Boosting retention and fighting off fraud with AppsFlyer

Background

Rapido is India’s first and largest bike taxi operator in India, having captured roughly 20% of the entire ride-sharing segment.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in the tech hub of Bangalore, Rapido has now expanded to close to 100 cities across India.

To date, the company’s 1.5 million captains (driver-partners) serve more than 15 million registered customers with their door-to-door transportation and delivery services, accumulating well over 50 million rides and a total of over 250 million kilometers.

Four in 10 of the world’s most congested cities are in India. Rapido’s bike taxis offer flexible mobility while bridging last-mile connectivity gaps in cities with underdeveloped public transportation infrastructure. Furthermore, Rapido provides an additional income source for its driver-partners and their families, allowing them to participate in a fast-growing app ecosystem-enabled market.

In 2019, Rapido closed its largest round of funding so far, netting $50M in venture capital.

Challenge

Four years ago, Rapido faced three significant challenges prior to working with AppsFlyer:

1. The performance marketing team needed to ensure they had complete understanding and insight into their user acquisition funnel. The right attribution knowledge can make or break a mobile app-based business, which is why getting this right was fundamental to success.
   
   
2. Rapido needed to expand to more media sources and networks to fuel user growth, significantly raising the risk of fraudulent traffic and jeopardizing potential return on marketing investment.
   
   However, manually looking for fraud indicators across a wide range of partners was not a realistic option when considering such a task’s breadth and complexity; managing hundreds of segments across multiple networks is no easy task.
   
   
3. While user growth was a fundamental metric, Rapido knew that the key to driving lifetime value (LTV) was user retention. Therefore, Rapido needed to develop a robust strategy to reactivate dormant users and successfully re-engage these users.

Solution

After a thorough comparison of potential partners, Rapido chose AppsFlyer to unify all its data sources into one dashboard, which facilitated an accurate and real-time view of their user acquisition and remarketing activities.

AppsFlyer’s platform gave Rapido the ability to compare the performance of their campaign activities’ across various media sources, allowing them to optimize ad spend. This allowed them to quickly pare back on underperforming campaigns and double down on successful ones.

Furthermore, Rapido was able to make use of AppsFlyer Audiences, which leveraged valuable data like rich in-app events for advanced segmentation.

For instance, marketers could not only tell which users completed a purchase but also rich in-app event attributes informed them what items were purchased at what price. Rapido was also able to gauge which engagement campaign drove the most purchases and optimize on that.

AppsFlyer Audiences also allowed Rapido the ability to sync generated audiences across different network partners in one single flow, allowing them to quickly scale their remarketing program with no additional effort. This powerful tool ensured the right type of users were remarketed to at the right time with no conflicting or overlapping messages.

And to make sure their expansion is fraud-free, Rapido also deployed Protect360, AppsFlyer’s fraud protection solution.

Upon identifying the media partners they wanted to work with, Rapido integrated them into the AppsFlyer platform, which measured their performance.

Using Protect360, the marketing team could now quickly identify suspicious patterns such as instances of high installs paired with questionably low conversion rates (in-app account openings); time-stamp anomalies (indicating either install hijacking or click flooding); or the use of device emulators (a tool used by fraudsters for various bot-related fraud schemes or large-scale device farm operations).

With Protect360, partners could more quickly and efficiently filter out media sources with high fraud rates, regardless of fraud type, thereby increasing ROI and the quality of acquired users.

“Retention is the holy grail for growth in any organization. With the rapid user base growth at Rapido, retention of these users becomes uber critical, and the partnership with Appsflyer has been influential in achieving our retention objectives.

Thanks to the capabilities provided by AppsFlyer Audiences, we were able to utilize the rich in-app events & detailed user parameters to come up with advanced segmentation for remarketing campaigns. With split testing features, we were able to get critical insights to develop an optimized channel mix for each of these segments that helped improve the remarketing efficiencies and retention rate growth.” – Amit Verma, Marketing Head

Results

With AppsFlyer, Rapido leveraged its attribution insights to optimize their campaigns and increase marketing spend with high-performing partners while reducing expenditures on partners with high fraudulent traffic.

This ultimately led to a 25% month-over-month increase in Monthly Transacting Users.

Rapido successfully managed to recapture their users’ attention by re-engaging them actively, leading to a boost in ROI. By building dynamic segments and re-engaged users at various touchpoints along their journey, Rapido saw a 20% increase in retention.

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