«Since the very beginning, the Appness team has proven to be knowledgeable, flexible, and responsive to our inquiries and needs. Today, Appness is our key traffic & creative partner, which helps us achieve our business goals. We believe in growth and development of this partnerships, and we see great prospects ahead.» — Riccardo Bianchetta, Head Of Marketing at Bending Spoons.
The Company
Bending Spoons is a fast-growing tech company with headquarters in Milan, focused on developing mobile apps. Since it was founded 5 years ago, the company has achieved notable results: with an impressive portfolio of 20+ apps that have been downloaded over 200 million times, Bending Spoons products are now enjoyed by millions of users every month.
The Business Model
The company’s strategy is based on delivering to the global market a wide variety of mobile apps, spanning from fitness to photo & video editing category. One of the most successful apps in the fitness category — 30 Day Fitness Challenge — is equivalent to a personal trainer: users can browse through fitness plans, workouts and exercises with HD video tutorial. While the app is free to download and comes with a 1-week free trial, premium features are only available to those who purchase a subscription.
The Business Challenge
In terms of business goals, Bending Spoons’ top priorities were to keep and raise user retention and to build loyalty that would lead to the revenue increase in a long run. Considerable efforts of the team were directed towards developing and testing new features, improving user experience and other product-related projects. Due to the roadmap commitment, the company needed more marketing resources to scale into new markets and engage more users.
«Our core value has always been to provide our users with outstanding content that enriches overall user experience and makes them enjoy our apps. We are focused on bringing technology-centric solutions to our mobile products, that’s why a large part of our crew is involved in research and development activities.» — Marta Manzo, Digital Marketing Specialist at Bending Spoons.
The Appness Solution
The need for a large number of ad creatives brought the company to Appness. In December 2017, Bending Spoons began working with the Appness team on creative purchasing model, and thanks to Appness’ designers, the company quickly established a steady flow of quality traffic coming from Facebook.
«What we’ve achieved with Appness, is a very fast and non-stop delivery of creatives. The entire process, from writing a brief to rolling out the final ad campaign, takes just a couple of days and not more. This gives us ample room for experimenting and testing,» shared Marta.
Later, Bending Spoons broadened their cooperation with Appness, delegating media buying job to the trusted partner. The platform’s automatization capabilities allowed Bending Spoons to implement a scalable user acquisition strategy, improve the conversion rate and turn the traffic into paying customers.
Advertising Strategies
As the 30 Day Fitness app was rapidly gaining in popularity among users, the ad budget was significantly increased as well. Therefore, the client decided to not only buy creatives from Appness designers, but also to leverage the expertise of the Appness media buying team.
For the entire period of cooperation, the Appness team created and tested over 700 creative variations for 30 Day Fitness. They tried out a few ad formats and stopped at 1080×1080 videos for Facebook news feed. Colorful GIF-animation lasting up to 30 seconds generated the best performance, with an average CTR above 2%:
Ad content that worked well:
- Custom animation with sets of exercises;
- Silhouette getting slimmer with background figures reflecting weight loss;
- Graph with a downward arrow symbolizing the rapid achievement of results.
Also Appness media buyers tested three different targeting methods:
- Wide targeting with optimization for purchases;
- Optimization for purchases + lookalike targeting;
- Targeting by interests – fitness, healthy lifestyle, etc.
The second model proved to be the most efficient
Creative Model Results:
- During the period from December 2017 to August 2018, over 700 creatives have been created and tested;
- Appness designers have developed and applied over 25 approaches to boost the performance of creatives;
- Roughly half of the entire ad budget has been spent through Appness creatives.
Media Buying Model Results:
- For 3 months, Appness has generated over 700K installs for the 30 Day Fitness app;
- The volume of free trials has grown twice – from 25K to 54K targeted events;
- The conversion rate from free trial to purchase stands at 40-50% depending on GEO, which meets the client’s KPI.
«We have worked with Appness for just 3 months, and we are very happy with the results that have been achieved for such a short time. Appness showed the ability to meet our business goals in terms of conversion rate and the traffic quality, and we are now open for testing other traffic sources with them.» — stated Marta.
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