during the height of the pandemic: in 2020, retailers
saw a year over year 58% increase in in-app transactions from September 2019 to September 2020. As
consumers continue to shop in-app and pick up curbside, mobile has become the number one destination users
turn to when buying a product.
Features like BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) and curbside pickup that developed as a result of the
pandemic and became in-app offerings will continue to be expected even as the pandemic subsides. For
brands, this means continual investments in the mobile app to facilitate easy, seamless shopping experiences.
This is increasingly necessary if retailers hope to keep up with Amazon and big-box retailers.
Michaels and the Walmart app offering curbside pickup and delivery through the app.
However, retention isn’t something you think about after you acquire new users, rather, it should permeate
all stages of the funnel. You wouldn’t want to waste money or time acquiring a user likely to churn quickly, for
example, and you want users with high retention rates to be advocates for your brand. To foster user retention,
ensuring customers receive a good user experience is key. This means fixing broken touchpoints and creating
connected, cohesive opportunities with deep linking for users to interact with you no matter what channel,
platform, or device they’re on. Build trust by making interacting with your brand easy, engaging users, and
personalizing their experiences to convince users to stick around long after the pandemic subsides.
The unique challenges of mobile, including a crowded Play/App Store of over 4 million existing apps, disruptive
new businesses clamoring for mindshare, and the stores themselves driving traffic to competitors through
proprietary search ads, mean making your app known to the world is no small feat.
Last year a majority of our Mobile Growth Survey* respondents (38.2%) reported that driving app discovery
was their biggest challenge of 2020. In 2021 and beyond, creating new pathways for users to discover and
fully adopt your app will be critical.
*The Mobile Growth Survey is a yearly survey that informs the results and content of our annual Mobile Growth Handbook.
This development isn’t exclusive to iOS, either. We’ve seen this shift towards strict privacy policies throughout
the past year, indicating that the mobile industry is moving towards a world where universal identifiers will
be unavailable. For instance, Google announced its plan to phase out support of third-party cookies in 2022,
making targeted advertising across the web more difficult — as many adtech solutions used to do this today
rely heavily on third-party cookies. We also expect Google to deprecate the GAID (Google Advertising ID) on
Android in the future, which would assign mobile advertising campaigns on Android the same fate as those
on iOS. iOS 15 is continuing this trend with an even stronger push for a move away from device data with the
removal of access to IP and a strong disruption of email tracking. Soon, the mobile industry will be faced with
a new reality where the ability to use device-level data to run and measure mobile ad campaigns is no longer
guaranteed.
Although mobile advertising and measurement is going to be more difficult, marketers will simply need to find
new ways to connect users with their app. For example, certain networks that are less reliant on universal IDs
could support effective re-engagement campaigns without the need for IDs – for example, networks whose
inventory is direct-to-device (e.g. preloads and other types of OEM inventory). Owned and earned media
will become increasingly important, as will strategically leveraging your existing user base on desktop and
mobile to convert into app users. We are confident that savvy marketers will be able to discover and create
alternative methods to drive app adoption, and look forward to a mobile ecosystem that places the holistic
customer experience at the forefront of its marketing efforts.
In this whitepaper, we’ll cover every stage of growth, so your team can execute a custom mobile growth
strategy. We’ll provide you with a holistic framework for structuring your growth marketing and unpack specific
tactics for each stage your company will encounter. At the end of each section, you’ll find a brief summary of
the main takeaways, as well as questions meant to help better align your team on your growth strategy.
Let’s begin!
Organic App
Growth
1. Organic App Growth
Although much has been written about the impact of COVID on the mobile industry, less has focused on a
key split in how apps that saw a “pandemic bump” experienced growth. Specifically, in comparison to paid
channels, organic app growth is up:
The best thing about this development from a LTV-focused mobile growth perspective? Owned channels are
statistically more effective at driving value to your business. Branch research has found that organic channels
(such as email, smart banners, and referrals) are up to 4.4X more effective at driving purchases than paid
acquisition channels.
Additionally, although iOS 14 changes heavily affect paid mobile advertising, organic acquisition is
unaffected. This presents new opportunities for owned-media and earned-media campaigns brands should
take advantage of. We expect to see more emphasis on organic channels, as well as a shift to acquiring
users on desktop and mobile websites and converting them into the app. Ensuring that your brand’s links
across platforms take users into your app will become even more critical to provide the best experience and
facilitate user acquisition, engagement, and retention. Investing in owned, organic channels will be imperative
to create connected, holistic journeys for your users across digital touchpoints as the effectiveness of paid
mobile advertising diminishes. Although there will be changes and difficulties measuring paid app install
ad campaigns, we are excited to see a world where brands think of their campaigns from a user journey
perspective first, instead of focusing narrowly on tracking install ads.
Other platforms
(mobile, web, desktop,
OTT, etc.)
iOS iOS
owned/earned paid ads
- Not impacted
Saket Toshniwal
Senior Product Manager (Growth and CRM)
"It’s a lot easier to acquire users who have already visited your website,
or downloaded your app but haven’t been using it, or dropped from
the registration form. It reduces CPAs. We use FB, Instagram, Snapchat,
Pinterest. It makes sense to experiment and try every channel in order
to see which one works."
The new, more effective way to think about your SEO strategy is by funneling intent, as shown below:
Eli Schwartz
Growth Advisor
“The overall meaning of organic is non-paid, and it's not necessarily driven
intentionally. There are things you can do once you discover that organic vein.
Organic vegetables need to be watered and given sunlight, but there's a natural
process to it. You are not paying for it and when it comes to SEO, it is a link that
you should be naturally getting without manipulating anything directly.”
• LCD TV reviews
LCD TVs
• New CD TVs
• LCD TV 2019
• Eye liner
Source:
https://editorialist.com/beauty/best-eyeliner/
Because designing UX to fulfill intent considers not only the keyword itself, but the user’s current goals and
mindset, the content you create is likely to rank higher:
Keep in mind that Google increasingly favors editorial content over SEO-optimized auto-generated pages that
don’t bring actual value to readers. This ongoing shift again returns dividends for a growth team investing in
intent-to-content based, rather than keyword-based SEO optimization.
Web to App
Intent-based SEO can create brand alignment and begin a user path to conversion, but for the advanced
growth team, it is also a core top-of-funnel expansion strategy for high-ROI app installs.
Your existing mobile website is an often-overlooked resource to turn existing mobile visitors into loyal app
users. In fact, doing so is 82% less expensive than running app install ads.
If our mantra at every stage of the funnel is to maximize the number of users who take the next step, how do
you best convert web users to app users? Smart banners like Branch’s Journeys are the best way to persuade
users from your mobile website to move their brand relationship into your app. Smart banners exploded in the
early days of the pandemic, likely correlated with a time of market uncertainty when many paid marketing
budgets were frozen or cut, putting a spotlight on their value as a low-cost acquisition strategy.
Personalization
As with any user interaction personalization matters - to the tune of making your banners 5x more effective.
You can personalize your smart banners at scale in a variety of ways, based on many number of attributes that
signal specific user intent.
Source: Branch
• Presenting an interstitial to a high-frequency visitor already familiar with your brand, while slowly
building the relationship with a first-time user by presenting a smaller, less assertive floating button.
• Encouraging a user who has just converted on web (by making a purchase, starting a subscription,
creating a profile or anything else that is meaningful for your team) to take the next step in their
“relationship” with your brand with a half or full page banner that connects their action to a tangible
benefit of your app.
» Calls to action that give context to what the user has just done and tease how the app is the
next logical step, like “track your purchase in the app”, “get real time-updates on your item with
the app”, or “download the app to get the most out of your subscription” provide continuity that
has outsized results in getting users to see the value in downloading in the moment.
