Best practices for promoting your app with Meta Ads

Meta is a must for promoting an app to the people who will use it. But for the strategy to pay off, there are six rules to follow.

1. Define your target audience

Knowing who you want to reach is an obvious first step before launching any campaign.

You can still pick an audience by demographics, interests, behaviors and location through Facebook’s detailed targeting. But broad targeting usually works better these days.

Meta’s algorithms have become much better at finding the right audience. Broad targeting (also known as “Advantage+ Audience”) gives them more room to optimize and find likely users, which often means better performance and lower costs than narrow targeting.

Our many tests confirm it: broad targeting (Broad or Advantage+) beats the other options (interests, lookalikes built from a list) almost every time.

2. Create an engaging ad

An engaging ad is key to catching your audience’s attention. It needs a clear, concise message that highlights what your app does for people.

Understanding your audience’s needs is how you create ads that hold their attention. Keep putting their needs into words, and keep looking for a clear way to show how your product meets them.

Studying the ads of your competitors and market leaders is essential to understand what works best.

For this kind of competitive research, tools like Foreplay are especially useful: they let you see the best-performing Facebook ads in your industry.

Explore their solution here: https://www.foreplay.co/?via=symetrics

3. Use a clear call to action

A clear call to action in your ad encourages people to download your app. Keep it simple, like “Download now” or “Install now,” so the next step is obvious.

4. Test your ads

Testing is essential to see what works best for your audience. Try different ad formats, images, videos and calls to action to see what resonates. Meta offers split testing, which lets you compare several versions of an ad and see which one performs best.

One effective approach is to set up a campaign or ad set dedicated to creative testing, usually with 20 to 30% of your total budget. A separate structure forces Meta’s algorithms to actively test your new creative and give it impressions, instead of favoring the ads that already perform.

5. Monitor and optimize performance

Use Ads Manager to track how your ads perform and adjust what needs adjusting.

Check your performance every day, but don’t act too often. Every change restarts the learning phase and forces the algorithm to readjust.

So group your optimizations once or twice a week.

6. Build a campaign structure that matches your goals

Your campaign structure should follow your goals: whether you only aim for app installs, or for conversion events further down the funnel.

Here are the conversion events you can track in an app promotion campaign:

• App install: the first download and installation of your app
• Account creation or sign-up: when users create a new account in your app
• Tutorial completion: users finishing onboarding
• First action: the first meaningful interaction (for example, a first search or a first item added to cart)
• Purchase or transaction: completing a purchase or payment
• Subscription: starting a paid plan
• Feature activation: using specific key features
• Return visit: coming back to the app after first use

Cost per install (CPI) benchmarks by industry

Here are average CPI benchmarks by industry, from a Liftoff report:

• Shopping: $4.88
• Travel: $3.66
• Entertainment: $3.10
• Gaming: $2.73
• Finance: $2.59
• Education: $2.07
• Health and fitness: $1.86
• Business: $1.32
• Flash sales: $0.99

Keep in mind that these benchmarks vary with each app and each campaign. By testing and optimizing your Meta ads, you can work toward a lower CPI for your app.