The Current State of DSPs for Mobile User Acquisition

Programmatic advertising has been a staple for brands for many years, but for many mobile marketers, programmatic and the various Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) are still relatively new. Terms like RTB, machine learning, ad exchanges, and dCPMs are now becoming part of the daily conversation for app growth marketers.

Embrace Transparency in User Acquisition

What initially attracted advertisers to the programmatic revolution was the ability to reach millions of users from a centralized platform. However, this advantage is diminished if there’s no transparency about where campaigns are running and how different variables affect performance.

The mobile industry is often dominated by black boxes: you set a budget, define a CPI goal, upload your assets, and hope that your ads will reach the right audience and convert. While this may seem low-risk, in the long run, you miss opportunities to build your brand, gather valuable insights for your overall strategy, and, importantly, take control of your campaigns.

Transparency offers control over your marketing campaigns, better insights into who your most valuable users are and where to find them, improved accountability from your partners, and the ability to identify publishers who can become strategic allies.

Move Beyond Channel-Level Reporting to Impression-Level Analysis

If your approach to media optimization is simply stopping communication with publishers, then there’s an entire world waiting for you to explore.

With a DSP, you might discover that users who click on your 300×50 banners in Wordscapes on mid-range Samsung phones at midnight have three times the average LTV. This insight allows you to negotiate direct deals with the publisher to increase volume or experiment with different ad sets for that publisher to improve results further.

Impression-level reporting enables you to compare multiple dimensions or macros simultaneously, such as audiences, GEOs, devices, and locations. Meanwhile, machine learning algorithms help optimize your campaigns rapidly based on these results (most DSPs offer this feature, though their quality and performance may vary).

Align Your KPIs with Your Business Cycle

If you’re an established brand, you can target untapped audiences with tailored messages to capture their attention and drive them to your service. Retargeting can also be used to re-engage existing users, keeping them engaged with your app or reminding them of new offers. In this scenario, it’s crucial to define KPIs that facilitate growth without limiting your reach. This might include audience coverage, average LTV, or churn rate.

For new apps, understanding your business model is key. If you’re marketing a hyper-casual game, you might run broad campaigns with different targeting setups and ad versions to see what resonates. Test each strategy against its conversion rates and focus on achieving your CPI goal.

Conversely, if you’re launching a new ride-sharing service, consider that building trust is essential before driving action. This may result in higher CPI or CPA initially, but as your brand becomes more recognized and trusted, your ad spend will become more efficient. At this stage, you’ll need to define new KPIs that align with the brand-building phase of your business lifecycle.

You Don’t Have to Do It All Alone

There’s a certain mystique surrounding programmatic advertising, with its abundance of jargon, numbers, and data, leading some to believe that managing a programmatic campaign requires rocket science. While that’s far from true, running a successful programmatic campaign does require time, deep media management knowledge, and a supportive team.

If you lack the necessary resources, many programmatic platforms offer teams dedicated to managing your campaigns. While you can let your vendor handle everything, for optimal results, consider a hybrid approach where you receive campaign management support while retaining full access to impression-level reporting and decision-making power.

Establish Your Measurement and Attribution Platform

Before you spend any money, ensure you have a mobile measurement platform (MMP) in place. An MMP will help you attribute your campaign conversions to specific channels and pass back conversion data to your media partners. For programmatic advertising, this is crucial for optimizing your platform based on positive outcomes.

Once you’ve chosen the right MMP, make sure to define the appropriate attribution settings according to your strategy. If you’re using the default settings, consider consulting with your MMP and media partners for recommendations. The nature of your business, your business lifecycle stage, and your current offline media investment can all influence how you should configure your attribution settings.