Beyond Social Media: How to Diversify Your Mobile Traffic Strategy

The majority of mobile growth teams depend heavily on just one acquisition channel: paid social. But this approach comes with risks. First, as acquisition costs rise, paid UA eats up most of your budget - leaving little room to try new things. Worse, when the single source of your growth loses its appeal, performance declines, and costs keep going up, you have very few alternatives.

Why Social-Only UA Is Starting To Break Down

Paid social media advertising was effective for a long time, to the point that many teams based their entire user acquisition model on it. But that model is beginning to show some weaknesses. Costs per install have been steadily increasing on the main social platforms, and while the platforms used to prioritize the best ad creative, they now prioritize the highest bidder. On top of that, there are occasional spikes in demand, regular policy changes, and account reviews that can temporarily halt campaigns. These fluctuations are difficult to predict and can't be accounted for in a standard model. This hidden volatility makes the whole channel riskier than many realize.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency update has exacerbated the situation. When users can opt out of tracking, the platforms can't be fed the same quantity or quality of information needed to diligently target ads. Advertisers linked to a user's IDFA had more concrete information on their customers and could directly verify the success of their ad campaigns. Now that this information is estimated by the platforms, advertisers on social media have to rely on the platform's "best guess" of what's working.

This comes with implicit biases toward keeping ad spend high and sticking with what has previously gotten results, but no longer works due to inaccurate or lack of information. Detailed information was helpful for business success, but it was also a boon to privacy, and now stricter privacy regulations are degrading that information.

What Mobile Ad Networks Actually Give You

A mobile ad network essentially pools ad space from multiple mobile apps and websites. Hence, instead of relying on a single ad space type in a particular app environment, it gives you access to native ads, interstitial adverts, rewarded video ads, push notification ads android, etc., through thousands of apps. This is where diversification tends to become a growth driver rather than simply a precautionary one.

The same goes for budget compartmentalization. Indeed, you might not want to put all your eggs into one bidding environment, but that also doesn't mean your entire budget has to compete in a single secondary auction for a handful of installs. You can distribute across multiple networks, with each network also helping you access a diverse range of potential installs. You get this kind of granular insight with mediation tools since each network you add for competition also gives you additional data on what those real users are looking for.

The mobile advertising industry as a whole is rich enough in opportunity now for this kind of multi-network market to make intuitive sense. eMarketer, for example, projected mobile ad spend worldwide to exceed \$362 billion in 2023, with mobile accounting for just over 70% of total digital ad spending. This isn't exactly a nascent marketplace with a wealth of underexploited niches; it's the core of the digital media landscape.

Push Notification Ads: The Format Social Can't Replicate

If diversification is your goal, this is the format to watch. Push notification ads are accessed directly from a device's lock screen or notification tray - never within any app's feed or content. On Android, the format has more breathing room to operate than its counterpart on iOS. This is partly because campaign permissions are more permissive and partly because notifications aren't systematized the same way they are on iOS - where smaller, more 'noisy' notifications might be grouped together rather than displayed individually.

The result is an ad format that isn't competing with organic content, comments, or an algorithm that determines if your ad is even worthy of being seen by the user. It's just a binary tap or don't tap. This simplicity of engagement helps eliminate some noise and approximate a purer measure of a given ad's appeal to a particular user. A well-targeted and interesting push notification ad will actively generate more views, taps, and conversions than a standard display ad, because the audience and inventory are people who already express at least some interest in notifications as an ads channel.

The reasons to try push through an ad network are straightforward. For one, they've got direct access to a bunch of this format's inventory. Most of the big players are still throwing most of their ad spend at the duopoly, leaving these formats less saturated, so users see far fewer of these ads and the ads they do receive are likely to be seen. If you tried to reach all these smaller apps and publishers directly, the manpower cost would be overwhelming.

Making Push Notification Campaigns Actually Scale

Launching a push campaign is not the real challenge. The hard part is making it scale. And more work goes into it than what most teams consider.

