One of the more common requests we get from smaller developers is to run ads on Google UAC. Unfortunately, Google UAC can take significant budgets to make work – in this episode we explain why this is the case – and provide some numbers to illustrate this.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Today, I’m going to talk about Google UAC and why we do not typically recommend it for relatively early stage apps. By this I mean typically apps that have anything under 5000 to 20,000 dollars a month in spend. Now for very many app developers, this can come as a surprising recommendation – after all isn’t Google among the biggest companies in the world? 

Doesn’t Google get such a huge chunk of its revenue from ads? And doesn’t it own one of the most powerful advertising engines from the world? That is all true. However, Google’s UAC (Universal App Campaign) is very, very much a black box. What that means is that it’s so reliant on machine learning and artificial intelligence that it’s very, very much geared towards seeing large advertisers succeed because it really requires a large volume of data for any advertisers to start to see success with. 

Let me illustrate with more specifics. Now, let’s take an example where we have a Google UAC campaign. And let’s assume your CPA is $50. Google typically recommends that you get at least 10 conversions per day for this campaign and that would mean you want to have a daily budget of at least $500. Now, that’s assuming you’ve hit the CPA of $50 going out the gate which you are not guaranteed to hit. 

So you have a daily budget of something like $700 or $800 a day to account for CPAs over $50. And additionally Google’s learning phase takes anywhere from three to five weeks before the campaign start to stabilize, before you start to see stable numbers, before you start to see reliable metrics coming back in terms of your CPA. 

Now if you were to assume that at the very least this is taking 20 days for the learning to be completed, and if you have to assume anything from $700 to $800 a day multiplied 20 days – that’s really $14,000 spent just on your learning phase before your ROIs and your CPAs come within the range that want them to be. So that $14,000 – $15,000 budget can be extremely high for most app developers. 

Now while we’ve seen very low CPIs, very low CPA for app developers, this is typically a very, very risky proposition for the vast majority of apps unless they tend to have very low CPAs that they want to optimize for. For this reason, we typically don’t recommend using Google UAC campaigns for most app developers as they go out of the gate. 

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