Use data from Q5 to boost mobile app growth for the entire year

Wondering how to improve the marketing performance of your mobile app without spending more money? The high winter season is also known as Q5.

The amount of data received during the winter holidays can improve your marketing strategy. Here, you can learn how to extract insights that will make this approach work, enhance your ad creative strategy, transform hypotheses into proven facts, personalize your product and increase lifetime value.

What (or when) is Q5?

The mobile app field has a high season called Q5. During the winter holidays, its results equal the whole quarter in revenue. It's not just a winter story. Q5 can be used in the spring and summer.

Q5 data is valuable.

• You get a more expensive audience. The business period of e-commerce ends right after Christmas, when mobile apps come into play. As e-commerce is the largest rival of mobile apps in terms of digital advertising, reduced e-commerce ads frees up the market for apps, which allows app campaigns to get more reach for less money. They also get access to a more expensive and, as a result, more affluent audience at a lower cost than usual.
• Gain a deeper understanding of users’ behavior. Many people make resolutions at the beginning of the year to become better versions of themselves. The “New Year’s resolution” mindset makes people ready to invest in themselves. And that makes Q5 incredibly successful for fitness, health, self-growth and education apps.
• Higher engagement rates. During the Christmas holidays, people spend more time at home and, of course, on their phones. Accordingly, app ads get more of their attention.

Mobile apps grow in profit because of these reasons. The revenue of the Headway app increased by 200%.

Headway app data from Sensor Tower. Headway is an image.

Four ways to leverage data from Q5 right now

Improve your creative ad strategy

You can estimate your traffic more effectively during Q5. Trends begin to appear when you get a lot of traffic. After building your daily trend, you can use it for the following periods.

We noticed that our ads performed better in the morning and evening. A lot of traffic during Q5 made it clear that this was a trend we couldn't see clearly. We have changed our creatives because of this discovery. People can effectively spend their downtime with our app.

Estimating traffic on an hourly basis can help identify the best ad creatives. You will incur less ineffective costs when you notice them. You get more revenue from top performers.

Our team scales top-performing ads in a variety of ways. Changing the placement of an image with a different ad copy is an example. We decided to experiment more and randomlyrotated a bed on the ad. The bed was even more successful than the previous version because the creative continued performing in a new position. We haven't hesitated to change such tiny details since that time, because they can be significant for Facebook ads on a large amount of traffic.

Headway is an image.

Transform your hypothesis into proven facts

During Q5 marketers try new creatives and ad placements that they hesitated to use at other times of the year. It is a great strategy to follow because you can check your hypothesis on a larger audience and draw conclusions. Don't limit this approach to the Q5 period. You can use verified ad techniques to boost your marketing strategy. How do you apply it in practice?

We didn't believe that Reels would work as an ad placement for us, and we thought our feed was the best. The ad placement didn't seem efficient enough, we tested it a couple of times. We decided to try it out on a large audience during Q5. It worked out well. With a lot of cheaper traffic, we were able to create a strategy for our regular ads on Reels.

Improve marketing metrics through cheaper access to expensive audiences

LTV can be increased by getting new audiences that weren't accessible before. How does it work?

You usually reach users with a cost per thousand. Users with a $25 CPM are expensive for you. Users become affordable since prices drop in Q5.

Why do you need more expensive users when you can reach your good old 15 CPM users at a much lower price? The users have greater purchasing power if the CPM is higher. Users with a $25 CPM are more likely to convert to purchase. A more expensive audience has a better chance of renewing their subscription after a month or a year than a less expensive audience.

The LTV increases as you get more users in your app. This approach helps you build a margin of safety for your app.

Now that you know your users better, personalize more

A lot of data from new creatives, new users and new ad techniques give you a lot of insights to use throughout the year. You have a chance to maximize these insights.

Observe users behavior during this period and draw conclusions. They behaved in your store, on the payment wall and during the trial. Is there a correlation between creativity and behavior in the app? Second, turn these insights into an action plan to improve your product.

During Q5 we noticed that our ad creative about decision fatigue became one of the top performers, and many users converted to buyers because of it. This topic is relevant to our users and we have to create more content about it. Users like the layout of the ad creative so we can use it for the screen. We tested both hypotheses and got positive results. Both approaches are used in our app.

You can use these methods to improve your marketing strategy and product.