# How to Optimize User Acquisition Across Major Ad Channels — Shane Ly, AppsFlyer

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Drz5BRTbo
Duration: 19 min
Language: English
Words: 3534
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/j2Drz5BRTbo

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Bernard today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in Revenue cats state of subscription apps report each episode in this series we'll explore one crucial metric and share actionable insights from Top subscription app operators with me today Shane Lee Solutions architect at absf on the podcast I talk with Shane about the state of major acquisition channels in 2025 how improved measurement is increasing confidence in ad spend and why Reddit much be your next top performing user acquisition Channel hey Shane thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks David thanks for having us uh very excited to join

[0:39] I'm my name is Shane I'm a Solutions architect here at apps flyer typically work on pre-sales side of things but I work on a variety of clients including subscription apps itself of all sizes so super happy to to join and uh give insights itself awesome so I did want to talk through what you're seeing and I think working at apps you do have a really unique perspective on the industry I mean y'all work with tens of thousands of apps across all different verticals and see like what's working what's not working you get to see a lot of data that probably few people in the industry get to see you get to like work

[1:14] Hands-On with a lot of people in the industry who get those unique perspectives I think few folks in the industry get so yeah super excited to kind of dive into what's working today 2025 with acquisition for subscription apps and so I wanted to go through all the major channels but let's just kick it off with like an overview what's going on with user acquisition today what's working what's not in the past several years on iOS signal loss has been the biggest kind of challenge itself so how do we know that a ad is actually driving subscriptions itself so as with iOS with SK ad Network we've got

[1:54] limited measurement windows so essentially in order to do measurement we have to be very creative with how we do this measurement itself today Android is business as usual for iOS there's several new developments in 2024 and which we can also take advantage of in in 2025 let's go through just Channel by Channel and like what's working what's not so Apple search ads I mean this is kind of like the starter kit of what I and you know many people recommend like if you're not at least starting with search ads you're probably leaving money on the table so what do you see working in search ads and then anything new or

[2:27] different these past couple years typically search chats are still working pretty well any measurement partner is still getting reports of the keyword data so what are you buying Etc where are your placements you're still able to lifetime value or LTB these users so it's easy to see a user coming in on Apple search ads and then ultimately did they subscribe did they cancel did they renew so these are all signals that still were on Apple search ads itself one thing that did change super recently so I imagine you and the team are still kind of sorting through exactly how this is going to to impact things but I know

[3:01] Apple did change viewr attribution with apple search ads I don't even fully understand it but has somebody who does this day and day out maybe you can explain it to me and the audience a little better and like what it will and won't impact moving forward let's do a little bit of historical as well so historically with apple search ads we were able to get clickthrough attribution or essentially as long as someone's clicked on the ad and we do attribution with them by way of their tokens we do have the ability to attribute on these clicks so very recently Apple search ads announced that they are also doing viewr attributions

[3:36] and essentially what that means is let's say they've searched for a keyword and they've seen promotion or seen the ad itself essentially What's Happening Here is they're able to also tell us that hey there was a viewr attribution for this particular device and how that's going to help is even though they saw a keyword that they searched on even though they didn't click on it we're able to still report on the fact that there was a view of that ad itself gocha is that going to like over attribute to search ads like is that I think I saw a few people on Twitter commenting on maybe over attribution or is that just

[4:10] an additional signal that you're going to be able to like sort differently than the click-through attributions our comment here or my comment here is going to be more that they are leveling the playing field So Meta Tik Tok Google all do viewr attributions today it was something that was asked for by various advertisers itself but now they able to see the performance of the viewr attributions regardless you're still able to filter these within the dashboard so you see viewrs and you see click-throughs anyways so I would not call that overattribution I would essentially say that it's an additional signal itself cool yeah yeah so it sounds like more helpful than anything

[4:47] else it it's great to see apple evolving on things I mean I think there's many fronts where we would hope Apple and Google will continue evolving let's move on to some of the bigger networks Tik Tok has been in the news a ton this year and a ton of people are are finding more success I mean I feel like it's really growing if you use your acquisition Channel not just for trying to go viral and Organics but also actually you know running campaigns on Tik Tok What do you see going on in Tik Tok so for 2024 we'll talk about 2025 in a second here 2024 there was there were quite a lot of

[5:18] developments itself number one they became a uh self-reporting or self- attributing network so essentially they're responding back to us with hey we did see attribution itself typically when happens with a self-reporting network there's a device ID that needs to be transmitted iOS the issue there is that you now have to prompt on both sides so essentially we have signal loss there for 2024 going into 2025 we now have them as a advanced srn so essentially what happens here is there are additional signals that are sent over to them to make attribution itself so we're seeing quite a big lift in terms of attribution through that method

