How to Scale a VPN App Offer with Push Notifications: X20 Conversions [Case Study]
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So you have a perfectly working app marketing campaign: it converts and brings profit. Most likely, this gives you an idea to scale it — for example, boost your reach with social media or search ads. Or maybe you can just duplicate your successful campaigns?
No doubt, this all works. But what if there is an alternative, more efficient way to grow conversions and profit?
This is what this case study is exactly about. So sit back, and let’s look at how PropellerAds partner chose an off-the-beaten-track and decided to explore new traffic sources to scale his app marketing campaign.
About the Mobile App Marketing Campaign
Our partner promotes a Utility app called Jax VPN. The basic advertising campaign for the app is the following:
| Traffic: Onclick from PropellerAds GEO: Tier 3 ( CI, CG, IN, ID, IN, TH, PH, MX) |
The campaign was successful — but after some time, it began to face two issues:
- User acquisition scaling slowed down. In simple words, new users stopped joining as actively as before.
- Lack of user engagement.
So, our partner needed extra traffic sources and a fresh audience — and decided to try Push Ads.
He created a new Push ad campaign — and here is when the story begins.
How Our Partner Boosted App User Acquisition with Push Notifications
The new ad campaign was launched — but at first, it didn’t show an immediate boost in conversions and userbase growth. Was it time to optimize it using PropellerAds’ special features for Push campaigns?
Definitely, and here is what our partner did.
Added Push Badges
Badges are small icons placed on Push creatives. Being a seemingly small detail, they are proven to make a creative more visible and boost CTRs. There are more than 30 badge options at the PropellerAds self-service platform — and the Wrench one perfectly suits Utility offers.
Here is how the Jax VPN creative was upgraded:
Together with several other scaling efforts, the new campaign became a real game changer: look how a little icon helped boost performance (stats are given for September-November 2022):
| Campaign | Clicks | Conversions | CR |
| Wrench + Extra campaigns for scaling | 5 912 251 | 226 322 | 3.83 |
| No badge campaign | 99 907 | 1 546 | 1.55 |
To sum up: Push Notifications with badges became one of the keys to almost a 2,5 times CR boost. Combined with the other scaling techniques and additional mobile app marketing campaigns, the Wrench badge brought 224 776 more conversions than no-badge creatives.
Set Targeting for a Specific Audience
PropellerAds targeting options allow you to create custom audiences to attract the most relevant traffic. This task becomes even easier with Push Notifications: we have ready tailor-made audiences sorted by particular interests:
So, you just pick the right audience — in this case, it was Utilities — and begin targeting users who are most interested in your offer.
Our partner created a new campaign with such a targeting — and look how it worked out:
| Clicks | Conversions | CR | CTR | Conversion Price |
| 936 670 | 100 266 | 10.70 | 4.776 | $0.12 |
To sum up: by targeting the most relevant audience, the Jax VPN offer gained a 10.7% CR, received 100 266 conversions, and sped up the overall user acquisition process.
Went for the Retargeting Feature
Things got much better now! Still, there were many clicks left that didn’t turn into conversions — so our partner saw a need to increase CR even more.
To do it, he collected custom audiences and launched new retargeting campaigns. So, users who clicked a push once were re-engaged with new notifications, and many of them converted into customers.
Here are the statistics of the retargeting campaigns:
| Campaign | Clicks | Conversions | CR | CTR |
| Retargeting Campaign 1 | 145 905 | 17 832 | 12.22 | 2.968 |
| Retargeting Campaign 2 | 124 495 | 18 095 | 14.53 | 3.154 |
To sum up: retargeting efforts resulted in a 13,3% average CR and 35 927 new conversions.
The Results: 20 Times Higher Conversions
As you see, scaling with Push notifications was more than successful! Here are the final results:
| September 2022 | 21 904 Conversions with Onclick traffic |
| November 2022 | 578 609 Conversions with Onclick and Push traffic |
This graph vividly shows the growth after we added push notifications campaigns:
In fact, the boost happened on both formats — and with Push traffic, the number of conversions became 20 times bigger.
Bonus Part: Tips from PropellerAds
This is just one of the success stories with the PropellerAds Push notifications format. And we bet you want your next campaign to be the same impressive!
To help you, we gathered the best tips for using push to make your campaigns work.
Diversify Pricing Models
Push Notifications are compatible with CPA Goal, CPC, SmartCPC, and CPM bidding models. Your choice should depend on what is your campaign’s primary goal:
- CPA Goal: best for cost-effective spending
- SmartCPC: best for testing and scaling campaigns
- CPC: best for reaching maximum user engagement, especially when combined with Whitelists
- CPM: best for scaling with the well-tested creatives
Note: When choosing your CPA Goal bid, make sure it is not too low (this won’t bring you traffic) and not too high (this won’t bring you profit). Keep your ROI in check to ensure your CPA Goal rates are up-to-date.
Get the Most Out Of Targeting and Retargeting Options
Push Notifications offer interest and demographic targeting so that you can automatically choose the most relevant audience. Besides, you can create your own custom audiences, too.
It also makes sense to create additional campaigns with narrow targeting. For example, if your offer brings the most conversions on the Android 8+ version’s Edge browser, you can launch a separate Android 8+/Edge campaign, and it will have higher eCPM rates.
Test, Test, and Test
Push Notifications give a great space for testing creatives. There are plenty of extra features that can boost CTR:
- Push Badges for different offer types. You can choose a badge manually or go for auto-badge selection so that PropellerAds picks the most suitable one for your campaign.
- Localization. Don’t forget to translate your creatives into the target GEO language.
- Custom Button Text. Your creative can become even more clickable if you change the standard button CTA into something more personalized:
All of this is available on the PropellerAds self-service platform — so you can start your campaign right away.
And don’t forget to join our Telegram Chat to discuss Push Notifications, this article, or any other media buying topics!
