Case Study

IDT Cuts Apple Search Ads CPA 60% Leveraging Automation on Competitive Conquesting Campaign

Vertical: Finance, Social Networking

Takeaways

60%
Average CPA Decrease
for New User Acquisitions

59%
Spend Reduction
While Maintaining Growth

65%
Average CPG Decrease
for First Paid Transfer

Across four decades, IDT Corporation has pioneered technologies and services that enable people around the world to communicate and share more easily and affordably. With its flagship Boss Revolution app, IDT connects 5M+ subscribers through dependable international calling and remittance services, bridging distances and uniting people worldwide.

Challenge

For its Boss Revolution app, IDT faced no shortage of competition in the App Store. The explosion of fintech apps compelled the IDT mobile growth team to allocate a share of their Apple Search Ads spend to bidding on competitor keywords. Winning impressions on search results for brands offering similar services demonstrated potential for driving incremental growth. However, both cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per goal (CPG) for first-time transfers after install were quickly inflating. IDT needed to improve the efficiency of their competitive conquesting efforts.

Solution

IDT onboarded the Apple Search Ads campaign management platform, Search Ads Maven. They laid out their goals for the Search Ads Maven team, identifying the target CPA and CPG rates that would keep return on ad spend (ROAS) positive. After this consultation, the Search Ads Maven team formulated an automation strategy aimed at accomplishing IDT’s competitive conquesting goals while establishing guardrails to ensure that resulting growth would be profitable.

Because IDT leverages Kochava as their mobile measurement partner (MMP) of choice, they were able to seamlessly integrate with Search Ads Maven to syndicate first-time transfer events directly into the platform. Using the event data, the Search Ads Maven team helped build a custom goal to drive optimization on in-app events— enabling IDT to see past the install to truly business-impacting events.

Search Ads Maven Works With Kochava and Any Other MMP

Did You Know?

With Apple Search Ads, you can optimize for app installs at your ideal CPA. If you want optimization on post-install events of greater impact to your business, an Apple Search Ads campaign management platform such as Search Ads Maven enables app event optimization through MMP integration and automation rules that manage your bids in alignment with a target CPG for those events.

Impact

The automation strategy was implemented on a pilot campaign. Before-and-after analysis showed a 60% drop in CPA and 65% decrease in CPG for first-time transfers. The most impressive outcome: overall spend savings of 59% while maintaining the same install volume as the pre-automation period. The team is excited to broaden its use of the automation strategy to drive greater efficiency on Apple Search Ads.

”Apple Search Ads has become such a more efficient growth channel for us. Automation is saving our team time and producing savings that we get to reinvest for greater growth.
Mark FranklinDirector of Digital Marketing, IDT Corporation