In India, there’s an app for everything – banking, gaming, education, and even helping expectant parents visualise their dream child. It’s no surprise in one of the most productive app markets in the world.
Indian developers launched more than 44,600 mobile apps and games in 2023 alone, averaging almost 4,000 a month. And its market volume and value are sizable.
By 2027, India’s app market — which serves over 700 million smartphone users — is expected to reach approximately $4.8 billion in market volume, an increase of over 50% from 2023.
Given the sheer growth potential, there’s a valuable opportunity for app-based businesses to not just increase their customer base but to also unlock profits.
One way to do that is for businesses to relook their customer acquisition strategy: Engaging with the most relevant customers via app campaigns can improve their return on investment.
That is especially relevant for startups because some may find it hard to secure fresh capital in a funding winter fuelled by an uncertain macroeconomic climate and heightened investor expectations.
In fact, a break from tradition might be in order. Typically, app campaigns rely on single event optimisation to reach customers. But a multievent bidding setup, which optimises for several events across the marketing funnel, can augment results.
The rule of thumb: Single event optimisation
Typically, app-based businesses rely on single event optimisation to meet their profitability goals and boost return on ad spend. That means their campaign bids are tuned to optimise for a single event or signal, such as app installation or purchase. It’s a tried-and-tested approach.
But there is room for tweaks. In sectors such as banking and financial services, gaming, and automotives, the conversion cycle can take between 10 to 15 days, or much longer. As a result, businesses may face low conversion event volumes at the start, which hinders campaign optimisation.
What sticks is that sectors with naturally lengthy conversion cycles often need to expand their customer base quickly and at scale to achieve profitability. So how can marketers tackle the issue of customers taking a while to convert? They can tweak their app marketing strategy to cast a wider net.
A way to profitable growth: Multievent bidding
A wider, richer pool of signals across the marketing funnel can make a real difference to a campaign. This is where a campaign powered by multievent bidding comes in.
When you run an App campaign that uses multievent bidding, your campaign optimises for key events across a customer’s journey that drive the desired conversion. The events, identified with the power of Google AI, increase the number of signals to your campaign and the opportunities you have for optimisation.
The multievent bidding setup also assigns distinct weightages to different events in the marketing funnel, so your campaign reaches audiences who’re most likely to convert. Additionally, the setup uses Google’s target return on ad spend bidding strategy, which lets you price your bid according to the likelihood of conversion.
With conversion event weightages and campaign bids optimised in real-time, you’re well-placed to manage your customer acquisition cost, meet your ROI goals, and achieve a more profitable campaign.
To date, we’ve run multievent bidding in over 60 campaigns for businesses across a range of industries, with favourable results.
With multievent bidding, the App campaigns we ran:
The online travel booking platform Goibibo was among those who partnered with us to adopt multievent bidding. That customer acquisition strategy, which is especially useful for businesses that experience a seasonal surge in demand, helped Goibibo reach high-value customers who spent more than ₹3,500 on its app.
Through multievent bidding, Goibibo’s App campaign was optimised for three different events across the funnel. Within two weeks, the campaign scaled and performed better than legacy campaigns, converting high-value customers even as it engaged with those who were exploring their options and not yet ready to book.
In the finance industry, we saw how multievent bidding helped India’s leading app for online investors, Groww, to stand out in the marketplace when the pool of potential new customers seemed stagnant.
Through a three-step process, the platform set up its campaigns to optimise towards new customers, especially those who would help it achieve better returns. The first step involved adopting a full-funnel strategy and optimising for all conversion events in a customer’s journey, from sign-up to making an investment.
Next, Groww customised the campaign by assigning a different weightage to each event. This ensured that customers who were close to conversion were prioritised by the campaign.
Lastly, it optimised its bid values towards customers with the highest lifetime value, that is, customers who frequently transacted with them.
Groww’s director of acquisition, Pradheep Manivel, says, “The combined approach of optimising towards the full user journey and value-based bidding helped us not only make our acquisition efficient at the top of the funnel, but also acquire more valuable users, which is key to our business. This has become an integral part of our acquisition strategy as we look at business ahead.”
So if you’re an app-based business looking to drive profitable growth, now might be the time to uplevel your customer acquisition strategy with multievent bidding.
Contributors: Rahul Panse, App Specialist; Viplove Khushalani, Advertising Solutions Architect