[5:58] essentially Tik Tok was the first one that did it with us following suit Snapchat also did that with us and then meta as well and hopefully Google pretty soon but essentially with this with the advanced srns we are starting to get more signals Itself by sending additional parameters over for attribution gotcha and and so you mentioned that getting those additional signals is helping drive more efficient spend and being able to to get the signal quicker and more accurate from that srn integration correct we're getting the signals better quicker because we're not relying on scans 24-hour or delay mechanism in addition you're able to LTB the users so we do

[6:38] abide by any of the user data retention policies they all have different retention policies but you're able to LTV the users for a subscription app what that means is now we could see that hey they did subscribe 7 days later and then they did renew a month two month three month four for instance yeah I imagine that's super helpful moving on to meta I I feel like meta is seems like the network that is most quickly and most effectively recovered from ATT over the past few years and I just hear so many apps who are doing well on meta these days that the the signals are

[7:13] getting stronger the algorithms like figuring it out what are yall seeing on your end as far as the effectiveness of a meta and any changes to that on the meta and uh itself they are the they are one of the larger ones um aside from Google uh itself so ESS entally what we're seeing here is just more attribution methods there are web to app plays itself so sometimes advertisers do send them to a web landing page first and then ultimately into their app for a subscription sometimes they do a subscription first and then into the app and then they do send them into the app itself so there's various methods of

[7:49] doing this outside of scan you could still run SK ad network with skad network you do have that limited window itself so we do see advertisers taking advantage of multiple ways of doing this so just to recap it is app install campaigns with advanced srns in 2025 that's a very big signal recovery there still are web to app plays with meta itself so essentially sending them to a web landing page and then ultimately converting and in parallel there's still skad Network that can be ran as well probably should be a completely separate topic but let's going on with scan is it getting more effective you know it does

[8:26] seem like more of the big networks are adopting it yeah tell me about what you're seeing work and not work as far as scan goes scan skad Network we are seeing a lot of networks coming on it's over 100 now itself usually the larger ones meta Google Tik Tok for instance essentially that's still the deterministic way of getting hey where did your users come from the limitations here are just going to be that you're only able to measure up to a certain amount of time so networks on scan 3 you're able to measure 48 Hours essentially of data and then for networks on scan 4 you're able to

[9:02] measure up to 35 days of data however on your second and third postbacks what's happening there is you have less Fidelity so for subscription app it might be did they subscribe or not there's not much more details that can be put into those post backs do you see any networks where that 35-day window does make a meaningful difference like does that first renewal on a monthly or continued engagement does that get fed back into the algorithm in a way that actually helps better train the algorithms or is it kind of one of those like nice to have but maybe doesn't actually impact things for the larger

[9:40] networks we have not seen them using that signal on skad network we do see it on our dashboard we do see performance itself but we haven't seen that actually fed into the algorithms possibly due to the fact that when you are looking for signals Downstream there are privacy thresholds itself so you don't fully have accurate like subscription data you have very accurate install data so users did come from a particular Network however when it actually comes to did they subscribe you could be missing 10% of that traffic we do have dashboards that show that with a null conversion rate however that is something that's still an issue today with desk ad

[10:21] network has the industry kind of solidified around particular best practices or schema around scans were any tips about you know apps trying to use scan it hasn't been a standard around a template it's still been here are six bits or 63 conversion values let's configure that where measurement Partners come into play here is that we make it easy to actually configure those itself so you can see within at least within apps fers UI you have the ability to configure do we want to measure Revenue do we want to measure just the event do we want to measure a funnel Etc so instead of having Developers to

[10:59] figure this out essentially we're having a marketer come into marketer SL Advertiser come into our UI and essentially configure that in our conversion Studio itself well moving on to the next kind of big player in the space Google I know Google's actually been making a lot of moves the last couple of years so tell me about what's working with Google probably the biggest thing that Google's done in the last year from a attribution perspective is that YouTube now serves an at prompt very exciting for us because historically Google did not do any prompting so we're not able to any measurement Partners not able to make measurement with Google using

[11:39] traditional methods and reason for that is there's no device ID on the Google side now that YouTube has it that's been a huge Advantage we are now starting to see attributions to Google or to YouTube itself and you're able to get the same signal so essentially if we do attribution you're able to lifetime value the users itself very cool what kind of opt-in rates are you seeing I know yall kind of share data and it's been cool I've seen a few reports here and there over the years of opt-in rates and double opt-in rates but is it meaningful and I guess even if the percentage is low you at least have kind

