On October 25, 2018, Rockshake team attended the App Growth Summit at the UCSF Conference Center in San Francisco. It was our third year attending and, in our opinion, the best Summit yet.

A full day of packed content split between retrospective analysis of 2018’s learnings, and projections for where to optimize app growth strategies in 2019, the event also offered a great format for mobile app growth professionals to meet and network. If you missed this year’s event, don’t worry, here are our main takeaways.

Powering Growth with New UA Channels

In today’s challenging mobile landscape, app marketers who best understand how to reach the right users at the right time will be the ultimate winners. It is essential to focus on things that move the needle. Many app growth experts shared their learnings from multi-channel experiences, and what's worked best for them and what to avoid.

For Turo, a peer-to-peer carsharing company, a big part of their highly-qualified leads come from referrals. The same goes for MileIQ. And Data plays an important part for the mileage tracking and logging app in implementing a successful user referral program. A key source of qualified users for Invoices2go was partnerships with small and medium-sized business. Targeting has become one of the most crucial aspects of any UA campaign. To stay competitive and ahead of the curve, HER, the dating and social app for LGBTQ+ People targets paid subscribers on adult sites. With well-crafted messaging, it results in higher conversions and increased LTVs.

Panel Discussion - Changing Your UA Channel

Creatives for App Marketing Success

Creative quality has a significant impact on advertising effectiveness. However, often it is an afterthought next to ad placement and targeting. Optimizing your ad creative is the No.1 thing you can do to improve your app marketing campaigns. As WB Games’ Gabriel Goldwasser puts it, “Creative can make or break a campaign.” Amazon Music shared they use a mix of creatives, and implement different types of tests, before scaling up campaigns. Others spy on and analyze competitive creatives. In an ever-increasingly automated world, creatives are the final frontier of marketer-controlled optimizations.

Going Global: International UA

International user acquisition is challenging and requires the right strategy. Today, being global means you go local. Wish is #1 shopping app in 40+ countries. With data, they optimize user experiences in many different cultures and user behavior patterns and make users in all countries feel the app is local. Kabam’s strategy for testing new markets was to look at user spending from organic growth. If users are playing the English version of the game, Kabam would double down on paid UA in those markets, analyze the results and decide on localization efforts. Calm is now localized in German, and plan to add more languages in the future. For most geos, the meditation and sleep app is revenue positive. In Germany, they saw a huge revenue increase when localized the app. It’s very different for AnchorFree. The VPN app is used to avoid internet censorship as a simple workaround for millions. It allows users to access sites that would otherwise be blocked or banned. They saw situational user growth in MENA due to the unrest in the region.

International growth experts sharing learnings on global efforts

It was a great experience for us to see industry leaders and mobile app experts sharing their mobile growth strategies at this year’s App Growth Summit SF. We look forward to more to come. If you are looking for a partner to grow your app, we’d love to connect. Just reach out here, we can’t wait to learn more about your goals.  

Until next time!