How to scale TikTok as a channel to further Hallow’s growth, incorporating seasonal campaign launches with a specific focus on key markets to support ambitious growth goals.

We began by testing targeting options with TikTok, to determine appropriate segments within the potential audience. We then established a creative testing mechanism that focused on identifying creative wins quickly and efficiently; eventually unlocking User Generated Content as a key to success on TikTok, and ultimately expanding to additional markets. Phiture also helped Hallow with the big Lent and Easter campaign launches on TikTok.

On TikTok we were able to see early results within 3-5 weeks, which led to an increase in installs and purchases of almost 300%. Since then, TikTok has been established as one of the key marketing channels for Hallow. During the main events for Lent and Easter; we managed to scale up the volumes while maintaining performance efficiencies achieving increases in installs of 412% for Lent, and 230% for Easter.

Once Upon launched in 2017 and represented a new frontier for the photo books industry, being app-only. After several years of sustained organic growth Once Upon was ready to add to its app product and expand its customer base. The motivated team wanted to acquire as many new customers as possible, however it was important to maintain a low cost per install and cost per engagement. For Once Upon, the key engagement metric is known as cost per second post. This is very industry-specific and refers to the second time a user posts a picture in the app.

Phiture, who manages Once Upon’s app advertising, was tasked with finding a solution that could reduce the costs of such engagement while still keeping pace with ambitious acquisition goals.

Phiture’s Consultants took time to analyze Once Upon’s existing identifying Apple Search Ads (ASA) as a key strategic area for improvement for Once Upon, and presented Skai’s App Marketing solution as a great fit for their needs. To increase volume at an efficient cost per acquisition and maintain a profitable ROI, Phiture tested different strategies in different markets, including experimentation with distribution order rules, targetting returning users, and launching weekend campaigns.

These experiments quickly improved the performance of Once Upon’s ASA campaigns and drove outstanding results. In addition, for the first time, Once Upon’s mobile measurement partner data was organized with advertising performance data in a single platform. This allowed for high-level optimization and data-driven decision-making, ultimately contributing to more awareness and business for Once Upon.

Phiture drove big improvements to performance which included a dramatic 32% year-over-year decrease in cost per install and a 61% year-over-year decrease in cost per second post. This represented a ROI of over 100% in the first months of the engagement in 2020, while for the whole of 2021, Phiture achieved an incredible ROI of approximately 240%.

Additionally, Phiture nearly tripled the number of Apple’s App Store targets in the process testing over 12,500 keywords.

SoundCloud is an artist-first platform powered by an ecosystem of creators uploading content for consumption by SoundCloud’s vast user base of listeners. Providing creators with a distribution platform and the opportunity to interact with millions of unique listeners creates a feedback loop benefiting both creators and listeners. The more music creators upload, the more opportunity they have to build a following, whilst also providing a richer experience for listeners on the platform.

With this in mind, SoundCloud seeks to increase the number of first time uploaders (creators) to return and upload more music. A cluster segmentation analysis showed that early lifecycle behaviors and validation metrics affect creator retention down the line. SoundCloud identified three critical events that, if performed within the first few days of a creator’s first upload, will lead to:

• Higher long-term creator retention and lower churn for core creator activities
• Higher session counts
• Higher subscription conversion rates

Increasing retention is a common goal amongst industry leaders – and is becoming increasingly difficult as the competitive landscape for sharing and streaming music becomes crowded. Leveraging personalized lifecycle marketing is one of the key levers to activate & engage new creators early on by nudging them toward key creator actions early on in their lifecycle.

Understanding this shift away from simply educating users during onboarding, the goal was to design an experience that prompts creators to complete these actions within their first three days, i.e., with a sense of urgency.

+18.56% uplift in creator onboarding – i.e., creators completing key metrics identified by SoundCloud.

Motivating new users to complete key events within their first three days helps to reduce the time spent by artists getting set up on the platform, increasing their opportunity to interact with listeners and build a following. Optimizing onboarding in this way, utilizing innovative new research and concepts, helps to balance the quantitative with qualitative. It is important to utilize psychological concepts as a lever for CRM experiments, as this approach can help to identify high-impact tests based on well-researched concepts that are rooted in evidence-based, human psychology.

EasyPark is an award-winning app that provides forward-thinking digital parking solutions for drivers in European cities. By using cutting-edge technology that helps users find and manage parking sessions right from their smartphone, as well as providing EV charging assistance for electric cars, EasyPark helps to build smarter, more liveable cities, one parking spot at a time.