As you build out your strategy, treat web-to-app optimization with the same degree of rigour that you
approach paid ads iteration with advanced plays, like:
• Creating banners that consider the context of where your user is coming from:
» Users who find your website through SEO are in a different mindframe than those who come
because a friend sent them a link. Honoring those differences through different calls to action
- targeted by referring URL - has a dramatic impact on view-to-click rates and starts your “app
relationship” off right with your users feeling like you understand them.
» Even in a single channel, users coming from a “new in stock” email have a different mindframe
from those coming from a blast about an annual sale or even an abandoned cart email. By
personalizing the CTA on your banner to the specific campaigns your marketing team runs, you
can create the kind of cross-channel personalization that reinforces loyalty and makes the ask
for a user to download your app make more sense in the moment.
• Creating banners with graphics that mirror direct mail, out-of-home, TV, over-the-top, or awareness-
centered campaigns, and changing the banners as those campaigns change by season or geography.
Users are more likely to give you dedicated space on their phone by downloading the app when it feels
like a core part of the overall brand experience. Shortcut that by mirroring other high-impact campaigns
while providing copy that highlights a unique benefit of the app.
• Using targeted onsite banners as an extension of your SEM campaigns by creating banners that only
show to users who come from paid web campaigns. This acquires users through a paid “two hop”
approach that is far more cost effective from a CPI perspective than more traditional install-focused
networks.
• Serve different versions of your Journeys smart banners to the same audience. Running separate tests
that seek optimizations in copy, creative, and placement will help drive best-in-class results.
• Diversify the value-add of your banners. The app has different perceived benefits to users depending
on their lifecycle status, intent, and mindframe. Highlighting separate benefits of the app at different
times will help you determine what kind of users are receptive to each one.
• Double down on re-engagement. The benefits of a higher LTV for users with your app only applies if you
consistently drive them there. Targeting users with the app already installed to engage there, rather
than face roadblocks on mobile web, helps improve the return on ad spend of the campaigns that
made your user adopt the app originally.
We increasingly see brands using QR codes to both introduce and re-engage consumers with their app.
The unique circumstances of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have functionally required people to
become more aware of and use QR codes as social distancing drove interactions like ordering a coffee, looking
at a menu, or scheduling a time to workout online. QR codes put people at ease by providing a contactless,
anxiety-free interaction while delivering a seamless user experience. Now is the perfect time to start or expand
your usage of QR codes to scale user acquisition and educate your customers on how the app fits into their
daily life.
Follow these tips to get the most out of your QR code strategy:
Prevent broken experiences and create cohesive experiences through direct and deferred deep linking.
If your QR code is advertising a specific product, ensure the QR code opens the app directly to that specific
advertised product. This not only builds trust with your customers, but teaches them how to use the app by
short-cutting right to the place where they’ll find immediate value.
Ensure your link/QR code generator can update the link destination after deployment. By their nature, QR
codes exist printed in the physical world and can stay in the hands of your users for longer than a typical
online deployment. You’ll want the flexibility to re-direct users to new messaging or destinations if your original
content loses relevance or promotion expires, or if you might want to later change the content or the promotion
associated with it. With a tool like Branch’s link generator, you can easily refresh a user’s destination even
when the QR code has been in the field for months.
Add a QR code to your desktop experience that minimizes friction when people download your app. This
removes friction and steps from the path to download, and allows you to add nuance to your onboarding
experience. For instance, if you know a user came from a QR code via desktop, you could customize their
onboarding in a way that adds value and makes sense given the install source, for example, encouraging them
to use a magic link to sign in.
Place QR Codes on storefront locations. We’ve seen this become increasingly common, especially with the
pandemic across verticals. For example, the Quick Serve Restaurant space has increasingly implemented QR
codes as stores look to limit the number of patrons inside, while maintaining per-store revenue and giving their
users the benefit of a faster ordering experience. This has the brand-facing benefit of building a “mobile order
ahead” habit that can persist far past the pandemic restrictions.
Tip:
If you have multiple locations,
each QR code should be
different so you can deduce
which ones drive the most
app installs or in-app
purchases. This will also
help you understand which
locations QR codes don’t
drive as many app installs,
so you can take a different
approach such as targeted
online advertising.
With this method, you can customize the SMS message your users receive, and include any promos or discounts
within the message. By doing so, you can test whether additional short-term incentives like a discount code for
first-time users who download via TMTA creates better retention and LTV. TMTA also allows you to understand
information such as the install source, campaign reach and efficacy, and lets you customize the onboarding
experience of users coming from TMTA.
You can use TMTA strategically on certain pages, such as order confirmation or buy online and pickup in store,
to show users why downloading the app at that certain point is the right next step. For teams where speed
is of the essence or an integrated effort isn't in the cards short-term, a simple TMTA landing page can be a
solution that provides a bridge for your users between desktop and app, while eliminating the need for a
separate project from your front-end eng team. You can give a clear acquisition call to action with a simple
TMTA landing page.
CQ Hotels and Chewy take its users to the app via TMTA. After entering their phone number, users receive
a text with a link to the app. If the app is not installed, they are routed to the App store to download.
• Improve your SEO strategy by uncovering and matching user intent. Tweak the user experience and create
content that fulfills that intent. Google prioritizes content that adds value.
• Turn your mobile website into a core app acquisition channel by using web-to-app smart banners that
deep link users to relevant in-app content. Personalizing the banners based on previous user activity is 5x
more effective than generic banners. Prioritize A/B testing different messaging and creatives to audiences
based on demographic and behavioral criteria to find out what resonates for distinct segments.
• QR codes are an effective way to bring offline users online and build bridges between your desktop and
mobile platforms. Best practices include using QR link parameters to personalize and shortcut onboarding,
incorporating QR codes into products/product packaging or storefronts, and ensuring your QR generator
supports updating the associated link destination post-deployment.
• Bring your desktop users into your app with Text-me-the-App (TMTA), which allows users to text
themselves a link to your app. Leverage custom parameters to customize your SMS messages and measure
associated performance.
• What kinds of new content and experiences can we create that align with the different
types of user intent?
• Are we utilizing our existing platforms like the mobile and desktop web to convert web
visitors into loyal app users? If so, how do we further personalize and optimize smart
banners?
• How can we use QR codes to bring our offline users online? How can we leverage
storefronts, direct mail campaigns, or product packaging to better facilitate and expand
their use?
Paid media weaves through our offline and online existence across every conceivable channel: print ads in
hard copy publications, display ads on every website, product feeds, dynamic retargeting, and paid social are
just a few examples of what an average person will experience daily. Given the cost, ecosystem challenges and
rampant fraud, why do companies place such a premium on paid media?
Paid media reliably broadens a brand’s reach at every stage in the funnel, from awareness to conversion to
winback. Place a dynamic bid and you can reach a uniquely tailored audience at exactly the right time. This is
especially critical with channels where the accessible audience for a brand’s organic outreach can get lost in
the noise or lack the requisite scale to reliably achieve holistic growth goals. Sophisticated networks provide
both scale and granular targeting that can introduce new, highly tailored customers to a brand on a regular
basis, specifically by creating a paradigm that favors paid placements above “earned” views.
There are various ways to both structure ad buys, align paid media KPIs and measure paid efforts/
effectiveness:
Pros: Publishers are often willing to offer less expensive engagements because the ad does not
require down-funnel conversion for payment. Therefore, CPM can be cheaper on a per-install basis
if the placement is very well-aligned with an app’s core audience. CPMs are also good for branding
and awareness campaigns where the goal is to get a message in front of as many eyes as possible.
Cons: A challenge with CPM is “backing out,” or ensuring performance metrics make sense. For
example, if you buy a CPM for $10 but are only getting paid on a CPI of $, you would need to
achieve conversions for 10 installs from that $10 CPM buy to just break even.
