Is AppLovin Actually Incremental? 8 Tests, Real Data, Real Results

[00:00:00] Connaugh McLaughlin: I'm just gonna set the table with like, I'm having so much fun with this platform. Like, you know, testing out all different kinds of creative, whether that's, you know, content creator videos, that's still images, that's UGC street interviews. You know, we're testing it all out right now.

[00:00:19] Connaugh McLaughlin: And like I think one of the best things about AppLovin is that, you know, we are reutilizing creative. That's, that we are already using in other places. So, you know, I'm seeing in Slack channels like, you know, all the, all image and videos, you know, for other channels. And I'm like, I'm gonna grab that, you know, I'll take that, I'll test that for AppLovin, you know, so, everything's super excited right now or super exciting right now.

[00:00:43] Connaugh McLaughlin: And I think we're still trying to like figuring out what exactly type of content works the best, but we're seeing really positive results, kind of like in all areas right now in terms of the, the creative itself.

[00:00:56] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today, in fact, in person by Mr. Tony Chopp. Tony, reach your handout over here. Well, there it is. See proof. We're in the same room. Tony's joining us here to talk a little bit more about a topic that we've touched on many times in this, on this podcast, but that is AppLovin. And, and we're joined also by one of our Paid Media Managers, Connaugh McLaughlin, who's been kind of our expert here on AppLovin over the last few months as we've been really scaling that channel. So what we're gonna talk about today is a little bit of an update on kind of some of the conversations we've been having around the incrementality of the platform, and then Conone are gonna jump straight into some of the more tactical stuff that we've learned in the past. We've been talking in terms of speculation, in terms of the tests. Now we've actually been using AppLovin and across. Probably up to almost 10 clients, and we have a lot more kind of learnings and on the ground feedback for you guys to talk through. So let's let's start off with that kind of incrementality discussion of around maybe recapping for us, Tony, some of the tests we've run in the past and kind of where we're at now. 

[00:01:24] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Oh, hi Richard. Happy New Year. Oh, thank you. By the way, I was I had the, I'm Tony Chopp. I'm the host of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast last week while you were out, so yeah. How'd that feel? Pretty good. Feels pretty good. Cool. We'll take it. What yeah, happy New Year. So, yeah, AppLovin it remains like one of the most exciting, like channel, like new channel entrances that I've ever seen in my 20 year career doing this.

[00:02:31] Tony Chopp: So, to your point, like last year, it was really oh man, what is, this? Is, this is blowing up so fast. Like, is it. Is it good, I guess? Yeah. Is is the question that, that all people start to ask? And we ask and answer that question through incrementality testing. So we started putting the channel through its paces halfway through, halfway through last year. And then really accelerated that in October of last year when App 11 opened up their self-service portal. We were one of the early partners to be able to onboard, onboard some clients into that. So. We we're up to eight completed incrementality tests on the channel. And we're, every new project that we start, we, we add another, we start with an incrementality test.

[00:03:19] Tony Chopp: And the the common thread if you will, through all of them, has been incrementality measures that come back as positively incremental. So, so what does that mean? What, when we do an incrementality test, we measure what the platform tells us the business impact is versus the impact on revenue. Okay?

[00:03:39] Tony Chopp: We just compare those two things and we're looking for a difference. And every time we measure AppLovin, the platform tells us the business impact is one to one. Then we go look at revenue. The business impact is larger, 1.2, 1.5, whatever it is, every single one of the tests has come back positive. And the, the takeaway from this is the, the, the measurement. If you're gonna look in the, in the, app 11 platform, I think maybe we should start calling it Axon now. They re they rebranded it

[00:04:14] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yeah.

[00:04:16] Tony Chopp: Alo and slash axon. The, the measurement in the platform is. Going to be conservative and it makes sense sort of, if you think about it.

[00:04:26] Tony Chopp: I, I think one of the things that they did when they launched the platform to e-commerce advertisers that, that I think was really smart, is they only use really sharp attribution. So there's no view attribution setting available in the platform. It's only click attribution and to make it even sharper. Keep me honest here. It's either one day or day, or zero day, like same

[00:04:54] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yep. Yep.

