Atom Finance is a US based market intelligence platform launched in 2019, that provides institutional-quality investment research resources to individual investors. Atom initially launched as a desktop product, and when the app was developed, Atom turned to Aura to reach high quality Android users that would sign up to their freemium subscription-based service.
Trang Dao, Atom’s VP of Growth, shares the full story of working with Aura and explains how this channel provided significant value to their overall UA strategy.
The challenge
As a relatively new app, getting your name out there and standing out from the crowd poses several challenges. First of all, traditional advertising channels are highly saturated, and it’s hard to differentiate your app and really catch users’ attention.
In addition to these challenges, it’s tricky to find quality Android traffic - today advertisers are reliant on Google UAC (Universal App Campaigns) and Facebook app install campaigns, which are somewhat of a black box and don’t give you the visibility you’d like to see.
The solution
We started working with Aura to solve these issues and meet our main KPI - grow our user base with engaged customers who perform actions such as creating stock watchlists and linking their investment portfolio.
Specifically, Aura’s solution gave us the ability to reach users natively on their device in high impact moments - like when they’re first setting up their new phone. This is paired with strong targeting capabilities, based on data users opt-in to sharing during their device setup - like age and gender. Together, this strategy helped us efficiently reach our top performing demographics.
The specific ad formats Aura offered us were also a big pull - notably, the full screen offer at the end of a new phone’s onboarding flow. This ad format isn’t readily available on many mobile marketing campaigns - but with Aura it’s one of the main ad formats.
Giving users a feeling of trust
In addition, reaching users directly via their devices - rather than their social media feeds - adds an element of trust to our product. Because our platform integrates users' brokerage accounts, many first-time users are naturally hesitant to link their portfolios - despite the multiple layers of encryption and anonymization we apply to the information.
The legitimacy that a native device placement provides our app helps ease this friction - the results of our campaigns correlate to this. Not only were we improving trust, we were simultaneously strengthening our brand awareness by being part of the unboxing experience on new mobile phones. As a young company, the combination of this awareness and user trust Aura provided us was a big plus.
The results
We began with a test phase on a limited budget to test the waters, and we hit our targets right away.
We then increased our budget, and since doing so we’ve managed to get the double benefit of scale and efficiency, meeting all our CPA targets.
- 57% decrease in the D30 cost of users linking their portfolios to Atom
- Month over month numbers significantly improving
- Efficient in converting users to sign up
The reporting
Aura’s easy-to-use reporting dashboard is a big plus. It lets us track every aspect of our campaign’s performance, from app downloads and launches, to attributed installs and cost. For each metric, we’re able to see our results broken down into customizable charts and tables, which makes it super easy to stay up to date on all our KPIs in a single dashboard. Combining this with our campaign performance and relationship with the Aura team, who always communicate our next steps clearly, we’re delighted with this partnership and look forward to Aura helping us drive our growth in the year to come.
If you’d like to hear more from Trang about building a marketing strategy for an early stage finance app, check out her podcast on Out of the Box
