Performance Marketing Tech Stack

Here’s what we’ve learned from our tech stack and how it can help your MaaS app gain traction

Imagine you have a great mobility app, but only a fraction of your target audience is aware that it actually exists. Digital marketing can help to spread the word to your target audience and generate active users for long-term, profitable customer relationships.

To reach your audience, you’ll need to promote the app on channels that they use. And to find these, you’ll need the right tools, or, “tech stack.”

Having a solid tech stack makes it easier to measure the success of your campaigns and to optimize the campaigns in regards to key performance indicators. For example, with the right tools you can quickly see your ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend). This useful metric is calculated by dividing the generated revenue of acquired users how much it cost to acquire them.

Due to the sheer amount of potential channels, measuring your campaign’s performance and steering the campaigns can quickly become overwhelming. And so, choosing the right tools for your business is essential to running efficient marketing campaigns.

So where do you start? And how do you structure your stack? Here we’ll walk you through a case study with one of our clients to show you exactly how we used the following tools and the effect they had on the success of our campaign:

• Digital marketing channels
• Attribution tools
• Engagement tools
• Analytical tools

So which mobility app are we talking about?

SSB BestPreis is a multi-modal app in Stuttgart, enhancing regular public transport search, book, and pay functions with other modes of mobility like carsharing or bikesharing. The app’s biggest is in its pricing mechanism that automatically calculates the best ticket option for public transport. All you have to do is to book single tickets and as soon as the cumulated price of the tickets reaches the price of a daily ticket, you only get charged for the day ticket. With multiple daily tickets you would eventually reach a weekly ticket, and so on. It’s basically like the Oyster Card in London, but digital via app.

Defining the target audience of BestPreis

SSB BestPreis targets people who occasionally use public transport in Stuttgart but don’t own a monthly ticket. This audience is thus more likely to ride irregularly and prefers to have the freedom to decide how they spend their money and get around.

Digital marketing channels

How to reach potential customers and convert them into paying users

SSB first approached us several months ago with the job to set up a digital campaign to generate new users from the defined target group. With a runtime of nine months, they wanted to prominently advertise the BestPreis app on all relevant digital channels in the metropolitan area of Stuttgart.

Their most important goal was to drive installations which would then convert into long-term paying users. In order to get maximum coverage in the Stuttgart area, we used Facebook, Instagram, Google App Campaigns, and Apple Search Ads. Those tools ensure the highest reach, since they have the biggest user base in Germany.

We structured the campaign based on these requirements, while tailoring and managing it based on the relevant channels, expenses, and target values. In order to track and evaluate the campaign, we set up a dashboard displaying all significant KPIs including impressions, clicks, installs, ad spendings, and Cost-per-Install (CPI).

On top of that, we tracked subsequent in-app events like registrations, adding of a payment profile and transactions/bookings to keep a holistic overview of paid installs vs. the actual usage of the app.

For analysis and optimization, it’s important to build so-called cohorts in order to see how specific users interact with the app after they have installed. Imagine that you start testing another audience on Facebook in the course of the campaign. Here, you need to split these users from the ones that you have acquired beforehand, since they may interact differently with your app than the audience before (the cohort here would be all paid installs on Facebook that happened in the timeframe of the test). If you were to analyze those users together, you would get the wrong picture of how the new audience performed.

Coming up with the right creatives is key

When crafting creatives for Facebook or Instagram campaigns, you won’t be able to get around running a competitor analysis to determine your unique selling proposition.

We combined our chosen USP with a design concept based on SSB’s brand identity. In the end, we handed over 20 variants to our design team who then helped create over 200 ad variants, mixes of different attributes like headers, call to actions, and images.

Our competitor analysis was essential to help the BestPreis stand out from other available public transport apps in Stuttgart. With a total of four public transport apps in the city, competition is fierce. So we had to help it stand out by showing what makes BestPreis unique, using snappy claims like “hop in, pay later,” or “not for free, but always the best price.”

