Bond.ua App Case Study: The First Campaign of a New Product Share: newage. digital solutions Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 22 May 2023 Reading Time 5-Minute Read The client approached New Age Digital Solutions with the need to advertise the newly created Bond.ua app — a tool for buying domestic Ukrainian government bonds, also known as military bonds. The Challenge For many Ukrainians, the opportunity to buy domestic government bonds has become news. The app that’s used for buying the bonds recently received significant media support. The bonds were presented by the media and opinion leaders as a profitable financial instrument, and their purchase as a patriotic act. So, despite the novelty of the product, customers did not need an introduction to it. New Age created the first advertising campaigns for the application, and our goal was to capture the app’s initial audience. The main KPI of the campaigns was the number of app installations. The Solution There can be no detailed targeting in application installation campaigns, either by age, gender or audience. So the main target for us was geographical location. The application was promoted in Kyiv, Odesa, and Dnipro, as well as in Lviv, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zakarpattia, Khmelnytsky and Ternopil regions. The regions were offered to the client given the broader situation in the country – we focused on conditionally safe regions in the spring of 2022. Tools The tracking took place through Firebase, which was installed by the client. In iOS, the conversion was credited only after the user opened the application – that is, it was not about the installations themselves, but about a deeper convention of the first instance of opening. Because of this, we did not see the actual number of installations in the advertising campaign but saw the users who installed the application and opened it. At the same time, there was no such confusion on Android, and we saw information about installations. Earlier we had problems with Firebase tracking when the system claimed that Cyprus had no iOs users at all. Then we were able to find “lost” users after changing the tracking system. Google Ads became the main tool for the app’s promotion. We decided to choose it as the guarantee of a guaranteed result. The client had not yet started, and the product was new, so we decided not to experiment but only to test the most plausible hypotheses. Moreover, Google Ads campaigns are adaptive, which means that we were able to set options for titles, descriptions and creatives, and the system itself, watching users, will collect the most effective combinations of options. We also intended to launch advertising on Facebook, but we had to postpone that idea. Meta does not allow the promotion of applications that are in beta because it is not a fully ready product for promotion to the end user and can damage Meta’s reputation. A mandatory requirement for promotion is to configure the Facebook SDK – a tool that configures an advertising campaign and gets application_id. Together with the client, we agreed on the nuances for the advertising campaign on Facebook and will later share this experience. The Result In total, during the three weeks of the campaign (mid-April to early May), we reached almost 2 million users, of whom more than 8,000 installed and opened the application. The cost of installation throughout the campaign was lower than planned, while the number of installations exceeded expectations twice. If we talk about conversion, most of the traffic on Android was taken by the Lviv region and Kyiv. They accounted for the largest and approximately equal part of the shows and installations. At the same time, the CPA in all cities and regions was approximately the same, differing from each other by 1 cent. On iOS, we saw a similar picture – most of the conveyors fell on Kyiv and Lviv region. But the cost of conversions varied from region to region. The average cost of conversion to iOS for all geographical locations was ten times more than the installations on Android devices. In general, the number of installations increased during the campaign and their cost decreased – this is how it should be when your advertising is set up by professionals. Conclusions and Recommendations As a result of the advertising campaign, we exceeded the metrics for almost all the metrics we had: impressions, clicks, CPC and CPA (Android), and CPC (iOS), although the CPA for iOS was 12.64% higher than planned. We exceeded the main KPI, the number of installations, by 72.24%. In future advertising campaigns, we recommend expanding geotargeting to reach a larger audience. Regional centers, such as Uzhhorod, Lutsk, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk should be singled out. Expanding the audience will provide a larger statistical sample so that we can draw further conclusions based on the data. But, of course, we must take into account the situation in the country and not run advertising in areas and cities that are close to hostilities. In future, we recommend testing Apple Search Ads campaigns to increase iOS performance. This should affect the cost, reach, and conversions of users of this platform. Optimization campaigns should be run for deeper conversion – buying bonds in the application. Before an app can be promoted on Facebook, you need to configure and link the app to Facebook, configure the SDK, and bind application_id. If the application involves monetization, or the sale of anything through the app, internal payments need to be properly configured.Without fulfilling all these recommendations, creating an advertising campaign for the app on Facebook is impossible.