[00:04:55] Tony Chopp: like attribution. So if you think about it, those, that's like as sharp of an attribution window as you could possibly use to measure the impact of the ads. Therefore it makes pretty logical sense that the actual business impact is larger.

[00:05:13] Tony Chopp: AKA, this theme of every incrementality test that we've done so far indicates PO positive business impact. Yeah. So, and another thing that's. That's, I think up until recently, 'cause we got one test back recently that had a, a really large positive incrementality factor, which kind of throws us for a little bit of a loop, even though it's positive.

[00:05:36] Tony Chopp: It's, it's really, really large up until that test. The other thing that was fairly consistent about all of the prior tests is the. Incrementality percentage measurement for all of them was PR in a pretty tight band, 120% incremental, 130% incremental, 150% incremental. So when, when the band is really tight like that, it. It leads to a higher level of confidence that your measurement is correlating to, to business impact in a really consistent way. And we see this from all of the incrementality tests that we run on meta seven day click, you know, it's 120%, 115%, 125%, the ulcerative cluster, and they all sort of cluster in this really tight band.

[00:06:26] Tony Chopp: Mm-hmm. And I think the, there, I'll give you an, an alternate. Universe that that's more challenging, which is, which is YouTube. When we do incrementality tests on YouTube, we, we get like these really wide bands. Sometimes it's really, really incremental. Sometimes it's the opposite of that. Those things just lead us to have a lower level of confidence and, and ultimately we need to ask and answer more questions.

[00:06:50] Tony Chopp: So, but kind of I'm curious, what, what would you add, subtract from any of that, from what you've seen?

[00:06:57] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yeah, no, I think just to touch a little bit more on the incrementality percent averages that we're seeing, if we take out that one outlier that we had about a week ago we're averaging about slightly above 151% for all the tests that have come back so far. So, like you said, it's kind of like, it's, it's a great recipe for success.

[00:07:15] Connaugh McLaughlin: We have a tight tight average of. Like those incrementality results coming in around the same score you know, which we can, you know, feel confident about driving. A lot of spend behind.

[00:07:26] Tony Chopp: So the, the indicators basically here that what we, what we've learned is that AppLovin is consistent in how it performs, how it reports, and it's erring on the side of being conservative, which is generally the side you want. A platform that you're on. So yeah, I think, I think that's absolutely right. So it reminds me of like any, like in the scientific method of like, your, your hypothesis or your experiment being repeatable.

[00:07:49] Tony Chopp: Mm-hmm. I think that's like the, maybe a decent metaphor for what it feels like to be you know, running media at an agency in a bunch of different, for a bunch of different accounts and getting really consistent measurement out of a channel. It, it leads to. A, a higher ever increasing level of confidence that mm-hmm.

[00:08:10] Tony Chopp: We're, we can be, be confident that we're, we're helping create contribution margin with this investment. So part of what we're talking about then today is the transition from, let's say, science to application, right? We've been running the experiment, we have a high level of confidence in this platform, and now we've been actually putting it to work for us. Now I, I know Tony, maybe you're gonna talk about this a little bit later, but it was our third biggest spinning channel over the holidays, which is meaningful. Like, as you had said, this is kind of the biggest explosion onto the scene of a platform that we've seen in a long time. But since we've actually been now running APP 11 for a number of clients. We've actually been in the day to day outside of just the test, sort of lab environment. What we wanna talk through now then is like some of the more tactical elements of this, right? Like what are, as far as we can tell, best practices. Now, I guess we don't, we don't necessarily want to put our stamp on any of these because it's early, but some initial kind of learnings about what tactically works best on this platform.

[00:09:05] Tony Chopp: So I'll turn it over to Connaugh. You can kind of start off there. Maybe give us some context about your work. With this platform so far. Just real quick, Kam, before you go, I just wanna kind of set the table. So, when AppLovin First came onto the scene in, at the end of 2024, they invited some advertisers to join the platform and they were functioning as like a full service.

