The Athletic and Croud Drive Conversions Through Universal App Campaigns
Croud drove 31K in conversions for sports website, The Athletic, by universal app campaigns.
The challenge
The Athletic was operating in a saturated market in the US. In order to continue to grow and expand as a business, The Athletic had to find new markets. This brought on new challenges such as increased investment and continued optimization.
The Croud difference
Google, Croud, and The Athletic worked closely together in partnership to break into four large and diverse markets. The Athletic had big ambitions, and Croud had the expertise to recognize how international expansion would be a strategic growth area.
After digging into their business objectives and profitability metrics, the team presented an International Expansion plan to grow market share and expand their paying subscriber base beyond the US, starting out with English-speaking countries.
Croud launched Universal App campaigns (UAC) internationally to direct users into The Athletic’s iOS & Android apps to sign-up. Creative is often the variable to success and the team used the new UAC ad groups feature to separate creative by sport and test algorithmically which sports creative resonated the most in each market.
The results
International campaigns make up almost 15% of The Athletic’s overall investment and within six months, these campaigns contributed to 19% of their app sign-up growth, while achieving low-cost installs.
For this campaign, results included:
- 36.3 million impressions
- 31,000 conversions
- CPI of $1.83
Client testimonial
Tracy Pan, Senior Director, Performance Marketing, The Athletic said:
To achieve The Athletic’s marketing objective of quickly growing an overseas subscriber base, we decided to partner with Croud on our campaign due to their localization knowledge. We also teamed up with Google to provide a scalable marketing solution. Working alongside Croud and Google, and by continually testing, learning and optimizing throughout each campaign launch, means we really generated really positive results for the business.
About Croud
Croud is an award-winning, global, full-service digital marketing partner, specialising in developing key strategies for sustainable business growth.