Pros: Analyzing CPC provides fast feedback on the types of content, keyword bets, or audience
targets that get targeted users to take the first step and these insights can be translated to more
effective aggregate CPI over time. Awareness-focused campaigns, without down-funnel goals, may
benefit from CPC as the main KPI.
Cons: CPC has inherently less value to the mobile marketer than post-click or post-install metrics
due to the degree of dropoff in the click-to-install funnel. Well intentioned content that poorly maps
to the app’s core purpose or “click-bait” creatives may result in strong CPC but poor CPI/CPA and be
a drain on marketing budget with poor incrementality.
Gallant Chen
Growth Advisor, Ex-VP Digital Marketing
“There's 2 key benefits of paid [advertising]. One is it's more measurable than
organic in most cases and you can typically see results much more quickly. In
most cases, organic investments take much longer to play out - so you have
the benefit of speed and being able to measure it with paid acquisition.”
This is also a great way to discover what resonates with your target audience. Start at a low spend, initially
cast a wide net across different strategies and tactics, then cut what isn’t working and reinvest in the
strategies that do work. The wide net is crucial to ensure you get a full picture into what works.
Most search ads are based on intent rather than a specific persona, though you can technically target both. These
types of ads are great to use when you know you have a type of product someone knows they need
or want.
Chris Stevens
CMO
“In a lot of eCommerce companies, social really doesn't perform on par with transactional
intent where you can buy transactional intent. It usually ends up being an issue of mix. How
much do you want in each of those buckets and how do you optimize that media spend for
return? That mix is going to depend on the organization you're in.”
Alpha - Isolate
The purpose of Alpha campaigns is to isolate your profitable keywords and exercise greater control over
them since we know they drive higher performance. In Alpha campaigns, you use single-keyword ad groups,
or “SKAGs,” using exact match. This allows you to optimize bids and targeting, and to create more relevant ad
copy at a detailed level.
Advanced Search Engine Marketing Strategy: Leverage Google Ads Smart Bidding AI
It used to be that sophisticated marketers manually bid and optimized their campaigns. However, over the
past 2-3 years Google’s Smart Bidding tools have become much more effective. In most cases, using Google’s
Target CPA or Target ROAS tools will outperform manual bidding. Part of the reason why is that Google
leverages Artificial Intelligence to process proprietary data signals that are not available to you as an
advertiser.
The key to leverage Smart Bidding AI effectively is to share accurate data with Google on conversions and
revenue so they can use this data to optimize your campaigns.
App installs have become less frequent the longer we own a smartphone - people with 10 years of smartphone
ownership install 40% fewer apps than someone with under 2 years. While COVID may have slowed this trend,
During Device Set-up - Setup wizards display recommended apps when consumers are configuring their new device
Scrolling Between Apps - Preloads can generate brand impressions during the considerable amount of time
spent thumbing through devices looking for what’s next.
Organizing Their Device - Smart Game folders will organize a consumer’s games in one convenient place - and
then recommend new games within the folder to the user.
1. It’s all About Removing Consumer Friction - By providing experiences that are outside the app,
Discovery-Based Advertising allows for installs outside the ad-to-store framework that has
bogged down the install process. Instead, this allows the app to take an organic route to being
discovered by being available when the consumer is ready rather than trying to find intent.
Other forms of Discovery-based advertising focus on friction within the traditional ad-to-store
framework, one form of which is called SingleTap technology. SingleTap bypasses the friction of
visiting the app store altogether, allowing a user to confirm interest in the app and then auto-
installing it in the background.
2. Evaluation is Based on Different Metrics - Since discovery is more organic, conversions happen
on a different timeline. Consider, for example, a travel app. While someone may be looking to
immediately book a vacation, it’s more likely that the urge to use the app will come weeks or
months later. But when they do get that urge, the app is there waiting to be used. The key is
that just like all cars will accelerate from 0-60, some app categories tend to take longer to be
discovered. One metric that is helpful is a “Days to 25” metric that tracks the amount of time it
takes for 25% of preloads installed on a new device to be opened and used. These metrics are,
of course, overall averages and are heavily influenced by both macro and individual factors, but
here is how some common app categories rank:
Trust-based Advertising
Many people buy things because their friends or people they admire tell them to — in fact, 90% of people trust
recommendations from friends and family.
Trust-based advertising encapsulates affiliate marketing and influencer marketing, both of which are based
on an assumed interest due to trust in others. While this falls under paid advertising, it has a very different
dynamic. These methods can be used alongside virality practices when you have a product that can inspire
others — but works best when the referrals and influencers are authentic. Paying an influencer who is a
good fit for your brand and has a similar target audience to yours goes a long way, rather than choosing an
influencer who might have a large following but doesn’t match your brand.
Affiliate Marketing
Deep linking users from a campaign to the advertised product into the app and subsequently attributing in-
app conversions back to the affiliate source optimizes both sides of the this unique funnel:
The end advertiser sees increased campaign impact by reducing friction to conversion. While ideal in
any campaign, eliminating unnecessary steps in a “trusted source” intent path is critical to both the short-
term conversion and the long-term “halo effect” a user perceives from influencer/ brand affinity. This often
translates to higher ongoing LTV for the brand.
The affiliates/publishers/partners get credit for their true impact, including cross-platform user conversion
paths, unencumbered by false positives or negatives. For well aligned publisher/ brand relationships, this
typically results in higher payouts for the influencer (by eliminating holes in attributing click-to-conversion rate
and minimizing mid-funnel dropoff) and gives stronger signals about whether the brand/ influencer pairing is
a good ongoing fit.
The end user gets a seamless transition into the app with fewer steps between them and the desired action,
which reinforces trust with the influencer and mirrors some of that affinity onto the brand itself. Because the
destination app preserves context of the user’s click and delivers them directly to the content they expected,
with any promised offers and coupons are automatically applied, there is a continuity of experience and trust.
This reduces likelihood for churn and increases the opportunity for ongoing conversions.
Business looking to improve their advertising impact and margins on mobile should make app-focused affiliate
marketing campaigns a core tenet of their strategy because:
4. Innovative Technology
Platforms that support affiliate marketing have made huge strides. Building and rolling out
affiliate programs, making creatives and links available, tracking and attributing conversions
and paying out affiliates based on their performance have all been automated to a
large extent.
Mada Seghete
Co-founder and Head of Marketing
“Influencers can work really well if you find the right influencer. There was
an age in which Instagram influencers did really well. I think it's somewhat
saturated now and it's become a lot more expensive than it used to be.
But I think there's still this opportunity to either pay a lot and work with a
big influencer... but also using these micro-influencers who have a smaller
network but can promote your product.”
ENGAGEMENT COST
Is this influencer getting a high engagement What would the all-in rate be for partnering
rate relative to their follower count? with this influencer? Do they expect a one-
time fee, a CPA revshare agreement or some
combination thereof? Based on previous
RELEVANCY AND AUTHENTICITY
brand work and their engagement metrics,
Does this influencer create content in
what kind of ROI can I anticipate? What
my niche? Will their users perceive our
sort of ROI have I seen in campaigns with
partnership as a natural extension of
audiences similar to theirs?
their previous work and interests? Is this
someone I will want affiliated with my
brand long-term?
SPONSORED CONTENT
Has this influencer worked with brands
DEMOGRAPHICS
before? What were the results? Are there
Would the audience that follows this brands they would not work with again?
influencer buy my product? How does
AUTHENTICITY
this influencer's demographics compare
to my typical audience targets? Does this Do they appear to be authentic in their
PROFESSIONALISM
Is working with this influencer easy? What
does the collaboration process look like?
What do changes or reshoots look like and
what will they commit to contractually?
