Optimising Ad Campaigns: Growth, Retention, and Everything in Between
From common pitfalls to real-time insights and the art of visualising performance, Charles F Manning, Chief Executive Officer & President at Kochava, deep dives into the brains and data behind successful ad strategies.
In the dynamic and ever-evolving world of digital advertising, everyone’s chasing more users, more engagement, more ROI—ideally yesterday. But between buzzwords like “attribution modeling” and dashboards that look like a spaceship cockpit, it’s easy to forget that behind every campaign is a messy, beautiful mix of data and psychology.
When it comes to ad campaigns—clicks don’t always mean conversions, and one mistimed push notification can ruin a perfectly good user’s day. “Marketers don’t want app installs. They want
in-app purchases, registrations, content engagement—you name it. 100 installs that perform meaningfully post-install are far more valuable than 1,000 installs that quickly churn,” says Charles F Manning, Chief Executive Officer & President at Kochava.
In this conversation with Martechvibe, Manning breaks down more myths around the marketer-campaign equation, and talks about metrics that actually matter.
Full interview:
How does Kochava’s mobile attribution analytics connect user acquisition to long-term retention?
In truth, marketers don’t want app installs. They want in-app purchases, registrations, content engagement—you name it. 100 installs that perform meaningfully post-install are far more valuable than 1,000 installs that quickly churn. The install is just the gateway, but if it doesn’t lead to down-funnel engagement and retention, then it’s a dead end.
So, while we help app marketers measure every install back to the source that drove it (across both paid and owned media), the real potency of Kochava is the capacity to measure in-app sessions, events, and rich metadata throughout the funnel, plus retargeting efforts to re-engage existing users.
This enables the marketer to understand user quality, retention, and lifetime value that install tracking alone doesn’t deliver. We also provide AI-powered predictive churn modeling to forecast user churn before it happens, enabling the marketer to re-engage at-risk users before uninstall.
What are some of the most common mistakes advertisers make when setting up mobile ad campaigns?
Lack of a measurement plan. Build your measurement plan up front. Ensure you’re already measuring the in-app events and key performance indicators (KPIs) that define success. There’s nothing worse than launching campaigns only to find that you’re not measuring what matters to your business and therefore can’t prove success through the reporting data.
If you’re running a retargeting campaign and the goal is getting users who previously installed your app to start a free trial, make sure you’re accurately measuring free trial events and are able to syndicate those events to your media partner.
Not accounting for ad fraud. Don’t forget about ad fraud. It’s out there and it’s costing marketers a fortune. Kochava provides out-of-the-box, AI-powered ad fraud prevention. Our fraud prevention protects your ad spend dollars by detecting and mitigating common fraud tactics such as click flooding, install hijacking, SDK spoofing, and more.
Accepting default attribution settings. Don’t be satisfied with default lookback windows and configurable attribution settings. These are the control levers that allow you to make sure your campaigns are being measured with veracity and true causality. Talk with your support team or whoever you choose as your MMP to understand best practices for optimising configuration attribution to align with the objectives of your campaigns.
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How does real-time data visualisation help in optimising ad campaigns mid-flight?
Real-time, data-driven visualisation empowers organisations to assess key performance indicators (KPIs) mid-flight and quickly refine their strategies. Those KPIs can be tailored based on an organisation’s desired business outcomes. For a streaming app, that might mean seeing the install-to-trial-start conversion ratio. If they see that a particular network, campaign, or creative is significantly underperforming, they can shift that spend somewhere else where the install-to-event ratio is optimal.
For a quick service restaurant, the KPI may be install-to-first-order conversions. It’s really having that quick access to observe these tailored KPIs against live campaigns as they’re unfolding; that means you don’t have to wait 30 days until the campaign is over to course-correct and optimise. You can make smarter decisions and fine-tune strategies on the fly.
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What role does cross-platform data integration play in improving attribution accuracy?
We no longer live in a one-device-to-one-user world. Consumers have multiple connected devices across mobile, tablet, CTV, web, and beyond. To fully understand the user journey and path to purchase/conversion, you need a cross-platform measurement strategy. That’s why Kochava built IdentityLink.
It enables organisations to connect the dots via identity resolution across all platforms and connected devices. If a user’s journey starts through a mobile app install attributed to a social media ad on TikTok, and then later they’re engaging on your website, or watching content in your CTV app, you can observe that and optimise your cross-channel, cross-platform strategies. It helps you understand where your users are truly coming from and how to reach them on the right device, with the right message, at the right moment.
How can attribution aid in saving user acquisition costs?
You can only analyse what you measure. If you’re not integrated with an MMP like Kochava, your app campaigns are being measured in silos across each different media partner. We enable organisations to obtain a single source of truth—to measure all campaigns across all partners through one dashboard. This enables you to deduplicate conversions and understand influence across your media mix.
Further, through our cost aggregation tool, you can integrate with the cost APIs of your partners to pull all spend data into our platform—allowing you to see cost per impression, cost per click, and cost per acquisition. Even more importantly though, you have that rich post-install event and revenue data to calculate beyond acquisition costs and see return on ad spend at day 7, 30, 90, and so forth. By obtaining this 360-degree perspective, you truly understand costs vs. returns and can optimise for maximum efficiency.
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