In my last post, I mentioned how we are learning about paid distribution on Facebook, and some early thoughts based on our experience. To summarize from the last post, you need a way to track installs from ad clicks -- whether an in house script, Ad Tracker, or some other mechanism -- and you need to understand how much you are really paying for getting users on Facebook.
In this post I want to talk a bit about the fine tuning process to optimize the install conversion rate.
Some background is probably in order. Feel free to skip over this paragraph if this reads like rudimentary stuff for you. A user becoming active on your app is the last step in a long series of steps -- or rather, better worded as a the drops coming out of a funnel. Lots of people online have talked about this funnel -- and a recent post by Dave Mcclure describes it as AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revnue). I'd like to add one more "A" before that -- Awareness. The hard value of this might be nearly zero, but it does contribute in helping improve Acquisition. What I mean is this: where Acquisition is about clickthroughs to your page, Awareness is about people knowing about you without even ever visiting your site. Putting it back in context -- in order for you to get 1 active user, you need to have a multiple users install your app, and a multiple of that come to the install page. This is the funnel you need, and the wider the mouth of the funnel, more the active user growth. Without any fine tuning, you need to have a certain number of ad clicks (assuming that's the only way you get growth for now) and therefore a certain amount to spend on advertising. The next thing to do is -- optimize the funnel. And the first step for that is measurement. As I said earlier, you need to measure conversion to installs -- and even further measure conversion to active users whenever possible.
Now that's out of the way, here's how we are somewhat fine tuning our conversion rates. At the time of our last post, our conversion rate from ad clicks to installs was hovering around 25%. Currently, for the same apps, it hovers around 40%. This means where earlier on each new install was costing us 60c approximatelyt, it now costs us 38c (assuming 15c CPC).
One of the first things we played with, obviously, was the creative. We tested several different creatives and constantly measure conversion rates, and we stuck with those that gave us higher conversion rates. We played with ad traffic through different times in the day. We put in small amounts of money into our daily budget through the day to control the ad clicks, and again measured. Did I say Ad Tracker is a wonderful tool? We found that for our app Shared Memories the times we got the best conversion rates was late evenings and weekends. Afternoons was worst.
And remember -- we were not looking for a high click through rate. We were solely looking for conversion rate. In fact lower CTR was somewhat better. Why? Awareness. A lower CTR for me meant that more people looked at the ad for Shared Memories. In non Facebook advertising, this may not be that relevant -- because you the advertiser control all of your landing page. But in case of Facebook, the landing page is a very vanilla Add Application page that is no different than any other app (in our case so far). So the best place we had to sell the user on our app was in the creative itself. And with a lower CTR but higher conversion, we were getting more people knowing about our app, and we were paying less per install. This awareness is useful -- it plants a seed in the user's mind that might bring them back to us later. It's all about conversion, my friend.
Eventually, we are building a set of applications that can help us reach out into a larger user base, and use that to advertise our existing apps. Some people question the value of game apps -- but I believe these apps are crucial to help drive traffic and lower advertising costs. They help spread Awareness -- and it goes some ways in helping increase your conversion rates from ad clicks. And if extremely popular, they can be instrumental in opening up the funnel mouth for your other apps.
We recently launched Balloonz!. Balloonz is a simple, fun game that lets you fill yucky things in balloons and thrown them at friends. Friends can dodge balloons by passing them on to someone else -- with a catch that balloons will explode in some time and you have to pass them on within that time. Users can even create their own fillings for Balloonz. Real simple. And in 5 days that this app has been of Facebook, we've grown to about 3K user installs today. Again our measuring ability and learnings with other apps helped -- our conversion rate has been close to 55% for this app.
As an end note, we will be at Community Next this week. We'd love to exchange ideas and thoughts on Facebook apps. Email me at vikas at jambool in case you are there and might be interested in chatting. I will be very interested in learning from you.
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