Intelligent Artifice, formerly the Mobile User Acquisition Show

In today’s episode, we take a detour from growth marketing into professional growth with Holly Chen. Holly is a digital marketer and growth advisor, consulting with companies on how to unlock scale and establish growth strategies. She was on our podcast earlier this year - on one of our more insightful episodes to date, where she spoke of how she helped Slack set up cross channel attribution to reverse a declining growth trajectory on mobile.

But today we are talking about Holly’s new project, Ceiling Breakers, a group coaching program for people from underrepresented communities to accelerate their careers into leadership roles. Holly talks about what inspired Ceiling Breakers and how she has been personally impacted by working with leading edge coaches. She outlines why and how guided introspection in the presence of a skilled coach can enable underrepresented leaders to embrace their authentic identities - and step into their power as leaders. This is a fascinating episode on how powerful guided reflection can be in breaking down systemic barriers to diversity. 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🥳 Introducing Ceiling Breakers
🕯️ Why inspired Holly to start her coaching initiative
🔗 The link between a growth mindset and leadership
🧩 Characteristics of a growth mindset
🔭 Understanding the larger context of work
✊🏿 How the BLM movement galvanized uncomfortable conversations
🧑‍🏫 The power of leadership coaching
👔 There is more to work than work
🤹🏻 Skills are only a fraction of what makes up work
⛔ 3 obstacles faced by underrepresented communities in the workplace
🙃 How people overcorrect to battle stereotypes
👬🏾 Why having a like role model is linked to adopting a leadership style
🌿 One leadership style doesn’t fit all
🗣️ How to deal with the negative inner voices
🧺 The wide buffet that is the coaching space
📚 Reading about leadership doesn’t prepare you for a trigger moment
☯️ Below the line vs above the line leadership
👀 How coaches encourage a different perspective
🦋 Work and life are both impacted by deep personal changes
🧑‍💻 Why coaches from the same industry understand issues better
➿ The two-fold advantage of group coaching
🧱 The importance of building a community
💪 How to embrace your diversity as a strength
💬 Hearing others’ stories builds empathy
📝 How it is possible to learn from observing coaching in practice

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-skilled-coaches-can-help-underrepresented-leaders-break-through-ceilings-with-holly-chen-founder-of-ceiling-breakers-formerly-at-slack-google/

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Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

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Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

In today’s episode we will cover the mechanics of how conversion values get incremented in SKAdNetwork. This was one of the open questions from my session at the App Promotion Summit on How to implement SKAdNetwork in a Post-IDFA World. We couldn't dive into this in detail in the main session - so I promised to cover this in a podcast episode - here it is!

(Note: this is a 101 episode as it delves into some fundamental concepts that folks at the session asked for clarity on - so if you’re conversant with these fundamentals, please feel free to skip this.)

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

📊 Understanding conversion values with SKAdNetwork
➕ How values are incremented 64 times
🚶‍♀️ Correlation the user journey to the conversion value
#️⃣ Binary vs decimal number systems
🧮 The math behind conversion

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/skadnetwork-101-understanding-the-mechanics-of-the-updateconversionvalue-method/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

**

Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

Our guest today is Natalie Drozd, app marketing expert. Her specialisation lies in App Store optimization, and growing apps through organic and paid marketing.

In our conversation today, Natalie breaks down her strategies for unearthing the hidden levers in managing what can often appear to be a very opaque black box - Google UAC. She explains how to manage bids, creatives and audiences to drive performance even when there aren't explicit ways to do so. I took a ton of notes from this episode that we were able to implement directly - and I highly recommend this episode as a masterclass in making sense of Google UAC.

As a note: As some of you may know, we had had Natalie on the show a few weeks ago. For various reasons we had to remove that episode - and re-record. This is the revised/finished product - enjoy!

