After migrating to the new UA automation tools, more than a dozen of our clients have already been able to scale their operations and develop more complex marketing strategies without hiring additional staff.

But let’s start from the beginning.

User acquisition (UA) managers know how challenging it can be to manage creatives, ad sets, and campaigns across multiple ad networks.

This post was first published on pocketgamer.biz.

You probably have experienced the frustration of seeing your campaigns’ Cost Per Mille (CPM) increase and the number of installs decrease, even after creating new campaigns in other ad networks. And if your app or game is already showing decent results, you may be hesitant to change anything for fear of harming the AI algorithm behind it.

The number of decisions managers must act on to optimize marketing campaigns has exploded, and manually managing them all is no longer feasible.

With the gaming industry expected to grow at a 7.2% CAGR to exceed $200B in 2024, competition is fierce, and the pressure to differentiate your game from others is more significant than ever. This is where automating your user acquisition can make all the difference.

The new set of UA automation tools created by Appodeal has improved the lives of UA managers working at mobile app and game studios.

  • AutoBid lets the AI algorithms find the optimal bid and budget for your campaigns in multiple ad networks and get the most out of your marketing spend.
  • You can also create new target audiences, test 100 new creatives daily, and find new ways to beat your competitors.
  • And all this while keeping your acquisition costs as low as possible.

Keep reading to learn how you can benefit from automating your user acquisition efforts and learn valuable tips and strategies to get started.

UA automation powered by artificial intelligence

There are two ways mobile businesses can automate their UA Campaigns: rule-based and AI-based automation.

Rule-based automation systems require domain experts to implement “IF X happens, THEN do Y” type logic to relevant business problems.

However, rule-based automation has several downsides. It’s unsuitable for different cohorts’ behaviors, leading to sub-optimal performance and diminishing returns in some ad sets. It is also not adaptive to dynamic environments. Some platforms or ad networks can severely impact rule-set mechanisms, and UA managers may need several changes. Spending time on these adjustments can lead to frustration.

If you want to avoid all that hassle, Appodeal’s UA automation is AI-based. You can synchronize your monetization, user acquisition, and analytics data from your growth platform.

By doing so, you can leverage the power of artificial intelligence to process and learn from this data, leading to more effective and efficient decision-making.

Appodeal’s AI-powered platform is designed to handle large volumes of data and identify trends and patterns that might not be visible to the human eye. Appodeal algorithms can learn from historical data and build complex relationships between variables.

Compared to traditional models, the AI-powered platform offers a more effective and efficient approach to data management.

Appodeal’s UA automation tools allow you to save valuable time and resources while gaining deeper insights into your business’s performance.

How to start benefiting from UA automation?

As game studios and app developers continue to compete in the crowded mobile market, AI-based algorithms unlock the possibility to:

  • Predict new cohorts’ LTV (Lifetime Value) based on your revenue model.
  • Automate the optimum bid to ensure the most installs based on your ROAS goals.
  • Allocate the ad budget across your ad networks to find the best distribution channel for your needs.
  • Or even detect changes in user behavior and suggest new action points faster than any rule-based automation.

It can be challenging to visualize how these concepts apply to real-life situations.

In the following section, we’ll delve into some actual use cases of how UA automation has helped some of our clients.

Practical use cases of UA automation

Reducing costs and time with AutoBid

At Appodeal, we have trained our AI-based algorithms to detect the ups and downs of the ARPDAU of your ad campaigns.

Once that happens, Appodeal’s AutoBid will quickly update the current bids for that campaign to try to get you closer to your target ROAS.

This happens automatically, without the need for humans to intervene.

Source: Appodeal

The system can make these changes quickly, so you can keep earning money from your ads even if something changes in your users’ behavior.

Also, by automating repetitive tasks such as bid and budget adjustments, we allowed UA teams to focus on more strategic and creative tasks that require human ingenuity.

This, in turn, allows mobile businesses and UA teams to dive deeper into campaign performance analysis, brainstorm new ad creatives, and think more strategically about how we can optimize our clients’ campaigns for success.

Forecasting your LTV for up to 2 years

Sometimes, the top-performing UA campaigns target a small cohort of potential customers.

Still, estimating campaign-level metrics manually can be dull and lead to uncertainty, especially when predicting the LTV of future users based on a small group of recent acquisitions.

UA automation algorithms can help you optimize your targeting strategies.

By taking a more practical approach, mobile businesses can gain valuable insights into user behavior and predict future LTV with greater accuracy. Appodeal allows LTV predictions for up to 2 years in advance. This way, you can ensure that your ad campaigns effectively reach and engage even the smallest cohorts.

In addition, forecasted metrics can help you make more informed decisions about how to allocate your ad spend and maximize your ROI.

A/B Testing a hundred ad creatives per week

At our company, iterating on creative ideas is a never-ending process. When our creative team produces video content, we run tests to determine which ideas perform the best. To do this, we upload everything to an ad network of choice and run the test overnight, analyzing the results the following day.

This approach allows us to quickly identify the winners and losers and communicate the results to our team. We then implement the best-performing ideas into our live campaigns, starting the process anew.

Source: Appodeal

Why do we do this? Well, our creative team can produce hundreds of video creatives in a single week, and we need to test them all to ensure we’re using the most effective ones.

Additionally, manually uploading all of these creatives to several sources for each of our live campaigns would take hours. However, with the help of the Appodeal dashboard, we can accomplish this in a matter of minutes.

Through this approach, we can constantly improve our campaigns and keep our creative ideas fresh and compelling.

Stay ahead of your competitors with UA automation

Let’s face it, manually managing your UA campaigns can be tedious and time-consuming.

However, UA automation has the power to change that. By automating your user acquisition, you free up time and resources to focus on more exciting projects that can lead to further growth and innovation within your company.

By embracing UA automation, mobile businesses like yours gain a competitive edge over competitors. The sooner you adopt this technology, the greater your advantage will be.

Not only will you save valuable time and resources, but you’ll also be able to focus on higher-value tasks that can drive your mobile apps and games forward.

At Appodeal, we’ve seen firsthand the benefits of UA automation. Those clients that have already tested our UA automation tools have been able to scale their operations and develop more complex marketing strategies without hiring additional staff.

The results have been impressive, and we believe that UA automation can be a game-changer for any media-buying department looking to stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape.

So, if you’re tired of spending hours on mundane tasks and want to focus on more exciting and strategic projects, it’s time to jump on the UA automation train. The benefits are clear, and the rewards will come in no time.