Head-to-head tests: make the most of your advertising budget

App marketers know how to run head-to-head tests to compare retargeting providers. To better see which campaigns perform the best - for both user acquisition and retargeting campaigns - head-to-head tests answer the question: who gives me the highest number of conversions for the best price?

We’re happy to share that Remerge so far has a track record of winning 19 out of 20 head-to-head tests based on client feedback. We believe that information and transparency is key, so we’ve put together a mini-guide on how to set up a head-to-head test.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• previous purchasers who haven’t made a purchase in the last 1-3 days (for gaming apps)
• users who have installed the app but have never made a first purchase (for food delivery apps)
• users who have not finished a tutorial
• users who have been inactive for three days and haven’t finished a tutorial *segments can be best defined with the help of your account manager.

The same setup is key in helping you compare which service delivers best: running a campaign in July and another in December can affect your comparisons due to seasonality.

You’ll want to measure the strength of your partner’s technology - their capacity for bidding or winning. Depending on your business model, running your tests with the same KPIs and pricing model, such as CPC, will help you to better assess the reach and scale of each DSP partner. It is advisable to run these campaigns with same budgets (in this case, the bigger the better).

After running your test for several days, the data you collect will give you a general feeling on which campaign is performing well for your setup based on what you want to achieve – your KPIs – along with the scale that each selected partner can provide.

The best next step would be to leverage dynamic capabilities on all three dimensions to boost overall revenue. Think about the results and optimize your retargeting activities by discontinuing campaigns with the least scalable providers and shifting your marketing budget to fewer running partners, therefore avoiding partner cannibalization (several partners bidding and competing for the same users at the same time can increase your costs due to the possibility of paying twice for the same user). As you optimize with your retargeting partners, you should see performance improve over time.

Got a question? Reach out to us at hello@remerge.io