Cutting customer acquisition costs by 30%
Background
Founded in 2012, Dineout has become a platform that offers an all-round dining-out experience to the foodies of our country. From discovering the best restaurants to helping reserve a table and getting the best deals, Dineout has pioneered this space. As India’s largest restaurant tech solutions platform, the established startup offers B2C services to the diners and B2B services to help restaurant partners improve their services.
Dineout wanted to cost-effectively scale its user base by venturing beyond India’s three major advertising platforms, but was concerned about user quality – specifically, achieving high retention and lifetime value. With thousands of untested advertising partners that offered competitive customer acquisition costs, Dineout faced the challenging task of finding networks that would not compromise its in-app conversion rate.
By referencing AppsFlyer’s Performance Index and with the AppsFlyer team’s support, Dineout was able to find a number of media partners that netted high-quality users at a comparatively low cost. Raw data from AppsFlyer’s Data Locker as well as aggregate reports from dashboards such as Overview, Retargeting, and Cohorts allowed Dineout to quickly view and assess performance and metrics across all of its partner networks. This helped the company realize a 30% improvement across key metrics such as cost per install, customer acquisition costs, and cost per conversion. The time saved by directly leveraging AppsFlyer’s partners’ integrations also allowed the Dineout team to focus on new growth initiatives.
Challenge
The Dineout marketing team faced two problems: achieving quality users and doing so at a large scale. While Dineout was acquiring new users at a healthy rate, it was difficult to assess the quality of these new users post-install and ensure they were sustaining high in-app conversion rates with existing users.
While Dineout worked primarily with three of India’s major self-service ad platforms, customer acquisition costs were comparatively higher. Increasing the cost-effectiveness of their spend and scaling more aggressively meant branching out through newer channels with untapped potential. This posed a risk, since the team was unsure about the quality of new users acquired through lower-cost channels; therefore, understanding the lifetime value of users acquired through these played an important role in Dineout’s decision-making.
Solution
In sifting through thousands of different platform options, Dineout decided to start its journey by referencing AppsFlyer’s Performance Index, while considering AppsFlyer’s tailored recommendations in exploring a range of new advertising platforms and media partners. Dineout tested out several new platforms and found that one-third of them yielded users with high LTV at a comparatively low cost.
Working with these many media partners and evaluating metrics across platforms would have been challenging if not for AppsFlyer’s intuitive dashboards such as Activity, Retargeting, and Overview dashboards which gave the Dineout team a snapshot of the combined platform performance, allowing Dineout to assess results across multiple networks. The dashboard also gave Dineout full control over the dimensions to exclude.
“With AppsFlyer, we have been able to explore more channels and make tactical changes seamlessly in real time. We have been constantly able to improve ROAS because of the availability of granular data and unified dashboard view.” – Chahal Vaid, Digital Marketing Manager
Dineout also credits the attentive and continuous support of the AppsFlyer Customer Success team in enabling them to experiment to such a high degree, despite the onset of remote work conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With AppsFlyer’s feature and usage walkthrough support, Dineout was able to obtain a level of granularity, data comprehensiveness, and actionable insights that truly boosted the effectiveness and focus of their spend. The exclusion lists from AppsFlyer’s audiences solution also allowed Dineout to stop wasting ad-spend on existing users while protecting the integrity of their user data.
Wanting to dig deeper into consumer data and make better use of raw data reports, the Dineout team utilized AppsFlyer’s Data Locker solution to better automate and sync AppsFlyer data with Dineout’s internal BI systems for day-to-day analytics. Raw, user-level reports from Data Locker, which included details such as device information and hour-to-hour breakdowns, helped Dineout to optimize their KPIs.
Results
By allocating funds towards better-performing platforms, Dineout was able to realize an overall 30% improvement across key metrics such as cost per install, customer acquisition costs and cost per conversion.
“AppsFlyer’s extensive integrations with many partners has helped us scale our campaigns with ease while keeping the costs in check.” – Nikhil Bakshi, Co-Founder & CMO
The time saving and overall success realized from this integration also made it possible for the Dineout marketing team to focus on new growth initiatives.
Through the support of the AppsFlyer team, Dineout now plans on using the OneLink solution – AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution that converts owned media users into mobile app users, regardless of device, operating system, channel, or platform. This will help Dineout in measuring their owned media performance on AppsFlyer.
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