How SoundCloud Increased ROAS for non-branded keywords by 190%

Challenge

App Store Search accounts for 75% of all of SoundCloud’s downloads, making it by far their primary acquisition channel. But SoundCloud struggled to effectively scale their Apple Search Ads campaigns, with spending reaching only 56% of their daily budgets.

Solution

SoundCloud teamed up with AppTweak’s App Growth Consultants and Data Science team to optimize their Apple Search Ads campaigns. Over the course of one year, AppTweak has implemented a multistep approach to scale their Apple Search Ads campaigns (increase budget) while optimizing the campaign for Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Step 1: Optimize Keyword Discovery

As a first step to reach full budget utilization, we identified we needed to help SoundCloud find new keywords to bid on. Using Atlas AI, AppTweak’s own large language model, we created our own discovery campaign to find new relevant keywords for SoundCloud to appear on.

Thanks to Atlas AI we have a very good understanding of how the App Store groups apps and keywords together. As a result we can with a very high accuracy identify thousands of keywords that are closely related to each other and specific apps.

Our approach:

• we identified a number of strong performing keywords
• we asked Atlas AI to create a cluster of thousands of keywords closely related to each of these keywords
• we uploaded these keywords into one master discovery campaign on Apple Search Ads
• we added these keywords as negative keywords to the original search match discovery campaign to avoid double-bidding

Once we identified high-potential keywords via this discovery campaign, we made sure to move these keywords from the discovery campaign into general or performance campaigns so we could better control bids and budgets via the following simple rule:

If Taps > 20 → move to stable campaigns with bid = CR * Target CPI and add as negative keyword to discovery campaign

By moving keywords to performance campaigns with custom bids, we could increase the budget for those campaigns leading to a surge in impressions and downloads.

To further optimize campaign performance, we implemented a set of automation rules to optimize bids and cost-per-install (CPI):

• If impression share > 90% and CPT > xx, lower bid 10%
• If CPI > Target CPI, set new bid = Target CPI x CVR

As a result, we reached full budget utilization and doubled downloads while lowering CPI 23% within the first 3 months.

Step 2: Optimize for ROAS

As we doubled downloads, SoundCloud was tempted to increase their budget. However, with more budget, the need to optimize campaign performance towards high revenue downloads grew.

Therefore we integrated with SoundCloud’s MMP and built a LifeTime Value (LTV) model to be able to assign a value to custom events (Average Revenue per Event or ARPE) tracked via MMPs.

ARPE = Total LTV / Event = Target CPE

Similar to a Cost Per Install (CPI) optimization, we can optimize campaigns for any Cost Per Event (CPE) and Event Conversion Rate (ECVR):

Bid = ECVR * Target CPE

When optimizing for ROAS and setting bids by Cost per Event (CPE), the difficulty is to identify which event to optimize towards. It’s important to identify a custom event with a high enough Event Conversion Rate (ECVR) so you can tie it back to keywords with enough confidence.

After successfully implementing these optimizations, ROAS increased 190% which allowed us to double the budget.

Step 3: Expand to new markets

To be able to further expand the budget while maintaining current CPIs and maximize ROAS, the next step was to launch the campaign in new markets. After optimizing the campaign in the USA, we launched the campaign in:

• Germany
• The United Kingdom
• Canada
• France
• Australia
• Austria
• Italy
• Spain

The choice for these markets was based on SoundCloud’s business requirements. But we also leveraged countries with similar languages (ex Australia vs USA or Austria vs Germany) to more quickly transfer previous wins to other countries.

Results

After collaborating for 1 year and implementing this multi-step approach, SoundCloud tripled their budget, increased downloads for non-branded keywords by 4 times, all while increasing ROAS on non-branded keywords 190%.