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎰 3 levers you can influence on Google UAC
🎚️ High bids do not guarantee high value users
📍 Placements are key to performance.
😎 How you can use bidding to influence placements
🔃 The tradeoff between broad and targeted audiences - and how they are impacted by placements/bids
🔬 Breaking down the 3 UAC placements
🎛️ How you should choose your mix of placements depending on your goals of ROAS and scale
⚖️ How to use bids to prioritise outcomes
🏇 The competition aspect of placements
📹 Using YouTube for brand-building
☯️ The differences between passive and active marketing and the impact on conversions
🌱 Why YouTube is the place for growth
🎡 The product lifecycle informs ad goals
🧲 The stability of IAP-based campaigns
🎟️ Google’s minimum event volume threshold
🤹 CPA campaigns on Play search and Play browse; CPM campaigns on AdMob
🎞️ How to run video only and display only campaigns
📽️ Running video-only ads on YouTube for less competition
🏁 Different campaigns for the same event will compete with each other
📡 Google’s machine learning uses signals from your app
🗄️ Machine learning is not AI
🔝How to bid for maximum value
🎄 Seasonality impacts performance
🌎 The many factors to consider when targeting worldwide users
🏘️ The way to structure ad groups correctly
🛍️ Choosing the right event for the region depending on market size
🎚️ Event volume is critical
🔬 How to test new creatives in UAC
🗣️ The value of YouTube comments; even the bad ones
👍 All engagement is good engagement
🛒 Testing campaigns in non-core geos
📅 Why you shouldn’t make changes to campaigns more than once a week
🍂 Don’t forget about weekly seasonality
🗺️ How to structure worldwide campaign
📝 How to track changes to campaigns effectively
💅 100k: the number of changes that Google is making to your ad
🤑 Google is invested in marketer success
➕ Turning Google’s knowledge everything into a positive


Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/thinking-out-of-the-black-box-to-win-with-google-uac-with-natalie-drozd-redux/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

**

Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

Our guests today are Brian Krebs and Anthony Cross. Brian is the founder and CEO of MetricWorks, and Anthony formerly at Big Fish Games. In today’s conversation they offer very interesting perspectives on why SKAdNetwork isn’t enough - and what it needs to be supplemented by in order for mobile measurement to truly reflect the value of marketing efforts.

In today’s conversation, we reflect on why measurement in a world where marketing is influenced by multiple variables has no clear and easy answers - certainly none seemingly as simple as the solutions that deterministic measurement offered. The solution then is to embrace the multiple variables involved - and use an approach that is a mix of SKAdNetwork, econometric modeling and intelligent experimentation.

Key highlights:

🌓 Why last touch attribution does not give the whole picture
🏋️‍♂️ Incrementality is THE criteria for marketing effectiveness
🤏 The limitations of SKAdNetwork signals for measurement
🧮 Top statistics-based approaches to measuring incrementality that work
🍼 How statistical models rely on IDFAs to be useful
🧨 No-IDFA is going to blow up the measurement landscape
📚 Big Fish used multiple sources of data in a custom dashboard to solve for attribution
💡 How Big Fish used data science to get marketing insights
🦋 Using data science to comparing LTV curves through a gaming app launch cycle to amp up ROAS
◀️ Reverse engineering LTV curves to inform ad spend decisions
🗺️ Mapping in-app events to monetisation and retention opportunities
💸 Spend needs to tie back to business, and LTV is the only way to do that
📍 Where to apply econometric modelling in marketing
🎨 How to use media mix models for marketing
🏗️ How to build models that calculate impact and outcomes
💯 Micro and macro level factors to consider for accurate predictions
🍃 How seasonality and trends impact lift
⚙️ Tweaking factors to generate insights about what-if scenarios
👋 The journey from deterministic to probabilistic has already begun
🧪 Testing successful campaigns with interrupted time series can give counterintuitive results
💪 How the post-IDFA landscape is strengthening the case for incrementality testing
🔻 The opportunity cost for interrupted time series experiments
⚖️ The careful balance in ITS experiments
🔎 Why models are necessary alongside experiments for real validation
🧱 How to construct an econometric model by choosing the right variables
📅 Why daily data is better than weekly data for training models in spite of the increased noise
📈 The value of seasonality and trends encoding in models
🔮 The key to good prediction for granularity in each event
🔬 Understanding counterfactual experiments and setting baselines
🥇 Why incrementality testing is the gold standard now but not post-IDFA
👬🏻 The two-fold team buy-ins for testing
🤝 Why transparent partners are very important to a UA team
🌌 Why experiments are tied to a certain level of scale
🚼 Why single apps don’t have to worry about incrementality till scale
👌 The tried and tested approach to learning how to model

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-use-econometric-models-to-supplement-skadnetwork-for-mobile-measurement-in-ios-14-with-brian-krebs-and-anthony-cross/

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Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

**

Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

Facebook recently made its Automated App Ads(AAA) available for all advertisers - as a part of its broader push toward having greater automation drive advertising performance.

