Universal App Campaigns Now Available To All

Until very recently, Google offered two main ways of promoting mobile apps: using app extensions to link to your app from a text ad, or running the now defunct App Promotion Ads (later known as Mobile App Install Campaigns). Now it is possible to stream-line all your app promotion efforts through Universal App Campaigns, which is fresh out of beta and available to all advertisers. In this blog we explore the new features that Universal App Campaigns offer, and how they can help advertisers promote their mobile apps.

What are Universal App Campaigns?

Universal App Campaigns are designed to streamline the whole process of promoting mobile apps, by dynamically serving and optimising ads according to your Cost-Per-Install target, across all Google networks. This enables you to reach users across:

+ Google Search network (+ partners)

+ Google Display Network

+ YouTube

+ AdMob (inside other apps)

+ Play Store

They are currently only available for Android, and there has been no word on making this available for iOS as yet.

How do they work?

The advertiser inputs four lines of ad copy, a Cost-per-install target, a daily budget and an optional YouTube video. Google will then dynamically optimise your campaigns to get maximum app install volume at your target CPI. This includes automatically determining how much you bid, which network to serve your ads on, whether to show a text or image ad, and which lines of ad copy to serve. Your ads are automatically created; app images, videos, and app descriptions are pulled in directly from your Google Play store listing to generate all different ad formats.

The beauty of Universal App Campaigns is that everything is out-of-the-box. This means that no code is required to track app installs; all conversion tracking is implemented automatically when you set up your campaign. All optimisation and ad serving is automatic, so all you have to do is set up your campaigns, set your target CPI and let Google work its magic. According to the results we have seen so far, the best thing you can do to improve download volume is increase your budget!

The results so far

Although it is early days, the results we have been seeing so far are extremely encouraging. For one of our clients, we compared the stats from their top performing month when running Mobile App Install campaigns on the Search and Display network to the last month’s Universal App Campaign stats. Here are the results:

+ 574% increase in app downloads

+ 67% decrease in Cost-per-install

+ 6.8% increase in Conversion rate

For another client, the target CPI of £1.50 was achieved within a day of launching the campaign, and this has been maintained while spend and volume of downloads has increased 10 fold, and shows no signs of abating.

If you have an app you’d like to promote and would like to learn more about Universal App Campaigns, just give us call!

To view this blog written by Will Midgley on Periscopix's website, please click here.