Preventing fraud and optimizing creatives helped Dave work faster and save $408k

Overview 

• Fintech company Dave Inc. needed to ensure it was acquiring legitimate, high-value customers. But running multiple campaigns across various media channels left the team drowning in disjointed data.  
• AppsFlyer helped Dave to unify mobile attribution with cost aggregation and eliminate fraud. This restored confidence in their ad budgets and led to increased ROAS. 
• Dave also used AppsFlyer’s Creative Optimization tool for deep insights into the performance of their advertising creatives. This enabled them to make data-driven campaign decisions that attracted high-value users, boosting LTV. 

Background

Founded in 2016, Dave is upending the banking industry with its suite of breakthrough financial products designed to improve its members’ financial health. The company is also one of the fastest-growing financial apps in history, signing up more than 12 million members in under four years.

The marketing team at Dave Inc. was looking to streamline its technology and gather accurate, actionable data insights in a more efficient way. 

In particular, they were struggling to combine attribution with cost aggregation and creative optimization. Dave’s Creative Optimization Manager had to build reports manually after pulling data from different media partner channels — a tedious and time-consuming task. As a dynamic, digital-first app, Dave needed to get much faster at gathering data insights, optimizing campaigns, and improving ROAS. 

AppsFlyer had the unified solutions that Dave needed to build a world-class user acquisition and retention strategy built on accurate, holistic data insights.  

Challenges 

As a banking app in the fintech space, Dave’s first challenge was ensuring its ad budget was fraud free and figuring out which media channels to invest in to acquire new users. 

Another challenge was where to find higher-value customers. Due to transitioning from device-level data (located at the bottom of the funnel) to aggregated data (at the top), optimizing creatives became an important strategy for finding high-value customers throughout the funnel. 

But the creative optimization process was cumbersome and manual, involving pulling reports from each media channel and sorting the data from each one. Comparing data across channels often meant comparing “apples to oranges”, skewing the reporting and causing delays as they worked to refine it. 

Solution

As a fintech company, data privacy is second nature to Dave. This was a key reason for choosing AppsFlyer in 2018, when the company sought help to measure and optimize their paid campaigns efficiently. 
AppsFlyer’s suite of tools provided Dave with a complete attribution solution, combining CX & deep linking, cost aggregation, fraud protection, and creative optimization:

• Protect360  – As a banking app, Dave needed an industry-leading standard in fraud protection. They found that in AppsFlyer’s Protect360, which protects marketing budgets from potential threats in real-time. This strategy encompasses cluster analysis, tailored validation rules, in-app fraud prevention tactics, and post-attribution fraud detection. With Protect360, Dave has been able to confidently test new channels such as referrals – an effective technique for acquiring new users, but one that can be fraught with fraud without a solution like Protect360. 

We like having advanced fraud protection on our ads because of who we are… There are [fraudulent users] taking advances and not paying them away using a stolen identity. Stolen information can be a problem, and it’s usually done in an automated fashion. AppsFlyer immediately blocks fraud from these paid ads in real-time, and that is particularly useful when working with referral companies, which are a potentially big channel for a lot of that type of fraud. Overall, Protect360 made us more confident in working with referral networks like Zero Parallel.

Christian Espinoza, Senior Marketing Tech Stack Manager

• Customer Experience & Deep Linking: Banking apps need solutions that help them know who their customers are, to prevent fraud based on false ID. This data is also useful for retention and re-engagement campaigns. Dave used AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution, OneLink, to help with identity resolution, minimizing fraud while ensuring an unbroken user experience. The deep linking technology measures the user journey from web to app in an unbroken fashion, validating user transactions from top of the funnel to in-app events.
  
• Creative Optimization: This AI-powered tool revolutionized Dave’s approach to creative reporting and optimization. By automating and streamlining the creative optimization process, the marketing team could efficiently produce optimized ad creatives, as well as providing more accurate ROAS calculations. They could also quickly identify and replace poorly performing creatives, which made their ad budgets more effective. 

The biggest benefits of Creative optimization were twofold. The first was being able to iterate on what performed best for specific platforms through A/B testing, which helped improve the messaging in our creatives per channel. And the second was helping us find those channels with the high-value users we’re looking for.

Christian Espinoza, Senior Marketing Tech Stack Manager

Dave was also able to use Creative Optimization together with AppsFlyer’s ROI360 solution, giving them fresher data cost-reporting capabilities, and CPA insights – all in one dashboard.

Results 

AppsFlyer’s unified approach to measurement provided Dave with the accurate, fraud-free data they needed to validate new users and calculate ROAS with confidence. This empowered them to invest their ad spend into the channels that brought the highest-value customers. 

With AppsFlyer’s Protect 360 solution, Dave saved $408k from fraud in 2023 alone, proving many times the initial investment in this anti-fraud solution.  

AppsFlyer’s Creative Optimization solution saved the Marketing team up to 10 hours a week on building and sharing creative optimization reports, making them more nimble in finding the most effective combination of creative elements for each media channel. As well as boosting day-to-day efficiency, Creative Optimization delivered a 10% reduction in ad spend, a 12% increase in CTR, and a 5% decrease in CPI. And for cost per first-time cash advance, there was a decrease of 10%. 

Christian Espinoza, Dave’s Senior Marketing Tech Stack Manager, is now considering trying out AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution for QR codes on their website and offline campaigns, helping to refine the user journey orchestration further down the funnel. He’s also keen on exploring AppsFlyer’s Privacy Cloud solution –  a data clean room, where Dave’s first-party data can be securely used to provide more granular, enriched data insights.

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