Engagement
Low High Medium Medium Low High
with Brand
Social
High High-Low Low High Medium High
Influence
There are many different paths to finding value through paid media. But regardless of your media mix, overall
spend or team size, one thing’s clear across the board - context and personalization doesn’t stop at the ad
click. If you can meet a user you’ve brought into the app for the first time with an experience that connects to
the ad they saw, you’re far more likely to create a lasting relationship that results in long-term ROI. Deferred
deep linking can provide that context, making your users more likely to convert by removing friction and
enhancing their experience.
Here are some fantastic examples of deferred deep linking from paid ads straight into the app, bolstering
engagement:
Here’s an overview of how mobile advertising on iOS will be affected without IDFAS:
Personalization
User-level data like the IDFA and GAID allow advertisers and ad networks to understand which users to
show certain ads to. Because this data is unique to each device, this data can also be used to serve highly
personalized ads based on user characteristics and activities. For example, certain user segments could be
targeted to show ads to download the Dominos app because they’re part of an audience that has indicated
they enjoy pizza. Without granular-level data, though, this type of personalization becomes impossible unless
users opt in to ad tracking.
Retargeting
As mentioned above, advertisers and ad networks traditionally used the IDFA and GAID to understand which
users to show ads to. This is useful in retargeting and re-engagement campaigns to win back users at risk of
lapsing or who have already lapsed. However, if users do not opt in to ad tracking, it will be impossible for your
ad networks to find the right users to show retargeting ads to, decreasing the effectiveness of your campaigns
and increasing the potential for wasted ad spend, ultimately making it more difficult to reach your business
goals.
Although advertisers could still technically retarget using an identifier like an email address or phone number,
many apps simply don’t have that kind of user information. The implications of lack of retargeting functionality
are wasted time and spend acquiring users who end up churning quickly.
Frequency Capping
Advertisers use frequency capping to limit the number of times a user is shown a certain ad within a time
frame. Advertisers can ask ad networks to set parameters for the frequency and time period for which devices
with certain IDFAs would see an ad, such as capping views to 5 times within 48 hours. This will be much harder
to do without IDFAs, meaning users will be more likely to be inundated with ads irrelevant to them.
Monetary benefits – Remind users that by opting in, they’re keeping your app free for them to use. “Opting in
keeps this ad free for you to use.”
Personalization – Explain how opting in gets rid of content users don’t care about. “Opt in to get rid of ads not
relevant to you.” “Opt in to only see ads relevant to you.”
Addressing privacy concerns – Include why and how users’ data is used, and ensure them that their data is in
safe hands. “We use your data to serve you more relevant ads and to help keep this app free. We never rent or
sell your data.”
Urgency + FOMO-Inducing Language – Emphasize the importance and timeliness of opting in now rather than
waiting. “Opt in now to stop seeing irrelevant ads.” “Allow tracking now to ensure you never see irrelevant ads.”
“Allow tracking so you don’t see irrelevant ads later.”
Keep in mind that you cannot provide any incentive for granting permission to ad tracking or prevent access
to any app functionality for users to opt out, nor can you show an image of Apple’s ATT modal in your own
prompt. You can reference Apple’s guidelines here for more detailed information.
Note that you cannot ask users to opt in via your own permission prompt — users must opt in via Apple’s ATT
framework only, so don’t use “Allow” on your call to action button or any other word that might lead users to
think they’re granting permission.
In this example, Domino’s UK presents a modal to users that gives additional context to the subsequent
Apple prompt. In their contextual modal, Domino’s explains the value of personalized ads, giving users more
background information before they see Apple’s prompt. Note how they use ‘continue’ in the call to action
button to bring users to the next screen instead of 'allow' to ensure they do not violate Apple's policies.
Macy’s explains to users how their data is used — to be able to suggest products they’ll love. By tying value
and a tangible benefit back to data sharing, Macy’s focuses on providing users the best shopping experience
and makes their ask sound less daunting.
We recommend placing both your context-providing modal and the Apple ATT modal where users are most
primed to give consent. This could be after moments after achievement, such as completing a game, after
they spend a certain amount of time in the app, or after onboarding. Don’t show the modal when users are in
the middle of completing a task, such as playing a game or filling in a form. Interrupting users in high-stakes
moments is more likely to lead to frustration and drop off than opt-in. Continually test and iterate at which
points in your users’ journey are most conducive to higher opt-in rates.
• Paid ads can broaden your reach and increase conversion rates with your target audience.
• Effective channel mixes for paid media are more diverse than ever, including web inventory (both
desktop and mobile), in-app ads, and cross-platform ads on TV/OTT (over-the-top) channels, and voice
search.
» Intent-based advertising:
Ads based on someone’s stated — not assumed — interest in something. Search ads are
considered intent-based advertising.
» Trust-based advertising:
Ads based on assumed interest due to trust in others, such as an influencer or affiliate. While
this falls under paid advertising, it has a very different dynamic.
• Affiliate marketing is low-risk, broadens your audience, and is easier than ever with today’s technology.
Using your app for affiliate marketing can increase conversions and engagement, give publishers greater
payout, and enhance the user experience.
• Influencer marketing can be used to reach a broader audience similar to your own. Not all influencers
have the same level of reach or engagement – and larger follower count doesn’t necessarily make one
influencer better. Some things to keep in mind when choosing an influencer are:
» Engagement
» Demographics
» Cost
» Sponsored posts
» Professionalism
• What type of paid advertising are you currently running: audience-targeting based,
intent-based, or trust-based? How do your CPIs compare to other companies in your
vertical? What are your optimization goals? If you haven’t yet started running paid ads,
which one would be best to start with for your brand, budget, and quarter-over-quarter
goals?
• Are you driving the users to your app in your affiliate campaigns? How often do links fail,
dragging users to the mobile web instead?
• Are your influencers aligned with your brand’s values? What is important to you when
choosing an influencer? What kind of results do you expect from the influencer and how
do you evaluate short vs. long-term benefit?
Virality
3. Virality
Virality may be the gold standard of mobile growth, but it’s a unique challenge on a platform where attention
spans are minute, choice is rampant, and walled gardens define the user experience. Despite the odds, there
are clear best practices to approach and measure your virality goals.
Give people a unique reason to engage via incentives while appealing to a few select emotions, and your team
can create the conditions for a chain reaction of interest, excitement, and impact.
Josh Elman
Partner @ Greylock,
former VP Product
“Virality fundamentally is the way in which you get your current users who
love your product to pass it on to more people, so that they will also want
to pick up and use your product. It is the best way you can possibly spread
because it's free or can be incentivized, and it depends on your existing users
and their love — it's all about activating them.”
Mada Seghete
Co-founder and Head of Marketing
Emotion
Not only does this give your brand the reputation as one who invests in their users, unsurprisingly, incentive-
based referrals perform better than non-incentivized ones. In a Branch study on incentivized vs. non-
incentivized referrals, the “high converting bucket” made up of incentivized referrals had an average
conversion rate of 70%. In comparison, the “low converting bucket” consisting of non-incentivized referrals had
an average conversion rate of 30%.
In its early days, Dropbox enticed users with free storage space if they invited a friend to use Dropbox. Each
additional user on the platform made the platform itself more protected and got users to depend on the
service, paving the way for both better B2C and B2B monetization and defensibility.
Food delivery apps Seamless and Drizly give both the referrer and the referee $5 off when the referee places
their first order. It’s a tangible incentive, but since the average order value on both platforms is far above
$5, they’re effectively just waiving service fees on a users’ first orders. Given CPAs for paid advertising in the
delivery space, it’s a clear win from a business perspective that builds greater long-term loyalty and brand
affinity than a generic ad on Facebook might generate.
Well-executed viral campaigns seem simple, but this strategy is fraught with unique obstacles, especially when
it comes to referral programs. Some best practices to follow:
• Make sure your links can share the content inside your app, and that they deferred deep link through
install. Apps with great content have huge virality potential. Taking new users directly to content, rather
than leaving them to figure out how your navigation works, is key to capitalize on your advantage.
