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Vera Lefebvre is an app specialist for Google’s Northern European team, and works alongside brands and agencies to ensure they get the most from their app advertising strategies.
“My mobile website is great at driving revenue, so why should I also invest in an app?”
It’s a question I’ve heard in hundreds of client meetings over the past few years. And it’s a fair one. For web-first businesses — like those in retail, banking, or education — their mobile site is often the engine of new customer acquisition. The idea of diverting resources to an app that might not attract brand-new customers can feel counterintuitive.
But this perspective misses the app’s true superpower: 64% of online users prefer an app to a website. And, in the Netherlands, the in-app advertising market is forecasted to grow further as brands increasingly embrace advanced data analytics to deliver highly personalised ad experiences.
We should stop thinking of an app as just another acquisition channel and start seeing it for what it truly is: a powerful tool for customer retention and lifetime value. Its goal is to graduate your best web customers into an environment where they become even more valuable.
The data behind the value shift
The difference between a mobile web user and an app user is significant. Kantar research shows that people who use a brand’s app are far more committed, and other research shows people view 4.2X more products per session in apps, compared to mobile websites.
An app offers a user experience that a mobile browser simply can’t match. With instantaneous load times, seamless features like Face ID or Wallet for checkout, the path to purchase is virtually frictionless. App users can also fuel the success of web campaigns via features like deep linking.
Your toughest app advertising objections overruled
The shift to app-first value creates new challenges around cost, measurement, and scaling. To help brands tackle these challenges, my team at Google has created a brand-new app playbook that answers over 35 of our clients’ most frequently asked questions.
Here is a sneak peek at three of them:
1. Objection: Getting new app users is expensive. How do we find high-value, repeat purchasers?
Answer: You can mitigate the expense by focusing on predictive lifetime value. Google’s Smart Bidding is optimised to utilise historic revenue data, targeting users statistically predicted to make repeat purchases. This ensures your budget is consistently focussed on profit, not just high download volume.
2. Objection: We don’t have enough high-quality creative assets and lack the time to produce more.
Answer: This is a common struggle. The key is to shift your focus from producing a few “perfect” assets to providing a high diversity of inputs (headlines, descriptions, images, and videos).
App campaigns are designed to automatically test and optimise combinations of these assets across thousands of placements. This frees up creative resources and moves your creative process from guesswork to a data-informed strategy that continuously improves performance.
3. Objection: How can we be sure our app install campaigns aren’t wasting budget by engaging existing customers?
Answer: The most effective way to ensure your acquisition budget is laser-focussed on genuinely new users is by utilising Customer Exclusion Lists. By regularly uploading a hashed list of your existing customer identifiers (like emails), you can block ads from being shown to these segments. This guarantees your valuable media spend drives new customer growth.
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