Pinterest is a relative newcomer to app
install ads — they’ve been available on the platform to all marketers since
late March — but strong early results like an average cost-per-install
rate that is 23% lower than the overall rate convinced greeting card app Ink
Cards to invest a portion of its Mother’s Day budget in giving the format a
try.
While about 80% of Pinterest's 175
million users come from mobile, it is often pigeonholed as a platform for women
and the do-it-yourself crowd. Social ad agency Bamboo has been running tests of
app install ad campaigns on the platform for the past several months, and the
performance to date has convinced the company that there is an opportunity here
for marketers who jump in early to target a wide range of consumers and drive
results.
“We’ve had success with every vertical
we’ve tested so far,” Danny Sauter, co-founder of Bamboo,
wrote in an email to Marketing Dive. “Some of our campaigns are seeing greater
than 40% male audience share of spend, and we’ve already seen success with
e-commerce, productivity, and fitness apps.”
A unique opportunity
Some of the verticals and audiences that
have performed well on Pinterest include productivity, lifestyle, e-commerce,
fitness and fintech.
One reason Pinterest app install ads could
be worth a try is that marketers can currently use a more direct sales pitch
than is allowed on some other social media platforms.
“There are opportunities right now that
might not exist in a few months,” Sauter noted. “For example, there’s no
‘20% text rule,’ the dreaded rule from Facebook that says your image must
contain less than 20% text. This means you can be more aggressive with in-image
headlines, text overlays, and instructional copy.”
Despite Bamboo’s insistence that
Pinterest’s audience is broader than some might expect, the stats suggest that
it still skews heavily toward women, who account for 81% of users,
although the audience is evolving, with men accounting for 40% of new
signups.
The insights suggest Mother’s Day falls
right in the platform’s audience sweet spot, giving Ink
Cards, which lets users create a customized gift card and have
it printed and mailed, a good reason to test the tactic.
“Much of [Ink Cards’] business is seasonal,
and Mother’s Day is top of mind right now,” Sauter said. “We’re serving App
Install ads around Mother’s day specific search keywords right now. The match
is clear — someone who is searching for Mother’s Day gift ideas might be
interested in an app that makes it easy to send beautiful, customized greeting
cards.”
Lower costs
With Bamboo’s clients seeing 23% lower cost-per-install rates on Pinterest,
on average, compared to their overall paid CPI and 13% lower cost-per-acquisition
rates as well as greater scale than on Twitter, it's not surprising that the
agency reports some are extending their Pinterest app install ad tests and
allocating up to 30% of their overall mobile advertising budget to the tactic.
Even with the strong results, marketers may
encounter some challenges. For example, with ads still relatively new on
Pinterest, marketers may need to work extra hard to make it clear to users
what the content they are clicking on is.
To address this issue, Bamboo tested including
app icons in the ads and the results with positive results.
“We found that including app icons
— either your app icon itself, or the Google Play/Apple iTunes logos
— on images actually improve performance by up to 30%,” Sauter said. “This
was due to a greater click-to-install conversion rate, since people had a
better idea that they were actually clicking on an app install ad."
“Since ads are still so new, priming our
audience on what they are actually clicking on, and what to expect after they
click, is proving to be really important,” he added.
Giving it a try
Another challenge is finding the right
balance of cost versus volume. Bamboo recommends that for Pinterest app install
campaigns, marketers shoot for a 0.3% clickthrough rate or above — and not
the typical threshold of 1% brands use on Facebook.
The agency also compared Pinterest’s two
types of placements — search alone and search plus home feed — and
found that campaigns running exclusively on search perform better in early
testing, with per-cost rates lower for installs, acquisitions and clicks for
search alone.
With driving new app installs both crucial
and challenging in a saturated market, the arrival of Pinterest's app
campaigns gives marketers a new audience to approach.
“We’d urge marketers to try and find a way
to make room in their budget for a Pinterest test,” Sauter counseled. “Devote a
slice of your existing mobile advertising budget to it, and see if it can beat
your current baselines — cost per install, cost per purchases, and so forth.
From there, let the performance dictate how much share of budget it should
occupy.”
#MobileMarketing #Application
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