Becoming one of the world’s most downloaded flight and hotel apps

Background

Hopper is the top-rated free app for finding cheap flights, predicting prices, and helping users book flights and hotels at the right time, saving up to 40%.

At the heart of the Hopper app is an algorithm that predicts the future prices of flights by processing trillions of data points to facilitate contextual travel recommendations.

It has become the most downloaded flight app in North America, promoting hundreds of deals every day across multiple different platforms, despite the fact that Hopper’s largest competitors vastly outspend them in digital marketing.

The key to Hopper’s monumental success is optimization at scale.

Challenge

On average, Hopper sends 42 push notifications before making a sale, with 90% of their overall sales attributed to push.

In early testing, Hopper quickly learned that ads with custom offers highly outperformed generic install ads. But to customize offers for thousands of origin airports and dozens of image variants would require tens of thousands of new creatives every day.

They also needed a way to quickly adjust allocation and creative roll-out across all their media partners based on accurate performance data as this would be unrealistic to do manually.

The team needed a way to automate their mobile marketing in a way that matched the advanced data science that fuels their prediction software.

Solution

Reliable attribution data from AppsFlyer provides Hopper with the measurement they require to meet their marketing automation goals.

Leveraging Smartly.io along with other internal tools to automate the creation of a large number of creatives using dynamic video templates, Hopper developed various scripts that pull cost, revenue, and cohort analysis performance data directly from AppsFlyer.

Based on this data, the UA team built the “Hopper Ads Engine,” an optimization engine that automates daily budget allocation and bids across partners, campaigns, and creatives.

None of this would be possible without granular real-time attribution and cost and revenue measurement.

Commenting on the solution was Simon Lejeune, Head of User Acquisition at Hopper:

“Operating in such a dynamic industry with ever-changing prices and flights we needed a solution that provided us with accurate, real time data we could count on.”

Results

The Hopper Ads Engine has allowed the team to triple their marketing spend and increase capacity by 10x while continuously improving campaign performance without increasing the team’s headcount, even freeing up time to take on monetization and retention challenges.

In the end, automating mobile marketing optimization was the secret to outperforming competitors who outspend Hopper 1000:1.

The team cited the following benefits as being key to their success:

• Accurate and holistic measurement to power Hopper’s automation algorithms
• Reliable integration with Hopper’s marketing stack to allow for real-time ad spend allocation and creative roll-out at scale
• Robust analytics to allow for granular optimization of the full customer journey
• Global support coverage with customer success teams across 15 offices worldwide, and a track record of first-class support with international, enterprise-grade clients

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