[00:09:31] Tony Chopp: Advertising channel to where they, they had a, a squad of people that was actually doing the, the media, buying the campaign set up and everything on the platform. So that changed in October of last year. Mm. When I say the platform became self-serve or opened up to self-serve, essentially what, what that that means is. They, they opened up an opportunity for us to bring our clients in and actually do the campaign setup, the media buying, et cetera, et cetera. And so as that happened, the, the amount of opportunity that we had to work in the platform touched the lab. Touch the buttons, pull the levers as increased and intercon of as we've gotten an opportunity to, to, to put more hands on it.

[00:10:13] Tony Chopp: I needed more hands. And so, so that, so that's sort of the genesis of how the AppLovin squad at CTC is growing. Mm-hmm. And as a function of that, we've actually had the opportunity, both KAA and myself. To actually build accounts from start to finish, from create a new account, get the pixel fired pixels and feeds wired up, build campaigns, and optimize them. So, so Connaugh you got, you got a bunch of a bunch of stuff going on in here and

[00:10:40] Tony Chopp: hit us, brother. What, what's standing out?

[00:10:42] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yeah, I think I'm just gonna set the table with like, I'm having so much fun with this platform. Like, you know, testing out all different kinds of creative, whether that's, you know, content creator videos, that's still images, that's UGC street interviews. You know, we're testing it all out right now.

[00:11:03] Connaugh McLaughlin: And like I think one of the best things about AppLovin is that, you know, we are reutilizing creative. That's, that we are already using in other places. So, you know, I'm seeing in Slack channels like, you know, all the, all image and videos, you know, for other channels. And I'm like, I'm gonna grab that, you know, I'll take that, I'll test that for AppLovin, you know, so, everything's super excited right now or super exciting right now.

[00:11:26] Connaugh McLaughlin: And I think we're still trying to like figuring out what exactly type of content works the best, but we're seeing really positive results, kind of like in all areas right now in terms of the, the creative itself.

[00:11:39] Tony Chopp: So, so let me, let's lemme kinda break this down into a section. So I'm gonna let's start with like here, these are the ones that come to mind account setup, like outta the gate.

[00:11:47] Tony Chopp: And then I wanna talk a little bit about structure and I wanna talk a little bit about. Spitting. And then I wanna talk a little bit about creative, and then I just have a random question about sort of end cards and like that, like little

[00:11:59] Tony Chopp: nuanced piece of the platform. But so for, for like step zero account setup,

[00:12:06] Tony Chopp: one of the things that has stood out to me is. If Shopify store account setup is magically simple, so

[00:12:13] Tony Chopp: fire up the Axon account, install the Shopify app, and the Shopify app fires the the pixel and the server events and pulls the feed out of the Shopify store into, into AppLovin.

[00:12:29] Tony Chopp: The whole setup process is if you have all the permissions, right, 10 minutes, and I think

[00:12:35] Tony Chopp: that's like, yeah. A, as a person who gets involved in like, some of the infrastructure projects throughout the agency and like getting all the wires wired up. I am. I'm very, very, it's, it's like enjoyable to set up an AppLovin upload account if you're a Shopify brand.

[00:12:51] Tony Chopp: Hmm. But I'm curious if you have any, any thoughts of, about that.

[00:12:55] Connaugh McLaughlin: No, totally, absolutely love it. I mean, we can get, essentially get everything together and started like on the same day, which is super exciting. And like, that's just the, like that's the day zero period uploading all that creative. Doing the Pixel and Shopify. And then, you know, after that we'll have initial learnings in like that end results in that three to five day range.

[00:13:17] Tony Chopp: Yeah. So let's quickly, let's say you're not on Shopify. What's the situation there? It's just more of a hassle, or it's not even available or what? No, it's available. I'm doing one right now for a for a site that's on like a custom backend. It's it's definitely more technically involved. The, the thing, one of the things that stood out to me when I did the Shopify.

