Mobile OEM inventory is increasing with year-over-year growth of 3.8 percent, with shipments expected to reach 1.43 billion by the end of 2022. Within this space, the smartphone Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Oppo (Realme and OnePlus), Vivo, Samsung, and Xiaomi occupy 52% of the market share as of Q1 2022. 

The traffic generated by the mobile OEMs provides a tremendous competitive advantage to mobile marketers as it continues to scale for as long as smartphones dominate the telecommunications industry. As a result, mobile OEMs have proven to be the best alternative for mobile marketers’ marketing mix as a user acquisition channel. 

Getting Started – How to look at campaign optimization with mobile OEMs

When mobile advertisers don’t see the right results for their campaigns, there’s a great temptation to pause the campaign right away. However, doing so without looking in-depth at how the campaign could be optimized to bring better results can be just a little short-sighted. Mobile OEMs provide an efficient system for advertisers to run their advertising (ad) campaigns smoothly with clear visibility to keep checking the performance metrics on how the ads have performed.

Moreover, finding the right price point to advertise with mobile OEMs can also be challenging. But through multiple ways of optimizing campaigns, app developers and brands can gain a lot more from mobile OEMs’ offerings. 

To get better outcomes and higher engagements, mobile marketers can consider two levels to optimize their user acquisition (UA) ad campaign – 

Advertisement placement optimization: Not all placements will drive the same level of quality. Advertisers need to look at which placements are driving quality users as compared to others and increase the bid for those placements so they can leverage more traffic. In addition, there are advertising (ad) placements that drive volumes but not quality – those can be optimized in two ways:  

  1. Advertisers can either choose to pause the entire placement but in this case, they will lose the entire traffic coming from mobile OEM inventory. 
  2. Or, they need to calculate the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) for a particular ad placement so they can decrease the bid and still get positive results for the ROAS and at the same time, retain volumes as well.

Creative optimization: When mobile advertisers are buying media, they need to ensure that they are preventing advertising fatigue – meaning if users are seeing the same advert multiple times, they will eventually stop interacting with it. Therefore, advertisers need to constantly rotate the creatives with the overall visual appeal of their brand, so the engagement of the ad remains constant as users get to see something new each time the advert is displayed. The higher the engagement of the ad, the better will be the conversion rate and  Effective Cost Per Install (ECPI) for the advertiser. 

Targeting optimization: Some app stores also offer appographic targeting that helps app advertisers promote their apps to new users based on their unique app interests. It allows the advertiser to target over 200 appographic segments based on app interests and leverages audience insights beyond category and ownership and all of this is user privacy compliant. 

The pricing models for advertising with mobile OEMs also remain flexible with the different ad placements, inventories, and the types of creatives mobile marketers want to experiment with. They can choose the kind of ads they want to cater to their audience, for example, native ads, interstitial ads, banner ads, and more, depending on the mobile OEM inventory they have decided to leverage. 

Optimize on pricing with Oppo and Vivo

For mobile OEMs like Oppo and Vivo which offer ad placements within the App Store, how can mobile marketers optimize their campaigns since they cannot remove the app completely or pause the campaign? 

They can optimize on pricing! Mobile marketers and advertisers can initially run all placements using the CPI (Cost Per Install) model which is competitive for them to win bids for maximum placements within the app store for testing traffic across all those placements. After learning which placements drive the best quality, they can calculate the ROAS and bid based on these results. 

View-Through Attribution (VTA) is key

The aforementioned mobile OEMs offer mobile marketers to leverage high-impact placements such as interstitial ads, video ads, and splash ads. To promote ads with these placements, it is imperative for mobile advertisers to enable View-Through Attribution (VTA). VTA allows advertisers to attribute installs or actions from mobile advertising campaigns that are impression-based. A lot of high-impact placements within Xiaomi and Huawei do not open unless VTA is enabled by the advertisers. 

How should advertisers optimize their advertising spend based on upcoming special promotions? 

For advertisers to place their ads during special promotions, they need to start by planning way ahead at least three weeks in advance from creative planning to getting approvals from mobile OEMs. 

For example, if there is a shopping app that wants to run a campaign for promotional offers (special promotions) for a specific time period – marketers of the app need to reach out to their agency partner that can help them leverage the right mobile OEM inventory mix for a certain period against certain placements that work best for their shopping app. When the shopping app is featured within alternative app stores on any of these promotional days, the: 

  • conversion rate goes up
  • volumes are higher
  • effective cost per acquisition per user will be much lower in case the shopping app has also been promoted through offline mediums and other networks like TV, and 3rd party ad networks. 

Counting on mobile OEMs for their marketing mix during timely events like these, apps tend to generate higher install rates with good quality. All that marketers need to do is to plan ahead of time for featuring requests and approvals for certain dates with the help of their agency partner. 

3 key tips to consider for campaign optimization

Mobile OEMs offer untapped access to larger user audiences owning smartphones outside the realm of search and social. Optimizing efforts for app marketing can be challenging, but mobile marketers can tackle the situations by:

  1. Experiment with pricing: Firstly, mobile marketers need to look at pricing based on quality. They should never remove an entire mobile OEM ecosystem because of quality. They need to be careful that app discoverability decreases if they pause the campaigns on a specific smartphone OEM. Therefore, they can always choose to negotiate pricing deals based on quality. 
  2. Measure mobile OEM performance: Every mobile OEM has different levels to offer placements and inventories to get apps launched in their respective app stores since each is at a different maturity level in its offerings. Analyzing which one works best, is the key to placing and winning bids for advertising a user acquisition campaign. 
  3. Choose one agency partner: Mobile marketers often tend to cannibalize when bidding for multiple inventories from their agency partners. They need an agency that acts as a single source of truth, specializes in mobile OEM inventory, and has exclusive or official partnerships with those mobile OEMs. They need the know-how to deal with the individual platforms from launch to running user acquisition campaigns and optimization. 

Advertisers need the know-how to deal with the individual platforms from launch to running UA campaigns and optimization. AVOW offers an untapped inventory with exclusive partnerships with OEMs such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo (OnePlus and Realme), Samsung, and Vivo. Our integrated Mobile OEM partners dominate 71% of the global Android market share and can advertise without Google, Facebook, or 3rd party ad networks. 

Contact us today to help you champion your app user acquisition goals with mobile OEMs!