Make the share feature easy to find, preview the shared content when it’s sent to a new user, and
deferred deep link through install to ensure users become obsessed with your app, not let down at
the start.
• Share an image in addition to a link. When users send content links to their friends, include a preview
of the content to give the receiver a sneak peek. This makes the new user more likely to click on the link
and download your app.
• If you only reward one party, incentivize the new user. While incentivizing both parties always works
best, excited users will share apps they love with their friends, especially if the nature of your app itself
incentivizes recruiting connections (for example, by benefit from network effect, longer-term inherent
benefit for the referrer, etc.).
Courtesy of Mediakix
Incentives Ego
Emotion
Emotion
People are emotion-driven, and these emotions can be influenced to
get users to share your app, content, or product. Different emotions
drive different actions, however. In general, positive emotions like joy
make people share (the happier the post, the more likely it is to be
shared), while negative emotions (anger, fear) drive more actual clicks
on the content. High-arousal emotions where you’re more excited,
such as anger, have been proven to drive more virality than low-
arousal emotions where you’re more subdued, like sadness. Here’s
how these high-arousal emotions influence virality:
SURPRISE
Showing something unexpected
drives curiosity.
Testing out various copy and creatives that drive different emotions can help hit your growth KPIs. By tweaking
your copy and creative to stir up various emotions in your user base, you can push them towards the action you
want them to take, whether that be to share, click, or comment in order to build your app or product’s virality.
One example: test out high-arousal, negative, “angry” copy like “10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use This App”
against low-arousal, positive copy meant to arouse surprise like “10 Reasons This App is the Best. You Won’t
Believe Number 3.”
K=i*c
where:
i= number of total shares sent by your users
(ex. If you have 1 user who shares to 5 friends, i = 5)
So k in this case = 5 x .2, which is 1. This essentially means that every new user you gain will bring in an
average of 1 more user. Higher k values indicate higher virality, and a value over 1 indicates that your app is
exponentially growing — because for every new user acquired, they are bringing in over 1 more new user to
hopefully become active and engaged. Thus, to achieve exponential growth you want a k value over 1.
The double viral loop indicates that once a new user joins because of a referral, invite, or share from an
existing user or influencer, when the original user is notified, they are likely to re-engage with your app and
share again.
former VP Product
“You've seen somebody else have this amazing experience and you ask
that question: "How did you do that!" A lot of great viral loops use what
I call 'demonstration virality', where somebody else in using a product is
demonstrating to you how that product gets used, is super viral.”
• Virality is measured by the k-factor, which specifically measures how many new users are generated
from one existing user. The formula is k = i*c. Aim for a k value greater than 1 to achieve exponential
growth.
• Providing incentives, and appealing to ego and emotion give you the best shot of tapping into user-
driven viral growth.
• Give your users an incentive to promote and share your app. In a Branch study, incentivized referrals had
an average conversion rate of 70%, while non-incentivized referrals had an average conversion rate
of 30%.
• Referral programs can create virality. Ensure that your referrals deep link and rewards are automatically
applied to improve overall conversion rate.
• Appeal to users’ ego to get them to share. When offering users a way to share your app with others,
highlight a feature that makes them look good, and tweak copy and creatives that play to the ego.
• Positive emotions like joy make people share (the happier the post, the more likely it is to be shared),
while negative emotions (anger, fear) drive more actual clicks on the content. Use these emotions to drive
the user behavior that helps crush your KPIs, such as increasing install rate, in-app actions, or purchase rate.
• Are you using incentives, ego and emotion to entice users to share your app or
content? Which emotions could we stimulate with our content?
• Are your referral programs easy to use? Is the user experience optimized for success?
Does the referral directly take users into the app? Is it personalized?
Activation
4. Activation
Activation is the rate at which new installs become active users. Think of it as the space between a user not
knowing why they’re in your app and becoming a loyal user. Any user can download your app, but their value
to your business is negligible until they identify and align with its value, and perform actions that contribute to
your business’ goals.
Users “activate” when they complete actions in your app engagement funnel that lead to your north star
metric, as shown in the figure below. Some brands have one particular action that defines activation, while
others have a series of actions but assign certain actions more value. Consider how your engagement funnel
KPIs tie into measurable team objectives across the organization, as well as how external partners, including
ad networks, can help you best optimize against them.
• SEO
MasterClass Subscription Rate Subscribers
• Direct
Honey • Sharing & Social Extension Install Rate Extension Users
Here’s an example of a user activation scenario from Yelp. The user finds Yelp through their team’s SEO efforts,
browses until they find a restaurant they like, and attempts to bookmark it. To bookmark, they must step up
their relationship with Yelp and sign up. Signups are likely a metric that Yelp tracks as part of its user activation
efforts.
Personalize
If you can personalize the onboarding process to your users, even in the simplest of ways, you’re starting out
ahead of the game in terms of retention. While much has been written about best practices to personalize the
onboarding process, here are three strategies we recommend in particular:
» Leverage your product analytics tool or team to understand what new user flows are best
correlated with long-term retention, then tailor questions to define which of these flows will be
most compelling for your new user, thereby tailoring their onboarding experience.
» Think holistically about personalization of not only the initial product interaction, but also
how you can tailor marketing touches over the next 3 and 7 days to reinforce onboarding
personalization. For example:
» Having different onboarding flows for different personas (such as a teacher vs student for
education app) will help deliver relevant-content faster and incentivize first-session exploration.
» The experience of app-install can be alienating. As users move from a contextual ask to
download your app to the app store, distractions like reviews, nutrition labels and unrelated
screenshots can interrupt the built-in motivation of the initial campaign. Re-building
identification with the app quickly during onboarding mitigates dropoff from install to
activation. This could include:
◊ Showing the name of the referrer if the user is coming from a referral. Capture deferred
deep link parameters about referring users and create continuity by displaying their
name or user profile picture to remind your new user that a trusted source wants to
introduce them to your app.
Yummly personalizes the user’s onboarding experience by asking for food preferences during onboarding.
“The more personalized you make something and the more you understand
their intent, the more likely you are to actually activate that user.”
Shannon Cook
Director of GTM Mobile Enablement
PicsArt reminds users of the app’s value by reminding users that value is
just a moment away. One quick sign-up and they’ll be able to “start making
awesome pictures!”
Pinterest keeps things simple by showing users how to pick topics and pin something, which is the main feature of the app.
Smule has users complete actions as part of the onboarding process, showing the app’s value
by making sure that the user knows how to get what they need to complete core actions.
In mobile, the user’s inherently short attention span amplifies the need to simplify. Making things easy, even
when motivation might be lower, increases the chances an action is taken.
Activation Threshold
(Fogg behavior model)
High
Motivation
Triggers succeed
Triggers fail
Low
“Aha!” moments are also crucial to your retention rates. The more the user engages in an “Aha!” moments
during their onboarding (in this case, sending a message), the higher chance they will be retained long-term.
• Activation is the rate at which acquired users become active users. Making a user active increases their
lifetime value, engagement, and retention.
• Acquired users become active users when they complete actions in your app that lead to your north star
metric/KPIs.
» Building belonging and identification by highlighting either a trusted voice (in onboarding flows
where the new user was referred, show the referrer’s name during onboarding) or delivering on
the promise of desired content.
» Ease in multiple app features over time — show the most important feature of your app first.
• The “Aha” Moment is when users actively understand the value of your app/product. The more a user
engages with an “Aha” moment, the more likely you are to retain them.
• Is your onboarding flow optimized to fulfill your north star metric? Does your
onboarding provide sufficient value? Is it personalized to fulfill user needs and improve
the user experience?
• What is your “Aha!” moment? How hard is it for users to find it?
