5x the ad spend for a mobile-app performance team in Southern Europe

Challenge

The team was buying subscription-app installs in-house, leaning on each platform’s own native rules to watch campaigns overnight and hold the funnel together at every stage (CPM, CTR, CPI, CPA, ROAS). It worked for a while. Native rules stop short in the three places that matter most for app UA:

• They cannot react to trials, subscriptions or any other custom in-app event
• They cannot scale a winner by duplicating it into a fresh campaign
• They cannot rank top and bottom performers, filter on more than one campaign name, or split a decision by creative tag or GEO

Those gaps capped how fast the team could put money behind a winner. They also wanted to buy on Snapchat, where there is no native rules tool at all, and had nobody in-house with the hours to run it properly. They came to us to take the daily buying and optimisation off their plate.

Solution

We started on Snapchat, the channel they had never been able to staff, and ran it alongside their existing in-house Meta buying as a straight comparison. With our buyers on the account around the clock and creative tests running continuously, CPA came down in the first month.

On the back of that they moved their Meta buying across to us as well, and we became the team running the accounts.

We monitor ad performance daily. Every account carries a written set of plays that says what we scale, what we cut, at what threshold and on what evidence, and we work them every day rather than waiting for a weekly review. That is what lets us hold the volume side of their scaling strategy together, which at peak means staying on top of thousands of live creatives per app.

We also duplicate and relaunch winning campaigns far more often than they could in-house, which is where most of the spend growth came from.

The portfolio runs across 20+ ad accounts, so every Monday each of their account owners gets the same top-creatives and top-audiences readout from us. Everyone sees what is working and what has been cut, and nothing gets rediscovered twice.

‍

Results

Handing the accounts over gave the client’s own buyers their week back. Their team now spends around 30% less time on campaign management, because the daily optimisation, the scaling decisions and the creative rotation sit with us.

Every new app they launch starts from the same playbook, which we then calibrate to that app’s own economics inside the first two weeks rather than starting from a blank page.

Ad spend across the portfolio is up 5x, funded by the efficiency we found rather than by accepting a worse CPA.