Our guest today is Natalie Drozd, app marketing expert. Her specialisation lies in App Store optimization, and growing apps through organic and paid marketing.

In our conversation today, Natalie breaks down her strategies for unearthing the hidden levers in managing what can often appear to be a very opaque black box - Google UAC. She explains how to manage bids, creatives and audiences to drive performance even when there aren't explicit ways to do so. I took a ton of notes from this episode that we were able to implement directly - and I highly recommend this episode as a masterclass in making sense of Google UAC.

As a note: As some of you may know, we had had Natalie on the show a few weeks ago. For various reasons we had to remove that episode - and re-record. This is the revised/finished product - enjoy!

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎰 3 levers you can influence on Google UAC
🎚️ High bids do not guarantee high value users
📍 Placements are key to performance.
😎 How you can use bidding to influence placements
🔃 The tradeoff between broad and targeted audiences - and how they are impacted by placements/bids
🔬 Breaking down the 3 UAC placements
🎛️ How you should choose your mix of placements depending on your goals of ROAS and scale
⚖️ How to use bids to prioritise outcomes
🏇 The competition aspect of placements
📹 Using YouTube for brand-building
☯️ The differences between passive and active marketing and the impact on conversions
🌱 Why YouTube is the place for growth
🎡 The product lifecycle informs ad goals
🧲 The stability of IAP-based campaigns
🎟️ Google’s minimum event volume threshold
🤹 CPA campaigns on Play search and Play browse; CPM campaigns on AdMob
🎞️ How to run video only and display only campaigns
📽️ Running video-only ads on YouTube for less competition
🏁 Different campaigns for the same event will compete with each other
📡 Google’s machine learning uses signals from your app
🗄️ Machine learning is not AI
🔝How to bid for maximum value
🎄 Seasonality impacts performance
🌎 The many factors to consider when targeting worldwide users
🏘️ The way to structure ad groups correctly
🛍️ Choosing the right event for the region depending on market size
🎚️ Event volume is critical
🔬 How to test new creatives in UAC
🗣️ The value of YouTube comments; even the bad ones
👍 All engagement is good engagement
🛒 Testing campaigns in non-core geos
📅 Why you shouldn’t make changes to campaigns more than once a week
🍂 Don’t forget about weekly seasonality
🗺️ How to structure worldwide campaign
📝 How to track changes to campaigns effectively
💅 100k: the number of changes that Google is making to your ad
🤑 Google is invested in marketer success
➕ Turning Google’s knowledge everything into a positive


Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/thinking-out-of-the-black-box-to-win-with-google-uac-with-natalie-drozd-redux/

**

Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

**

Check out our podcast featuring inside stories of how technology evolves and grows:
http://HowThingsGrow.co