Global Fintech App Uses Automation To Profitably Grow Customer Base

A great team to work with. I was impressed by their attention to detail and genuine desire to learn about our company before they took on our ads. They have a very talented design team and their ad copy was also top class.
- Niall Barry, User Acquisition Manager, MyWallSt

Overview

MyWallSt is a fintech / SaaS company with the goal of educating their community on investing principles and sharing insights on their set of hand-picked stocks. The MyWallSt app is a hub of educational content, investment analysis, market updates, stock picks of the month, and even allows users to invest through the app by connecting their brokerage accounts. 

A subscription to MyWallSt allows access to the top 1% of investment opportunities that are handpicked by the MyWallSt analyst team and consistently outpace the S&P 500 by more than 50%. MyWallSt proves that investing is for everyone, and they will show you how to succeed. 

Advertising Platforms Leveraged

Facebook Ads

Instagram Ads

Google Ads

YouTube Ads

Challenges

Fintech is a competitive industry. MyWallSt is a unique platform that offers content and analysis, thus competing with players like The Motley Fool, but is also an investing tool, pitting them against the likes of Robinhood and E*trade. Our advertising efforts needed to clearly and effectively articulate the value of MyWallSt to prospective customers in this busy, competitive market.
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Embracing a rebrand. MyWallSt was originally founded in 2008 as Rubicoin, but completely revamped their brand image under the name MyWallSt in 2019. Every rebrand comes with a unique set of challenges that will impact short term advertising performance. The rebrand also came with changes made to the overall conversion process. We had to recreate every conversion action to ensure we were tracking properly and redefine our target audience to match up with the new brand strategy.
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App retention rates are difficult to control when basing performance off of app installs. Although we saw a significant amount of app installs, the quality of the install was lacking. The overall conversion rate from download to customer was low. 

Strategies

Evolving Goals

When our partnership began, our goal was to drastically increase the quantity of users on the MyWallSt app, as was the goal they carried over from their previous agency relationship. The bulk of our ad spend was dedicated toward Facebook App Install campaigns, as we felt that was the felt channel to drive low cost app installs.

At the time, our goals were to increase the total amount of app installs given a break-even cost-per-install. The MyWallSt team had determined this cost-per-install based on their average back-end conversion rates.

We achieved these results almost instantly, but over time we realized that very few of these app installs were translating into paying customers. The low install-to-customer conversion rate was just as much our responsibility as it was the clients. We set out to help the client improve the app and the conversion funnel within the app, but we also knew that our strategy needed to be reworked to help increase back-end conversion rate. 

While our original strategy was effective in driving low-cost app installs, it was possible that this strategy was acquiring the wrong kinds of app installs, even if they were low-cost installs. We eventually would conclude that cost-per-install is not a metric we should be optimizing for, nor should it be a KPI that we use to evaluate performance. The only KPI that we should focus on is cost-per-acquired customer.

Technical Adjustments

We implemented a new strategy to be more segmented to our highest quality audience. For example, instead of targeting a lookalike audience of all previous app openers, we created lookalike audiences of the top 1% of past purchasers. We wanted to train Facebook’s algorithms to understand which of our users not only opened the app, but actually purchased on the app and would ultimately generate more lifetime revenue.

In order to avoid the issue of customer retention, we changed our goals in both Facebook and Google Ads to focus on users who start their trial as opposed to only app installs. Not only did this change help to increase retention rates, our start trial focused campaigns actually generated a significantly better cost-per-start-trial than our app install campaigns.

We opted into Facebook’s best practices to ensure our campaigns stay efficient, scalable, and are set up for long term success. We used video and created two versions (:30s and :15s) in order to show on both Facebook and Instagram placements. As a result, video has significantly outperformed still-images on Facebook. Campaign budget optimization and automatic placements are among Facebook’s best practices that allowed us to expand our reach and increase algorithmic learnings by showing ads to an audience we did not previously identify as our target market.

Creative Overhaul

The previous creative strategy focused heavily on highlighting the individual companies that were included as part of the MyWallSt short-list of valuable stock picks, and showing how MyWallSt was a place to invest in, and stay informed with news surrounding these companies. We later concluded that this strategy was appealing to the wrong audience - These ads were great at driving app installs, but did not appeal to the savvy investors that would ultimately drive the most amount of value on the app.

We also created a fifteen second version of the video in order to opt into Instagram placements, which ultimately increased our total amount of free trial signups.

Expanding Reach

By successfully leveraging automation across the Facebook and Google Ads networks, we were able to expand our reach to more potential subscribers. When we began our partnership with MyWallSt, it was believed that the ideal target customers were made up of middle aged, first-time investors. Through proper implementation of automation and automatic placements, we were able to profitably expand beyond this limited market and acquire customers from all different backgrounds. Today, our ad campaigns successfully target investors of all ages and levels of experience.

Results

Better understanding of goals, attribution and return on ad spend

• 244% Increase In Free Trial Signups
• 45% Increase In New Customers
• 79% Increase In New iOS Subscribers
• 264% Increase In Profitable Average Monthly Ad Spend