Loren Gould:ASO and TV appearances; facebook advertising

“hacking”

Dating made easy.

DOUBLE

Text Here

More Fun

Less Awkward

Safer

Double is a location based double dating app.Double makes dating:

DOUBLE

Started in October 2014

We’re live in London & NYC and have 34k MAUs

London and Edinburgh based

You might remember us from Dragons’ Den where we wore some pretty fetching suits

WHY ARE YOU TALKING

Good Question…

Having users is a relatively new thing for us

Up until October 2015 the app basically didn’t even work

And when it finally did work, getting users was tough…

I’m gonna talk about our experience with ‘hacking’ Facebook

OUR STRATEGY

STEP ONEBuild an

app

STEP TWOGet users

STEP THREE

OUR STRATEGY

STEP ONEBuild an

app

STEP TWOGet users

STEP THREE

This part was harder

than we thought

WHAT DID WE DO

We tried everythingHanding out flyersFlyering in student dorms - had a negative effectGoogle Ad wordsTwitter adsPR - Worked well but not sustainableNetworkingUsing a cardboard cutout at major eventsTube ads - way too expensive!

What about?

Lots of people told us they had success with Facebook

Problem

Facebook doesn’t allow dating (or gambling) companies to advertise on its platform… (I don’t know why)

Unless you can get on their ‘approved list’

There seems to be no process of getting on this ‘list’

And literally no one at Facebook seemed to know about it or who to speak to

At one point we set up an automated daily email to the entire marketing department… never got a response

Was there a way we could advertise on Facebook without being approved?

Maybe…

NOW WHAT

Maybe someone else could do it for us…So we paid Facebook pages to post articles about us and then boosted it (i.e. sponsored posts)

Good News:It worked (kinda)

Bad News:Great for awareness but not great for installsPosts we’re confusing as we couldn’t mention ‘date’Very difficult for the user to install the app - post > website > app link > App Store > InstallExpensive & difficult to do

NEXT STEPLets just do it ourselves …Created our own Facebook page and website called ‘The Campus’

Good News:We could post as much Double content as we likedPractically free

Bad News:No page likesNow have to create even more contentPosts still confusing Still difficult difficult for the user to install the appWe’re not a media company

But we could do loads of experiments

LEARNINGS SO FAR

Every time we do a Facebook campaign our metrics go up (sounds a lot more obvious than it is)

We can definitely do better

Experiments can be done very cheaply

Facebook is VERY big

I know nothing about Facebook advertising

LETS LEARN ABOUT FACEBOOK

Eventually discovered that Facebook have their own ad University buried deep in their site

Sat down and spent a week doing the whole thing

It was very boring

But I now knew the basics of how to run and ad and interpret the results

CAN WE TRICK FACEBOOK?Can we make Facebook think we’re advertising something else?

Every Facebook ad has to be approved by them

Its all done by computer

Facebook is so big that once the ad gets approve they will probably never see it again

If we can submit an ad and change it after it has been approved then Facebook may never notice

Can we make it look like an app install ad and make really easy for people install from the ad?

Finally! As long as we followed these rules we would be fine:Don’t have date or dating in the picture (logo and brand is fine)

Don’t have date or dating in the ad copy

Use a redirect url which you can change to send users to the App store after the ad is approved

Once the ad was approved we were golden and could run it as long as we want

Initial Results

UK App Store Lifestyke Ranking Jul 15 - Nov 15

Game Changer

Then we got a little lucky…

Facebook opened up Instagram to everyone for advertising

To test it we ran a really bad Instagram experiment

It was a total game changer

Much more effective than Facebook

After some optimisation we did a big push in New York and UK to see how well it would work

The Results

US App Store Lifestyle Ranking Jan 16 - Feb 16

The Results

UK App Store Lifestyle Ranking Dec 15 - Apr 16

Learnings

There is no silver bullet: Just because something doesn’t work well initially doesn’t mean it will never work

Persistence is key: I had no experience with FB and everything thing we learned was through trial and error. So many of our accounts got blacklisted as well.

It takes time: it took us months to get from step to step

Run as many experiments as you can: We learned the most from just trying stuff. Advertising on social platforms is cheap and the results are almost instantaneous

Just do it: even if you think its not possible just give it a try

THANK YOU

Loren Gould:ASO and TV appearances; facebook advertising

“hacking”