How We Scaled Facebook Ads & Lowered Customer Acquisition Costs for Himalaya

About the Client

Meet Himalaya, a great team that offers short actionable audio courses from Elon Musk, Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, Bryan Cranston, Seth Godin, and more, straight to your ears via their mobile app or web platform.

Himalaya wanted to scale their user acquisition and expand by advertising both their mobile app and their web platform across the US, LATAM, and Chinese-speaking people outside of mainland China. We were aiming to reach users in 3 main languages, English, Spanish, and Chinese (traditional and simplified).

When Sandra Wu, Director of Performance Marketing at Himalaya reached out to us, we quickly identified massive opportunities for growth. Usually, clients ask us to help them when they feel they reached some ceiling or want to challenge their existing setup.

Admiral Media excels in bringing apps onto the world stage due to our in-depth knowledge in international performance marketing. As well, with big-scale apps, the growth that we can achieve typically means an additional million users or revenue for the business. Here’s what we did and how we helped Himalaya to scale its business to a new level.

Product is king, marketing is the queen

No matter what stage your company is at, as long as you have a great product, we can take care of the rest. We believe the key to success is having a great product, a good technical setup, and effective creative testing. Once we help you establish all three, you’ll be poised to succeed.

With the above in mind, we proceeded to build a great foundation for Himalaya. We analyzed and improved the growth stack by starting and optimizing Google, Facebook, and Snapchat ads. Afterward, we built a well-oiled machine for creative testing.

Our team achieved success by addressing each of the following opportunities:

1. Analyze marketing tech stack: find missing links, improve event tracking, analyze the correlation between certain funnel events, and define proxy events for optimization.

2. Find the best performing creatives by A/B testing new concepts and creating variations of best-performing concepts.

3. Find the best-performing channel by rapid campaign testing that allowed us to figure out the best OS, country, language…pretty complex ha?

4. Find the best-performing audience for each channel, country & language by testing Broad, Lookalike, and interest targeting.

5. Scaling while maintaining good results by doing some of our secret magic tricks.

Following those 5 phases, we started with signup optimization and moved down the funnel to trial optimization once we got enough learnings and enough data within the account. Of course, we had to apply multiple levels of proxy event optimized campaigns to figure how many users drop out of the funnel and build a minimum daily event count for our campaigns.

However, it wasn’t that easy, soon enough after the launch, we figured there is a lot to improve on the creative side — we identified what works and what doesn’t and produced loads of iterations of our best performers. We also tried completely new directions using our in-house motion graphics production at Admiral Media. Ultimately we found our best practices and were able to gain traction which leads to those results:

• +875% Increase in the number of installs
• +676% Increase in the number of users acquired
• -79% Decrease in the CAC

“They always know the current best practices and were able to stay ahead of the curve.” – Sandra Wu, Director of Growth, Himalaya