App campaigns are easy to run and easy to waste money on, because the install is the vanity metric. An install that never opens the app twice cost you money and produced nothing. The real target is the in-app event that means a user has arrived.
The numbers I have delivered here are unusually efficient: 3,827 installs at $0.12 each on a total spend of $214.23 for an agritech app, achieved on a modest budget by feeding the algorithm clean event data and giving creative enough variation to find its audience.
What app campaign management covers
- Firebase or equivalent event setup, so optimisation targets quality rather than volume
- Asset strategy: text, image and video variety, which is what Google actually optimises across
- Store listing review, since conversion from click to install happens on a page most advertisers ignore
- Bidding by install or in-app action depending on data maturity
- Geographic and device segmentation where cost varies sharply
- Retention reporting alongside install cost, because cheap installs that churn are not cheap