Retention
5. Retention
Ethan Smith
CEO
“Retention is probably the most important part of your growth funnel. If you
acquire users and you don't activate them or retain them, then you have to
keep on buying more ads and getting more people coming in. So focusing on
retention is probably the most important thing.”
A good place to start is benchmarking based on the space you’re in. These are general benchmarks from Lenny
Rachitsky (Former Product Lead at Airbnb) and Casey Winters (CPO of Eventbrite):
Equally important is defining what indicates retention for a healthy user. Benchmarking here requires a
conversation on how often you expect different types of users to interact with your product. For example, a
user likely isn’t going to be booking Airbnb’s each day, but they might use Slack everyday:
Notice how products with more frequent use are in the “habit zone?” Building habits with your users is an
effective way to get them coming back for more in the context of your app’s unique value.
*Footnote: We left these categories in to show how hard it is in the B2C space to keep customers around and show how leaky the customer funnel really is.
Archie Abrams
VP Product, Shopify,
“We have a variety of use cases [at Lyft] that people would use rideshare for.
Going to an airport is the most common activation case, but it's not a very
retentive behavior because most people don't fly that often. So it's important
for us to bring folks in on use cases that get very episodic with long gaps
between rides and then move folks to a much more habitual use case, like
commuting to work, when running late, going out to the bar, etc.”
• A cue
• A reward
This often takes the form of push notifications, which if done right, can be a powerful way to create a habit
of continuously engaging with your app/product. Here are some examples of forming habits with cues and
rewards in pushes:
Cue Reward
Fitbit presents a cue to users encouraging them to hit their daily goal, and lets them know when they do. Users
feel a sense of urgency at the cue, then a sense of accomplishment after the reward. By putting your brand and
message in front of your users during a moment of achievement, over time users are likely to associate positive
feelings with your brand.
Netflix sends a push notification announcing a new season of a TV show the user watches.
The reward: being deep linked right into the show’s homepage in the Netflix app.
Dominic Coryell
former Growth at Facebook
“We rely on this gigantic network that we have called Facebook and
Instagram — and the hooks that we have are largely happening because
people are communicating on these platforms. For successful retention, the
process of discovering what features to build that will create better user
habits and help us compete against other messaging apps is important.”
Under Armour encourages customers to practice healthy habits while staying home. To do this, they send
multiple newsletter emails throughout the week such as “The Daily 3” to increase user engagement. Users who
click the CTA are brought into the Under Armour app to read the newsletter.
In the early days of the pandemic, Chipotle ran the #ChipotleLidFlip challenge on TikTok, a hashtag and video
challenge that received over 300M views, and their #GuacDance challenge which received over 1 billion views.
Proof that creating easy, actionable content for your users to engage with and respond to pays off big time!
Mada Seghete
Co-founder and Head of Marketing
“Right now is a crucial time to keep users informed and entertained when you
think about retention. So if you can't offer them your product, you can still
build a relationship with them. So I think this idea of relationship building as
part of retention is really important.”
Ethan Smith
CEO
“When thinking about retention, you want to think about the different states
of the user throughout their lifecycle. First they start as a new user, then we
activate them. So now they are a current user and then ultimately we want to
push them to become a power user. So somebody who's coming back many
times, they've built a habit around the app, they're ordering from DoorDash
every single week. But a lot of the time they do not become that power user.
So they might churn. And when they churn we can potentially resurrect them
or we might lose them forever.”
• Lack of Product Market Fit - Users did not see sufficient value to solve their perceived need or enough
differentiated value compared to your competitors.
• Lack of Activation - Users aren’t activating properly because they’re not finding that “Aha!” Moment.
• Low Usage Frequency - Users activate, but don’t use your product with the expected frequently.
• Cost - Users find potential value in the product, but either don’t convert or display high churn rates
because the product is too expensive.
• Bugs - Users become frustrated because key aspects of your product break or become inaccessible,
disturbing their usage and leading to frustration.
• Acquiring the Wrong Users - If you’re not acquiring the right audience, then you risk attracting low-
value, low-intent users unlikely to stick around.
While churn is typically associated with many factors, diagnosing exactly what categories are most
impacting your app is the first step to remediation. We recommend the following research methods
as a part of your diagnosis:
Email
Email can highlight unique new value propositions to remind and entice churned users back to remind them
about your app. Make sure your winback and re-engagement emails deep link your users into the app for a
seamless experience; you don’t want users to churn again because of a broken link and fragmented experience
that was entirely preventable. Some examples of email campaigns that optimize the user experience to
increase conversions:
Push
Push notifications are a unique tool in the mobile growth playbook to re-engage and retain users, especially
those who have lapsed for a significant period. Push notifications are most effective when personalized based
on user demographic data, behavior, interests, and any other factors that support increased relevance and
value. For example, if a user added items to their cart in your app, failed to complete purchase, and did not
return to your app for a while, you could send them a push personalized to highlight the items they’ve left
behind and encourage them to complete their purchase.
To optimize your CPA, make sure that placements take users with the app directly to advertised products and
content with minimal friction. Buying intent that lands on your app’s homepage, rather than on a relevant
product, will result in CPAs that shutter this channel’s viability before you have a chance to truly build it out.
SEO
The same principles that make intent-based SEO a key tool for app acquisition also serve as a favorable
tactic for lapsed user re-engagement. Understanding the intent and behavior of long-term engaged users can
provide insight into the keywords or phrases that similar lapsed users may search outside your app. Building
content that incorporates them in your SEO strategy is a low-cost way to help users with high-intent but low
usage find their way back into your app.
Source: Branch
This year, make it a priority to dig deeper into which acquisition channels see the most churn, and prioritize
developing a retention strategy for the types of users most often sourced from that specific channel. The top-
performing channels, copy and creative that worked for you pre-COVID may not reflect your best opportunities
today. Shifting user pain points and perception of value can mean that ad spend isn’t working as well as
previously expected, or that SEO efforts could benefit from additional fine-tuning.
• Similar to how you should think about topline growth, think of retention as a tangible outcome that
should inform all stages of the funnel.
• “Good” retention rates vary based on your vertical, monetization strategy, and how often users interact
with your product.
• Engagement and retention go hand in hand - you must proactively engage your users to keep value
alignment with their evolving needs and effectively retain them.
• Building habits with your users is an effective way to increase engagement and retention.
• To form a habit, focus on cue and reward. For apps, this often takes the form of a push notification, a
powerful way to facilitate a habit of continuous engagement with your product.
» Involves an interactive component like Instagram stories, polls, video challenges, and
competitions
• Churned users are large percentages of most brands’ potential user pools — resurrect them to capitalize
on a high-intent audience that already shows brand awareness and improve your retention rate.
• Churn from product market fit, activation issues, cost, and bugs should be remediated first.
» Creating deep linked email campaigns that highlight unique promotions or targeted incentives
and remind users about your app/product
» Deploying push notifications personalized to user behavior that deep link to relevant content in
the app
» Including keywords or phrases in your SEO strategy that incorporate learnings from your most
successful users
• Discover which acquisition channels result in the most churn, then develop a customized retention
strategy for that specific channel.
• How can you identify and build habits among your users to keep them coming back?
• What content creation should you prioritize to entertain, address pain points, or provide
value to your users that drives engagement?
• How can you resurrect churned users? Why have these users churned in the first place? Is
addressing this cause of churn an existential or incremental project?
• What data can your team use to reassess acquisition channels to see if they’re attracting
high-value users?
Measurement
6. Measurement
Aggregate growth without insight into the channels and campaigns that provide incrementality does little
to inform and direct your teams’ efforts. Measurement at every stage of the funnel is critical to both improve
outcomes and increase the budget and resources available to your team. If you can’t measure your efforts
defensibly, it’s difficult to encourage and expand investment.
