Health and Fitness App Chooses MOLOCO As Their Trusted DSP

Background

The health and fitness space is a rapidly growing category within the app store. According to Visual Capitalist data, downloads for health and fitness apps grew by 46% worldwide from Q1-Q2 in 2020. This growth was accelerated partly due to COVID-19 but is expected to continue through 2021. The growing popularity creates an opportunity for marketing managers to expand their user acquisition (UA) efforts to capitalize on the heightened organic interest.  MOLOCO was able to catch up with marketing veteran Eric Wu; a consultant focused on helping health and fitness apps improve their user acquisition strategy in an industry with many advertising platform options.

Challenge

There are many important factors to consider when selecting a performance-focused DSP (Demand Side Platform) partner. Advertisers operate within the constraints of their test budgets, but with the number of ad networks in the space, it can be challenging to know who to trust with your advertising dollars. For Eric’s clients, the goal was to look beyond app installs and focus on driving cost-efficient lower-funnel conversion events.  Since DSPs all have their strengths and weaknesses, it was important for Eric to identify partners whose strengths aligned with his post-install conversion goals.

Strategy

Eric began working with MOLOCO in June of 2020. The initial test was a part of Eric’s ongoing channel optimization to ensure that his clients maintained a healthy and robust marketing mix. Knowing that all new ad campaigns needed a fair trial, Eric helped test various subscription-monetized apps before finding a strong resonance between MOLOCO’s algorithm and his client’s health and fitness apps. There were a few key reasons why MOLOCO was able to generate strong post-install results.

MOLOCO is known within the industry for its extremely sophisticated machine learning capabilities. By allowing partners to share their past learnings and ingesting that historical data, Eric was able to tailor MOLOCO’s flexible platform to deliver positive results on a quicker timeline. Oftentimes, DSPs will push back if too many targeting constraints are applied early on in the trial phase. However, given Eric’s knowledge of the health and fitness app space, he knew that the ability to be nimble was going to be of the utmost importance for his clients. Fortunately, MOLOCO was able to exceed his expectations here.

MOLOCO’s account team also played a major role by staying flexible and responsive during the trial phase.  Early on in testing, it was discovered that video creatives were driving cost-effective CPAs, while display creative was underperforming.  By responding to the data and quickly pausing display assets, MOLOCO’s team was able to direct their focus to video creative testing, which drastically improved overall performance.

Results

As with most traffic tests, performance started slow. However, early results improved day by day, and within 10 days of launching, MOLOCO was hitting lower funnel CPA goals while other DSPs were still ramping up. Additionally, Eric’s clients observed a 25% higher conversion rate than other leading DSPs, a strong signal of the quality of MOLOCO’s user targeting.

Eric ran tests across multiple top mobile app DSPs to help scale his clients’ user acquisition. MOLOCO was able to hone in on the target demographic quickly, a high-quality audience Eric was previously only able to access through paid social channels. Within weeks, MOLOCO delivered a comparable performance to paid social and helped increase scale while maintaining CPA targets.

Conclusion

“Programmatic DSP inventory can be highly successful, but make sure you have strong fundamentals first. If you don’t have a solid understanding of your target audience, it's hard to expect a programmatic partner to solve that problem for you. Every DSP is a little bit different. It’s a good idea to test more DSPs than less, to find the best partners to layer together in your UA mix"

- Eric Wu, User Acquisition Marketing Consultant

To learn more about MOLOCO Cloud and how you can start leveraging your own strategic insights to fuel growth across the programmatic ecosystem, contact the machine learning and ad performance experts at MOLOCO today.