Tools

Here is a quick overview of tools you’ll need to properly track the right metrics for your campaign. All tools have been selected based on the GDPR policy and are fully GDPR compliant. Thus, all data is being stored in the EU and can be deleted at any time. Furthermore, there is a marketing opt-in/ opt-out toggle for users and all tools are taken into account in our privacy policy.

Attribution tools

Adjust is a tool that helps you learn more about user behavior in your app (it allows mobile app tracking via SDK integration). With adjust you can see how users find the app and how they interact with it. This was especially valuable for this campaign, because we could track which users were led to the app organically or coming from one of our ads. We then could see who converted into a paying user (by setting up a payment profile at moovel).

Engagement tools

In order to interact with users beyond setup, we use tools like Localytics and Talon.one. Localytics is used to create in-app messages, overlays, and push messages to directly contact users. When a user has the app installed on their phone, gives consent for marketing content, and has push notifications activated, you can send out reminders or small advertisement texts to engage them, or, even better, give them voucher codes as incentive to keep using the app.

Speaking of vouchers, Talon.one is an essential tool that we use to create them. Often times, a campaign is only successful when you incentivize the user to download the app. With the Talon.one integration, you can do exactly that. After getting the voucher code, the user simply has to install the app, set up a moovel account, and paste in the code. Since users can use these vouchers to book free rides, they will automatically be incentivized to start using the app. In this regard, vouchers are not only an incentive to install the app, but also a powerful tool in order to make new users try out your product and become regular users when they have a good experience. And in the end, that’s the ultimate goal for every business.

Analytical tools

Funnel.io, helps you combine different data sources (e.g. Adjust, Facebook, Google) so that you can have one single dashboard that shows you all figures and KPIs (a single source of truth). It serves as an interface in order to later on visualize all channels in a tool like Google Data Studio, for instance. Before using Funnel.io, we had to manually check the data of each source individually to then collect it in a spreadsheet. Funnel.io removes this work and connects with every channel so you can quickly see how effectively your campaigns are running.

We also use Google Data Studio to create dashboards visualizing the performance of a campaign. On the one hand, this makes it easy for our Performance Marketing to track performance quickly and optimize it when needed. On the other hand, this dashboard can also be shared with the customer. Any tool you use should include all important metrics like impressions, clicks, installs, Cost per Install, Costs per Click, registrations, payment profiles, bookings, total revenue, ROAS etc.

Results of the campaign

Now that we’ve given you an overview about the setup setup up for SSB BestPreis’s performance marketing campaign — including — the tech stack involved, it’s time to have a closer look at the campaign performance.

As mentioned above, this campaign ran for nine months. So naturally, we analyzed this time frame in order to determine the success of the marketing campaign.

It’s important to know that the longer the time period, the higher the ROAS. Why? Because ROAS is determined by dividing the revenue by the advertising costs and if a marketing campaign ends. This means that after ad spend stops, so do the costs. If the acquired users still keep on spending money in the app, the ROAS goes up. That said, typically the revenue generated from a cohort (e.g. all paid installs in November) decreases month by month, unless you take some re-engagement actions.

As you can see, we achieved an overall ROAS of 234 percent over nine months and generated €2.34 revenue for every euro that was spent for advertising.

Keeping this in mind, ROAS should always be considered over a longer period and be observed even after the paid campaign has ended (hint: make sure to learn more about the concept of customer lifetime value). To get a clearer picture of our performance for the BestPreis App, we calculated our ROAS up until January 2020, giving the campaign a lifetime ROAS of 384 percent. In other words after the paid campaign has ended, the acquired users kept on making purchases in the app and lifted the ROAS over the course of the next 5 months by 150 percent.

As you can see, having the right tech stack is indispensable to any modern digital marketing efforts. It helps you make the right data-driven decisions on where to spend and on how to get the most out of your media budget. Moreover, a stack will give you the tools to better analyze the performance of the entire campaign. That’s essential to communicating your success within your company and for showing it to your customers. Without the right tools, you risk wasting money and not knowing how and where to optimize your campaigns. That can keep you from achieving better results and, in the end, delighting your clients.

By Florian Teufel, Anton Stopka, Daniel Hurrle, Hendrik Gossmann and John Wegner