App campaigns make it easy to promote your apps across Google’s largest properties, including Search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network. This article goes through the best ways to set up and manage your app campaigns in order to get the best possible performance.
Setup, bidding and maintenance
To run a successful app campaign, you’ll need to set the right goals for your marketing objectives and use the most effective bids and budgets.
Campaign setup
When setting up your app campaign, think about:
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Your marketing goals: Decide whether you're trying to get people to download your app, take a specific action inside your app or something else.
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Events: Send any events that you're tracking in your app back to Google Ads and consider tracking other events that can act as a proxy for your desired event. Learn more about mobile app conversion tracking.
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Ramp-up: Take conversion delay into consideration. App campaigns can take a few days to start gathering information. If you find a high cost-per-install (CPI) early on, remember to account for conversion delays and set a realistic conversion window. Learn more about conversion tracking
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Competing campaigns: Avoid launching app campaigns in the same geographic location, as this can cause your campaigns to compete against each other.
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Budget: Make sure that you have enough budget allocated to allow your campaign to grow.
Bidding
When setting bids for your app campaign, bear in mind:
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Conversion delay: Make sure that you account for conversion delay when evaluating your campaign’s performance. In the first few days (or even weeks) of a campaign, the CPI may be inflated.
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View-through conversion (VTC)-adjusted CPI: Consider calculating your adjusted CPI by adding VTCs to your CPI equation. Learn more about view-through conversions.
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Recommended bids: Set your average daily budget at 50 times your target CPI, or 10 times your target CPA.
Learn more about bidding in app campaigns.
Maintenance
Once your app campaign is up and running, it’s important to maintain it properly for best performance. We recommend that you:
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Avoid changing the campaign type, for example, from 'Install volume' to 'Install actions', after launching.
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Try not to make drastic changes to your campaign, for example, changing the budget by >20% or changing your CPI by >20%.
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Avoid restricting your campaign’s audience by excluding too many locations, placements or mobile categories, or by using other targeting options.
Assets
Creative assets are the 'face' of your app campaign – it’s what your potential customers see first, so you want to make sure that they’re being shown the most effective ad. To make sure that the right ads are showing for the right people, it’s important that you upload a variety of assets for your app campaign. It’s also helpful to understand how app campaign asset reporting works.
Video assets
Having a variety of video assets is critical to the success of an app campaign. Make sure that you provide:
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Videos of multiple durations
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Videos with different orientations, like vertical, square and landscape (the ideal video aspect ratios are 16:9, 1:1, and 2:3 – bear in mind that portrait videos have a 60% higher conversion rate than landscape videos)
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Videos that feature gameplay or app usage and have a clear call-to-action like 'Download' or 'Install now'
Asset reporting
Asset reporting lets you check the cost, click-through rate (CTR), CPI and other data for your assets all in one place. The asset report has 5 different ratings: 'Waiting', 'Learning', 'Low', 'Good' and 'Best'; these ratings are relative to the other assets in your campaign. We recommend that you:
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Add more assets instead of removing 'Good' or 'Low'-rated assets – it’s better to have 2 assets than one, even if one is rated 'Good' or 'Low'.
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Double-check (or change) the date range for the report if you see questionable data or a '0' in one of the data columns.
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Bear in mind that sometimes a conversion can happen without a click, such as if the view-through conversion window is longer.
Other assets
Text assets can be used independently or combined with other assets (for example, with a landscape image to create a native ad). Remember to:
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Use all four lines of text when setting up a campaign.
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Make sure that your text assets don’t contain more than 1 exclamation mark (!) so they don't violate our editorial policies.
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Run your HTML5 assets through the Google Ads HTML5 Validator tool prior to uploading your HTML5 ad. Learn more about HTML5 for app campaigns.
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Try and upload four independent lines of text, 20 images and 20 videos, and use a diversity of aspect ratios and image sizes.
Measurement
Correct measurement setup and event tracking is crucial to your app campaign’s success. We recommend that you:
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Use Firebase, Google’s free solution, or use one of Google’s approved Attribution Partners. Learn more about Firebase or how to track app conversions with third-party app analytics.
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Identify which in-app events represent more value for you and make sure that you’re tracking those events.
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Understand view-through conversions (VTCs), viewability standards and how they affect measurement parity. Learn more about VTCs or about viewability.
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For iOS app campaigns, set up and configure SKAdNetwork. Learn more about best practices for iOS app campaigns
Events
Sending in-app events to Google Ads helps your campaigns succeed by providing more data for the system to learn from. Think about:
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Events: At a minimum, track installs and at least one in-app event. Ideally, you should track multiple events, including revenue-generating events.
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Timeline: Confirm that the Google Ads conversion window aligns with the windows that you’ve set up in your third-party system. For most third-party providers, the default is 30 days.
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Count: Decide whether to count only the first time an event happens, or every time.
