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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