💎 Growth Gems #50 - ATT, Paid UA, Creatives, Growth and Onboarding

Sep 07, 2021

Hi there,

This week I’m sharing gems on attribution, paid UA, data, creatives and onboarding from experts like Moshi Blum, Darius Mora and Michael Berliner.

🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK

💎 Think about the onboarding as a separate product: there is so much value to derive from optimizing the onboarding. You don’t want to just put together a couple of screens while you over-engineer the rest of the product.

by Darius Moravcik (CMO at Reflectly - Journaling app)
at 28:30 in Acquiring Apps as a Growth Strategy

Attribution: probabilistic attribution, privacy thresholds

💎 We haven’t yet felt the full impact of iOS 14.5 because some attribution is still done with probabilistic attribution. But that will change as soon as Apple cracks down on it.

by Moshi Blum (VP Marketing at Beach Bum Games)
at 13:15 in From iOS 14.5 to iOS 15

⛏️ Going Deeper: ironSource and Unity have apparently been crushing it, and Upptic sees that on iOS SDK networks have started to represent a bigger proportion of the profitable spend than FB/Google. A possible reason is that they are still relying on this probabilistic attribution. Is it a shortsighted approach, though?

💎 The more SKAdNetwork campaigns you have (you can have up to 100), the less likely you are to pass the privacy thresholds. AppsFlyer has seen the number of conversions especially decrease (privacy thresholds not met) when there are more than 50. But that’s something the advertiser doesn’t always have control on (e.g. Facebook).

by Roy Yanai (Head of Product at Appsflyer)
at 18:43 in From iOS 14.5 to iOS 15

⛏️ Going Deeper: there were most likely privacy thresholds changes on Apple’s side around May 20th

Paid UA: the new advantage, Custom Product Pages, in-house DSPs

💎 LTV measurement has become the new advantage one advertiser can have above another. The better you are at measuring value, the better you can be at optimizing your campaigns.

by Roy Yanai (Head of Product at Appsflyer)
at 42:00 in From iOS 14.5 to iOS 15

💎 Having Custom Product Pages is a huge acquisition enabler for an app catering to multiple intents. Example: Wix is enabling building a website, sending email campaigns, managing chats, etc. and currently has to pack all of this in one app store listing.

by Elad Bleistein (Head of Mobile Growth at Wix)
at 28:39 in From iOS 14.5 to iOS 15

💎 Transferring iOS apps can be difficult due to use of CloudKit or developers being in the Small Business program (paying only 15%). It has prevented deals from happening. One of the first pre-screening questions is whether or not the apps use iCloud or sign-in with Apple.

by Darius Moravcik (CMO at Reflectly - Journaling app)
at 10:16 in Acquiring Apps as a Growth Strategy

💎 In-house DSPs can’t compete with large managed DSPs on Android, or can’t compete with Google and Facebook’s algorithm and their ability to leverage their data (including competitors’ data) to create lookalikes. However, when moving to contextual buys(e.g. due to ATT), it levels up the playing field which allows in-house bidders like SocialPoint’s to compete.

by Alexandre Noirot-Cosson (Head of Marketing - Live Games at SocialPoint)
at 15:19 in The one about DSPs

💎 Transparency and control are why SocialPoint wanted to build a DSP in-house (besides the bidder itself):

Transparency: you can see which bids you were offered, which ones you successfully purchased, which ones you made an offer on but didn’t win. You also know exactly what you buy and where you buy it: there is no black box like there can be with ad-side DSPs.
Control: you decide what you buy and at which price you buy it. Controlling the algorithm and the decision making means you control the type of users you want to buy and for which purpose in the game.

by Alexandre Noirot-Cosson (Head of Marketing - Live Games at SocialPoint)
at 03:40 in The one about DSPs

⛏️ Going Deeper: SocialPoint hasn’t built the entire DSP in-house. They use a bidder as a service technology (building a bidder in-house is apparently a very difficult thing to do), then they built their algorithm on top of that.

Creatives: android-first testing, leveraging influencers

💎 At Beach Bum Games, creatives are now tested on Android first. If performance is good, then they transfer to iOS and monitor the performance of higher-funnel metrics. All hypercasual games used to test on iOS first, and now they’ve switched.

by Moshi Blum (VP Marketing at Beach Bum Games)
at 23:00 in From iOS 14.5 to iOS 15

💎 Most people pay influencers for the distribution, but often it’s not worth it. What’s interesting with influencers is the creative content that you can run as ads. If you do this enough, you’ll find UGC creatives that really work and often outperform creatives you could create yourself.

by Darius Moravcik (CMO at Reflectly - Journaling app)
at 16:00 in Acquiring Apps as a Growth Strategy

Growth: CAC/LTV ratio, increasing throughput

💎 A lot of times, business health and growth can be at odds with each other because you can trade health for more growth. Looking at the CAC/LTV ratio in combination with Revenue is healthy because it considers both. It also gives you a common reference across the whole business.

by Michael Berliner (Principal Product Manager at MasterClass)
at 09:12 in Growth Optimization: Metrics & Frameworks

💎 The throughput funnel for a team is a function of velocity, success rate and average impact.

Velocity: how many feature experiences are you putting out per engineer per week? Example at Airbnb: 1 test/engineer per week.
Success rate: for 100 experiments, how many are a statistically significant winner that you’re going to roll out? A good benchmark is a 20-30% success rate which means you should expect 70-80% of your test to be flat or negative.
Average Impact: if you have a 30% success rate, what’s the average impact over these? A more established company like Facebook might have a +1% average impact that drives a lot of revenue. More earlier stage companies should have a much higher average impact.

by Michael Berliner (Principal Product Manager at MasterClass)
at 20:07 in Growth Optimization: Metrics & Frameworks

⛏️ Going Deeper: Michael also shared insights on how to increase testing velocity through team structure changes and how working with a pod structure can be the most impactful change so growth-related work doesn’t end up in other teams’ backlogs.

Onboarding: how to approach it

💎 There are two main schools of thought for onboarding:

Make it very brief and simple, then ask people to subscribe
Make it longer while making it interactive and valuable

by Darius Moravcik (CMO at Reflectly - Journaling app)
at 20:40 in Acquiring Apps as a Growth Strategy

⛏️ Going Deeper: if you’re testing option 2, Fastic and Noom are doing very interesting things. Also check out Darius Contractor’s Psych’d Framework.

by Darius Moravcik (CMO at Reflectly - Journaling app)
at 28:30 in Acquiring Apps as a Growth Strategy

And before I leave, a friendly advice for UA managers following the IDFA loss:

Now you MUST be friend with the product team - Matej Lancaric

See you next time. Stay savvy!

⛏️ Sylvain

Growth Gems