A View From Above: Conversations with CEOs blog series is back! This time our guest is Jules Minvielle – the CEO of mobile performance specialist Surikate. With tons of mobile advertising experience under his belt, Minvielle shares some very interesting thoughts about programmatic, social media, fraud and mobile performance as a whole.
AppsFlyer: What is the advantage of running UA campaigns on social media?
Minvielle: Social media is definitely one the main sources of mobile inventory and usually generates good performance. Any User Acquisition strategy should include social media as a first step, for example with a platform like Facebook which offers a long list of targeting options. Social media is a good way to keep your costs low, the reach is good & global, but it’s also true that it has some limitations. To scale a campaign and to generate a large volume of qualified users, a campaign should also integrate other solutions than social media. For example, running a social media campaign alongside a direct premium publishers campaign is a great fit as both complement each other.
Which social networks do you focus on and why? Are there networks that perform better for certain verticals?
At Surikate, we work with direct publishers and we buy all types of mobile media: display, search, email, video, native… social media is one of them. We usually use the following platforms:
Facebook is definitely the social media platform that offers the highest level of reach. It is a generalist platform. We usually use it to work on CPI or CPL campaigns. The audience is large & diverse. There is also a good diversity of formats on Facebook, with Canvas being really innovative and one of the most exciting. Last but not least, gaming campaigns usually perform well on Facebook.
Snapchat is a great social platform to reach the 15–25 audience. A large portion of the younger generations have migrated their social media usage to Snapchat, so it’s essential to consider it for any campaign targeting this audience. However, it’s still early stage to determine if we will be able to generate a solid performance on this platform.
Pinterest has recently started to sell their audience on mobile. This platform should be a priority for any campaign targeting women on verticals like fashion, retail, decoration… But even if this solution is recent, I think it should be tested as the lifetime value from Pinterest is higher than on any other social media platform.
Which verticals are getting stronger in EMEA now and therefore generating rising media costs? What should app marketers from these verticals focus on when they run campaigns?
EMEA is not a region where we can see large investments from game developers. The verticals that are driving most mobile spend are fashion, retail, travel, utility, automotive, FMCG, social, and news. Clients like Uber and Shopdirect, Volkswagen, and Ford now promote their app or mobile services on an ongoing basis. User Acquisition for apps in these verticals require strict KPI-driven performance. Marketers should focus on post-install or lead. Attribution solutions like AppsFlyer offer multiple postback options that allow the strict monitoring of performance in real time.
Are you seeing a shift from UA to retargeting?
Retargeting is just a moment in a mobile performance marketing plan. After User Acquisition activity, it is important to work on engagement. Retargeting is an ideal solution to convert users who have been exposed to a banner or who have downloaded an app without generating any real action. However it is important to define a performance-oriented campaign from the get go. This is the only way to properly combine user acquisition, engagement & retention.
When should app marketers use programmatic media buying? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this practice?
We have been working for two years on programmatic. We tested 20 different DSPs so far. From our vast experience we can say that programmatic is clearly not an efficient solution to drive mobile performance. One should not use a DSP for any CPI campaign with a clear CPA target like generating a sale, first booking, first deposit etc… ROI will either be negative or extremely low. The only type of performance campaigns that could work on programmatic are a cost per click, cost per view and cost per lead.
The only way to generate strong mobile performance is to work transparently with direct publishers, to optimise all sources one by one, to automatically AB Test different formats, and to segment all audiences based on precise targeting options.
Programmatic buying is more suited for a branding, awareness building, and visibility campaign on a large scale.
What is innovative in Surikate’s approach to media buying? How are you setting yourself apart from the intense competition in the app media space?
During six years of activity to date, our 120-strong company has been developing mobile performance expertise. We have worked on over 10,000 campaigns with more than 1,000 clients across more than 150 countries.
Our optimisation methodology is focused on three key points:
- Direct publishers collaboration and inventory optimisation
- Automatic format optimisation: we use our own creative studio and AB Testing algorithm
- Audience targeting: we use our own data to segment audiences and target converting users
On top of our performance-driven expertise, we operate on a global scale. With offices in five cities (Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco, Hong Kong & London), we have delivery & operation teams in the main time zones. We can work on a massive scale on every global campaigns (150 countries).
We work for all verticals: Gaming is just a part of our expertise, we have clients from retail, FMCG, automotive, social, travel, utility, music, gambling, fashion and more… Generating performance across all these verticals requires high level of knowledge, a large network of publishers, a high volume of data and the experience of many successful campaigns
Is Surikate shifting from CPI to CPA? Which KPIs are you focusing on now?
Surikate has been working for years now on performance, so we don’t just generate impressions, clicks or installs. We work on optimisation that will significantly impact our clients’ revenue. Our clients are more focused on KPIs like CPL or CPA (usage, retention, registration, booking, purchase, subscription).
How are you dealing with fraud? How will fraud affect the mobile ecosystem next year?
For years now, fraud has been a key concern for us. We have a solution integrated in our performance platform that helps us monitor the quality of each campaign. Our delivery team is also trained to identify any bad or fraudulent sources. Focusing on KPIs other than CPM / CPC / CPI is also a way to guarantee that our clients reach a good ROI on every campaign. We constantly optimise our sources and block anything suspicious generating poor engagement or retention.