Our prospective clients will sometimes ask us, “Why would I turn to a retargeting DSP when we do all of our media buying in-house?” It’s a good question, and we want to give as thorough an answer as possible. Using a self-serve DSP or running retargeting in-house in theory means superior control over your media buying, and fewer costs in the short term. But it’s hard to match the amount of time, effort, customization and additional insights a dedicated retargeting partner can offer.
The main issue for many of our clients is that bandwidth within their data science and product teams is limited. App publishers have so many other elements to focus on in the daily effort of running and marketing a mobile app that it’s nearly impossible to dedicate the amount of time to retargeting that an advanced retargeting partner can allocate.
Outsourcing some of this work to a retargeting DSP such as Adikteev’s ensures that there is a dedicated team in charge of your re-engagement efforts. As most mobile app publishers understand by now, user re-engagement is vital to the health of your app audience. Working with a dedicated partner ensures that user re-engagement won’t be treated as an afterthought, but as an essential part of your business model.
Not only do most app publishers lack the bandwidth to include retargeting as an essential part of their app marketing efforts, but even those apps with a large data science and product team don’t often have the breadth of experience and data that a retargeting partner can offer.
We’ve been in the business of re-engagement for over 5 years, and in that time we’ve accumulated billions of data points on hundreds of apps in different verticals. While app publishers have undoubtedly accumulated plenty of insights about their own users, as an app re-engagement partner we have tons of data about the universe of app user engagement at large. We understand how users behave overall within specific verticals, not just one single app. We’ve collected information about ideal bid prices, which strategies work the best for which types of apps, how to maintain revenue streams as IDFA collection decreases, etc.
It would take an app publisher tons of time, effort and a large chunk of their budget to arrive at this level of experience and know-how. Relying on experts who already have experience exceeding the goals of app publishers is a more cost-effective solution as detailed insights are already available in a shorter amount of time. This can work either as a complement to existing retargeting efforts within your team, or on its own.
In addition to years of data points and more bandwidth for your team, a dedicated re-engagement partner can offer specific strategic recommendations and analyses tailored to your app. At Adikteev, we offer a complementary pre-launch analysis: our Business Intelligence team does a deep dive into your app data in order to develop the best strategy for your campaigns. Custom analyses, reports, and algorithms are developed based on your app’s specific needs, and experts can offer consultations about the strategies that work best for your app based on vertical, geo, audience size or any other relevant factors.
We’re also one of the few app re-engagement partners with the capacity to develop custom creatives, including video and playables, in-house. Our creative studio services are included in our regular service to our clients, something that many other re-engagement partners cannot offer.
As we mentioned before, running retargeting in-house is a large operation that can take time and effort away from the day-to-day of running your app. If you’re still running self-managed retargeting campaigns, you may run into issues of scale when trying to address your entire app audience. On average, self-serve DSPs see a match rate of 30-45% leaving 55-70% of your audience untouched.
Working with a re-engagement partner can boost your ability to reach your entire app audience, even if you already have a retargeting infrastructure in place. Adding inventory and deploying a different media buying methodology will increase the amount of users your campaigns will reach, in turn increasing performance.
It’s important to note as well that many self-serve retargeting platforms use static lists of users for campaigns. Our methodology runs on dynamic cohorts, which means that we are able to optimize campaigns based on user behavior in real time, rather than after the fact. This increases the efficiency of your budget, and ensures you’re targeting the correct users for the correct product or service. For example, with static user lists, the likelihood of a user seeing the same ad for a product they’ve already purchased is higher since it is not updated in real time. Dynamic cohorts update automatically to ensure that the user being served the impression is actually seeing an ad that’s relevant to them.
Retargeting is our primary focus at Adikteev, and it’s much more nuanced than install campaigns. If you’re running self-serve retargeting all by itself, there’s a possibility that you’re only getting a small portion of the story for all the reasons listed above. Running an additional retargeting partner that offers supplemental analyses and employs other methodologies to measure performance can act as a point of reference for self-serve retargeting campaigns.
Getting in-depth insights about your app audience, receiving creative support, and relying on the billions of in-app data points we’ve collected about all verticals will give your team the space and time to focus on the most important aspect of your business: running an amazing app. Even if you continue running self-serve retargeting alongside our managed service, working with a re-engagement partner such as Adikteev can offer a more well-rounded view of your retargeting efforts. We can help run campaigns at scale, increase the accuracy of your campaigns, and also act as a guide for self-serve retargeting campaigns to ensure you’re truly getting a 360° view of performance.
When retargeting first became a possibility for app marketers, it was treated as an add-on for user acquisition. It was only seen as something that was nice to have, complementing UA efforts. But in the last five years or so, we’ve seen user re-engagement take on huge importance in app marketing. We’ve been able to increase the user retention rates of our clients and drive revenue by over 200%. Whether you’re running a self-serve option and looking to add more visibility to your results, or considering the switch to a managed retargeting service, we have the experience and know-how to drive incremental revenue, engage and retain high value users, and provide the support necessary to exceed your KPIs.