In this second episode of Behind the Apps: Mobile Marketing Talks, host David Murphy talks to Sotiris Sotiriadis, the Paid Media Team Lead at Exness, a global multi-asset broker in the online trading industry. They discuss the Exness Trade app, its launch, user acquisition, and monetization. They also talk about the challenges of the industry, including regulatory issues and the need for diversifying acquisition channels. Sotiris also emphasizes the importance of testing, learning, and adapting user acquisition strategies, highlights the role of AVOW in helping Exness tap into user acquisition through mobile OEM channels, and shares the success Exness has achieved in UA campaigns and improving acquisition performance.
“(Mobile) OEM marketing, at least for Exness, is here to stay. It offers us high conversion traffic and a low fraud rate, and we are glad to have the experts of OEM marketing, AVOW, to help us succeed”
– Sotiris Sotiriadis from Exness on why Mobile OEM Advertising is here to stay
→ Watch the full interview on YouTube
Interview with Sotiris Sotiriadis, Paid Media Team Lead at Exness
Introduction
David Murphy (Host): Sotiris, welcome, and thank you very much for being with us today. Could you please kick off by sharing a little bit about yourself and your role at Exness?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): Yeah, of course. So as you already mentioned, I’m Sotiris. I’ve been working at Exness for the last three years and started working at Exness as a Paid Search Team Lead, and eventually, I grew into a Paid Media Team Lead, taking care of the whole media buying of Exness across all the geos and regions that we are operating on. In total, I’ve accumulated eight years in the industry, and working at Exness has been a really exciting journey going through the changes that are happening in the marketing industry and the way that we do things.
About Exness and the Exness Trade App
David Murphy (Host): And tell me more about Exness.
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): So Exness is a financial services company. In other words, we are a multi-asset trading broker. We offer people the opportunity to trade CFDs (Contracts for Difference) in multiple instruments, including currency pairs, cryptocurrencies, stocks, shares, and precious metals.
David Murphy (Host): Now, if we move on to your app, when did it launch, what do people use it for, how many users do you have, and how do you monetize it?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): So our main app is called Exness Trade. The app was introduced in 2013 and it was mainly introduced for digital acquisition purposes, as the financial services trading industry back then was focusing on terminal-based trading through MT4, MT5 (Meta Trader) or alternative platforms. Exness, the company, understood that there is an opportunity for us to onboard and expand our acquisition through mobile traders. Not the professional guys who will trade on terminals, but people who do it more casually, let’s say. So that’s how the need for the app came up. Mobile screen time back then was steadily increasing, and that’s why it made business sense to move the acquisition strategy towards mobile. The purpose of a mobile app is to onboard users, and we do media buying and rely heavily on media buying for the app. Of course, we monetize through deposits; that’s value-based monetization. From those deposits, the company has some spread revenue profits, which is perfectly aligned with what we do in mobile and with the strategic direction of the company.
David Murphy (Host): So, your revenue stream is exactly as it would be if people were trading on any other channel using the Exness platform. The app just offers them an easy way to do it from the palm of their hand, wherever they are.
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): Yes, 100%.
“So this is leading us to the understanding, the importance, that we need to diversify our acquisition channels, and this is what we have been doing with AVOW specifically, but also many other channels.”
– In regards to Exness’s challenges posed by industry and platform regulations
Industry Challenges
David Murphy (Host): What are your biggest challenges right now? You know, there’s a lot of stuff going on. From a tech perspective, from a regulatory perspective, all the stuff around data privacy, you’re obviously working in a heavily regulated industry. So, what are you seeing at the moment?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): What you mentioned are actually the biggest challenges that we are facing. Regulatory backgrounds in the countries in which we are operating are a gray area, let’s say. So we have to comply following certain laws and certain regulations. But on the other hand, because of the industry, there have been cases of similar companies doing some non-ethical, let’s say, activities. And therefore the industry is heavily regulated and heavily monitored as well. And this applies to the platforms that we are using. In the past years, it was way easier for us to run ads on, let’s say Google, on Facebook, and other platforms, but nowadays, this comes with a big regulation and a big moderation challenge. So this is leading us to the understanding, the importance, that we need to diversify our acquisition channels, and this is what we have been doing with AVOW specifically, but also many other channels. On the tech side of things, of course, we are facing attribution challenges, which are inevitable for any advertiser, I believe. And we are working internally at Exness with a very sophisticated approach on understanding the impact of advertising through using multiple sources, multiple solutions, and multiple approaches, such as alternative kinds of attributions. MTA, multi-touch attribution, MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) and performance understanding through geo-tests and through A and B experiments.
“We have managed to obtain very comparable CPAs with OEMs versus other acquisition channels. (…) India, Indonesia, and some other countries are not eligible to run financial ads on Google. So AVOW has been a great avenue for us to keep investing in those countries and keep getting acquisition.”
– On working with Mobile OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and AVOW
User Acquisition and Diversification with Mobile OEMs
David Murphy (Host): So I was going to talk specifically about user acquisition and how you’ve traditionally acquired new users. I think you’ve sort of covered that. You talked about using Google and Meta, but some of the regulatory demands have led you to look for other sources, other channels. When it comes to the mobile OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), the device makers, when did you first start turning your attention to them?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): I would also like to add, before I answer these questions, is that the industry and Exness are heavily driven by partners and affiliates, which are still a massive part of our user acquisition strategy. But, correctly, as you mentioned in digital acquisition, specifically media buying, we have been focusing on Facebook and Meta. I believe that we started looking into OEMs in early 2020. We started mainly with AVOW’s help, and the reason leading us to that was to try to reach audiences through multiple inventories that were very aligned with the countries that we wanted to target, on devices such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, or Huawei, which is the inventory that AVOW let us access. These devices are very aligned with the countries that we’re mostly interested in, such as Southeast Asia.
