What you’ll learn:
How to choose the right retargeting partner
Watch the full video here!
Marianne
Today, we’re going to talk about retargeting and we’re going to try to give you some tips to unlock your app’s potential. I’m Marianne Clerc. I’m working at Adikteev as Performance Director. Just to give you some words about Adikteev— we’re an app retargeting platform and we help our clients make the most of their app and grow their revenue on it. What about you, Hanna? Can you introduce yourself?
Hanna
I’m Hanna. I work at Playtika. I’ve been doing online marketing for a few years now. About a year and a half ago, I joined Playtika and their Retargeting Team.
Ben
I’m Benjamin Burgess. I’m with Life360. We are a location-sharing global app with 50 million users. I’ve been with Life360 for about 18 months. Prior to that, I was with AccuWeather. And so, retargeting is pretty important to our user base.
Marianne
Can you give us some context on retargeting? What is retargeting for you, guys? What are the main challenges that you are facing?
Hanna
Of course. First of all, for those who don’t know, Playtika is one of the biggest game developers in the industry. We have a very diverse portfolio of games. We do social casino and casual… just a lot of different types of games.
At Playtika we look at marketing in a holistic way. While we understand that UA is very important and we need to attract new users, it’s also crucial to invest in retargeting and make sure that we bring back those users that may have left our games and ideally even prevent them from churning. It’s super important for us to invest in retargeting, user engagement and user experience, and improve retention and revenue.
One of the biggest challenges that we’re facing, and I think everyone will agree on this, is the whole issue with privacy— that we don’t know where this is going in the future. Especially in retargeting, we really want to bring back those high-quality users. And in a world where we have less and less data to do that, it’s becoming very challenging.
Ben
For Life360, we have two main points that we focus on. We have a very cumbersome onboarding process and so we leave a lot of installs that don’t convert to registration. Basically, we pretty much ask for your first-born child to be on board with us. So there’s a lot left on the table. With the numbers that we’re dealing with, that’s significant. So, that’s our first one, the install to registration.
And then the second one, we’re a free app, that’s why the majority of our users use our free location services. We have a premium service that pays the bills for us and identifying those power users who are likely to ‘trial’ and then become subscribers is key for us. It’s basically those two: the onboarding stuff with the uninstalls to registration, and then the getting to free trial.
Marianne
Yeah, exactly. And as they mentioned, as the first step to any retargeting campaign, it’s key to understand your audience and define it well. So maybe you can help us understand how you define your audience well. What works well for you?
Ben
The easy answer is to focus on your power users. I’ve worked in departments where I’m the entire user engagement, lifecycle marketing, growth, organic, paid… And I’ve worked with teams where I have a life cycle marketing team, I have a growth team. So I understand both sides where you wear many hats and where you only have one hat. But still, it’s important that you understand your user base. Understand what those in-app actions are that lead to those key events. For example, I have to work with my lifecycle marketing team and product team, to understand user behavior and the key indicators that show me, like, if this user completes these three actions they’re likely to become a power user or likely to take advantage of paid features. Again, we have millions of users that just look at location sharing and they’re not in that same boat for us.
The simple answer for me to finding the right audience is, really talking with your teams, working with the product team and lifecycle marketing team and understanding. It’s really easy to work in silos. I deal with that— we’re a remote-first company. Outside of just dealing with the people I deal with day to day, it’s really easy to not be in conversations with product and lifecycle marketing.
Hanna
For us, I think the key is segmentation. First of all, we always separate the audience into paying and non-paying users; we understand the behaviour is completely different and it doesn’t make sense to retarget them the same way. We’re very lucky that we have our own BI tool that allows us to segment our users in any way we want basically. We have a million parameters that we can use.
Aside from segmenting the audiences, it also allows us to get insights into the user journey, behaviour, and user experience. And then we can make decisions based on that.
That said, I think it’s important to remember that I don’t think there is such a thing as the right audience— no one has the magic recipe for what works best. I wish we did! It would make things a lot easier. The key is to keep testing things, checking new audiences, always be very, very, very dynamic, and adapt to the changes that we’re seeing. I think that’s very important.
And for us, something that we’ve been seeing that works very well is to do treatment campaigns. For those that don’t know what that is, we basically use a gift inside the game to attract the users to make them come back. For that, it’s very important to find not only the right audience but also the right gift that would make them come back and continue to play the game. So, we have to find that sweet spot in between.
Aside from finding the right audience, gift, and everything, it’s key to find the right creative— because a good audience without a good creative does nothing.
Marianne
Could you share with us what works well for Playtika?
Hanna
We have a very, very big focus on creatives at Playtika. We are always testing new concepts, making iterations, and trying to find the next top-performing creative for us. We look at it as an ongoing process all the time. We’re never satisfied. We’re never happy. We always try to make it better and improve the results.
We also try to keep a very diverse portfolio. It’s important for us to keep doing banners, videos, and cinematography. Lately, we have started experimenting with playable that you guys [at Adikteev] are helping us with. I’m very excited about that, I think there’s a lot of potential.
I think it’s also key to run tests and analyses. Adikteev also helps with that, with creative benchmarks, to help us understand where we stand in terms of our competitors in the industry. I think the key is testing all the time.
In retargeting, what we see works really well though is appealing directly to the user. We want to make them feel we’re talking to them personally. Messages like “We miss you, come back” or “We haven’t even seen you in a while.”
Marianne
You can even test the call-to-action.
