Advertising

3 Essential Tips to Drive App Installs From Facebook

Becky Doles

Looking to reach a broad yet targeted audience for your mobile app? If you haven’t considered Facebook as a platform to drive mobile app installs, the social network is a channel not to be missed. With over 101 million daily active users in the U.S. who connect to Facebook on their mobile phones and tablets, Facebook offers an ad unit for promoting apps that not only appears directly in mobile news feeds, but links directly to the App Store. This type of ad unit, called the Mobile App Install Ad, has been shown to perform incredibly well for app marketers. In fact, the click-to-install rate from these ads is 10 times higher on average than the standard banner ad, according to AdExchanger. In a recent study, Iddiction found that Facebook’s targeting abilities contributes to cost effective CPIs. Compared to other advertising partners, the volume its Appoday app saw from Facebook was 4-10x better equivalent to the larger channels Iddiction uses. As a result, Iddiction plans to double their UA spend on Facebook Mobile App Install Ads.

Interested in seeing the same type of success driving app installs from Facebook? Here are three ways to make the most of Mobile App Install Ads:

Target Your Audiences

As with all ad units on Facebook, mobile app install ad units also offer a multitude of ways that marketers can target who sees your ad. By leveraging the information in users’ profiles, Facebook can offer marketers the ability to customize audiences for advertising campaigns based on data such as demographics, interests, email, and phone number. Facebook also offers the ability to target users who “lookalike” other groups of Facebook users. This means you can target users who are similar to users who may like an app similar to yours, or are similar to a group of Facebook users you know have already demonstrated strong lifetime value for your app. This last option is one way to drive higher click thru rates and conversions as the audience is most likely to be interested in your app.

Connect and Cross-Promote With Existing Audience

When driving downloads for your app, who will want to install it more than existing customers? If your app has previously been desktop or browser-based, be sure to leverage Facebook’s custom audiences when developing your mobile app install ads to reach these users while they are using Facebook on mobile devices. Custom audiences allow advertisers to target ads to a specific set of users with whom they have already established a relationship on or off of Facebook. Audiences can be defined by either user email address, Facebook UIDs, user phone numbers, or app user IDs.  By attracting existing customers (or even just users who have liked your Facebook page) you may see CPIs more than 50% lower than average.

Design Creative Assets Specifically for Facebook Mobile App Ads

As with all channels, Facebook is a unique advertising platform, and your creatives should be treated as such. It’s important to consider both user behavior and the limitations of the mobile install ad unit when designing ad campaigns for your mobile app. While there are other options for other types of Facebook campaigns, it’s important to use the required 600 x 360 banner for mobile app install ads (which only shows up in news feeds), as this ad unit has been shown to deliver twice the click through rate of the smaller default size. Additionally, be sure to read Facebook’s guidelines for designing creatives. It’s mandatory that images contain less than twenty percent text! You should also constantly test your ads as different keywords and images may work better than others, especially with different audiences. Finally, refresh your creatives every few weeks as the CPI for each campaign can as much as double every 20 days.

If you’re a mobile app marketer, what tips do you have for driving app installs from Facebook? Leave your tips and tricks in the comments.

Author
Becky Doles

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she led a variety of marketing and communications projects at San Francisco startups. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After living nearly a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned to her home of Charleston, SC, where you can find her enjoying the sun and salt water with her family.

One response to “3 Essential Tips to Drive App Installs From Facebook”

  1. neil says:

    Doitmobile.co.uk couldn’t agree more, we offer all the tools
    for FB mobile advertising

    We optimize advertisers spend and try to lower the cost of
    the campaign.

    As an example, if a client set the CPI rate at £1.50 per
    install and spend

    £10,000, expecting 6,666 downloads.

    Our job is to reduce the overall cost effectiveness so
    clients are getting more for the spend.

    As an example, we ran a casino App install campaign, which
    saw 54% reduction in 3 days on the set CPI price, meaning that the client paid
    £0.79.5p for the same amount of downloads, through us.

    We have a tracking ad unit placed within the FB SDK, thus
    giving us ultimate tracking capabilities.

    Advertisers can:

    Optimize CPI, we run algorithm’s every 5 minutes on
    campaigns, giving the best results possible.

    Reduce user acquisition cost

    Get highly engaged users

    Use multivariate testing to save time and target what is
    working, with the right targeting.

    Find profitable audiences with less media spend.

    Real clicks from real people!!

    Get in touch, [email protected]

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