Key growth metrics to measure and highlight depend on your goals and whether you’re optimizing for B2C
or B2B success, but common metrics include:
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Customer acquisition
• Engagement
• Revenue
• Customer retention or loyalty
• Lead management and down-funnel progression
Measuring Awareness
“Awareness” is a purposefully broad term that describes campaigns focused on making potential customers
more familiar with your business. This breadth makes awareness a difficult KPI to directly measure and
attribute. As marketing leaders push for performance-based outcomes, fewer and fewer companies consider
pure awareness a core KPI unless they can tie it back to business goals.
Despite the difficulty of tying awareness to specific down-funnel conversions, growth teams should continue to
invest in awareness as a best practice. Because awareness can be hard to attribute, we recommend measuring
the efficacy of your awareness efforts through associated metrics around direct traffic, brand searches, and
non-branded searches.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic can provide directional feedback about the effectiveness of an awareness campaign. Because
non-referred users don’t come to your platform through a campaign link or keyword search, we know that
they’re directly typing your website into an address bar. This indicates preexisting brand awareness. Word
of mouth, billboards, or ads that create interest but not short-term intent are all expressions of effective
awareness campaigns that causally impact direct traffic. Therefore, measuring your direct traffic growth over
time is a useful tool to understand how your awareness campaigns contribute to growth.
Branded searches indicate a specific intent to interact from people who already know about and intentionally
seek your product. These users come to your site from the intermediary of an intentional/organic search instead
of a marketing campaign like a referral link. In short, these prospects are already aware of your brand.
Since these people are already aware of your brand and are taking effort to find you, you can use branded
searches over time to measure your awareness campaigns.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, non-branded searches originate from people who searched for a
general term, rather than branded content and found your website. SEO commonly drives non-branded search
traffic by identifying search queries that are related to your brand but don’t directly reference the brand itself
and building content that can turn directional intent into brand interaction and awareness.
While many vendors gloss over this complexity, it defines the mobile experience in our personal day-to-day
brand interactions. Imagine, for example, a typical interaction with a fitness app from a bird’s eye view:
• A user sees a video ad for the app on Facebook but doesn’t click the ad itself.
• The next day, they search for the app and watches a sponsored post from an influencer on Youtube
then click the influencer’s link, but they get distracted by a colleague and forget to install.
• A few hours later, they remember your brand and organically search for the app on the App Store and
finally install.
When we know the full picture, it’s easy to discern the multiple required touchpoints that impact awareness,
intent, and conversion. The complexity here is technological limitation - different, siloed cookies and device
identifiers are the best proxy for this user’s identity at each touchpoint. That means most mobile attribution
providers must rely on short-half life metadata, like a point-in-time IP address, to distribute credit amongst
the campaigns that drove our user to install. The result is attribution that appears to be data-driven, but is
often defined by false positives and false negatives. This “clear” but inherently flawed data often leads well-
intentioned marketers to optimize campaigns and channels with poor incrementality.
Such intricate journeys are now the norm as users jump from various channels, platforms, and devices as they
interact with your brand before finally converting. The challenge for modern brands is to understand these
touchpoints are a connected part of a user’s journey, and to attribute these fragments to one user. To achieve
this, a robust attribution model is a necessity. Simply put, measurement of your efforts starts with accurate
attribution. Understanding which channels work best for you, understanding your ROI, and optimizing your
strategies are simply not possible without a robust attribution system.
As the time between touchpoint and conversion grows, the attribution problem magnifies, leaving companies
that use mobile to drive purchase of “big ticket” (houses, cars, etc.) or seasonal (vacations, seasonal sports)
items especially vulnerable to the impact of flawed data.
Last-Click
Last-click is the most common type of attribution model in mobile. It gives all credit to the last user interaction
before a conversion, disregarding prior touches. Most ad networks reflect their individual impact on a client’s
business through a last-click model, and networks that charge on a CPI or CPA model typically bill on last-click.
Pros: Using this attribution model is straightforward, as it assigns credit to only the last user
interaction for a conversion. Last-click lets you gain visibility into the campaign that was the final
driver in convincing a user to convert.
Cons: Because this attribution model disregards any touchpoints prior to the last click, you don’t get
a full picture of the user journey that led to the conversion. By failing to give credit to touchpoints
before the last click, you miss out on understanding what other touchpoints led to conversion, and
understanding what other touchpoints you can optimize. Using last-click as your single source of
truth potentially could misrepresent your users’ journeys, as other touchpoints are not given credit
they might deserve.
Pros: First-click gives you full insight into the interaction that led users to discover your brand.
Cons: Because all touchpoints after first-click are given no credit, you fail to understand what other
touchpoints that influenced conversion. Using first-click as your single source of truth potentially
could misrepresent your users’ journeys, as other touchpoints are not given credit they might
deserve.
Pros: Eliminating direct interactions lets you determine how users learned about your brand and
what prompted them to interact with you.
Cons: Last non-direct click gives 100% of credit to a single touchpoint, meaning that other
touchpoints could get less credit than they deserve. This could lead to misrepresentation of data,
as well as making decisions based off misrepresented data.
Pros: By spreading credit evenly among touchpoints instead of assigning all credit to one
touchpoint, you can view a full picture of users’ journeys and better optimize every down-funnel
campaign for conversion.
Cons: Because credit is equal among all touchpoints, a touchpoint that influenced conversion more
than others would get less than the credit it deserves. Similarly, a touchpoint that had very little
influence on conversion could get more credit than it deserves. This could lead to an inaccurate view
of the touchpoints in the user journey, and lead to campaign decisions based on misrepresented data.
Time Decay
This model gives all interactions in the user journey credit, but gives more credit to the interactions close to the
actual click/conversion.
Pros: Rather than assigning equal credit to all touchpoints or all credit to one touchpoint, time
decay recognizes that touchpoints in user journeys have different degrees of influence over
conversion. Because it gives touchpoints closer to conversion more influence,
Cons: Because it gives touchpoints closer to conversion more influence, earlier touchpoints might
not get the credit they deserve, potentially misrepresenting the user journey.
Pros: Like time decay, the position-based attribution model recognizes that different touchpoints
have different degrees of influence. By giving first and last touches the most weight, the position-
based attribution model views the moment a user discovers your brand and the last interaction
before conversion as the most influential. This helps you better understand and optimize these
touchpoints while still considering those in between them.
Cons: By giving first and last touches the majority of credit, touchpoints in the middle may not get the
credit they deserve, leading to campaign decisions based on misrepresented data.
Cohort Analysis
Cohort analysis is the study of user groups based on related behaviors over time, rather than the study of
specific metrics. As a marketer or product leader, a cohort would be a subgroup of users grouped by certain
interactions with your properties (e.g. app/website) and campaigns (e.g. email/text), as well as certain
qualifying events, such as the first time a user downloads an app.
• How does my retention of users from different ad networks differ over time? How does this compare to
ARPU from the same set of networks?
• Which sub publishers statistically deliver low ROI? Should I have a conversation with my network
partners about these outliers?
• Are conversion rates higher for users acquired through paid or organic channels? How can insights
around effective copy or creative from organic channels increase the day 7 efficacy of my paid
campaigns?
Fabien-Pierre Nicolas
VP US Marketing
“We measure over the period of 28 days the number of times people are
engaging with our product. Since we are in the news business and it is an ad
driven business, we need people to come pretty often - so at least 1 day out
of 2. So if they come all 14 days, they become a medium heavy user. And this
has a very strong correlation to revenue.”
How does SKAdNetwork work exactly? When a user clicks on an ad that takes them to the App Store, the ad
network can pass basic attribution parameters along with the click. Should the click result in a conversion
(install), the App Store will notify the ad network accordingly. Apple will report the campaign information —
network, publisher, and campaign ID (limited to 100 values for details such as campaign, creative, placement,
etc.) devoid of device-level details via postbacks to the ad network. They’ll also pass the conversion value — a
scale of 0-63 which the advertiser can set to give some estimates to the users’ quality.
