Estimating campaign results without conversion tracking

We’ve all been there.

You’re running a campaign with a decent budget, but there’s no conversion tracking in place.

Because of that, you can’t quite report more than cost, impressions, CTR, and clicks. As a marketer, that’s not really a spot you wanna be in. Well, unless you could find a way to get close enough to reality without relying on engineering 😉

Here are three ways to achieve that:

1. Use the overall conversion rate of your product: on apps, for example, you can know how many in-app purchases you sell daily in total, but not necessarily by traffic source. In this case, you could take your app’s overall conversion rate and assume your campaigns perform similarly.

2. Ask BI for the number of conversions registered in your products’ database during a given time: let’s say they tell you that you had 92 sales registered on your database last month. If you divide that by the number of visitors you had in the same period, now you got an assumed conversion rate that you could use.

3. You can get a benchmark from a market study: this is not ideal, and I wouldn’t recommend this approach to make any big decisions, but I’ve seen it being used for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Still, if your company doesn’t know how much it’s selling, then maybe that’s a strong signal you might have bigger problems to worry about.

By the way, using assumptions like this (in the right way) is a clear indication of seniority. The opposite is also true. So learning how to feel comfortable with using proxies is a great way to get to a next level in your career.

⭐ Extra tip: when reporting results using proxies and assumptions, it’s always a good idea to mention how you got that number somewhere in your presentation.

Easy App Reports and a new newsletter: App Bakers 🥐

If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I built a SaaS with a close friend a year and a half ago. Back then, I thought that If we got 20 subscribers in the first year, I’d consider it an ultimate success.

Fast forward to now, we reached 170 customers from all over the world. Pretty mindblowing, to be honest. It’s incredible what happens when you build something that solves a problem you deeply understand – and there’s enough demand for it.

One of our main initiatives is this newsletter on Analytics and Marketing for apps. We’re calling it App Bakers.

So if you’re here for all the app-specific content, you might want to check it out: click here.

I’m personally curating the content that is going there and I’ll also write/record original content whenever possible.

Takes on Apple Search Ads

In December, I spoke at the App Growth Week about Apple Search Ads and the impact of UA on organic rankings. Now they released the full interview on YouTube, so I thought maybe you’d like to watch it:

App Growth Week | Evolution of Apple Search Ads and effective UA strategies for 2023

Some of the questions I covered:

• What are the best strategies for Apple Search Ads in 2023?
• What to expect from new App Store ad placements?
• Do installations from Apple Search Ads contribute to higher keyword rankings?

🛠 Tools I’m using

HelloNext is a web-based platform that enables users to manage and prioritize product feedback from their customers. It offers a variety of features such as customizable feedback boards, voting systems, and integrations with popular tools like Slack and Trello. I use HelloNext on Easy App Reports because it’s simple to understand and manage all customer suggestions, with that in hand we can priotize every single sprint fast and easily.

📕 Books I’m reading

The Great CEO Within is a comprehensive guide to building and scaling a successful business, written by veteran CEO and executive coach, Matt Mochary. The book emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and continuous learning as key traits for successful leaders and provides practical insights and advice on topics such as creating a vision, building a strong team, setting goals and metrics, developing a company culture, and managing growth. With valuable insights from Mochary’s own experiences as a CEO and executive coach, “The Great CEO Within” is an essential read for entrepreneurs and CEOs who want to take their businesses to the next level.

Quote of the week

It’s a cliché question to ask, What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: Well, thank God I don’t have cancer – The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.

Resurfaced using Readwise<

If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I bought an app a couple of months ago.

Then I recorded myself creating its new text metadata (title, subtitle, keywords, promotional text, and description) in Brazilian Portuguese – obviously.

The video below was recorded at 5 am, and I wasn’t at home, so the quality isn’t great. Still, I think it’s a nice example of a non-scripted “quick and dirty” kind of optimization:

So on the 23rd of September, our first app release was approved by Apple.

The results were instant:

🔥 8.7x more impressions: 107 to 939 (per week)

🔥 8.2x more downloads: 5 to 41 (per week)

Not a lot, but, hey, we’re going places!

