7 best practices for remarketing your mobile app in 2024

In this article, we discuss the importance of mobile retargeting for app businesses, and share a series of best practices to help you improve your customer retention rates. Here’s how to take the app side of your business to the next level.

Why in-app retargeting?

For app businesses, a fast-growing user base doesn’t guarantee long term success. Around 74% of today’s app users will uninstall an app or become inactive within just 24 hours of the initial install. With this in mind, it’s essential for you, as a mobile marketer, to reduce churn as early as possible by using retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting, which targets current and lapsed users, is the best way for you to maintain brand awareness across your user base. Retargeting also helps you to accumulate repeat purchases and revenue growth. You can execute these campaigns through several digital channels, such as social media, email marketing or in-app advertising – but if you are an app business looking to retarget your users, we recommend in-app retargeting.

How does in-app retargeting work?

In-app retargeting helps you to advertise your app via ad placements within the other apps that your users are engaging with. In-app ads are highly effective because they reach your users in apps where they are already spending their time and money. Crucially, from a user experience standpoint, clicking an in-app advert is all it takes to direct a user out of one app and back into your own – making it a great way to re-engage and reactivate your customers.

Not only that, but in-app advertising also provides you with rich insights into what your users do in other apps and what they spend their money on. The buying and selling of in-app ad placements is driven by computer algorithms in virtual auctions where the bidding decisions are based on the data of the user who will see the ad. This data becomes extremely useful in developing highly-effective mobile campaigns.

As a mobile advertising partner, the Remerge team has delivered in-app retargeting campaigns for some of the world’s biggest apps. In this article, we bring you seven best practices for in-app retargeting, based on a decade of industry experience and expert insights from guests on our mobile marketing podcast, Apptivate.

1. Use deep links in your campaigns

Make it as easy as possible for users to get from an ad to the heart of your app. Deep links send users directly to a specific in-app location, instead of your app’s homepage or main feed. This way your users will land where you want them to and they won’t have to navigate there themselves. 

This simplifies the user experience and helps to increase conversion rates. A gaming app, for example, can entice a user back into the game by advertising the last level that the user was on and take them there directly after the ad click.

2. Work with a tracking and attribution provider

Mobile measurement partners (MMPs) specialize in measuring the in-app actions your users take after clicking your ads – and they’ll be responsible for independently tracking all of your campaign data. You’re going to need an MMP if you plan to run programmatic mobile campaigns, so it makes sense to find the right one well in advance of launching your campaigns to ensure that you have the correct technical set up in place.

3. Segment your users strategically

Utilize all available user data and strategically build audience segments to target with your campaigns. This will enable you to send powerful and personalized messages to your users, which will result in better conversion rates. Furthermore, it will enable you to compare performance across different user segments. 

By concentrating on users who have reached a particular stage within your app, e.g, reached a certain level in a game or made a first product search, you can increase purchases by making personalized offers to specific user groups.

4. Save time and reduce errors with automation

Retargeting can be complex and manual – imagine having to regularly export, segment and upload your entire audience data for different campaigns. A mobile advertising partner can synchronize with your app’s event data to replace all manual processes and save you time by implementing dynamic audience segmentation. 

Advertising partners can also exclude certain users from your campaigns in real time, such as those who have already converted via other channels (i.e., push notification, email marketing or even organic). Much of this would simply not be viable on a manual basis.

5. Make sure your campaigns are privacy-compliant

Consumers are more conscious than ever of their digital footprint, so using their data for advertising purposes must be done carefully and non-invasively. Privacy-first advertising frameworks such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative and Google’s upcoming Privacy Sandbox tools are being developed to serve that need, but for advertisers, it adds an extra layer of complexity that they need to adapt and adhere to.

For brands looking towards programmatic in-app advertising, where a mobile advertising partner is required, we’d recommend teaming up with one who acts as a ‘data processor’ to ensure the highest level of data protection and to safeguard your user’s privacy. You can learn more about the shift toward privacy-first advertising here.

6. Customize your creatives and landing pages

Creating great ads and in-app landing pages for different segments takes time and skill. Nevertheless, it’s an important investment that will benefit your campaigns’ conversion rates. Creatives that are visually impactful, easy to understand and personalized to the audience you are targeting will typically work best. 

A programmatic mobile advertising partner can also support or guide you in your creative strategy by drawing from years of creative tests. They can also advise you on which ad formats work best, help you with creative ideation and assist you with reworking or resizing any assets you already have.

7. Learn more through A/B testing

The most successful campaigns constantly evolve as deeper insights are obtained from your campaigns’ performance data. When starting out, you may want to test simple segments throughout the entire conversion funnel to better understand your users’ behavior. From there, you can refine your approach to segmentation, creatives and messaging as your understanding of user behavior becomes more sophisticated. 

When A/B testing your ads, be sure to change only one element at a time, so that the root cause of any improvements in your ad’s performance can be easily attributed.

Summary

For app businesses, mobile retargeting is a tried and tested strategy that drives retention and fuels recurring purchases. Using deep links in your campaigns and careful A/B testing are essential foundations for any successful strategy, but it’s also important to consider which third parties you partner up with. 

Mobile advertising and measurement partners are there to ensure that your campaigns are measured accurately and objectively – and that you receive the guidance you need when it comes to user privacy, creative strategy, campaign automation and strategic audience segmentation.

For further guidance on retargeting, feel free to get in touch with the Remerge team or check out our comprehensive retargeting guide here for free.