First, you must segment your audience. You cannot send the same push to a new install and a lapsed user. Segment by recency, by in-app behavior, by device, and by country. Opt-in rates vary widely, so do not create one-size-fits-all segments.

With push, timing is vital. Sending during hours of heavy screen time drastically boosts your open rates. But don't copy and paste such information. Your data can prove time-tailoring push works best for you.

Next, you must rotate your creative. Push fatigues faster than other formats when you serve the same copy for a few days. This is particularly true for mobile marketers since the same call-to-action gets reused in every push. Rotate your headlines and test urgency vs curiosity. Rotate your rich push layouts to keep content fresh.

And finally, segmentation, timing, and creative are useless without targeting understanding. Recognizing behavioral data are poor in a post-ATT world, you must use likely intent signals for targeting. What app someone is using, what category it falls into, what time it is - these are all you have left. So targeted campaigns aren't optional anymore.

Choosing A Network Without Getting Burned

Not all ad networks are good for your budget. Not the most useful thing to check their cost first either. The quality of the traffic is more important. A network providing you with cheap installs from bots or unengaged users can ruin your retention numbers even if the CPI made you smile at first.

To filter ad networks, ask specifically about the measures they take against fraud. The most common types affecting CPI campaigns are click spam, install farms, and SDK spoofing. If they can't describe what they do to prevent this, you're better off spending your budget elsewhere.

Also, transparency in reporting. You want a detailed report on a source level - by placement, by country, by device type, by creative. You don't want one averaged number hiding the good from the bad sources. This number also must not count any reattributions or organic installs it helped you get.

Check the flexibility of targeting next. How detailed you can get with the targeting by country and by device type. Or perhaps, you're already running some Android-specific push campaigns. Then, you will want to stay sure it's possible to disable iOS completely and get Android traffic on device level reporting.

Measuring Channels Honestly

Effective diversification is possible as long as there's an equal playing field for comparison, and that's where proper attribution comes in. Running push, social, and Google UAC ads without consistent measurement tracking from a mobile measurement partner would just leave you with a collection of isolated, unconnected data points for each channel. The MMP technology will standardize that data, ensuring that cost per install and return on ad spend are consistent measurements across every traffic source.

It's tempting to rely on the quick-and-dirty CPI measurement to determine the efficacy of an ad spend, but ROAS provides a much more complete and accurate picture to guide your budget allocations. A slightly more expensive but quality user acquired through push, for example, factors in a higher lifetime value and better stickiness that would be lost in the CPI noise if you only focused on the first interaction point.

The same is true for the retargeting push, where a user who already installed the app is able to demonstrate the high intent they have in doing so, and the lift in revenue that comes from ROI-driven users. This wasted potential revenue stream is also a missed savings from a cheap-install network left unchecked.

Structuring Your Test Budget

The primary reason teams are not successful with diversification is not the channels - it's the way the budget is organized. Trying a new network with 5% of your spend for a couple of weeks and then shrugging and saying "it doesn't work" is a classic error. Stat noise at low spend levels will generally mask the true performance of anything and depending on the week make it look bad or good.

A cleaner method is a 70/20/10 split. Take 70% of your budget and put it into the channels you know work on an ROAS basis - including social, if it's still reliable. Take 20% and put it into channels that worked well enough to indicate you should keep trying them but didn't have the volume at low spend. Like the push network you tested last quarter that had solid opt-in and engagement. Take 10% and dedicate it to pure experiment, testing new networks or new formats you have not been on yet.

This strategy keeps your performance in place and allows any new channels an actual fair bit of runway to show their stuff. It's probably also worth noting to do these tests on a schedule as well - every 30 or 60 days review is a lot less likely to make a channel decision mistake than weekly is. Particularly push campaigns need time to accumulate enough opt-in and engagement data to know if they can work.

Having all those pieces in place will go a long way towards keeping your growth steady when one source starts drying up. And in a world where we're now talking about mobile ad spend as adding up to hundreds of billions a year, the volume you need to look where else is likely there.