How to grow your app with Facebook ads: Readdle’s Playbook

Congrats, you’ve built an app! Be it a ‘kill-20-minutes-on-the-subway’ game or a professional application, sooner or later as an app owner or marketer you face the question: How do I get more users?

At Readdle, we’ve got over 80M downloads in our portfolio (mostly organically), but we’ve done great experiments with Facebook ads. I’d like to share what we’ve learnt, so you can possibly grow your app faster.

It all started more than a year ago. The Sunrise calendar app was shutting down, and we decided to help its users find with something new, yet good enough. We launched a few campaigns on Facebook to showcase our Calendars 5 app’s top features. In the end, it DID work and we thought: Oh! We should probably invest more time in learning how we can leverage Facebook ads. (The lightbulb turned on!)

Getting started with Facebook SDK

The first thing you have to do to get the ball rolling is implement a Facebook SDK into your app. In a nutshell, this is a piece of Facebook code which helps you understand if a customer has come from a Facebook ad and tracks his behavior within your app.

The closest analogy is a Facebook pixel or Google analytics code you add to your website. Whenever someone installs your app from a Facebook ad and opens it afterwards, the code fires and tells: ‘Well, this guy’s come from Facebook, for sure.’

The biggest thing about setting up this SDK is defining your key app events (aka user’s actions). 14 of them are predefined by default, like purchase, adding an item to the Cart or achieving a certain level in the game.

Or, you can (and you should) log your own events, that are specific to your app. For example, in one of our freemium apps we logged a sequence of events that make up the purchase process: app installed > app opened > payment page opened > payment started > payment completed. This way we started building funnels and understood where most of the customers churned.

Beyond that, create an event for every single action a user might take in you app: file opened, file closed, camera opened, sent via email, 1Password used — literally anything. You’ll thank yourself later.

Here you can find ideas of what events you should log depending on the category of your app.

If this all sounds too scary for you, poke your developer. You might face a few difficulties, but in the end, this is not ‘launching Roadster to space’ hard.

Double down on creatives

I’m going to tell the most trivial thing now: your creatives is the first thing you should think about before spending thousands of dollars on ads.

At Readdle we tried old-school banners, carousel ads, canvas and videos. Apparently, videos nailed it for mobile apps.

Our best case is a short video showing the app’s top features.

• Use 1:1 instead of 16:9 video to occupy more real estate on user’s screen (1.3x better CTR for us)
• Keep your video under 30–40 seconds
• Text captions improved our CTR by 20%
• Videos with human faces drive better engagement and thus rank your ad higher

You don’t have to make a boring how-to guide — you don’t sell your app. You sell a promise of how much better people will get with your app.

As time goes, people will get used to your creatives and you’ll see a noticeable decrease in CTR and installs. That is why the process of constant creating and testing something new should be never ending.

What’s really important in copy is to show product’s value in one sentence. You’ve got to learn to show it in one catchy phrase. We’ve experimented a lot, probably with 15–20 taglines, before we found the one that worked best. Also make sure yours includes a call-to-action, e.g. Get it now, Install now etc.

Know Your Audience

If you’ve ever done customer surveys, great! You’re better than 90% of advertisers.

If not, there are a few tricks to jumpstart this process. First, check iTunes Connect to get the basics: top countries and devices. This is a big bite!

The next step is to hop to Facebook analytics. Select People tab and double check your app audience’s age, gender, sessions length, job titles, interests etc. This is where you pan for gold.

When you launch your first campaigns and get the initial installs, you’ll be able to segment those users who installed the app not organically, but specifically from your ad and create lookalike audiences from those people.

PRO TIP: Whether you have a generic app like an addictive game or a photo editing app, I strongly advise you to not stick to very specific targeting. Instead, try launching Worldwide campaigns aiming at everyone from 18 to 30 with English as their main language.

Leverage Lookalike audiences

If Lookalikes did not exist, we would have to invent them. Here’s how it works: You give Facebook a few thousand of your best customers, like the best paying or the most loyal, and you tell FB: Hey, find more people like these. And it will!

Important note: The average size of this sample audience should be between 1–50K.

It works like Black Box, and it’s hard to tell by which characteristics Facebook matches these people. But, it gets you what you want: tons of installs. You can create 1%, 2%, 5% and 10% lookalike audiences that differ on how much this new audience is similar to your sample. 1% is the best quality.

PRO TIP: Create lookalikes not only within a specific country, but also spread them across the whole regions (e.g. Europe) for a broader reach. For Readdle, 1% lookalike > Worldwide has always delivered the best results.

Be laser-focused with your placements

This a rule of thumb for running your ads. If you run ads on both Facebook and Instagram in the same ad set, odds are that one of them will perform far worse than the other.

And to be sure, it’s going to drag down your overall performance. Hence, at first, you need separate devices, placement and demographic groups even if it costs you hours creating almost the same ad sets.

Start with separating iPhone and iPad placements, men and women, Instagram and Facebook, age groups, etc.

For instance, our typical ad set looks something like this:

• iPhone
• Facebook feed
• Men
• 18–34

After a while, you get a great understanding of what works for you and what’s not worth wasting your time on. For instance, 80% of people use our PDF Expert app mostly on iPad, hence it made more sense for us to focus on this placement only.

Bidding and optimization

Facebook bidding is a pure auction. Amount of money that you’re ready to pay for your ad to be shown is the key factor to reach many people.

I strongly recommend setting automatic bidding at first — this is when Facebook is trying to find balance among yours and other advertisers’ bids. When you figure out how much an install costs to you, set an appropriate manual bid. Apparently, you’ll get a lot fewer installs, but you’ll never pay more than you can afford.

We’ve always launched new campaigns with automatic bids to get initial impressions, test videos and copy and only then changed them to our comfortable bid.

If you find that automatic bidding fits into your budget, stay away from it — don’t break what works.

As for optimizing goals, our go-to strategy is to pay for impressions and optimize for app installs. As we have mostly paid apps in our portfolio, we get all LTV from the install, and hence, it works for us.

If you have a free app with in-app purchases, optimize for a specific event (like purchase). This way, you’ll get installs not from random people (you make zilch from them), but from those who are most likely to perform a specific action within the app.

Expanding to the world

You’ve probably already launched a few campaigns in the US and figured out this costs you a buck. We’ve tried States first, and it didn’t take us long to understand this is expensive. Hence, we’ve come up with the new strategy for cheaper (in terms of bids) countries. The whole point of it is to group countries into 3 tiers based on their importance.

Tier 1. Canada, Australia, Switzerland, UK, Italy, Germany and France.

Tier 2. Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands and Turkey.

Note: You’ll have to localize your ads into all of the Tier 1 & 2 languages.

Tier 3.

• South America. All except Brazil and Mexico are on the same ad set, Spanish language
• Growing Asian markets (English)
• Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar — all in Arabic)
• Europe (rest of the European countries except Tiers 1 & 2 — all in one set).

Wrapping it all up

Facebook ads are the easiest ways to get started with growing your app, and against all odds, it is still the place where a lot of your potential customers hangout.

Just take your time to figure out your product’s core value and deliver it to people with the right words instead of just bombarding them with cheesy ads.

Good luck!

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