Service

PPC advertising in Google Ads

Project

PC emulator (PC mobile games)

Objective

– Increase the number of downloads

Period

November, 2020 - March, 2021

Take a quick look at the results we achieved:

  • the number of conversions increased from 1027 to 9179 per month.
  • CPA decreased from $1.95 to $1.44

So, let’s dive into the details

Initial data on the project:

Client: The company is the developer of an online emulator for running APK applications on a PC. The site features over 1,000 popular mobile games.

Target audience: Gamers who prefer to play on PC.
Before the cooperation there were 1027 of app downloads per month with CPA of $1.95.

The goal was to increase the number of downloads up to 1500 per month, decreasing the CPA to $1.50.

Before the cooperation with the RegisTeam, the advertising campaign was set up by a full-time PPC specialist of their own company. An employee launched several campaigns on Google Ads. We performed the audit and decided to completely rebuild them in accordance with the advertising strategy we developed.

Project issues

There are several errors identified in the advertising campaigns:

  • the strategy “Cost-per-conversion optimization” was applied. That constantly showed fluctuating results of CPA and number of conversions
  • advertising campaigns were not structured, keywords were not divided into groups
  • campaigns weren’t optimized for gender, age, or geography
  • match types for keywords were not applied
  • no ads had any keyword in the title

Campaign structure before changes:

All keywords are added to the one group. That didn’t make it possible to apply detailed targeting settings (gender, age, interests, etc) to each keyword. Another disadvantage of such a structure is that you are unable to create unique ads for certain groups of keywords that are relevant to a specific target audience. No matter how the query is worded, one general ad is shown in the search results. So you get a low CTR of ads as a result.

Take a look at advertisements that were in client’s advertising campaigns:

There is no keyword in the headings, the content does not address a target audience. Ads do not stand out in the search results against competitors.

The advertising effectiveness before launching new campaigns looked like:

Preparing and launching new advertising campaigns takes as much time as adjusting existing ones. At the same time, the effectiveness of new campaigns is many times higher.

Project stages

Step 1.

At the first stage, we did a deep analysis of the website. In particular, it was an analysis of:

  • new advertising campaigns were launched in accordance with the advertising strategy developed by us
  • a separate group was created for each keyword
  • a unique advertisement was created with a keyword in the title for each target request. We took into account the features of the target audience and used the appropriate triggers in each advertisement
  • responsive ads were created and finally showed a good result.

The structure of the launched campaigns:

Campaigns are divided into groups. This structure allows you to optimize keywords, specific ads, adjust bids in each group and, as a result, flexibly manage the final CPA.

This is what ads look like:

Advertising effectiveness a month after the launch:

At the end of the month, we had СPA of $1.38 and 1695.74 of app downloads
We achieved the planned result and even exceeded it.

Step 2.

The next step in our plan was to test automated bid strategies. For this purpose, we created campaigns with identical settings. The only difference was the bidding.
For the testing, we divided 8 companies into 2 strategies:

  1. Maximize conversions is a strategy that allows you to get the maximum possible number of conversions keeping to the established budget.
  2. Target CPA is a smart bidding strategy in Google Ads that helps you get as many conversions as possible for a predetermined cost or less.

Target CPA bidding strategy
The strategies were chosen taking into account the main objective of advertising – increasing the number of conversions. Testing was carried out for 3 weeks.

Finer points

While working on the project, we have constantly investigated popular mobile games on Google Play and estimated their demand. We promoted such games that have low competition among emulator developers. We added from 10 to 15 popular games per week and advertised them to PC users.

The greater part of the semantic core was collected manually, since automatic collection missed some of the keywords important to us. For example, “subway surfers laptop” or “play free game online subway surfer”.

Results

Here is the result after 3 months of work:

  • We promoted the most popular mobile games in the US market.
  • Number of conversions was increased from 1027 to 9179 per month .
  • CPA was decreased from $1.95 to $1.44

Afterwards
When it is about getting the most out of your ads, especially in highly competitive niches, the experience and expertise of PPC professionals is a key. Full-time PPC specialists in field-specific companies often work stereotypically, using the same strategies. Our team works with all available tools and develops unique strategies for each project. Therefore, we find the best possible solutions.

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