If you’re a startup wanting to scale your business in the most efficient way or you need a more thorough understanding of how to capitalize on Programmatic Advertising, we interviewed Cuneyt Unar, VP of Marketing at Celer Network, to share his best tips.
Cuneyt Unar is a user acquisition expert with experience running campaigns for the social casino game category. You're about to discover a trick for running Google UAC keyword campaigns, how to optimize Facebook ads and what metrics should a UA lead focus on
What are your best tips for user acquisition in particular with programmatic advertising?
With programmatic advertising taking care of all your targeting, UA managers need to be focused on creative optimization.
My number 1 tip for creative optimization is do not make assumptions. This is not specific to any space, any format, or any channels.
The second tip is that every channel and every platform have different strengths and weaknesses. A good example is Google UAC campaigns can be very troublesome to really identify the traffic source since Google provides very limited visibility.
However, what we found most performing really well and bringing in the highest ROI is the keyword campaigns within Google UAC. Google is doing a fantastic job of serving these ads in Google Play and we have seen that these campaigns are bringing in the highest ROI out of every other channel that Google UAC serves us.
With Facebook, we want to make sure that we feed the ad serving algorithm with as many data points as possible. Personally, what I see work successfully on Facebook is the ability to target highly relevant users through the look-alike campaigns.
Not only does it offer a wide variety of audiences to mobile marketers, it also offers a unique technology in the mobile performance marketing space - Facebook ID matching.
Facebook’s ID matching allows mobile marketers to identify users who may have churned at some stage even if that user has changed devices. The technology recognizes that user and allows marketers the ability to highly target re-marketing campaigns.
What kind of creatives have you seen perform well?
Specifically on Facebook, we are seeing an increasing success, especially in the mobile Esport genre, using short video formats that are highly volatile, highly engaging, and in the form of TikTok style videos.
I’m not sure if these videos can be scaled up to masses, but our early findings show us an increase in click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI.
Also, I think that in terms of creatives, gifs and HTML5s are the second most successful formats on Facebook. I believe we have not saturated this opportunity yet and there’s still a lot more to grasp.
When should founders look to hire a UA professional?
I’ve been in the mobile performance marketing space a little over 10 years now and worked at companies like Google, Product Madness and most recently, Celer X.
I think it’s tricky, but it goes back to how founders define user acquisition.
It’s not only about paid and it’s not only about organics. It’s all the channels that can really drive traffic to your products and services.
With this definition in mind, I do think that the founders should start thinking about how they define an end user - one that is the ideal target for their apps or mobile games.
When you think about the Google Play Console and App Store Connect as being the end product that can help marketers and founders publish and market their apps to their users, I think it’s best for the founders to really think about how they can leverage these tools in the best way possible.
That’s why I want to simply say hire a UA professional as soon as possible if founders don’t have the advanced knowledge of how to utilize the Google Play Console and App Store Connect.
UA leads should have a great understanding of the intricacies of organic user acquisition as well as paid user acquisition so that they can jump on board and start helping the founders as soon as possible. Moreover, they can maximize the efficacy of the organic growth before spending their valuable US dollars on paid acquisition.
What are some of the advanced knowledge that UA managers have that founders should know?
Well, attribution is number one because that's where it all begins!
It is really complicated to define and explain attribution to a founder in those early conversations because it’s the thing that builds the infrastructure of your UA efforts. Attribution is not only important for new user acquisition but it's also important for re-marketing and retargeting campaigns that all companies will need at some stage in their growth cycle.
Apart from attribution, it's really important to understand the importance of the creative piece in any UA campaign both for organic and paid. I think there are some easy wins and low-hanging fruits if founders and early stage companies can find a way to invest as early as possible in the creative side of things.
Lastly, I want to mention fraud which is becoming a bigger concern in the performance marketing space especially in mobile. Although there are different ways of defining fraud, I do think it's really important for founders to be aware of what's happening in the mobile performance marketing space and learn about how to protect their brands and products before fully investing in UA.
How should UA Leads interact with the finance team?
First of all, cross-functional collaboration requires a different skillset. From a UA perspective, I find it really fun to engage with the finance counterparts because even though I know we have different KPIs, but we are still looking at the same picture just from different angles.
Speaking of Pollen VC, I think every UA lead should be aware that the money that all the installs are generating are not yet cash available in the bank account. The app ecosystem just doesn’t work like that.
I like to understand the KPIs that the finance team is being measured with and how they look into the financial sustainability and the profitability of the business. This gives me a clearer understanding of the big picture of the business so that I can tie it in with my UA efforts, media planning and budget planning.
The second thing I want to touch base on is financial planning. I think clean documentation of the financial planning is really important regardless of the stage of the company and especially in those early-stage startups.
I find it really helpful to have financial planning documentation that we can collaborate upon and share with senior stakeholders and the management. It also helps us be on the same page in terms of how to approach our UA efforts for the upcoming weeks and months.
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