Buying Installs on Facebook – A Case Study

My employer recently completed a 10K install campaign on Facebook, in support of its new consumer review app, and I thought I’d share our experiences and take-aways.

The primary options for Facebook advertising networks are the following: RockYou, Social Media, Cubics, FBExchange, Lookery, Slide, and Video Egg.

While I made a few calls around to check pricing and processes, I had pretty much decided beforehand that we were going to use RockYou because of their reach, their expertise with apps and viral marketing, their brand, and my belief that they wouldn’t do anything too sleazy in pushing our app because they have a big brand to protect. 

RockYou came in at $0.50 per install for our campaign.  There were a few others that came in $0.10 lower than that, and I’ve heard of installs going for as little as $0.30.  Rates varied depending on how large a campaign you could commit to.

Once I had decided on RockYou, the first step was to sign a basic insertion order.

Once that was done, it was up to us to provide RockYou with the following promotional materials:

-    A 300X250 Graphic (to be displayed to FB users following their install of a RockYou app)
-    A text title (40 characters) and body text (75 characters) that described your app
-    A blue Facebooky button and button text (e.g. Add Reviews!)
-    A 55X55 icon for use in banner ads

We decided to have a professional designer do our big graphic, as the quality of the graphic can have a big effect on click throughs and conversion.   Even though you only pay for installs, a reasonable conversion rate is important as RockYou reserves the right to cancel your campaign if it isn’t converting.  Here’s what we came up with for the graphic (and this ended up converting at 3X the rate of our other promotional materials):

Once RockYou had our promotional materials, they were able to turn on our campaign in hours. 

Once the campaign was on, the impact was dramatic.  We immediately saw massive rating activity, and generated a few thousand installs per day until our campaign was finished.  RockYou has the ability to push far more than a few thousand daily installs, but they prioritize based on how much the advertiser is paying per install. 

Our daily install rate was not flat – one day we did close to 3K, and one day we did about 1K.  I don’t know whether this was due to more aggressive promotion of our campaign by RockYou, or due to other factors.  This fluctuation in the rate of installs makes it hard to predict when your campaign is going to end – this actually bit us in the ass a little bit, as our campaign ended more quickly than we expected.  This was a bummer because we rolled out a new, social aspect to the app (compatibility tests based on rating) while the campaign was live, expecting to have a few days to gauge the results (when it reality we had one day).

RockYou does not provide publishers with live stats, or any automated tool to check stats.  We were dependent on our account manager to email us sporadic install updates.

When we realized that our campaign was being used up faster than expected, we contacted our account manager (late on a Friday afternoon), and requested that they pause the campaign until we could finish our app tweaks.  They complied, and then at our request, turned back on our campaign when our dev work was done on a Saturday afternoon.  We appreciated that like us, RockYou appears to work seven days per week.

One of the most disappointing, and unexpected, aspects of our campaign was the amount of international traffic we received from the campaign.  Our app saw only about 25% US traffic during the campaign.  It’s problematic for a consumer review app (that is supported primarily by US advertisers) when you’re generating hundreds of reviews in Turkish (Turkey was the third largest source of traffic after the US and the UK).

Other than the distribution itself, the most positive aspect of the campaign was the ability to test different aspects of the app, on the fly, with enough scale to measure the impact of small tweaks.  Over the course of a couple of days, we were able to substantially increase PVs per visit and ratings per visit by tweaking some features.  Using Google Analytics, we were able to set up goals that corresponded with important behaviors like sharing the app, or sharing a review.

We also captured a lot of data about how folks interact with the app, which should help us to make it stickier, more social, and generally better.

My advice to those considering a purchased install campaign is as follows:

• Capture as much analytics data as possible during the campaign, and make sure to make tweaks to your app on the fly so that you can make A/B comparisons
• In a similar vein, do your best to figure out exactly what data you want to capture from your campaign – I see data capture as almost as important as marketing distribution for your initial paid campaign
• Make sure the social aspects of your app are fully built out before launching your campaign – you want to make sure you get full bang for your buck from second and third degree referrals
• Check with your ad network about your ability to pause your campaign on the fly, should inspiration strike you about a potentially viral feature that you can add
• Be aggressive about hounding your account rep for install data so that there are no surprises about how quickly your campaign is expiring
• If your app involves UGC, figure out how you’re going to handle content in foreign languages
• Don’t half ass the promotional material – spend a little more for a designer
• Don’t develop a long term dependence on paid installs.  As fun as it is to watch all your numbers going up, eventually your app is going to have to stand on its own.

All in all, I was happy with the results of our campaign, and was impressed with RockYou.  They were responsive and professional, and showed that they can deliver installs in a hurry.

If anyone wants to share their own experiences with any of the FB ad networks, they can click through and do so below:<br>

Check out RateItAll

Comments

[Jordan Mitchell]

Cool post. Thx for sharing!

[david marks]

Great post Lawrence -- thanks for publishing the play-by-play with data points. I wonder how these have changed over the last few months as the overall FB app market has evolved?

[allan isfan]

Lawrence,

This a fantastic blog post ... thanks so much for sharing. I had not considered all your suggestions ... thinking an install is an install. The info I just got from this post is going to dramatically change my plans and I think will really help us be much more successful.

Do you think that pricing and effectiveness have changed since you wrote the post due to economy + massive facebook platform change?

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