💎 Growth Gems #68 - Retention, Creatives and Data
Hi there,
This week I’m sharing gems on MMPs and measurement, creatives and retention for subscription apps. These insights come from Alex Bauer, Ben Jeger, Raphaël Pudlowski, Andy Carvell and more.
Enjoy!
🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
Data: fingerprinting, iOS 16, Google’s privacy sandbox
If there’s a speaker from only one MMP on stage, I tend to skip the session (although there are always some surprises).
But in the The Evolution of MMPs from Attribution & Measurement to SKAdNetwork & Beyond panel at the last App Growth Summit Berlin, it was 5 MMPs on stage.
Between the upcoming iOS 16 and Google’s privacy sandbox, it was an interesting time for Maor Sadra (CEO at Incrmental) to discuss with Frederik Lanwer (Head of Customer Success at Adjust), Ben Jeger (Managing Director at AppsFlyer), Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch), Levi Schoonover (Global Director of Client Partnerships at Kochava) and Niels Beenen (Strategic Partnerships, EMEA at Singular).
💎 When it comes to measurement, the rate of change has increased. You do not want to be dealing with that on your own.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 1:20:10
💎 On iOS, a lot of the stupid fraud is gone because of the way SKAN is designed. The fraud is just going to change.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 1:22:50
💎 Fingerprinting is something that is going to be a thing of the past relatively soon. You have to be ready for a new reality.
by Niels Beenen (Strategic Partnerships, EMEA at Singular)
at 1:24:20
⛏️ Going Deeper: the iOS 16 release has been mentioned as the moment where this might happen. If it’s any indication, Apple published a session on ATT at WWDC clarifying that fingerprinting is never allowed and calling out specific things (e.g. user’s location or network connection).
💎 Probabilistic attribution is off by default with Kochava. They’ve introduced the notion of privacy profiles so that customers can select what they’re comfortable with tracking. Private Relay could be happening as soon as August.
by Levi Schoonover (Global Director of Client Partnerships at Kochava)
at 1:25:37
💎 For MMPs, the risk of doing something against Apple’s rules (e.g. fingerprinting) is much higher than for a single customer: Apple can use the presence of the SDK as a proxy for violation and boot all customers out of the stores (and has done so before). So MMPs need to balance that risk with providing measurement.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 1:27:40
💎 Google’s privacy sandbox is a lot more sophisticated than ATT. Google looked at what was happening in the ecosystem, they recognized how they were perceived differently than Apple.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 1:31:20
💎 Google is going to deprecate the Google Advertising ID (GAID) but the Google Play install referrer is going to stay intact and that’s a powerful method to attribute.
by Ben Jeger (Managing Director at AppsFlyer)
at 1:32:09
⛏️ Going Deeper: Ben was kind enough to give me more information about how this could work. The referrer is a unique identifier that is added automatically as a parameter at the end of the store listing URL, allowing MMPs to attribute the source of the install on first open.
For Self Reported Networks (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc.), MMPs could use the Google Play referrer they get on first open to “ask” the SRNs if they observed a click with this referrer so they can find a match and attribute the install.
💎 On an aggregated level, the data that will become available with Google’s privacy sandbox is much more granular than on iOS while still preserving privacy (128 bits in Google’s proposal vs. 8 or 9 bits for SKAN).
by Ben Jeger (Managing Director at AppsFlyer)
at 1:33:10
💎 Web2App will continue to exist with Google’s privacy sandbox.
by Ben Jeger (Managing Director at AppsFlyer)
at 1:34:48
⛏️ Going Deeper: in case you missed it, the good news from last week on the iOS side is that SKAdNetwork 4.0 will allow for web to app attribution. Check out Eric Seufert’s article Is SKAdNetwork 4.0 a turning point for mobile advertising: Privacy with Purpose? and the updated SKAdNetwork documentation for more information.
I was looking forward to Google Search placements via Google UAC ads to be attributed, but it seems that Google has not really moved towards embracing SKAN so this remains to be seen.
Another good news of this 4.0 update: the replacement of the timer system by multiple attribution windows.
We might just need to be a little patient (but I hear Apple would like this to go faster than it has before once it’s rolled out).
💎 Google SDK runtime is a pretty interesting concept: it essentially creates a wall between the sdk and what happens on the app to allow different data to flow through in different ways.
by Levi Schoonover (Global Director of Client Partnerships at Kochava)
at 1:35:54
💎 With Google’s privacy sandbox, advertisers will keep getting creative granularity.
by Niels Beenen (Strategic Partnerships, EMEA at Singular)
at 1:36:40
💎 Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is incredibly important and is probably the future of measurement. Tactical, channel-specific metrics might help you optimize ASA or Google UAC campaigns but they are not going to give you what you need to compare those 2 across a level playing field. MMM gives you a new 30-thousand-foot view.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 1:42:05
⛏️ Going Deeper: there are a few other signs of this trend…
Facebook has a MMM partner certification, which will be in parallel to the MMP certification. TikTok and Roku announced something similar.