As of this writing, we see a number of challenges with AAA due to which we don't recommend doubling down on AAA.

In this episode, we explain how AAA works - and what some of the challenges with it are.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤖 What are Facebook’s Automated App Ads
🦾 The optimisation that AAA automates
⚗️ The introduction of liquidity
📏 Why CPA is not necessarily the right metric to use
🤷 AAA doesn’t leverage your existing knowledge of your users
🧭 Navigating the learning phase is tricky
🔌 Why knowing when to pull the plug is uncertain
🧺 AAA is like putting all your eggs in one basket
🌁 How performance data is obfuscated
😵 There’s no way to know what’s going wrong, when something's going wrong
🎯 Target exclusion is not quite there yet
🌅 It’s early days yet; AAA will get better
🌏 Test in non-critical geos
⚖️ How to choose the right type of campaigns for testing
☔ Using split tests is the prudent path forward


Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/5-reasons-why-facebooks-automated-app-ads-aaa-arent-ready-for-prime-time-yet/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

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Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

We’re very excited to present a very special episode - highlights from The Definitive Guide To Marketing In a Post-IDFA World.

As some of you may know, we released the book last week - featuring highlights from over 500 minutes of audio, featuring some of the smartest folks in mobile that we’ve had a chance to speak to on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

On today’s episode, we feature the most impactful quotes from the book. These are also highlights from some of the previous episodes of the Mobile User Acquisition Show that deal with the privacy changes coming with iOS 14.

These feature some of the smartest folks in mobile who’ve been guests on the Mobile UA show, including: John Koetsier, Thomas Petit, David Philippson, Maor Sadra, Eric Seufert, Nimrod Zuta, Pau Quevedo, Andy Carvell, Kevin Bravo, Gadi Eliashiv, Nebojsa Radovic, Colette Nataf, Gabe Kwakyi, Warren Woodward, and Mark Loranger.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

👁️ The very real dangers of easily-accessible IDFAs
😇 Apple has an agenda with the iOS 14, and it isn't pure altruism
📈 How making the IDFA useless pushes Apple’s revenue up
🧠 The ideal demographic for advertisers to target is the same that knew to turn off IDFAs
📍 Limit ad tracking actually meant more invasive tracking
📐 Measurement was always tricky
🌗 Why attribution only presents a partial picture
📊 Why relying on LTV was not great to begin with
💰 How IDFAs are going to fundamentally change app UA economics
💵 Predicting ad revenue will be uncertain for the moment
🤖 Preparing for changes in the programmatic landscape
🔦 How post-IDFA strategies will have a renewed focus on retention and reengagement
🗓️ Understanding the opportunities of the conversion value framework in SKAdNetwork
💭 4 considerations to customise your conversation value framework
🧩 How MMPs will evolve to still be a critical component of the measurement infrastructure
🏁 Why causal inference can address some of the issues with SKAdNetwork
🌫️ How IDFAs are going to change the game for publishers.
🌊 How to use web flows for UA and what to expect
🎨 Optimizing for creative hits is vital
🦾 Using automation as a part of your UA playbook
👍 Do whatever you need to do to maximise consent
🧰 Tools to have in your marketing arsenal: pre-permissioning and win-backs
📲 Why in-app bidding may carry the day
💲 Why uncertain times are not the right time to look for capital
💥 Post-IDFA is a time to focus inward and reassess the impact at a business level

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/highlights-from-the-definitive-guide-to-marketing-post-idfa-world/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

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Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