[00:13:35] Tony Chopp: Set up is the, the pixel's pretty in depth, so like meta meta's can pixel fires, like, I don't know, six or eight, like standard events. So, you know, page view, view content, add to cart, payment info, checkout or purchase. There's a couple others that you can add. The, the number of events that the AppLovin pixel is, is looking at is like, it's super long. And so I have a theory. I have a theory that I haven't really. I'm kind of a, I'm kind of a data and signal guy. Like when I think about what it means to be successful in advertising and I think one of, one of the app, one of the Axon app advantages is actually the pixel is, is really deep and it looks at a lot of events. All that to say, to answer your question, Richard. The Shopify install really quick. Mm-hmm. The non Shopify install is requiring more resources from a developer standpoint. Yes. And the reason why is because of all these events that we're having to having to trigger. And the story I make up is that all those events help that pixel, find the right, find the right audience.

[00:14:38] Tony Chopp: Well, yeah. It sounds like a richer data set potentially. Exactly. For this. Platform, but Okay. Let's then let's kind of roll from the setup piece into the actual like, operation. Alright. So, yeah. So set up. Cool. Easy Shopify. Now let's just talk about campaign structure. So the, a age old debate consolidation versus segmentation. Hit me.

[00:15:00] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yeah. What I'm learning so far is you know, right now when we're starting off like a hot, new, fresh account, we want to have everything under one consolidated campaign. You know, ramp up 14 days through the learning period with that one campaign, apply the incrementality test and like, kind of kind of get those initial learnings that we're after.

[00:15:21] Connaugh McLaughlin: After we go, after we go from there, then we can kind of start looking at like, okay, is this a client with like a larger range of AOVs? You know, what's the a OV of the current universal campaign that we have? Do we want to segment out additional campaigns to make sure that we are driving spend to like higher a OV products?

[00:15:41] Connaugh McLaughlin: So that's something like, that's something we're experimenting with right now.

[00:15:45] Tony Chopp: So this is a question I don't know the answer to. Is the bidding set at the campaign level only or is there an opportunity to set bid at the ad set level?

[00:15:55] Connaugh McLaughlin: That's correct. Right now it's only at the campaign level.

[00:15:58] Tony Chopp: So this goes to my like age old, like tonyism about why to segment. So the answer for why to segment is because you need a different setting. So kind of to your point about like the a OV thing or you know, whether it's marginal profile or whatever else. This, you know, I, I think this is gonna be, this continued. Thing, every advertising channel we go into, like the, the reason we would've to segment is 'cause we need a different bid. And if we, if that's set at the campaign level, then that it makes sense that a OV would be, would be the trigger.

[00:16:32] Connaugh McLaughlin: Right. 

[00:16:33] Tony Chopp: What else, what else stands out to you about, about structure that, that feels interesting or novel?

[00:16:38] Connaugh McLaughlin: Well, I think one more thing to, to touch on, on that is that with the A OV with the A OV. Yeah. You know, like. On Google previously or other platforms, you know, if we have a consolidated campaign the algorithm may what's the word I'm looking for? Like favor the highest converting products essentially, and then push spend towards those products.

[00:16:59] Connaugh McLaughlin: So then you're having all the lower a OV items, get the spend. So, I, you know, I'm not, I think AppLovin so far is doing a decent job of distribution and. Across like the AOVs, but definitely like speaking to the reps, you know, we're testing out, having other campaigns to drive spend towards those.

[00:17:14] Tony Chopp: This is just a layman's question just because I didn't, I don't think I heard you guys mention this. But obviously like the reason on meta that we would do segmentation by a OV has to do with cost controls. Is there anything like, how, what's the situation with that on app level? Yeah. Yeah. They, they only do, they only do cost controls.

[00:17:31] Tony Chopp: Okay. So they started with make that clear.

[00:17:32] Tony Chopp: Yeah.