Alex also later shared that if Apple technically blocks fingerprinting (not just a policy block) on all channels (and not just ad tracking but also including owned media e.g. a brand’s website), then media mix modeling or another kind of matching becomes increasingly more important.
💎 Multi-touch attribution is the promised land that has never arrived and now is never going to. It is not the way moving forward: too complicated and will not be possible technically. Instead, ask yourself what you were looking for in multi-touch which is typically insights into how different things contributed.
by Alex Bauer (Head of Product & Market Strategy at Branch)
at 2:00:10
⛏️ Going Deeper: Ben has a more nuanced view, saying that while pre-install attribution is not very actionable it is much more interesting to understand post-install behavior and what the best user journey/flow should be (e.g. what CRM triggers should be activated) and that there is data to do so.
Creatives: automation, testing
In the last Growth Gems edition, I shared insights on Google Ads from the Reality Games team.
The Google GameCamp webinar had a second presentation UA and Creatives teams making it together by Marcin Smajek (VP of Growth at Reality Games) and Raphaël Pudlowski (Art Director at Reality Games), this time on creatives.
If you deal with a lot of creatives (who doesn’t?) and localizations, you should find these interesting!
💎 You can manage all your localized static ads and video end screens in Figma by managing translations on Google Sheets and using a Figma plugin to automatically insert translations in the ads.
by Raphaël Pudlowski (Art Director at Reality Games)
at 39:30
💎 If you are on a budget to produce creatives, stock videos/graphics/photos are your friends. You don’t have to buy the stock asset to test it for brainstorming: download the preview and edit with the preview until you like the result.
by Raphaël Pudlowski (Art Director at Reality Games)
at 47:02
💎 Testing with only 2 creatives at a time allows you to better understand why one of the variants is working better. Then you iterate. If you put 5 or 6 ads in your test, you might see a winner but you won’t know why.
by Raphaël Pudlowski (Art Director at Reality Games)
at 52:05
💎 How often you change your creatives depends on the country tier and the scale of the campaign(s). Change your creatives more often in tier 1 countries and in campaigns with more budget. Of course, also refresh when you notice creative fatigue.
by Marcin Smajek (VP of Growth at Reality Games)
at 56:09
Retention: focus based on growth stage, onboarding, winback
Purchasely launched their new podcast Subscription League, and the first guest was Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture).
Below my favorite insights from All about Retention with Andy Carvell.
💎 Before you even figure out your monetization model, you really need to have users coming back over the long term. It shows that a portion of your user base is getting value out of the product and is a key measure of product-market fit.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 03:15
💎 Working on retention means different things depending on the growth stage:
Early days (pre product-market fit): focus on having a solid product (good design, gut feel) and set analytics to measure retention. You won’t be able to run A/B tests because you don’t have enough volume, but you can get a qualitative understanding of how people use your product (even with wireframes, in alpha, in beta).
Later on (post product-market fit and at scale): CRM with push notifications, emails, in-app messages can be great boosters on top of the foundation. They typically require large cohorts to play with.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 04:40
⛏️ Going Deeper: this is not limited to just retention. The levers and areas of focus are going to be different based on your growth stage: ideas, frameworks, tests and tactics will vary in relevancy. More insights on this from Andy 👇
💎 From a customer qualification point of view, Phiture considers that 500k Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a good proxy to indicate a good level of product-market fit and a decent level of cohorts to work with. You also want to be acquiring new users at a good rate (tens of thousands of users per month at least) in order to work on early-funnel initiatives (onboarding/activation).
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 07:18
💎 Onboarding and activation are key steps, and it’s where Phiture typically sees the most upside in working. The attention span of a typical user is very low so you have 30-60 seconds to make a good impression and get them to understand the value of the app.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 08:55
💎 The more you show interest in the user early on through questions, the more they get the feeling that the experience is going to be more personalized to them and that they’ll get a higher quality experience.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 12:15
💎 If you want users to create an account, it’s generally good to get them to do it early because that’s when they have the highest intent.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 15:00
💎 The companies that will succeed will be assisted or powered to some extent by machine learning or other forms of predictive analytics to do smarter, fine-grained identification and targeting of specific users to interact differently with them. Example: identifying users that are likely to churn, and knowing how to interact with that user (an offer, new content to interact with, etc.).
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 23:35
💎 When it comes to winning back customers, first ask yourself if you actually need to give an offer to these users. Maybe jumping straight to offering a big discount is not the solution (e.g. the problem is not with the price but rather that they did not find the right content recommendation).
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 25:55
💎 Understanding churn reasons is difficult to do but working on doing so at both the individual and aggregated level is what will help you fix any underlying problems.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 26:40
And before I leave, a quote from a Business of Apps podcast on the skills needed for this industry:
“In this world, you can not do anything if you’re not skilled on the data side” - Gessica Bicego (CMO at Paired)
See you next time. Stay savvy!
⛏️ Sylvain