The winners of the 2022 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards were announced at an online Awards Ceremony last Friday. All this week, we’re taking a closer look at the winner in each category, starting today with the winners of the Grand Prix Award, the Most Effective Advertising Campaign, Most Effective App Advertising Platform, and Most Effective App Analytics Platform categories. 

Grand Prix Award
B&Q and Yodel Mobile – B&Q Unlocks the Power of Mobile App Success
When the UK lockdown came into force in March 2020, DIY and home improvement retailer B&Q realised that its mobile channel offered an untapped opportunity for business growth. B&Q app data showed the estimated lifetime value of a B&Q app user would become 3x that of a desktop/mobile customer, that the B&Q App could have an 8 per cent higher Average Order Value, a higher frequency of purchase (1.6 vs. 1.2), and deliver higher revenue per user than the web. So investment in mobile made sense, but with a limited budget, paid user acquisition campaigns were not an option. So B&Q settled on improving its organic discoverability as a way to grow its business.

Yodel was tasked with increasing organic visibility on the app stores; increasing new customer acquisition through the app; and breaking into the top 10 ranking on the app stores in the Lifestyle category.

Yodel first conducted an app audit to benchmark against the competition and identify growth opportunities. The audit suggested that despite strong brand awareness, the real opportunity was with new customer acquisition via mobile search, which was executed  with keyword optimisation focused on relevant and high-intent keywords rather than the usual strategy of high-volume or competitive keywords.

Rather than relying on ASO tools to do the research, Yodel applied a holistic approach to analysing user behaviour across web, search & SEO, social media platforms and intelligence tools, to identify keywords that were neglected by competitive brands. It also monitored all activity to quickly react to any fluctuations in keyword ranking, and deployed a fortnightly metadata optimisation cycle to allow for increasing the total number of indexed keywords, which had a positive impact on the discoverability of the app, and also triggered the algorithm to increase the app’s position in the app stores.

The results of Yodel’s efforts were supplied to the judges in confidence and were hugely impressive, earning this campaign the award for Most Effective App Store Optimisation Campaign and Most Effective Retail App Campaign, in addition to the top prize, the Grand Prix Award.
Congratulations!

Judges’ View:
“Excellent background and demo of strategy (short, mid and long term) applied and how it was flipped on the back of insight. Excellent research via audit to drive insights and excellent results too.”

Most Effective Advertising Campaign
Vodafone Turkey and Carat – Vodafone FreeZone TikTok Launch
The aim of this campaign was to promote the introduction of unlimited TikTok access to Vodafone Turkey’s Freezone tariff, which is aimed at the youth segment. Knowing that GenZs have a limited attention span, Vodafone deployed a multichannel, multifaceted campaign, embracing TikTok itself, influencers, other social channels, in-game advertising, TV and out of home.

Vodafone created a ‘Branded Mission’ augmented reality (AR) effect and invited the youth audience to take part in hashtag challenges based on the effect and associated hashtag. The influencer activity amplified the campaign on TikTok, while the social, in-game, OOH and TV executions – including a real-time activation in a popular youth series, ‘Karde?lerim’ – used QR codes to drive those who engaged with it back to TikTok.

The campaign reached 66.1 per cent of Turkey’s monthly active TikTok user base within just six days. In the same period, the Branded Mission received over 1,800 video submissions, which generated moore than 10m views. Over the course of a month, those figures rose to 10,200 videos, which were viewed over 98m times. Most importantly, the campaign delivered a 5.7 per cent increase in Vodafone Freezone subscribers.

Judges’ View:
“A very well strategized campaign. The campaign demonstrates a true understanding of the target audience and the right mix of the right channels to reach them with the right message. The follow-up work carried out to measure the perception of the target audience was a good way to understand the effect of the campaign.”

Most Effective App Advertising Platform
Skai – Skai’s App Marketing solution
Skai’s App Marketing solution is an intelligent mobile app marketing platform that helps app advertisers to acquire high-value users at scale. It enables advertisers to streamline their app advertising accounts through Apple Search Ads, Google Apps Campaigns, Meta, and Snapchat.

It leverages algorithm-based rules to optimize bids and budgets, taking the manual work out of setting bids, modifying keyword bids daily, and allocating budget in the most efficient way possible.  The platform also connects MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner) data with channel partners to bring all a brand’s data together in one place and tell the full story. And it enables workflow efficiencies through bulk creation, editing, and management. What would take hours of manual and tedious efforts can be done in a matter of minutes, simply and effectively.

The platform includes support for Custom Product Pages on the App Store, enabling app marketers to create full additional versions of their App Store product page to highlight specific features or content, customizing screenshots, promotional text, and app previews for different audience groups.

As part of its entry, Skai provided evidence of the platform’s success for a number of clients, including: a 280 per cent increase in installs growth and a 6 per cent decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA) for DraftKings. A 32 per cent decrease in cost per install and 61 per cent decrease in cost per second post for Phiture & Once Upon. A 20 per cent decrease in CPA for eToro. And a 314 per cent increase in registrations for C-Date.

As Phiture puts it: “Skai has been crucial in driving performance. We saw massive efficiencies in our app campaigns. If you’re an agency managing complex campaigns across Google App Campaigns and Apple Search Ads then Skai is a no-brainer.”

Judges’ View:
“This is an extremely innovative app marketing solution. I was especially impressed with the analytics function across multiple platforms.”

Most Effective App Analytics Platform
Snowplow Analytics – Snowplow BDP
Snowplow BDP (Behavioural Data Platform) generates, governs and models high-quality, granular behavioural data, ready for use in AI, ML, and Advanced Analytics applications. When integrated with other data tools from the modern data stack, the technology allows organizations to drive significant commercial value with behavioural data

The platform enables users to stream their data into the cloud environment of their choice, with the freedom to customize their pipeline according to your business needs, including the ability to define and track unlimited events; freedom to choose how to structure their data; full control over the data and pipeline infrastructure; and a modular architecture that allows Snowplow’s pipeline to be configured around the users needs. Snowplow currently serves more than 180 customers, and its tech is used by more than 600,000 websites. These customers use the platform for advanced marketing attribution, personalisation; product analytics; and churn reduction.

As part of its entry, Snowplow referenced its work with Green Building Supply (GBS), a US-based building supply company that specializes in providing sustainable, eco-friendly building products. The nature of GBS’ complex customer journey made it difficult to see how online ads played a role in actual orders. Snowplow worked with GBS to resolve this issue. By harnessing high-quality, granular behavioural data with Snowplow BDP, Green Building Supply optimized its paid ad performance, providing a significant uplift to ad revenue whilst improving the user experience. It saw an increase of paid revenue of 1400 per cent; a revenue increase of 137 per cent; and a 13x increase in new customers acquired through advertising. “With Snowplow data, we set sales records five months in a row from when we started the ad tests,” said Green Building Supply COO, Aaron Hirshberg.

Other clients include, Charlotte Tilbury which increased its ‘Add-to-basket’ rate by 200 per cent after integrating behavioural data into its product recommendation engine; and Software.com, which reported a 250 per cent increase in its user base since integrating Snowplow into its data stack.

Judges’ View:
“A strong, customer-focused product, with a big power play on data gathering and usage. Very strong to have a client move from Google Analytics to Snowplow. Great results and a great video explainer in the supporting materials.”

Well be back tomorrow with a summary or more winning campaigns and platforms. In the meantime, you can see all the winners here.

Congratulations to all our winners. If youd like to be informed when the 2023 edition of the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards opens for entries, email: awards@mobilemarketingmagazine.com