To bolster its user acquisition efforts and drive cross-channel impact across locales, EasyPark collaborated with Phiture’s performance marketing team and sought to build on the already successful App Store Optimization engagement (ASO). Together, the challenge was to scale EasyPark’s Google App Campaign spend within their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) targets with creative optimization strategies to place the app in the best position possible to convert new users in the post-COVID market.

The revamped structure brought impact almost immediately, with Phiture’s performance marketing team collaborating with EasyPark’s marketing team to devise new testing strategies across 14 European markets. The numbers showed instant improvements in installs to 1000 impressions (IPM) within the first month of testing new creatives — a +32% increase from the previous month.

Phiture’s campaign initiatives led to the optimization of EasyPark’s account strategy, resulting in the highest ad spend of all time while keeping the CPA under the specified target. Install rates increased by 47% over three months — higher than the all-time average — which can be attributed to successful cross-service synergy with ASO. In addition, in-app conversion rates improved by 6%, and we produced some of the highest IPM performance metrics ever recorded. The last few months had the highest inventory costs and most intense auction pressures to date — the average cost per thousand impressions was almost double that of the previous two years. However, it was offset with carefully planned creative refreshes and campaign optimization hacks.

Clue were already one of the world’s leading menstruation tracker apps when they first approached Phiture, helping over 11.6 million users across 180 countries better understand their bodies and take control of their reproductive health. To support their continued growth, Phiture were engaged to build a robust, holistic user acquisition strategy around ASO and ASA that would help increase visibility and drive conversion across key locales. The target was to incrementally increase monthly active users month-on-month and achieve significant user acquisition by the end of 2019 — as well as share our industry expertise with Clue’s growth team to help them independently manage ASO in the future. 

After 3 months of managing Clue’s App Store and Google Play Store listings, the team conducted a total of 8 experiments and recorded install uplifts of 7%, 6%, 4%, and 6% in the USA, Germany, Mexico, and Brazil respectively. For ASA, the scaling factors deployed by the team allowed us to identify which markets had high CPAs relative to the USA. With these insights, we were able to streamline spending and optimize ROI, driving CPA down by 35% in 2 months.

As much as we enjoy reaching milestones, the real value lies in learning how we got there. Above all, our findings revealed that there’s no one size fits all solution; a conversion driver in the USA might not have the same effect in Mexico or Germany or vice versa. We signed the engagement off by sharing a comprehensive experiment backlog with Clue’s internal growth team, highlighting all our results, conclusions, and recommendations, leaving them well-positioned to develop and launch their own mobile growth strategies moving forward.

Welcome Email Send Volume Increased Drastically

Within one day, daily email sends increased by over 600%. Projected over the course of a year, millions of additional new users will receive Welcome Emails because of this change.

Impact on Activation Metrics

Since playing tracks and liking content are two important metrics for SoundCloud to continually grow, the Phiture team focused on influencing new users to complete these actions early in their lifecycle. These Welcome Emails show an average uplift over control of 4.5% in Plays within 1 day and 4.2% in Likes within 1 day with 99% statistical significance.

The data shows us that by sending millions more Welcome Emails per year, an extra 507k users will play a track within 1 day and 315k users will like a track within 1 day. These are key activation steps that are highly correlated with longer-term engagement and retention.

This minor – but critical – adjustment in targeting logic is likely to make a massive impact on SoundCloud’s key metrics.

To identify a product-channel fit in order to best engage with the Burner user base and provide them with relevant content. In particular, the Burner team wanted to thoroughly test out Email as a new channel. Implementing the functionality natively would require significant time and resources on their side. Since Burner is highly focused on privacy, users’ email addresses are not collected during onboarding, so the traditional “push first strategy” did not necessarily apply.

The team at Phiture successfully identified that the optimal product-channel fit for Burner was a combination of in-app messages, newsfeed, and email. They were able to use in-app messages to enable a whole new channel (email), doing something that would normally need to be done in the product. There was high engagement with the in-app messages as a format and immediate validation that users wanted to receive more information via email. They were able to significantly improve email collection efforts through iterative optimization of the in-app message by 39% over the initial campaign performance. The email database can now be used to send informative and educational emails to users, further increasing engagement and retention. The engagement with the different cards and topics ranged from a low 5% to some cards that saw a very high engagement rate of 45%. This variation across different newsfeed cards helped us fine-tune content for our onboarding email series.

The newsfeed onboarding strategy provided additional value by providing insight into what users were clicking on most within their feed. In turn, this gave us an understanding of what topics users wanted more information about and what they were interested in during their first weeks with Burner. This insight helped to inform the onboarding email content, increasing the relevance of new-user communications.