Hanna
Yeah, exactly. We have to find the right call-to-action. And also, showing new features in the game is something that we’ve seen works really well for us.
Marianne
Cool. And you, Ben?
Ben
I’ll totally echo what she’s saying regarding testing, iterating on those tests, and basically diving into your data to understand it. I would also add to it: match your voice with your lifecycle marketing team. Know what your lifecycle marketing team is sending out there, what they got going out both in-app and also in email. Make sure you’re basically sending the same messages or you’re matching that message so it doesn’t feel like a completely different experience. It’s basic landing page 101, right? I mean, you want to make sure that you match the message you’re sending out.
Marianne
Yeah, exactly. I agree. So then, when you launch a campaign, you must be prepared, obviously. What do you think would be great to do before launching a retargeting campaign? During? Afterwards? What kind of analysis will help you to better understand the retargeting program?
Hanna
The first thing that we do before we start a retargeting campaign is an uplift test. We want to understand properly what impact our campaigns are doing and what’s the added value of running a retargeting activity. This is something that we also do before and it helps us understand what audiences we should be targeting in terms of recency, for example.
We also do it during the campaign, and during the activity. We’re always checking ourselves. We’re always trying to make things better. And we understand that the industry is very dynamic and it keeps changing, so we have to be on top of things and we have to keep making sure that our campaigns have an added value in that uplift that we were seeing in the beginning.
Aside from that, obviously, checking performance, KPIs, campaign reporting…
Marianne
And benchmarks maybe?
Hanna
Yes, exactly… check trends on a daily basis. We also started doing a lot of audience auditing with you guys, actually. We receive an audience overlap report and that allows us to make decisions in terms of audiences. Adikteev suggests a lot of new ways to set up campaigns to organize it so we can improve the campaigns. And we have been seeing great results with that. So, I think it’s very important to test and see where we stand in terms of audiences, especially in retargeting where we see that the audiences are much smaller than in UA. And creative analysis, of course— all the time.
Ben
I totally agree. The only thing I would add to that is I’m a big advocate of doing your homework, but just also in the user journey. A lot of us, when we come into a company, we download the app, onboard with the app, and then engage with the app from time to time, some more than others. I would advocate logging out, going back into the process, seeing what the choke points are, and familiarising yourself with that onboarding process.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people in the marketing department that they don’t remember what we ask for. They don’t remember what the pain points might be. And if you’re not familiar with that, you’re not going to resolve any issues. You’re not going to understand what those users are doing. I think I had this conversation last week at an offsite, and I was like “We ask for the phone number, the email, and the password, the Bluetooth, the health tracker…” They’re like, “We ask for the health tracker?” Like, “Yeah we ask for everything!” And it’s a surprise; they just don’t know.
So, doing that homework, knowing your choke points, understanding the onboarding process inside out, and reviewing it. Going back to it. Because the product team will change stuff and they’re not always sending a message out to marketing saying “Hey, we’ve updated this.” You need to know, inside and out, and be familiar with it. I can’t emphasize that enough.
Marianne
Thanks for sharing. Could you share with us what are the main components of a successful retargeting campaign?
Ben
While I’ve done retargeting in the past, my simple answer is converted users, right? But I would say, right now we’re onboarding and I have my own list of things but I would lean on my partner to help me analyze that data. But I’ll let Hanna go.
Hanna
It’s similar to what Ben was saying: it’s very important to work closely with the game studio and understand what the pain points are so we can really support them and make an impact with the activity.
Then also, as what we were talking about before, it’s super important to find the right audiences, and the right creatives, and then follow up on performance all the time, not only in terms of KPI but also in terms of audience audits, campaign reporting and creative analysis. It’s always trying to test, test, test and check yourselves. As I was saying, the key for us to be agile, and dynamic, and understand that we need to make decisions based on data-driven insights— we’re always looking into that. That’s why it’s important for us to find good retargeting partners to work with.
Marianne
And so what is the most important thing in choosing a retargeting partner?
Hanna
I would say the most important thing is results. We want to work with someone who delivers and whom we see good performance. But aside from that, two huge pillars for us are trust and communication. First, we want an open line of communication with our partner. We want to know that there’s transparency. Second, we want to know that we can trust them. We manage a lot of titles, activities, and channels. We want to be able to step back where we can trust your judgment, and know when you can come up with suggestions when something is not done in the best way. I think that’s why we enjoy working with Adikteev so much because we see all of that and we see that there’s this trust and great line of communication. That allows us to develop a relationship that goes beyond just being partners. We understand that, for us, we have the same goal and we’re working together, not against each other. That allows us to achieve great things, get better results, and just improve our performance all the time together.
Ben
I think this is like this great question, “So now that we’re dating, what do you like so much about us?” For me what it came down to was I did homework. I went and talked to my MMPs. I kinda got a referral from them on top retargeting partners. I reached out to different retargeting partners. I asked the questions.
First, the number one thing for me is customer success: do you have a customer success team? I need someone on my side who’s going to help me get this running, make it successful, and find out what they’re doing there.
Outside of that, I wanted to know what innovation are you doing: is it just status quo? What are you trying to do, what are you building upon, how can we take advantage of that, what can we do at the ground level and get in on that early?
Lastly, I would talk to your network— that’s why you’re at MAU, right? You’re here to talk to people who are like-minded or experiencing the same pain points. Talk to them, find out who they have used in the past, and find out what they liked about it and didn’t like. Ask the questions. For all of you, not just retargeting: your DSPs and there are different services out there. Don’t just talk to the company. Talk to your network about it.