As most app marketers know, time spent on device peaks during the holiday season. Between November and December, households across the globe are on their devices, shopping for holiday deals, ordering takeout for family gatherings, booking their vacations, or just spending some downtime with their favorite mobile game.
The key to making this seasonal uplift in new users, engagement, and intent work for your app is tackling it from all angles - from optimizing existing channels to expanding into new ones.
1. Build holiday-themed and urgent creatives that spike conversions
The challenges app marketers face during the holiday season are the same as those throughout the rest of the year - only amplified due to the high competition for users’ attention. To drive growth, you need to optimize your channels, generate strong content and creatives, reach your target audience, look for real-time marketing opportunities, and collect and analyze data to improve performance.
The key difference between this season and the rest of the year is the opportunities available to maximize your app’s growth through creatives. And there’s a lot of data to back up this claim*:
- Conversions are significantly higher throughout the holiday season due to more engagement in apps and on phones (2021, US, iOS)
- Game installs surge 3x during the week of Christmas (2021, US, Facebook)
- Advertisers test 2x the amount of creatives during the holidays, which means you don’t want to be left behind
*Data from the Unity Playworks platform, 2021-2022
This makes the holiday and shopping season prime opportunities to use your creatives to drive growth. It’s also the time when consumers are most likely to be engaged by emotional triggers, like nostalgia - since it’s a time traditionally affiliated with friends and family.
These triggers are a useful tool for building high conversion creatives. Your creatives can use users’ emotional responses to these triggers to connect your app with the mood of the season. By playing to these emotional responses you’ll stand a better chance of encouraging users to download your app.
Another effective emotional trigger to motivate users is urgency. Time-limited promotions and time-sensitive messaging are two great ways to insert urgency into your creatives. Urgency is an effective tool as it motivates users to engage as soon as possible or risk losing out - whether that’s on a special promotion or just the chance to get ahead of the shopping crowds, availability issues, or lengthy delivery times.
Some tips to help you ideate creatives that spark the holiday feeling include:
- Use real footage of real people that show emotional, heartwarming scenarios
- Test holiday symbols in your creatives - think snowflakes, witches, pumpkins, and turkeys
- Leverage narratives that center on family and community
2. Set up an offerwall campaign to exceed your ROAS goals
The offerwall is a user-initiated, rewarded in-app marketplace with three main constituents: developers use the offerwall to drive revenue, retain users, and motivate app engagement. Advertisers use the offerwall to reach unique, high-quality audiences that are looking to exchange engagement for rewards. Users engage with the offerwall for rewards, app discovery, and brand discovery, all while getting more of the app they’re already using.
Here are 3 best practices for mastering this ad unit during the holidays:
First, the most important thing to keep in mind is timing. You want to ensure that you have enough time before the shopping rush to reach a large audience, while also making sure that you’re not leveraging shopping season themes before the season is top of mind for users.
Second, like with your creatives, it’s important to create a sense of urgency with your offerwall campaigns to drive engagement. With holiday shopping starting earlier and earlier each year, it’s important to remind users that the holidays are coming and that right now is the time to shop. You can provide this sense of urgency in your messaging - by labeling deals as time-limited or tying them into specific holidays.
Third, use special promotions like double rewards on key shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Double rewards typically look like doubling the amount of in-app currency that users receive for completing a task - for example, offering users 40 gold coins instead of the 20 they would usually receive for the same task. Consumers will be inclined to engage with an offer that gives them extra rewards. As an advertiser, you can double down on your bid - the reward is higher, the traffic is higher. In fact, we’ve seen around a 35% lift in conversions during special promotions.
Overall, the offerwall is an effective placement to engage high-intent users and drive high ROAS - particularly if implemented correctly in your growth strategy.
3. Use device set-up placements as new phones enter the market
The holiday season has tons of new devices entering the market - with all the major players releasing the latest versions of their best-selling devices, many shoppers buy new devices as gifts to themselves and others. As such, device sales traditionally increase heavily in this period. And new models entering the market mean many users will be setting up their new devices.
New device activation is when users are most likely to install - the first 48 hours of unboxing their new device is when they’ll install over 50% of their apps. That makes this window the most impactful for app marketers looking to drive scale.
Aura from Unity partners with top device manufacturers and mobile carriers, like Vodafone, Samsung, and Orange, to deliver app discovery experiences directly to users on their devices, starting with device activation. This gives Aura the ability to get your app recommended during this pivotal moment of app discovery. On top of that, Aura uses opt-in data to personalize recommendations - helping to ensure that the users discovering your app will be those most likely to download it.
To make the most of this unique channel during the holiday season, there are three things to keep in mind.
First, like with traditional channels, holiday-ify your creatives. Second, like with offerwalls, timing and creating urgency is vital. Third, prepare for a longer LTV curve. On-device campaigns typically have a slower LTV return than traditional channels, but make up for it by showing greater ROAS in the long run. Running an on-device campaign, you should begin to see user engagement increase on D14 or D30.
This is because, when users download an app during device set-up, it’s usually not because they plan to use that app right away. They might download a recommended travel app, for example, during device set-up, but then only first login to the app when they’re starting to plan their trip a month later. The upside of using a channel like this is that you’re already there when users are looking to book that trip, instead of competing for the install when users are searching for their next travel app in the Google Play Store.
4. Reach users at moments when they’re already looking to spend
On-device channels are not only confined to new device set-up placements. The ability to reach users directly on their devices to drive app discovery extends to throughout the device lifecycle.
Another impactful on-device placement is native touchpoints. Because on-device channels are directly integrated into the operating systems of users’ devices, they enable advertisers to reach users with display ads that appear as native notifications.
This represents a key opportunity for advertisers to engage users with messaging related to contextual triggers. You can send users a notification that appears like a notification from their carrier or device manufacturer, letting them know that a holiday sale is currently running on your app. This is a great way to leverage urgency and tie your app into the holiday season.
An example of this could be a banner that appears on users home screen, letting them know that Black Friday is around the corner and that your app is currently running a related time-sensitive sale.
These native display ads enable your app to reach users as they’re already looking to spend - and help you get a head start on the competition.
Having a multi-channel approach to your holiday advertising strategy and knowing how to optimize all of those components is critical. If you’ve made it this far, you should have all of the best practices you need to drive growth this holiday season.
