Universal App Campaigns are a developers dream – Webpals Group

Google’s UAC Is only good news for advertisers and developers, says Inbal Lavi, CEO of Webpals Group

Last week, Google officially rolled out its Universal App Campaigns (UAC) to all app install campaigns after two years of providing it as an option for developers (the alternative was AdWords). The ‘universal’ part of the technology means that, rather than building and working on separate campaigns across Google’s various apps and platforms, advertisers can work on a single campaign to more efficiently promote apps across Google Search, YouTube, the Play Store etc.

Ultimately, UAC does a quantifiably better job of matching what is being advertised with the customers who want what the developer is advertising, instead of letting developers take a best guess. Google is now taking responsibility for who will see an ad, rather than leaving it up to developers to guess what would work best and pay extra money on learning where their potential customers are. This means that developers are now more likely to reach more relevant and paying users.

Competitive ecosystem
Advertising is an ever-changing and increasingly competitive ecosystem. As vying for traffic becomes more intense, the largest challenge advertisers will face is to pinpoint the most relevant users. These users are the ones who are most likely to convert (whether ‘convert’ means installs or in-app conversions is up to the developer) and the ones that will generate the highest lifetime value for the advertiser.

Before UAC, developers and advertisers were bidding on specific keywords, more often than not creating costly and perhaps unnecessary bidding wars. UAC’s approach is to generate the highest revenue by identifying the most relevant customer without keywords and competition. This has substantial benefits; the right customer is identified, targeted, and delivered as a result of the campaign, all for less cost and complexity than with past methods like AdWords.

Results-driven approach
With the way that UAC works (and the way that Webpals Group, including DauupClicksmob, its mobile arm, has been structured for years), the word ‘client’ ceases to have the same meaning as in the past. The results-driven approach of UAC encourages a different business model – it is less relevant to charge advertisers based on the old agency fee model of services rendered, because now the target results are far more measurable than in the past.

Rather, working with a revenue share model that shifts the paradigm away from agency/client toward a collaborative process creates the highest potential profit and a win-win situation for everyone involved. The rev-share model that Webpals Group works with encourages the goals advertisers set to be more ambitious because the UAC is taking on the burden of cost until the most relevant KPIs are met.

The advertiser wins because they achieve exactly what they are after (with as many variables as they deem necessary) and the service provider has a significant competitive advantage: the rich user segmentation data which can be offered to support UAC is derived from multiple platforms (not just Google) on account of the extensive number of Webpals Group websites.

Post-install data offers another huge amount of valuable information, together with innovative technologies enable us to cross-analyze and eventually better deliver the highest revenue enhancing results to our customer.

Building UAC was no small task for Google. It devoted a significant amount of energy to building machine learning to power the entire service and analyze hundreds of millions of signal combinations at any given time. The benefit of the time-intensive effort that went into building Google’s UAC is immense for advertisers, because machine learning technology gets smarter as time passes and the amount of data in the system grows.

Predictive learning
As UAC becomes a fully-realized option for advertisers, high ROI audiences will become something of a given, if only for the sheer amount of data that is available about the types of audiences that are relevant to specific campaigns.

The next step beyond machine learning alone is predictive learning, something that we are working on to push the boundaries of what we can offer and what advertisers can expect. The dynamic and competitive nature of advertising in 2017 is propelling our efforts to deliver the best technology and solutions.
UAC has proven beneficial to all in the two years since it was unveiled by Google and the news of the conversion of their entire strategy to UAC should have developers jumping for joy. It remains to be seen how strongly UAC will perform, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.


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