4 Advanced Tips To Increase Mobile App Installs with Facebook Ads

Although most marketers focus most of their Facebook marketing dollars on desktop, mobile ads have recently become one of the most effective and fastest growing ads units available available on Facebook. In fact, mobile ads now make up over 62% of all ad sales on Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have made it very clear over the past year that they believe mobile apps are the future of the internet and most of their recent ad innovations and company investments have come in the areas of mobile technology and app advertising.

Facebook ads are now the most powerful and cost effective platform for getting your mobile app discovered and installed by the most relevant and high value users possible.

Here are four tactics to help you acquire the most new users from your Mobile App Install Ads on Facebook:

 

1) Optimize Campaigns for Mobile App Installs.

Optimize your campaign objectives for more mobile app install by selecting “Optimize for Installs”.  It might be tempting to optimize your campaigns for more impressions or more clicks but I strongly recommend that you trust Facebook’s algorithms to serve ads to the users who are most likely to install you app.

I don’t know how Facebook’s optimization algorithms work. But after generating tens of thousands of conversions for my clients, I can tell you that they just work 🙂

 

2) Target Owners of New Mobile Devices

Most advertisers aren’t aware, but Facebook lets you target people who are using new mobile devices. The reason this is so powerful is that when people get new phones they usually search for new apps to load on their phones. Get your ads in front of these new phone owners at the right time and you can expect a great conversion rate with lots of new installs. (Late December is a great time to use this strategy because so many people get new phones for the holidays.

 

 

3) Target Users of the Right Mobile Devices

First the obvious… Make sure to always segment your campaigns (or Ad Sets) between iPhone users and Android users. iPhone users should be sent to your app’s iTunes page and Android users should go to the Play Store.

Next, consider if your app works better with users of specific types of devices:

• Phones vs tablets
• Larger screens vs smaller screens
• Newer models vs Older models

It’s often a good idea to segment your Ad Sets by phone type so you get a better idea of what is working best for you.

 

 

4) Lookalike Audiences from Active Users

Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences are the most powerful tools that Facebook offers to mobile app advertisers (and desktop advertisers as well).

I was recently at a conference for mobile app developers put on by Facebook and a quick polling of the audience showed that almost nobody knew it was even possible to create a Lookalike Audience based on app users activity.

Here’s how Mobile Lookalike Audiences work:

1. If you are using the Facebook SDK in your mobile app, then you can easily create custom audiences based on specific user activity in your app. You will want to create audiences based on your most active and valuable app users.
2. Once you have your Custom Audiences created, go into Power Editor and create Lookalike audiences based on your Custom Audiences of valuable app users. This will give you a target audience list of approximately 2 million users with characteristics very similar to those of your best users.
3. Create Mobile App Install campaigns targeting your Lookalike Audiences. You should also test combining your Lookalike lists together with some of the other techniques discussed above.

 

What do you think?

Have you tried running a campaign with Facebook Mobile App Install Ads? How did they work for you?

Do you know someone marketing a mobile app who might benefit from these strategies? Do them (and me) a favor and share this article with them. You might be really helping them to grow their business.