Reducing CPI by 41% with audience segmentation and suppression lists

Overview

• Car-share company Share Now needed to boost new registrations while cutting budget waste.
• AppsFlyer’s Audiences tool helped the team manage suppression lists and avoid advertising to existing users — resulting in significantly higher conversion rates.
• Meanwhile, lookalike audiences make it easy to reach valuable new customers, driving conversions up and marketing costs down.

Background 

Share Now is a car-sharing service that allows customers to rent cars for periods from one minute to 30 days. The company operates in 17 cities across Europe including Berlin, Paris, Milan, and Madrid.

Share Now provides a convenient and environmentally-friendly transportation option for individuals who need a car for a limited time. 

Customers sign up for Share Now through the company’s mobile app or website, which allows them to find available cars in their area and book them for a specific period of time. Once the customer has completed their rental, they park the car in any approved parking spot in the designated area — parking fees are included.

Being a mobile-first business, Share Now relies heavily on driving new user acquisition. Success for the Share Now team isn’t measured by installs — for them the ultimate goal is to grow the number of registered users. Burcu Erbey leads Share Now’s PPC team, which is responsible for driving new registrations as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. 

Challenge

One of the key objectives for Burcu’s team is to limit the amount of wasted budget. That means ensuring that new registration-focused campaigns only target non-users. Acquisition ads that reach existing customers are inefficient. 

The great news is that the likes of Google, Meta, and TikTok offer a way around this: they enable advertisers like Share Now to create suppression lists. 

A suppression list is a list of users’ email addresses, phone numbers, or other identifiers that a company excludes from its advertising campaigns. This way, the company avoids sending irrelevant ads to customers who have already registered on the app. Suppression lists represent one of the best ways for Share Now to protect its advertising budget.

Unfortunately, each advertising platform that enables suppression lists needs to be managed independently. That means each list needs to be set up and maintained multiple times across multiple platforms, wasting time and money. 

We were creating the same audiences on different channels. It was really inefficient and very time consuming. What we needed was a way to automate the creation, distribution, and ongoing management of our suppression lists.

Burcu Erbey, PPC Team Lead, Share Now

Solution 

Share Now turned to AppsFlyer’s Audiences solution in order to solve its suppression list challenge. Audiences is an audience segmentation and analytics tool. It increases user retention and lifetime value by empowering advertisers to deliver personalized engagement on owned and paid channels. 

With Audiences, Burcu and her team can effectively build, manage, and connect their audiences to more than 70 different partners. And, thanks to a single, easy-to-use dashboard, they can measure their performance and optimize their approach. 

It’s very easy for us to work with Audiences in AppsFlyer. We create our lists once in AppsFlyer and connect them to all our channels. There’s a wide range of filtering options that helps us segment our audiences based on different behaviors including locations, events, and devices. We also use it to support personalized advertising.

Burcu Erbey, PPC Team Lead, Share Now

In addition to managing its suppression lists, Share Now uses the power of Audiences to accomplish two further strategic acquisition goals. 

The first of those is to create lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is created by analyzing the characteristics of your current customer base with a view to finding similar people on other advertising platforms. 

The Share Now team uses lookalike audiences such as “frequent drivers”, “light users”, and “booked packages” in its campaigns. They know that “frequent drivers” are more valuable than “light users”, which means they can adjust their bidding strategy accordingly. Following this strategy allows Share Now to apply their unique knowledge of their customers to run successful and profitable lookalike campaigns.

Finally, Share Now uses Audiences to help with its cross-sell and upsell strategy. They send their audience segments to their demand-side platform (DSP) in order to run video and display campaigns. For example, they’ll look to reach their “frequent users” segment with an ad promoting the Share Now Pass, a monthly subscription plan that entitles customers to a discount off their trips. 

Valentina, Our AppsFlyer Customer Success Manager, has helped us learn how to make the most of the Audiences solution. She’s given us the confidence to use it in a number of ways across different types of campaigns.

Burcu Erbey, PPC Team Lead, Share Now

Results

Share Now harnesses the power of AppsFlyer Audiences to solve three core business problems: 

1. By using suppression lists at scale across a range of platforms, the company has increased its conversion rate by 35%.
2. They’ve also experienced a lot of success with lookalike campaigns: the conversion rate for these is more than 50% higher than for Share Now’s standard campaigns. 
3. In parallel, they’ve also driven costs down: cost per install decreased by 41% and cost per registration dropped by more than 25%. 

AppsFlyer is a vital partner for our marketing teams. We value the proactive support, the joint sessions, the quick and professional help, and the cooperation that has helped us achieve our goals.

Burcu Erbey, PPC Team Lead, Share Now

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