David Murphy (Host): And how is it for you working with the OEMs?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): We have managed to obtain very comparable CPAs with OEMs versus other acquisition channels. Not at the same volume, but the quality and CPA were very good, very spot-on with our targets, and comparable with the mainstream. Let’s call them traffic sources. It has been helpful for us to maintain market share and scale up, especially in countries where we experienced limitations in advertising from Google or Meta. As you probably know, India, Indonesia, and some other countries are not eligible to run financial ads on Google. So AVOW has been a great avenue for us to keep investing in those countries and keep getting acquisition.
“We need to be diversified in case platforms change regulations. We don’t want to be putting all of our eggs into a single basket you know? Platform policies can change, and they can change quite fast, and our responsibility is to keep user acquisition effective and to be working. So we need to be diversified.”
– On the topic of UA strategies in the future
Future User Acquisition Strategies
David Murphy (Host): So looking ahead, what is the outlook for your UA strategy going forward?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): I believe one of the main outlooks will be to keep diversifying our channels, because we have faced this in the past, and I’m pretty sure that we’re going to face it in the future. We need to be diversified in case platforms change regulations. We don’t want to be putting all of our eggs into a single basket you know? Platform policies can change, and they can change quite fast, and our responsibility is to keep user acquisition effective and to be working. So we need to be diversified. Of course, with the platforms and the channels that we’re using, we need to understand how they actually perform through conversion lift studies, brand lift studies, and geolift experiments. MMM ultimately will be the solution that will help us with all strategic decision-making. I know that this is not 100 % relevant for Exness, but for companies that focus in the EU, we expect alternative marketplaces to be another element to look for when thinking about user acquisition and diversification. The whole industry is heading toward a cookie-less future. So we need to keep exploring, implementing, testing, and understanding how different measurements work because, at the end of the day, it is not about the actual measurement, it’s about the decision-making that each measurement protocol will allow you to do. So that’s pretty much my outlook for user acquisition in the near future.
“AVOW played a crucial role in our app marketing and growth strategy because it was the first company to help us tap into user acquisition through OEM channels.”
“AVOW has helped us kickstart partnerships with multiple OEMs, including Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, and Huawei. They efficiently enabled us to start testing and scaling up campaigns in various geos in a very short time frame.”
– In regards to AVOW’s role in acquiring users through mobile OEM advertising.
AVOW’s Crucial Role in Exness’s App Marketing and Growth Strategy
David Murphy (Host): It’s interesting. In any of these conversations I have with people doing marketing for successful apps, you seem to sing from the same hymn sheet with a couple of things. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and you’ve got to keep refreshing your sources of new users. And secondly, just because it works today doesn’t mean it’s going to work tomorrow. You’ve got to keep testing. You’ve got to keep learning, and to some extent, you’ve got to keep failing because, by testing, you find out what’s working and what’s not working. It’s really interesting. Now, let’s finish off with a few quick questions about your work with AVOW, what role would you say they played in your app’s marketing and growth strategies?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): I would say that AVOW played a crucial role in our app marketing and growth strategy because it was the first company to help us tap into user acquisition through OEM channels. So, it was the company that presented us with alternative strategies that we could use in addition to our user acquisition strategies. AVOW has helped us kickstart partnerships with multiple OEMs, including Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, and Huawei. They efficiently enabled us to start testing and scaling up campaigns in various geos in a very short time frame.
David Murphy (Host): And in amongst the general picture of sort of satisfaction, I guess, are there any specific successes or milestones that you can point to in working together with AVOW?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): Yeah, we have a few milestones and successes that we can share with you. Between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024, we had a major transition campaign for Indonesia. We were running APK campaigns with Xiaomi, and we wanted to transition our budget to another app available on the Play Store for the same geo. So, with AVOW’s help, we have managed to transition very smoothly, but we also drastically improved acquisition performance. With the same spend, the CPI campaign drove many more registrations at a 14% lower CPR cost per registration and reduced our cost per FTD by 66%, which led into an expected revenue increase by 10x, which is amazing! I believe the availability of extra placements provided with the help of AVOW led us to qualify more sophisticated traders, which led to this improved profitability that I just described. This is an incredible win that was made possible through very close collaboration with the AVOW team and the very sharp, I would say, performance optimization of the campaigns.
“With the same spend, the CPI campaign drove many more registrations at a 14% lower CPR cost per registration and reduced our cost per FTD by 66%, which led into an expected revenue increase by 10x, which is amazing!”
“This is an incredible win that was made possible through very close collaboration with the AVOW team.”
– Regarding insights from working with AVOW
David Murphy (Host): Finally, Sotiris, have you gained any lessons or insights from working with AVOW?
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): Working with AVOW has given us great insights and lessons. Our partnership with AVOW started four years ago in 2020 and has remained strong since. AVOW has been with us every step of the way, supporting us in our OEM user acquisition strategy. And with the Exness Media Buying team, as we scale, as we go through restructures, and as we go through waves of problems, AVOW has been supporting us. OEM marketing, at least for Exness, is here to stay. It offers us high conversion traffic and a low fraud rate, and we are glad to have the experts of OEM marketing, AVOW, to help us succeed in this.
David Murphy (Host): So, Sotiris, thank you very much indeed for sharing those insights working with AVOW and the mobile OEMs. It’s been great to have you.
Sotiris Sotiriadis (Exness): Thank you for having me.
Inspired by Exness’s success? Boost your app’s user acquisition through mobile OEM advertising with AVOW’s expert help. Contact AVOW today to grow your audience and elevate your mobile marketing strategy!
Editor’s Note: The interview text has been lightly edited for clarity and coherence. Watch the full interview on YouTube.
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→ Behind the Apps Episode 1 with Tripledot Studios