Accelerating app growth in Africa powered by smarter decisions
Background
In early 2017, Vitalii Sharovarov knew it was time to change JiJi’s approach to attribution. In his role as CMO, he’d already helped support unprecedented growth. But, there was a feeling they could be driving even more growth while increasing their efficiency too.
Jiji is a successful Pan-African marketplace eCommerce platform.
Since launching in 2014, it’s helped Nigerian buyers and sellers trade goods and services with ease. In five years Jiji has grown into a team of nearly 400 people. The platform has 10 million unique monthly visits and two million active ads with a combined worth of $10 billion.
With home PC ownership being low, the Nigerian marketplace has become largely mobile phone-based. Jiji’s mobile app has fueled its growth and allowed them to connect and engage with their customers in a cost-effective way.
Challenge
As CMO Vitalii’s role is to support the acquisition of new users. That acquisition has relied heavily on Facebook Ads and Google Ads, along with a supporting cast of advertising partners.
The core challenge was identifying which channels were adding value and which were not. This can be challenging as Facebook and Google Ads have different attribution methods. As a result, it was very difficult for Vitalii’s team to compare performance between the two.
Vitalii also faced a challenge when setting up new ad network partners.
Many of these partners simply weren’t positioned to deal with the Nigerian marketplace. The negotiation, integration, testing, and analytics process is long and complicated.
Solution
Vitalii knew he needed a solution that would unify all their data, and for the first time, give Jiji an accurate view of their User Acquisition activity.
They tried to draw as much value from Google Analytics and even developed their own analytics solution. However, there was still a need for a comprehensive attribution solution. They quickly ruled out building their own API and started trialing a number of different attribution partners, before finally choosing AppsFlyer.
Immediately Vitalii and his team were able to see the difference.
Results
Connecting and negotiating with ad networks was easy as they already understood and trusted AppsFlyer. For the first time they could rapidly test more than 300 advertising partners and start making smarter buying decisions.
Now, Jiji has the ability to compare the performance between their Facebook and Google advertising campaigns. These insights help them save both time and money. They can quickly cut-back on poor performing campaigns and scale-up on successful campaigns.
“We could see that about 80% of our traffic was a problem for us. Much of that traffic was clear fraud that led to unprofitable installs for us. AppsFlyer identified unusual user behavior in real-time which meant we could cut investment in that channel quickly, and save thousands of dollars.” – Vitalii Sharovarov
Throughout the project, AppsFlyer has helped educate Vitalii’s team on the mobile analytics and attribution landscape, while also shaping their fraud protection strategy. Jiji’s trust in AppsFlyer means it is now the sole attribution and analytics platform in their marketing tech stack.
“The AppsFlyer team helped us improve our user acquisition and performance measurement. As a result, our marketing spend has been more efficient. Since 2019 our App’s traffic has grown twenty-fold. Our installs have increased from 7k a day at the start of 2019 to 22K a day in 2020. We’ve now had over 5 million installs in Nigeria alone. The technology is great, but without the people to support it, we could still be struggling. They’ve helped us understand our problems in a more technical way.” – Vitalii Sharovarov
Jiji has done a remarkable job to grow so quickly.
Jiji’s ambitions stretch beyond the borders of Nigeria. They demonstrated that with their acquisition of OLX which will help them expand into Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania. Jiji is set to overtake markets with over 300 million people in reach and to join the world’s top 10 list of most visited marketplaces.
Jiji has experienced exponential growth in Nigeria by using data to make smarter buying decisions. They’ve created a blueprint for success that can be applied to other African markets.
The lessons they’ve learned and the continued support of AppsFlyer will help them accelerate their growth in these new dynamic markets.
“AppsFlyer has everything we need to test and understand every source. They help us spend our budget more efficiently and understand what we need to do to grow. We will continue to use the service to drive effective growth among our apps. They were just a great find for us.” – Vitalii Sharovarov
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