8-Week Cross-Departmental Collaboration for App Launch Success

Color Collab started interviewing potential marketing agencies 3 months prior to their app launch. App Growth Network was among the agencies that they shortlisted. The client went through rounds of interviews with their executive team members and decided to award the account to AGN for these reasons that stood out from the rest:

• AGN’s organized processes

• The AGN team’s ability to build a custom app launch plan with a flexible timeline based on the launch objectives

• An in-house team dynamic in North America

• AGN’s experience with various genres, in this case a lifestyle game

Color Collab worked with all of AGN’s departments for 8 weeks leading up to the launch. The following steps were taken with each department to prepare for an efficient app launch:

Positioning is everything. An app must pair with the right audience, which needs to be researched and identified. The client must target the right users, understand their needs and clearly communicate why their product has a better solution for their needs.

In the case of Color Collab, this involved targeting some communities in which they had contributing artists—like in the Tattoo genre—in order to narrow down the market. At the same time, it was important to balance it out and not miss potential opportunities by making the target too narrow.

Judging too early causes errors due to low statistical significance and assumptions that some data may not work. But you also don’t want to be too late because that leads to harmful budget losses.

Touching the campaigns too frequently also hurts the machine learning algorithm, so it’s important to allow sufficient time and allow the pool of users to do its job and make decisions based on cohorts of users with certain characteristics.

We also have seen cases in which the SDKs may not work, which causes us to lose tracking and leads to delays in the campaign performance.

AGN has a process by department as seen in the example below. The flow depends on what stage of the app we are dealing with for every client.

We are very product centric. We are not a performance marketing agency. We are a full stack growth agency that prioritizes the product life cycle first.

The app pulse is very important to us, which is the ratio of gain over churn. Some apps need retention more than acquisition, some apps need acquisition more, and some need both simultaneously!

We dont make money on commissioning the first part of media—our success comes from growing with our clients together. Once an app is successful enough to increase their budget because their app pulse is healthy, that’s where we focus on the “hockey stick” growth curves

In the case of Color Collab, they worked with our Creative team, Customer Success and Analytics team. Every AGN specialist is educated and experienced in the app world, tech savvy, and selected carefully due to their experience with either digital marketing for mobile products or for their statistics and analytical expertise.

CPI, CPE, ROAS, Retention Day 1, 7, 14, pulse, churn rate, subscription ratios

See below!

Color Collab faced tough global competition by popular digital coloring books apps like Happy Color, Recolor and Coloring Book for Me.

To help them break into the space, Color Collab was looking for app growth marketing professionals to help them with a global launch strategy to build awareness of the app and increase app installs through organic and paid user acquisition efforts.

Their other business objectives included increasing daily active users and increasing app retention rate.

AGN worked closely with the Color Collab team to identify and implement a major change in the audience targeting—we recognized that fans of tattoos and tattoo artists were not remotely interested in coloring books.

So we began testing different custom and lookalike audiences making key changes in interests, by focusing on those that enjoy other coloring books/pages and changing the age ranges.

We also added video assets in place of static assets on ads which drove conversion and reduced cost while increasing conversion rates.

Through diligent monitoring and optimization of Google UAC, we saw a 96% increase in installs while decreasing CPI from $0.86 to $0.29.

We didn’t focus on monetization here but focused solely on acquisition and retention while developing thorough data analytics to inform the decision making process.

AGN data analytics pointed to a proxy metric indicating which users would retain, which was a user that colored 5 pieces in two weeks.

Close analysis of user behavior at stages of the funnel using Firebase allowed us to develop strategies that resulted in a 43% increase in users creating art.

For ASO, we focused primarily on English speaking countries (US/Canada first) to establish proof of concept, then expanded to the UK once we understood our market. We utilized the expansion of keyword targeting through Google ASO by creating Spanish language ASO (Mexico) while still using English words.

Through regular key research and optimization, we achieved a 61% increase in the Android user base.

Color Collab was a new coloring book app in the casual games category looking to break into the market by increasing app downloads and increasing user retention numbers.

After a thorough app marketing agency research process, Color Collab decided to hire AGN based on several criteria that met their needs and their willingness to deliver results based on a mutually agreed app launch timeline and growth objectives.

By working closely with the client, optimizing organic and paid user acquisition channels, and putting solid data processes in place to inform decisions, AGN was able to deliver positive results pre and post Color Collab’s app launch process.

If you’d like to benefit from the know-how of app marketing and mobile user acquisition experts, please contact us!