April 16, 2018
An important aspect of any type of marketing is understanding when seasonality hits your business and how to capitalize your existing brand awareness during this period. The same holds true when marketing your app. Search is one of the most common networks to advertise apps, but how do you know if you should invest more of your budget towards social app campaigns during these high times?
Let’s go back to brand awareness for a bit. It’s important your app has existing brand awareness. But what does this mean? Your app should be the first to mind when a user needs your service. Your company should be considered an industry leader and a brand people have come to trust.
Below I share the results we saw from one of my client’s during a high seasonality period.
During usual periods, outside of seasonality, two top search platforms (AdWords and Apple Ads) see great performance in terms of less expensive CPCs and install rates. Looking at these metrics, it would be preferable to shift budgets over to search:
However, it becomes important to turn to social campaigns to capitalize during peaks of seasonality and increased traffic. We specifically saw increases in Snapchat during these peak periods. CPCs decreased by 79%, install rates increased 124% and cost per install decreased by 92%:
We also saw improved performance in Facebook, CPCs decreased by 59%, install rates dropped by 17% and cost per install decreased by 55%:
We realized that as seasonality hits, search CPCs saw a rise, while social CPCs decreased. We saw conversion rates increase in search and social networks, however, it became more cost efficient to shift budgets towards social due to the rate at which users were installing. Having brand awareness and using social can help enhance performance throughout these peak periods. However, if you need to generate awareness for a new product or service you can expect higher costs from social and cheaper clicks from search. Since search tends to capture the demand generated from social and other marketing channels.