[00:17:33] Tony Chopp: That's it. So this like goes back, this goes back to that sort of other point that I made earlier about how when they built the platform, they sort of built it with like the best of, mm-hmm. You know, yeah, yeah. Controls. Interesting. So they started, initially it was only cost per purchase.

[00:17:47] Tony Chopp: That was the only bidding. Mm-hmm. And then halfway through last year, they gave us ROAS bidding, but both like efficiency based based bidding options. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Mm-hmm. So an element of it being sort of like, at a certain point, I mean this must have been in the nineties or whatever. Every new car all of a sudden had power steering power windows or something like that.

[00:18:04] Tony Chopp: Yeah, and it's sort of, because it's a newer platform and there's not a lot of those, or at least at this scale, it has all of the bells and whistles. Have been developed previous to or something. Well, you might almost say it the other way. It it's like, or it takes away a lot. That's shit. That's right. Yeah.

[00:18:17] Tony Chopp: That's interesting. Which is, I think like a really interesting, it'll be really interesting to watch the trajectory of the platform because they, the story I make up is they started with this really tight vision. We're gonna use zero day click attribution only. We're gonna do cost per purchase optimization goal only. And then like you, you hear me and kind of sort of like talking about like all of the reasons why the settings like are important. Like, oh, can we set the bid at the ad set level or like. What was another one that came up? Conna and I, you and I were talking about it. It was, oh, the, the, the scheduling, like, 'cause we had some creative that we wanted to start and stop

[00:18:56] Tony Chopp: at the ad set level around a sale.

[00:19:00] Tony Chopp: And we were like, 'cause it was over the holiday, I was helping you with it, you know, it was, you know, 

[00:19:05] Connaugh McLaughlin: yeah.

[00:19:05] Tony Chopp: and, so we, we asked our partners over at the platform like, Hey, can we do this? And they're like, no, we'll add it to the feature list. So it's like, there's like this tension, you know, they built this really simple thing and then all of us advertisers come in and like, Hey, can we do this?

[00:19:19] Tony Chopp: Can we do that? Can we do the other thing? See how long it takes us to screw it all up with our, our, desires. There you go. All right, well, let's let's, let's keep rolling on through here. So. We're talking campaign structure actually. Is there anything else that you wanna, well, yeah, so you, so you're at structure, like

[00:19:34] Tony Chopp: campaign level.

[00:19:35] Tony Chopp: I'd be curious if you just go one level deeper, kind of that, like how, how are you thinking about ad sets? Like

[00:19:40] Connaugh McLaughlin: yeah, yeah, totally. And like the. Creative set level, like, you know, we're testing a lot out right now by product, so you know, so we will get creative in creative in whether it's images or videos on like new product drops. So then like we'll have a creative set for that product drop. And we, for each creative set we're allowed 10 videos, 10 images, right?

[00:20:01] Connaugh McLaughlin: So we're uploading as many as we can. Let's say we have 10 videos, 10 images, and then you know, kind of AppLovin system, algorithm, algorithm, algorithm is figuring out. Which combination of those is working the best and then showing that those more consistently,

[00:20:16] Tony Chopp: Standard, standard practice, basically like

[00:20:20] Tony Chopp: it. So the, I guess maybe I was gonna say standard practice and then I was about to say like feed it as much creative as possible, but that, but I'm actually hearing sort of. Something a little bit different. Like there's a limit, a 10 image, 10 video limit for

[00:20:33] Tony Chopp: each creative set. 

[00:20:35] Connaugh McLaughlin: And one, one more thing on that creative, just like a little fun fact about AppLovin, is that it has a median exposure of ad creative videos of 35 seconds, which is longer than like

[00:20:48] Connaugh McLaughlin: most other ad platforms. Right?

[00:20:50] Tony Chopp: you can't skip and that's because, yeah, it's, you can't

[00:20:52] Tony Chopp: skip. Yeah. That's 

[00:20:53] Connaugh McLaughlin: right. So then a minimum of 10 seconds, watch time, guaranteed every ad

[00:20:59] Tony Chopp: Okay, so well that then kind of begs the question of like, how has that affected the types of creative you've seen work? I mean, you mentioned before like man on the street interviews or whatever, so you're testing everything, but is there a type of CRE creative product that's more conducive to this platform that you've seen so far?

