Top 5 Reasons To Start Paid User Acquisition For Your Mobile App

forbes.com

With over a million different apps on Google Play and Apple’s App Store, getting your app discovered is tough, and in many cases it may seem impossible to rise above the noise. While some app categories are less competitive than others, it’s safe to say that unless your app is the next Snapchat-style viral explosion (which, needless to say, is very rare), your marketing strategy should include paid user acquisition. The market has become too competitive to hold on to the old adage “we’re only growing organically,” and startups today are including marketing spend even in their seed round budgets.

With so many relevant channels, it’s easy to aimlessly spend marketing dollars away, but much harder to do so effectively. There are actually several different stages in the product lifecycle where it makes sense to pay to acquire new users. Here are the top 5:

Launch

You’ve just launched your app: woo-hoo! Both the App Store and Google Play have benefits for newly launched apps. Apple’s algorithms give you a head start after launch so that your app will rank higher compared to having the same volume of installs when it’s no longer new. Google Play has “Top Free” categories, giving users more places to discover your app. You will likely make PR efforts when launching, and together with paid user acquisition, you’ll be able to generate a significant number of downloads over a short period of time.

After launching, numbers used by the stores’ algorithms to rank your app in category charts and search results are still relatively low. Number of installs, active users, rating and review count. Moreover, users who see low numbers are less likely to install the app. Passing certain thresholds such as reaching 100K installs will boost your ASO and organic discovery efforts, and so acquiring users to meet this milestone in less time is a shortcut that can pay off.

Seeding

Your app is a community-based product or it has social aspects to it, and you need to quickly build a user base to get the ball rolling. Imagine using Instagram before anyone posted pictures or SoundCloud before people uploaded sounds. Would you stick around?

Data

You’re constantly iterating, improving and testing new features on the app, and you’re hoping that your newly released update will impact engagement or revenue (or better yet – both). You’ll need to collect data over time in order to measure the impact, so you have no choice but to wait until enough users pass through to make the results statistically significant. You can significantly speed up this process by acquiring users, which will also enable you to iterate faster and pave the way to a better product-market fit. The one caveat to keep in mind is that users you acquire won’t always behave the same way as organic users would.

Traction

You need to demonstrate traction and sustainable growth to keep going as a startup. If paid user acquisition is part of your marketing strategy, you’d better start early on and use it to boost that traction. Even if you’re not yet focused on monetization and you believe you’ll be able to monetize these users down the road, go for it.

ROI

Once you’re able to generate a return on investment on the user acquisition costs, congrats! As soon as you can prove that your model’s unit economics work and your user lifetime value exceeds your cost per user acquisition (LTV>CPA), you’ll want to ramp up and spend effectively as much as you can.