Mastering Mobile Ad Campaign Scaling: Common Pitfalls and Useful Tips

A lot of mobile advertisers fail to scale their ad campaigns on various ad platforms before they even begin. When it comes to scaling, tossing aside your gut feelings won't cut it. While it's a challenging endeavor, with a strategic approach, you can navigate this terrain and maximize your ad campaigns' potential.

In this article, I'll explore the key principles of scaling, common missteps, and proven strategies we have developed at AdQuantum, a performance marketing agency, to ensure your ad campaigns thrive.

Understanding Scaling and Its Purpose

Scaling refers to increasing the daily ad budget for a given project. Every app is unique, with monetization strategies, distinct benchmarks, unit economics, average revenues, and lifetime value rates.

These variables should be factored in before employing uniform scaling strategies across varied products. While some campaigns may accommodate doubling the budget daily without hitches, others may falter with even minimal changes.

There are two scaling methods: vertical and horizontal. Vertical scaling involves increasing budgets and bids within campaigns, while horizontal scaling entails making changes to campaign settings, optimization, and duplicating campaigns. So, it comes down to deciding if you want to duplicate a profitable campaign or increase its budget.

The choice between scaling types should be case-specific. On paid social platforms, vertical scaling – beginning with a budget increase followed by raising the bid – is typically recommended.

However, blending both techniques often yields better results on these platforms.

Mobile ad networks only allow vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling is futile since duplicated campaigns target the same audience as the original one.

Before initiating campaign scaling, ensure your product is ripe for it. A product is deemed scale-ready when it demonstrates positive unit economics concerning paid user acquisition – indicating that the campaign has consistently met its KPIs for at least 2-3 days.

From a marketing perspective, before scaling:

• Engage in creative testing.

• Ascertain the stability of ad campaigns, ensuring they don't incur abrupt cost hikes as budgets escalate.

• Ensure the user acquisition team has deduced the threshold metrics correlating ad spent to product profitability – surpassing these metrics could be detrimental.

While preparation demands considerable time and effort, the returns justify the investment. Relying solely on intuition can deplete budgets and undermine the efficacy of campaigns. Thus, allocating time for refining and enhancing your marketing strategies is pivotal for scaling success.

Pitfalls of Scaling

Scaling, while promising, entails challenges that warrant meticulous attention. Below are potential pitfalls in scaling ad campaigns:

• Audience Limitations

Every product has its limitations: the target audience is limited to a specific city or country, the level of user’s interest in the product, and the ability to engage users within an app.

Additionally, advertisers often vie for the same audience, leading to ad fatigue or getting overshadowed by competitors with larger budgets.

Simply having a high average revenue per user (ARPU) doesn't guarantee that a project will be more successful than its competitors. When it comes to user acquisition, a higher ARPU means users on average spend more, but it also means a smaller percentage of users can afford it.

Typically, there are more people willing to pay $30 for a subscription than those willing to pay $100. Conversely, projects with lower subscription costs face greater competition for the same audience.

That's why it's crucial to develop an effective user acquisition strategy before you start scaling to attract a steady stream of new users without suffering substantial losses.

• Cannibalization

This occurs when one campaign eats into another's traffic. Blindly duplicating campaigns can result in them competing against each other. To prevent cannibalization, implement a strategic approach to campaign duplication by diversifying targeting parameters.

Experiment with various audience segments, ad creatives, and GEOs to reach new audiences without overlap. Regularly analyze the performance of your campaigns to identify potential overlaps and optimize budget allocation for maximum efficiency.

• Abrupt Budget Increases

Sometimes, when an advertiser sees a campaign performing 2-3 times better than the target KPI, they impulsively start to significantly increase the budget for this campaign. However, in such cases, the media buying process usually gets disrupted.

In practice, it's better to increase the budget gradually. For example, if a campaign performed well at $300 per day, try keeping it at $500-600 per day for a few days before jumping to a budget of several thousand dollars.

• Premature Budget Increases

To avoid impulsive decisions, consider specific factors before increasing the campaign budget. Firstly, ensure that the campaign has consistently performed well over a longer period of time of not less than 3 days. Secondly, make sure the campaign has completed its learning phase. And thirdly, ensure it has already achieved several purchases at the target cost.

• Auction Limitations

No secret auctions have limitations. It's not uncommon for campaigns to experience a sudden decline, even after months of successful performance, resulting in a failure to attract the desired target audience. And the reasons for that may be:

1. Getting pushed out of the auction – this issue may arise when competing projects allocate larger budgets toward more compelling creatives, so you need to either increase your spending or find a better creative.

   
   

2. Product-channel fit – when a product reaches the limit of its available audience within the ad channels it fits, further spending growth becomes challenging. This is mainly applicable to niche products.

   
   

3. Competition in the auction within one product – this problem occurs when multiple teams are working on a project within the same advertising channel, such as both an agency and a client running campaigns simultaneously. There can be competition for top creatives, and if your ads aren’t strong enough, you may be outperformed, and your audience will be taken away. Thus, creatives become a crucial factor for scalability.

   
   

4. The quality of campaign optimization – if a campaign lacks optimization data within the conversion window, it can limit the campaign's scalability. Thus, scaling becomes impossible.

   
   

5. Algorithm changes and platform update scans also impact campaign performance and scalability. Staying updated with platform changes and adjusting campaign strategies accordingly is crucial to mitigate potential limitations.

• Misguided Scaling Approach

Doubling the campaign budget may seem like an easy solution, but it doesn't always yield the desired results. A viable alternative is campaign duplication. Gradually increase spend on the main campaign, and create 1-2 duplicates with minor audience and placement variations.

This step-by-step approach allows for a better evaluation of the impact of increased spend and provides a smoother path to scaling.

• Creative Fatigue

Ad creatives eventually experience fatigue, evident when click-through rate (CTR) and install rate (IR) drop while the cost per thousand (CPM) rises. Even in such cases, campaigns can still perform decently but not at their previous volume or level. To overcome creative fatigue, it's crucial to be prepared with multiple reserve creative approaches.

Instead of aggressive scaling, have new and fresh ad creatives ready to replace exhausted ones. By regularly refreshing your ad content and introducing new creative variations, you can maintain user engagement while avoiding creative fatigue.

Summing Up

Mastering mobile ad campaign scaling is both an art and a science. It demands a blend of strategic foresight, a keen understanding of your audience, and a vigilant eye on the ever-changing digital landscape.

Remember, scaling isn't just about increasing budgets; it's about making calculated decisions that align with your product's unique metrics and market dynamics. A thoughtful, well-prepared strategy in advance is your roadmap to navigating this complex terrain.

If you have any questions about mobile ad campaign scaling or need further clarification on any points discussed in this article, feel free to reach out to me.

Just ping me on LinkedIn, and I'll be more than happy to make things clearer for you. Scale wisely and confidently, and watch your campaigns soar to new heights!