How to Develop an App Retargeting Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide

If you can bring back more users to the app, your app profitability is most likely to be in the pink of health as returning users are usually the most valuable. But how do you remind the user to keep coming back to your app?

The answer is by displaying them retargeting ads.

What is Mobile App Retargeting?

Mobile app retargeting is the process of showing the ads to the users who have already a user or visited your mobile apps. They generally target the user to enhance the app engagement by reminding the users of the services or products in which they have earlier shown an interest.

Why Do You Need to Retarget Your Mobile App Users?

Users have fragile attention to your app. The attention span is available only till another app (even if it is not your competitor) gains it. Retargeting ads serve the purpose of reinstating the interest of the user back in the products until they make the purchase.

Benefits of Retargeting Mobile Users

Following are some of the top advantages of running retargeting ads for your mobile app users:

• Convert more sales
• Reach the prospect audience
• Boost brand value
• Improve marketing ROI
• Develop insights into customer journeys

Steps fo Building an App Retargeting Strategy

1. A different strategy for lapsed and new users

Your lapsed users and new users may have different perspectives for your brands. They may have different needs as well. If you are running the similar ad campaigns for both sets of the audience then you are doing it wrong, at least for one of them. Separate them and then plan different strategies for both of them.

Many advertisers tend to ignore lapsed users. However, an appropriate marketing strategy is very effective in converting them as well. Depending on your app model and general purchase journey, you can gain their attention back and drive more sales for your app. For example with a grocery shopping app, some users purchase on weekly while others opt for monthly purchases. Accordingly, you can target the users by showing ads after a month to the users who showed interest in your products but didn’t purchase within a week. Depending on your app model and general purchase behavior, you can use different data points as well as hypotheses to win lapsed users.

2. Personalize

As per Think with Google, more than half of the smartphone users are favorable towards mobile sites/apps that remember who they are and their past behavior. By showing the ads of products in which they have already shown interest, you gain the chances of pushing the users in the sales funnel towards the conversion.

Obviously, you are allowed to experiment with product categories and similar product recommendations. Along with that, you can also suggest more offerings and features of the exact product in the ads. Leverage the rich media ad format that can offer ads with multiple click choices and interactive ad experience to gain higher engagement. Video retargeting ad is another ad format that is getting quite popular these days as an increasing number of users are consuming videos.

3. Measure incrementality along with RoAS

As discussed in the point above, there are different types of ad formats that you can leverage with programmatic retargeting ads. Video, rich media, native, and interstitial ads are some of the commonly used formats among marketers these days. When it comes to tracking the campaign performance, things get even more complicated taking ad channels into considerations. Social media, websites, and apps are some of the channels where you would be running your ads.

With the permutation and combinations of ad formats and channels, it gets quite hectic to track what is actually performing for you and what is not. That's where you need to keep a close watch on the incremental lift calculation. It helps you see the impact of different touchpoints in the conversion journey on your revenue. Accordingly, you can optimize your ad spends for future campaigns.

4. Frequency capping

Frequency capping is the limit up to which you want to display your ads to the user. As the bombarding, the user with the same ad can cause a negative impact that lowers your brand value as well as reducing your ad score. Different app models and users interactions have different suggestions for the frequency cap.

You can occasionally experiment with the number and see what drives the most optimum results for you. To ensure that you are delivering valuable recommendations with your ads, you can experiment with the formats and channels as suggested above. It will maintain some freshness in the ads and will not annoy the user.

Final Note:

App retargeting does help advertisers in a big way. However, there is an underlying condition that it meets the right practices for it. The audience downloaded your app but did not make a purchase can be prompted to get engaged again with retargeting ads that meet the steps mentioned in the blog. If you are keen on leveraging the retargeting strategies available with RevX's mobile marketing platform, then you can schedule a consultation by reaching us at marketing@affle.com.

Varsha Singh is a Digital Marketing professional from Bangalore at Affle India Pvt Ltd. I use my articles to provide quality content & tutorials to assist marketers.