[12:15] of like a sample to help inform other decisions but what are you seeing as far as opting rates and how that affects efficiency so couple things that we typically advise is showing the prompt opt-in rates itself it can be anywhere from somewhere below 10% to 50 to 60% depending on app we have seen really high acceptance rates on certain apps itself so we would still recommend prompting and ultimately it's another data point that you are able to capture and possibly reuse so if you're using maybe you might be doing re-engagement at some point in the future so that would be another signal that you could send over to those networks to re-engage

[12:54] this this user so we've talked about kind of the three biggest players in the space I mean putting aside Apple search ads and Google Play ads which Google Play ads run through Google anyway but with those three biggest networks Tik Tok meta and Google are you seeing any particular trends of like increasing spend on Google versus meta or Tik Tok versus Google any Trends in kind of shifts of spend or apps being able to scale on one network but not another we're just seeing overall more spend going into all three itself so it's nice to see and the reason why is because now they're a little bit more confident in

[13:31] terms of hey is this actually driving performance when iOS 14 first came out spend was held back right because even though you put money in they don't know is it driving results itself so now 2024 20125 with additional data points we now are seeing advertisers invest a little bit more confidently itself yeah that makes sense as you're more able to more confidently attribute that spend of course you're going to spend more so it makes a lot of sense and it's it's interesting to hear that you're seeing that just across the board versus like any one network kind of running away with kind of sherff Bend Reddit is

[14:10] another kind of interesting topic I mean I don't hear a lot of apps talking about it but it feels like that could be another huge opportunity and maybe you know between Reddit snap and maybe there's a few other places any thoughts on on some of these smaller networks where there might actually be some kind of Arbitrage and opportunity to spend where maybe others are overlooking so Reddit has pretty much kickstarted their ad Network this year so they spent a lot more time on it particularly app install campaigns so they've grown quite a bit they became srn in terms of doing attribution they are investing pretty heavily in that they have a large user

[14:47] base so it's definitely one of those networks that are up and cominging and something that should be considered for subscription apps I mean people are going in there they're reading you know the subreddit itself they're allowing for promotions on those subreddits and measurement with a measurement partner you're going to be able to see was that an effective spin so pulling all this together got a lot of different channels a lot of opportunity but you know folks listening to this podcast got to figure out like where do we spend money how do we spend money what are the tactics that we need to be thinking about to help

[15:19] drive that efficiency so any kind of specific advice for folks as they kind of navigate those Waters I think the important part here is going going to be measurement overall itself so having a place where you're able to see that performance in an unbiased way so essentially we want to be able to compare meta with Google with Tik Tok we also want to be able to see your influencers or your programmatic buys Etc so having all that in one place is very important also any re-engagement like let's just say you acquire these users but they haven't made that subscription maybe there's an email push that gets sent out to them maybe they're

[16:00] re-engaged on another network but those are also important tactics just to make sure that we first acquire the user and then we get them into a subscription itself any other top tips especially for subscription apps which is going to be the majority of our listeners to make sure that you're driving that ad spin effectively probably the biggest one is just to make sure that the data pipelines are set up so essentially having a measurement a mobile measurement partner SDK eventally that will help us track the installs itself having a good pipeline for how to notify that a subscription was actually done back into this measurement partner

[16:38] reason for that is we need to effectively know where did that user come from and did they actually convert or did they actually subscribe so typically here we see trial starts and then subscription converted we do also want to monitor channels where subscribers are churning as well so those are all effective signals but essentially the biggest tip here is to make sure that we have that data pipeline set up so you're able to see this measurement end to end so where did they come from did they actually subscribe and is there a particular channel that maybe we should defocus because a majority of the users are

[17:14] churning itself yeah I mean it's a Hu huge problem and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast in in other ways but sometimes you'll drive a campaign where it looks amazing and like free trial starts are off the charts and then people are canceling that trial so having that data pipeline set up well so that you see if a channel is driving those low intent users who are just trying to use your free trial and are actually intending to subscribe it's just so important to get that measurement piece right is to to have that data fed in there all right well as we wrapping up anything else you wanted

[17:47] to share that's largely it just wanted to mention appflyer is the leading mobile measurement partner we're in most majority of the apps out there today so definitely if you want to learn more hit us up at apps.com and we'd be happy to to dive into details itself all awesome well thanks for joining me today really appreciate how much data apps fer does share with the industry you know you'll regularly share reports and blog posts and part of the reason we're doing this podcast is that y'all are sharing some data that's going to go into Revenue cast state of subscription apps report so definitely worth checking that out if you're

[18:18] listening to the podcast and and haven't seen the report yet checking out that data it's going to be really interesting and then keeping an eye on on what apps shares make sure you're paying attention to trend in the industry and stuff like that so do appreciate apps sharing the way it does thank you so much David thank you for having us lovely being on the podcast with with you all thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub do.com to join our private community [Music]

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