Cost Per What?

It’s 2016. We are living in a world where technology can help us better understand the return on our marketing investments. Sophisticated tracking and attribution platforms are able to open our eyes into the insights of each publisher’s ad spend and understand the Lifetime Value (LTV) of the users we are acquiring. The question we should be asking ourselves is, why are we still fixated on maintaining a certain Cost per Install (CPI) across all publishers?

Yes, companies today are still setting CPI goals horizontally across all publishers and reducing budgets from those that do not meet the CPI criteria. If people are doing this across multiple publishers, how can we expect to scale successfully on the most influential advertising destinations such as Facebook.

Each marketing moment or digital impression represents a unique value to a marketer. If unable to differentiate the value between the publishers, let alone audiences, there is a high likelihood of suboptimal results in a marketing program.

Let’s assume for a moment that you do have the tools to measure LTV across all publishers and understand the performance of each to optimize accordingly. These same macro concepts also apply to more nuanced actions within a single publisher. Take for example Facebook, who is one of the most powerful user acquisition publishers for mobile app installs. How can these cross-publisher learnings be applied to a marketer’s Facebook investment? Let’s explore this..

Not all audiences are created the same. Lookalikes versus Precise Interests versus Behaviors all behave in different ways. It is imperative that you are using the tools to help you understand how each one of these targeting options are performing for you. For example, a gaming company with a very strong IP saw a 78% lower 5 day return on investment (ROI) on interest targeting versus Lookalike targeting for their Tier 1 country targeting. This doesn’t mean that interest targeting is a bad option on Facebook — it means that the users being targeted via Interests have a lower value. So it is important that Skai signals to Facebook the value of those users to you.

Without using a partner that can automate your bid management, you will find it very difficult to scale your program on Facebook, as each one of these decisions would have to be done manually.

If you are looking for a solution that aligns to your internal marketing goals and will help you scale your Facebook program profitably, let us show you how LTV buying can be a game changer to your company.