Remember that how you implement Conversion Values will depend on what matters most to your business.
How you implement these values for your company may lie somewhere in-between the options we propose.
If your company cannot function without attributing lifetime value to your campaigns, we suggest you work
with your analytics team to work through how to best model this. Feel free to reach out to your Branch
representative to include them in those conversations.
What about if you have an app in which the only action(s) you care about must happen right after install,
such as a login or purchase of a subscription that gates your app? In this case, you could just track one or two
Conversion Values. In this example, where a login/subscription gates all content, we would suggest assigning
each action a conversion value to know if an ad network is driving installs for people with an account already,
or driving net-new subscribers.
1 Login
2 Subscribe
In order to do this, you could set Conversion Value “1” for the Login action and Conversion Value “2” for the
Subscribe action. Existing users would log in, triggering the value “1,” and then never reset the timer after that
(since they have already subscribed in the past). New users would subscribe, triggering the value “2,” which
would reset the timer. Since this is the higher of the two conversion values, when these users then log in after
subscribing (thus triggering a lower Conversion Value), the timer would not reset again. In both scenarios,
the install postback would be delayed by at most 24 hours, giving your ad networks some ability to quickly
optimize campaigns.
Business Goal: Understanding which ad campaigns are driving installs that convert
If your company’s KPIs are defined by the user taking a specific action, like making a purchase or converting to
a paid membership, and you must know if your ad campaign is driving this action, consider doing whatever you
can to delay the install postback timer from reaching zero before the user completes this action.
Doing this is a bit more of an art than a science, but the general idea is to try to think of a customer’s path to
that final action and assign each step along the way an increasing value, trying to max out the 64 available
values if you can.
63 Purchase
60 View Cart
59 Add to Wishlist
-- --
29 View Item
-- --
10 Views In-App Ad
-- --
2 Views Homescreen
It’s impossible to predict the path everyone will take. The basic goal is to create a framework that will hopefully
delay the postback as long as possible until the user completes the “final” action that you care about.
There are a few things to keep in mind if you go this route. First, there are several actions that could be used
early in the process or late in the process, depending on your app. One key example of this is a login. Does
a user have to login to view your content? If so, then login action would get a low conversion value. If they
don’t have to, your initial thinking may be to make it a higher conversion value. However, remember that the
postback timer only resets if a higher conversion value is triggered. So if you put login as conversion value
58, and a user decides to login right when they install the app, they will have to move through the rest of
the conversion process very quickly compared to someone who only logs in when they’re about to purchase
something.
Finally, due to Apple’s privacy threshold mentioned above, you will want to be careful about assigning
conversion values to actions that are too infrequently completed as this may mean a decrease in the total
number of conversion values received.
58 Purchase
32 Add to Cart
20 View Item
5 Login/Sign-up
While you won’t get insight into slower paths to purchase, this will at least give you an idea if certain ad
networks are driving installs that lead to quick conversions. It would also be worth spreading out the values
used in order to make tweaks in the future easier.
One way you can do this is to assign conversion values to revenue buckets:
-- --
Note that this could create more questions than it answers. Does a user’s first-time purchase revenue correlate
with their second purchase revenue, and their third? Does the type of campaign you’re running with one
network lend itself to higher initial purchase revenue but a campaign with another network is more geared
towards users with higher likelihood of continually purchasing? Remember, only one postback per user will ever
be sent, with only one conversion value attached to it, so making decisions based on the one revenue bucket
could be very misleading. Because of this, it is important to work closely with your analytics team to model out
how best to make decisions using this data.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider when tracking events and assigning SKAdNetwork Conversion Values
to them. However, the main factor to consider is what matters most to your business. The answer will no doubt
change as your business grows and evolves, so how you are tracking Conversion Values should always be a
topic for discussion between any relevant teams, from product to marketing to analytics. Create a framework
that enables you to start slow, but continually iterate as you learn more about how your users are interacting
with your SKAdNetwork campaigns. This means setting up your framework in a way that allows you to evolve
your strategy without requiring to make code-level changes and App Store updates every time.
• Measurement of all your efforts down the mobile growth funnel is critical to understanding your ROI and
to better optimize your growth strategy. A robust attribution model is pivotal to connect fragmented
user touchpoints.
• You can measure awareness by looking at direct traffic, branded searches, and non-branded searches
over time.
• Enterprise/B2B marketers face a different set of challenges than B2C marketers including various buyers
with different personas and a long deal cycle.
» Last non-direct click: Gives all credit to the second to last touchpoint
» Time decay: Gives all interactions in the user journey credit, but gives more credit to the
interactions close to the actual click/conversion
» Position-based/U-shaped: Gives the first and last touch the most and equal credit, while
splitting the rest of the credit among touchpoints in between them.
» W-shaped: Gives the first touch, the lead creation, and the opportunity creation the same credit.
Any touches in between these main 3 get 10% of credit attributed amongst all of them.
» Full Path: Also gives credit to the first touch, lead creation, and opportunity creation, but
includes the closing touch where the deal is closed. Credit is evenly split by 22.5% amongst the
4 touchpoints with the remaining 10% split among any remaining touchpoints in between those
main 4.
• Cohort analysis is the study of user groups based on related behaviors over time, rather than studying
specific metrics. You can use cohort analysis to gain a deeper, more granular understanding of your
data and understand patterns and behavior by user group over time.
• Are you measuring your growth efforts through every stage of the funnel?
• Are you using a robust attribution model that connects fragmented user touchpoints?
• Which attribution model would work best for your team? What are its pros and cons
against others?
• How can you use cohort analysis to better understand your growth efforts?
Although there have been many challenges to mobile growth within the last year, it’s increasingly important
to capitalize on the opportunities 2021 presents in order to sustain growth after the pandemic subsides.
As users continue to migrate the majority of their attention and wallet share to mobile, nimble, data-driven
growth teams will continue to increase in visibility and prominence at both “born in the app” and traditional
businesses.
The most valuable step your growth stakeholders can take is to create a cohesive plan for the strategies and
tactics you’ll pursue over the next 12 months. Whether you decide to focus on one or two new strategies or
implement several across the board, these growth tips will increase your app’s user base and better retain
these users throughout the mobile growth funnel. As you go forward in your journey, remember to integrate
growth as a key need and stakeholder in every product and marketing initiative, rather than a separate stage
of the funnel. Building the muscle of cross-channel, cross-platform growth can be challenging for organizations
that have traditionally maintained functional silos, but for businesses that are up to the challenge, the rewards
far outweigh the associated change management cost of strategic and communication realignment.
Ready to transform your mobile growth strategy? We’re here to help you every step of the way — chat with our
sales team to discover how the techniques and strategies mentioned above can help take your app growth to
the next level.
Johanna Lazar, Product Marketing Specialist, Branch Shannon Cook, Director of GTM Mobile Enablement,
Movable Ink
Olinda Pais, Content Marketing Manager, Branch
Archie Abrams, VP Product, Shopify, former VP of Growth
Amanda Grady, Strategy Director, Branch
at Lyft
Kim KooJoe, Design, Branch
Dominic Coryell, former Growth at Facebook
Coby Berman, COO, Radar
Luc Bondar, VP Marketing & Loyalty, United Airlines
Saket Toshniwal, Senior Product Manager (Growth and
Will Crocker Hay, Vice President, Customer and Partner
CRM), Lovoo
Marketing, Braze
Eli Schwartz, Growth Advisor
Tommy Yannopoulos, Director of Sales, Americas, Remerge
Gallant Chen, former VP Digital Marketing, Zendesk
Ethan Smith, CEO, Graphite
Chris Stevens, CMO, Spot Hero
Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, VP US Marketing, SmartNews
Josh Elman, Partner @ Greylock, former VP Product,
Robinhood
©2021 Branch