Ahead of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. Today, we’re previewing the Most Effective App Install Campaign nominees.

Band and M&C Saatchi Performance– Band UK Launch
BAND is a leading South Korean social messaging app with over 100m users. For its UK launch, it turned to M&C Saatchi Performance for a digital paid-media campaign.

The app enables users to create groups (or ‘bands’) of friends, colleagues, teammates, for easy group communication. Within bands, users can create community boards, shared calendars, host polls, send files or photos, post on the group wall, send instant chat messages and more. Users can create as many bands as they like, with options to make them ‘Open/Closed/Secret’ between other users.

To help BAND cement their position in the UK market, M&C Saatchi Performances focus was on targeting their most engaged users, also known as ‘Active Users’. This was defined as anyone who downloaded the app, created a group (thus becoming a ‘Group Band Leader’) and invited two new users to the app. The success metric was to generate a significant increase in Active Users over a 4-month period.

First-party data from BAND revealed that 71 per cent of the bands created in the first month were for sports teams, enabling M&C Saatchi Performance to target activity towards this area, using sports-focused social media influencers to endorse the app, with paid media activity centred on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Research among users also informed the creative direction of the campaign, explaining how the app’s features addressed different needs, with the creative refreshed regularly to keep the campaign fresh. In total, the campaign used 1,222 individual ads, pushing BAND to become a top 10 app in the UK as the media spend was constantly optimised towards the best-performing channels.

BitMango and Leadbolt – Mobile Playable Ads for Word Cookies App
Casual mobile games developer BitMango partnered with Leadbolt, a mobile advertising platform, on user acquisition campaigns with the goal of growing its base of Android and iOS players of its puzzle tile game, Word Cookies.

Leadbolt’s targeting algorithms, predictive modelling, and network of premium app publishers were used to identify ideal user characteristics and top performing mobile environments. Meanwhile, the mobile advertising platform’s Playable Ad format gave users the chance to experience a 30-second mini-game of Word Cookies within the ad before deciding whether to download it or not.

Using Leadbolt’s Playable Ads, BitMango managed to acquire 60,000 new users in one month and successfully achieve its day one retention objectives – with 50 per cent of those retained on day one still active on day seven.

NBC Universal (hayu) and Yodel Mobile – App Store Optimisation and Discoverability Campaign
NBCUniversal turned to Yodel for an organic app install campaign for its on-demand TV app, hayu. Yodel began by implementing its OS-specific App Store Optimisation programme. Using Yodel’s keyword optimisation loop, the company established a bank of optimised keywords for both the app stores, then tracked app and keyword rankings on a continuous basis and updated and optimised their app store descriptions. Alongside this, it implemented optimised screenshots and a video to act as a shopping window for users who visited the app store page, offering a closer look at the app to increase conversion rates.

To increase the organic discoverability of the app and hayu’s brand visibility, Yodel implemented a new web mark-up that would surface rich autosuggestions through Apple Search results in the Safari app. It analysed their top destinations in-app to determine prioritised mark-up areas, picked 10 key pages to be marked up and then measured the uplift in traffic. Having witnessed great results, we planned for the implementation of mark-up on all pages, including supporting the web developers with the implementation.

Yodel also optimised for key phrases for App Packs, which resulted in hayu ranking number 1 for ‘Reality TV app’, ‘On demand TV app’ and ‘Reality TV shows app’, which significantly increased installs and brand visibility.

The results of the campaign were shared with the judges in confidence, and demonstrated that Yodel’s App Store Optimisation and discoverability strategies were key in driving organic acquisition for the app.

Pixelberry Studios and Bidalgo – App Install Campaign
Pixelberry Studios turned to Bidalgo to increase downloads of its multi-layered role play app, Choices, targeting users who would be likely to immerse themselves in the game and complete in app purchases. Pixelberry aimed to unify all relevant media channels, data partners and creative solutions into one platform and use AI to automate and scale the entire media funnel including ad creative and ROAS (return on ad spend) optimization across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google UAC and Apple search ads. The goals were to increase monthly Installs, lower CPA (Cost Per Action), and increase conversion to in-app purchases.

Pixelberry Studios used Bidalgos AI platform to quickly identify which creative assets work, why, how to create more, and how they measure up in the industry. The platform automatically attributed the right creatives, optimizing multiple variables to reach the right users across these channels.

Bidalgo worked with Pixelberry to access early adoption of exciting new social channel features including Google and Facebook playable ads. The campaign delivered over 980,000 monthly installs, with a 33 per cent lower CPA, and a 121 per cent increase in conversion to in-app purchases.

Seasun Games and Taptica – Seasun Games Wins the Battle for Consumer Attention
Games firm Seasun Games is best known for the number one free app in the Korean iOS and Android App stores, Clans: Shadow of the Moon. The firm partnered with Taptica to deliver a targeted app marketing campaign that would encourage new users to download and continue playing the game at a low cost per install. The campaign goals were drive 5,000-8,000 new installs per month as efficiently as possible, and to retain 30 per cent of new users after day one.

Taptica focused on engaging new users in Korea with targeted app install campaigns optimising toward Cost Per Impression (CPI), loyal user rate, and registration rate to ensure that Seasun’s quality goals were achieved. By combining the power of programmatic with regular monitoring, the Taptica team could track engagement rates and optimise in real time.

Clans is an exciting fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), so to catch users attention, Taptica used creative from the game iself within the ads, targeting the younger players that were most likely to download and continue playing the game.

Working with Taptica, Seasun was able to drive thousands of new weekly installs, resulting in a return on investment of 170 per cent above benchmark goals. In addition, the day one retention rates of players was at 42 per cent, beating the 30 per cent target.

Join us to find out the winners of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards at our prestigious Awards Ceremony on 15 November. Tickets are available now, so book your place and celebrate the industrys best and brightest with us.