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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💰 Why we are bidding very high on Facebook’s value-optimized campaigns, but not on Snapchat or TikTok

🧮 How marketers justify high CPIs and CPMs on Facebook

🔬 Precise targeting is very impactful; but we are going to learn to live without it

📜 What we did pre-2016 is going to help us navigate the future

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

As marketers speculate as to what UA will look like in a post-IDFA world, there may be clues in the past as to what the future might hold. 

It is worthwhile to look at this via an example. Right now, for some of the whale-driven games that we are working on, we bid north of $20 for an install on Facebook’s value optimized campaigns. These campaigns sometimes have CPMs of over $100 on Facebook’s audience network.

We’re comfortable with bidding what might have seemed like astronomical amounts even a few years ago – only because Facebook’s precise targeting ensures that we have a very high probability of getting very high value users that would be ROI positive with these bids.

Without an IDFA, Facebook is no longer able to identify with precision as to who the very high value users are – or optimize for these users. What might that world look like?

This doesn’t have to be a hypothetical exercise – because there was a time before lookalikes and event optimized campaigns. There may be some clues to the future in some of our experiences before 2016 when Facebook’s AEO, or event optimized campaigns were introduced. 

Pre-AEO, we just optimized for installs, even for the most whale-driven games. We bid for installs – and knew that some percentage of those would translate into payers, and some percentage of those payers would be whales. 

We trusted that math to back out when we targeted wider/broader audiences on Facebook.

We did this not because we didn’t want to optimize for purchasers or high value purchasers – but because Facebook(or other ad networks) didn’t have the technology to be able to optimize for downstream events.

It’s also worth noting that this paradigm isn’t just a world of the past. 

It’s still present in networks like TikTok or Snap that have CPMs that are a fraction of Facebook – simply because they are primarily going after wide audiences and optimizing for the lowest cost installs (while these do have some form of downstream event optimization, these are acknowledged to be nowhere as powerful as Facebook’s – so the wide lowest-cost install paradigm is the most prevalent in these platforms).

In these platforms, as in Facebook a few years ago, the fact that you couldn’t laser-target high-value payers doesn’t kill you. 

Rather than bid $20 for a high-value user, we just bid $3 for an average user with the understanding that some average users will turn into payers.

The math will change, the ways we target and measure performance will change – but the viability of UA in and of itself *might* not change – as the market for impressions will normalize to reflect the new reality.

UA continued then, and will continue going forward – as marketers will simply target wide audiences, and CPMs and CPIs adjust to mirror a world without any sort of laser targeting.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!