Then it was time to understand why exactly this happened.

I was able to track down a couple of keywords that are responsible for this result: “tela de carregamento” (charging screen), and “papel parede natureza” (nature wallpaper).

We’re not ranking well in the other search terms to make any difference, so I’m just ignoring those.

“Well, but it’s just 45 downloads a week”

Yes. And here’s how I see it:

• Brazil went from being our market #20 to being our market #2, right behind the US. That with just one round. Mind-blowing. What else can we do in other markets, then?
• We know we can rank in the top 25 for queries with a search score of 30 or lower now, a crucial piece of information for our next round;
• We got results right off the bat.

“What about keywords added to the Promotional Text field?”

Yeah, we’re not ranking for any of those. Apple is still not indexing it.

It’s on the roadmap

We plan to decrease our pricing now. $5,99/week for a charging animation app is borderline insane.

Once we do that, we’ll have another chance to tweak our keywords, as well as maybe launch a new in-app event.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do next, feel free to reach out.

📕 What I’ve been reading

New Ad Placement Options – Apple Search Ads: Apple continues to push its ad game aggressively. Now they added placements on the Today Tab and… The Product Page tab. That means developers can finally buy their space on a competitor’s page. Interesting.

Creating an email lifecycle “welcome/onboarding series” that actually drives results: I love every single part of this post by Elena Verna. Idk who said that onboarding emails always drive results. Most of the time it actually doesn’t. So she shares four pillars on how to create welcome series your users will actually want to click.

One-year challenge: Turn a $20k Investment into $500k: I’ve been following this challenge since day 1. He’s using Facebook to grow and it turns out it’s working pretty well. There are many mud-throwers at Meta right now and companies are pulling investments from there. My take? That might be a great reason to consider Meta if the traffic costs are going down there. Why not?

(reading time: 3 minutes)

The danger of trying to beat the algorithm is that it usually leads to short-term hacks and spammy tactics that tend never to last.

I learned that the hard way, so I do my best not to think like that.

Instead, I try to understand what’s the game I’m playing and its rules.

Let’s take the App Store as an example

Although Apple provides guidelines for app developers, they never disclose their algorithm’s details.

So the best I can do is to test stuff and see what happens – which sometimes also includes observing what the others are doing.

On top of that, I also like to think like the enemy.

I remind myself that the App Store is like a supermarket, filled with millions of products. There, Apple is the owner, and I’m just one of the products they have on their shelf.

And if I put myself in Apple’s shoes, I can think about their goals and then try to use that information to my advantage.

For example, we could assume that Apple always aims to delight their customers while taking the iPhone and the App Store to gain more market share and revenue. Therefore, they probably need apps that are: high-quality, unique, trending, from top brands, or that leverage iPhone’s unique features.

From that, I might realize my app doesn’t use any of the iPhone’s new features. Or maybe my customers are leaving tons of negative reviews. Or maybe my retention sucks. Or all of the above.

Therefore, I’m probably not the best one to recommend. So you start thinking about how you could change that.

Suddenly, we’re aiming to go the extra mile and deliver something others will struggle to keep up with – instead of blindly trying to scam our way to the top.

This doesn’t exclude the hard work of creating the best metadata I can and trying to squeeze performance from every little technical aspect of it. Instead, it means that I can also take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and try to identify the big leaps I could make.

Applying this concept to other algorithms

But it doesn’t stop with the App Store. We can apply the same principle to any other black-box ecosystem you’re dealing with.

You’ll notice that your mindset will genuinely change if you do that. Instead of thinking about how to hack the system, you’ll start thinking about how you can play a better game – and this is one of the things true experts do that the rest don’t.

Ps: if you try this approach, I recommend following the news about these platforms. Press releases and documentation updates are a true gold mine if you want to be one step ahead of the others.

Putting it into action

Stop for 10 seconds to think: why is Instagram making the changes they’re doing? What could you do to play their new game better?

Thinking like the enemy on ASO

In my ASO course, we go more in-depth on how you can think like Apple and Google to rank your app on the top and how you can snowball your growth. If you’re struggling to grow your app, consider taking my course. It’s available on-demand here.