Raw attribution data illuminates a UA North Star to success

Background

Slickdeals launched in 1999 as one of the first deal-sharing communities, bringing together savvy eCommerce shoppers from around the globe to share deals and coupons across a variety of products and services.

Today, Slickdeals is one of the top 100 sites in the U.S. and has built a community of avid shoppers that is unmatched in its size, engagement and loyalty. Their mission is simple but powerful: To help savvy shoppers win at shopping.

The first Slickdeals app launched in 2013, but the company’s focus remained on their web presence. The company was facing a daunting shift as its users were quickly moving to mobile.

They scrambled to build their first mobile app and mobile web offerings, and in 2015 they partnered with their first MMP. But this MMP wasn’t cost effective, and didn’t understand the needs of a company with a lean UA team whose mobile business was taking off at an accelerated rate.

Slickdeals needed to maximize every minute and every dollar they invested acquiring and engaging mobile users.

They needed an MMP that was not just a vendor, but a partner who could help grow their mobile app from being a nice-to-have into a primary sales and engagement engine.

Challenge

The Slickdeals team couldn’t readily quantify success based on user lifetime value (LTV), meaning they couldn’t know which installs were worth the price, and therefore couldn’t accurately calculate their return on ad spend (ROAS).

Since Slickdeals’ revenue came in over a longer timeframe than some other eCommerce apps, they needed a solution to understand how users were behaving three to five years post-install. Affiliate monetization, registrations, and out clicks (users moving from the Slickdeals app to an affiliate app to make the final purchase) were their primary leading indicators for high quality, revenue positive users.

But this was only an approximation. Without an accurate picture of customer LTV and their ROAS across campaigns the team was not operating at maximum efficiency.

Deep linking users to in-app content from their extensive owned media was also an obstacle. Their previous MMP provided no deep linking solution. With so many users beginning on their website, or finding deals in email promotions, footers, or mobile banners, the lack of an effective deep linking solution to seamlessly move users to their app and measure web-to-app performance prevented them from fully understanding and optimizing the user journey.

Lastly, the team needed a way to effectively onboard new affiliate partners. The manual process was becoming increasingly time consuming, and was not scalable.

Solution

Slickdeals chose AppsFlyer to be their new MMP and growth partner.

With a robust in-house tech stack already up and running, the team leveraged a series of AppsFlyer’s Pull APIs. A Pull API allows advertisers to request raw and aggregated data reports for the mobile apps they measure with AppsFlyer, detailing all of their attribution data.

They used these APIs to ingest data directly into their system and export daily reports, including ad revenue raw data, organic and non-organic raw data, and aggregate user acquisition and remarketing. This allowed the team to accurately attribute downloads, calculate customer LTV, and determine their overall ROAS. Onboarding the API was a simple process, and the team was able to start generating insights quickly.

OneLink, AppsFlyer’s customer experience and deep linking solution, was ready to go out-of-the box, and allowed the team to deep link users and attribute owned media performance as accurately as paid media.

By adapting OneLink technology to their own in house deep links, they could attribute performance of emails, Smart Banners, and all owned media to break down silos between owned and paid media so the team didn’t miss a single step along the user journey to a download and ultimate purchase.

Michael Shyr, Senior Marketing Manager at Slickdeals, commented on AppsFlyer’s value to his team:

“With big changes in the mobile marketing ecosystem on the horizon, we leaned into AppsFlyer to provide valuable resources and perspectives we hadn’t thought of.”

Results

Slickdeals leaned in hard on their move to mobile, growing that channel from driving 10% of their traffic to driving over 70% of their traffic, all while growing revenue.

With the AppsFlyer suite of solutions at their fingertips, the team could identify and replicate their successes, making bold strategy decisions to grow their business knowing the data supported their choices.

They were able to confidently maximize the return on every ad dollar spent, freeing up budget to spend on more campaigns to drive more revenue without expanding overall resources. AppsFlyer’s 8,000+ integrated partners made onboarding new affiliate partners much easier, freeing up time to focus on growing their mobile business.

OneLink revealed the true impact of their owned media. Email and Smart Banners both drove high-intent visitors to their app, nurturing a robust revenue stream of high-LTV web-to-app users. In fact, using OneLink allowed the team to understand that email was the best UA channel for winning over their most loyal users. Between iOS and Android they realized that 90% of all users acquired through this channel went on to be a loyal user.

Overall, team members across the marketing organization were impressed by AppsFlyer’s knowledge and ability to apply it to Slickdeals’ specific use cases to make an immediate and lasting impact.

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