Annica, a self-proclaimed Iron Chef, grew up in Taiwan where her expertise in the kitchen was fostered. After graduating from National Taiwan University, she worked for the largest online job searching & recruiting site in Taiwan for 2 years.
Annica came to NYC to chase the American dream and experience life in the capital of the world. After she earned her Master’s Degree in Direct and Interactive Marketing at NYU, she worked for a stockbroker on Wall Street and later became Marketing Director at the company.
She fell in love with digital media in 2012, then decided to pursue it as her new career, becoming a Google certified partner and kicking off her career in mobile marketing.
ON METRICS
In general, to create a successful mobile business, I recommend reviewing and optimizing the following metrics: cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), lifetime value (LTV), customer retention rate and attrition rate.
The most important thing for my job is to spend marketing dollars efficiently. With that, my daily routine starts by logging into Facebook and tracking my CPM. If it’s high or low will determine how the rest of my day goes. If CPM is low, my day will pretty much be easy and breezy. If the CPM is expensive, I will likely need to spend some time digging in to figure out how to lower my CPI.
It’s also important to keep track of weekends and special events. If there are Academy Awards or some other special event like the recent solar eclipse, these events could potentially impact our user acquisition efforts. I like to look at metrics as frequently as I can and keep tabs on campaign performance in case I need to react quickly.
ON CREATIVES
I believe personalization is the key to success with ad creative. In order to attract prospects to engage with an ad, the creative has to be relevant and relatable to their personal interests or personality traits.
I try and test the easy things first including bids and budgets, before testing creatives. If I don’t see improvements, I then dive into the audience level to see what audiences are more expensive and less expensive. From there, since our creative channel is tailored to audiences, I will then consider testing creatives to gain better results.
Learn more about Annica from her Mobile Heroes profile.
ON OPPORTUNITIES
To keep your customer, keep your product simple and intuitive. Simplistic product design and marketing messaging are the keys to attracting and retaining quality users.
Also, don’t be afraid to shut networks down. When I started at Stash, I found a few networks that seemed shady who weren’t delivering quality results and wasted my time. They simply claimed “payouts are too low” as their only excuse for poor performance. I suggested we shut those networks down and focus on scaling other major channels up. It was the best way to spend our time wisely. We took back control of what we could accurately measure.
THE LAST WORD
Always be curious. Curiosity keeps your brain active and open to new ideas and therefore, opening up new possibilities.
Of course, optimization is essential. In order to be really, really successful, you need to find ways of reducing acquisition costs. The best way is to be in the platform daily, to see what’s going on and react with the best optimization strategies you can think of.
For data driven marketing and UA, you need to be precise and understand what you’re looking at. You must know what to do when good or bad things change in your campaigns, when to scale up, and how to scale up.