Colette Nataf is the founder and CEO at Lightning AI. In today’s conversation, Colette describes 3 potential scenarios: best case, worst case and somewhere in the middle - and talks through how we might prepare for the worst. She illustrates the possibilities with the experience of a company that is using web-based flows for their UA today in a pre-iOS-14 world, and outlines exactly how the different aspects of user acquisition might change come January.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🔱  The best, the worst and the middle case scenarios for iOS 14
🔒 How a privacy app manages growth without a single SDK
🌱 It is possible to grow without sophisticated attribution
🧮 Old school tracking with UTM parameters
🍂 The longer the funnel, the greater the drop-offs
💨 Targeting without conversion data doesn’t exist
🌎 Macro trends impact CPMs
🎬 Why it is a good idea to prep the user for a new flow
🔚 It is end times for broad targeting
👬🏻 No user level data means lookalikes will not work
🧶 Interest-based targeting will become more prominent
🗓️ How to set up a web-based flow
🗄️ The critical importance of stitching together data from different sources
🚫 Things that marketers should not attempt
💍 Marriage of convenience: marketing courts engineering
🤖 Bringing data science into the fold
🌪️ Prepare for the worst, even though it may not happen
🌟 Facebook will not remain a superstar
🌈 Which are the new channels on the block?
🖥️ The potential return of display advertising
🦋 How marketing teams will change and evolve.

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-drive-web-based-user-flows-for-your-ios-14-user-acquisition-with-colette-nataf-ceo-and-founder-at-lightning-ai/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

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Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

By day, Cassie Chernin is the director of UA at Scopely and passionate about running Facebook and Google ads for her apps. But this year, she has decided to put her prodigious tech talent towards a different cause.

Cassie volunteers for the not-for-profit, Tech for Campaigns, which brings together top tech talent to work towards driving electoral change at the grassroots level.

In our conversation today, Cassie describes what she does, how her background in marketing is helping support her political work, how her work helps drive grassroots support for the candidates she’s working with, and how her efforts are driving systemic change.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS
📥 Why Cassie joined Tech for Campaigns
💻 Tech expertise to effect electoral change
🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏽 How teams are set up at Tech for Campaigns
📧 How email campaigns work for political campaigns
#️⃣ Even political email campaigns have KPIs
🎯 Super targeted campaigns drive impact
👍 Why endorsements are a valuable tool in the email marketing arsenal
⛏️ How to mine the campaign for insights and messages
🌱 Grassroots level campaigns have ripple effects
🙃 What are leading indicators that a state might flip?

 
Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-a-band-of-volunteer-marketers-help-drive-political-change-with-cassie-chernin-volunteer-at-tech-for-campaigns/

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Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

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Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co

David Barnard started developing apps soon after the first iPhone was released. In the last 12 years, he has seen each minor and major change play out in the appstores - from the first paid apps and their price drops - to the explosion of freemium - to the advent of subscriptions. In today’s episode, he tells the stories of living through the roller coaster that the appstore has been.

If you’re wondering as to what relevance details from a decade ago will have to our world today, this episode will help you think about the unseen forces that influence what we see on our phones, and about how Apple’s policies have influenced the kinds of apps that flourish. Just as important, all of this helps contextualize the looming privacy changes that will effectively deprecate the IDFA in iOS 14.

This episode provides a fascinating and in-depth look at how the last decade helps us learn about what’s ahead - and we’re excited to present it.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💼 David’s background
2️⃣ 2 primary reasons why the App Store was a game-changer in 2008-09
🛡️ Introducing the App Store: a platform consumers trusted
🧶 App Store enabled indie developers
💸 Price played a huge role in galvanising the App Store
🗿 The Stone Age of monetisation
💰 Why the only way to earn from an app was to have a paid app
🤑 What “free apps are free” meant for monetisation
🍎 How the smallest of Apple’s decisions shaped the app marketplace
📊 The tale of 2 top charts
📸 Exposure: How curation influenced market economics
📲 Limited monetisation led to mass market apps
✨ With subscription, you get sophistication
⛔ The limited scope of early ad-monetisation
🎮 Games were big winners
⌛ The timeline of how the platform and the marketplace evolved together
🆓 The advent of in-app purchases - and the freemium/free-to-play model
🥕 Subscriptions and in-app purchases changed the incentives for developers
♾️ Value is the biggest driver of the subscription economy
🧯 Apple’s new IDFA policy is to offset some of the ills of the monetisation models
⚠️ Freemium isn’t evil; but it brought about unintended consequences
🔜 The future of the app economy is value-driven subscriptions
💞 How Tinder is an example of a subscription that also has consumable purchases

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/a-brief-history-of-app-store-monetization-with-david-barnard-developer-advocate-at-revenuecat/ 

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

**

Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co