[00:21:13] Tony Chopp: I.

[00:21:13] Connaugh McLaughlin: I think still trying to like look into those details, but one thing right now about that is that. You know, if we can get nine by 16 videos that are longer, you know, like that are in that 42nd to a minute range, okay, then we can actually uti utilize that fun fact and try to get that meat and exposure of 35 seconds.

[00:21:35] Connaugh McLaughlin: Okay.

[00:21:35] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that's like the. I think that's gonna be like the biggest piece of creative strategy for the channel. For that we, that's interesting. Think about going forward is the fact that the exposure is, there's no way to click out of it. like. There's no benefit at all to not using mm-hmm.

[00:21:54] Tony Chopp: 30 plus second videos.

[00:21:57] Tony Chopp: Yeah. And let me, let me just say, just in case anyone's tuning in on this for the first time, app 11 is serving you ads within mobile games, right? Yeah. I'm sure everybody knows

[00:22:05] Tony Chopp: that at this point, but just to like get the visual back in our minds of you're playing bale, whatever, a 32nd ad pops up, you can't skip, you have to watch it in order to get the next free level or whatever.

[00:22:15] Tony Chopp: Correct. Little fun fact they built, the app, 11 folks built an app, like, I think it's a solitary game. Oh, no

[00:22:21] Tony Chopp: way. And you can use it to trigger their ad inventory and it's kind of fun. Oh, cool. So we will get a link that we can share out on the podcast here, just so like, if you want to like experience it, feel like, feel what an ad looks like, you can download this app and Yeah. And it serves live, live ads. Like you can get actual impressions out of it. What's the, what's the minimum watch time like you have to watch? Do you know?

[00:22:41] Connaugh McLaughlin: 10 seconds.

[00:22:42] Tony Chopp: 10 seconds. Okay. Anyway, the, the, the thought like, to your point maybe a little earlier, Tony, was that with, with a ten second window in which you are sort of guaranteed eyeballs, more or less, you have opportunities to hook. You know, we always say the first three seconds on meta or whatever, but now you have the first 10 seconds to give yourself sort of more chances at making that hook land. So maybe you on one ad, you didn't really get it in the first three seconds, you accidentally put the hook. In the next three seconds or something like that, you know how we kind of take scenes and rearrange them or whatever. You have the opportunity for maybe the hook to land later and thereby sort of increase your chances of getting a high performing ad. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I think there's just gonna be all sorts of cool stuff that, that we're gonna try and our, our people are gonna try on upload and like, if you think about like how media is consumed on scroll, scrolly, social media, Throw, people are scrolling. Yeah. So you, I mean, you have very little opportunity to catch somebody's attention. Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, I think, I think this is just like a, it's a little bit, it's a little bit more of a canvas to work with. Yeah. I think that's gonna represent an opportunity for people to get really creative about how they, how they use that space.

[00:23:56] Tony Chopp: Interesting. Okay. Any other sort of creative observations that you've had so far?

[00:24:01] Connaugh McLaughlin: I think I think that about wraps it up for now, at least off the top of my head.

[00:24:07] Tony Chopp: Let's talk about, let's talk about the bidding stuff. So I mentioned they started with cost per purchase as the primary mechanism or bidding optimization. They gave us RO bidding last year, and then most recently they introduced a, like a new customer acquisition type of bid. I, I'd be curious to hear how you're, how you're thinking about those different things and how they're, how they're playing out in, in practically in the accounts.

[00:24:34] Connaugh McLaughlin: Yeah, for sure. Definitely running a mixture of like universal versus prospecting. Those are their two different campaign types. So universal campaigns including existing customers as well as prospecting and then prospecting campaigns, just prospecting. So, I've. Been kind of trying to figure out okay, like what percentage split or like find out more information about the universal campaigns is new versus returning kind of still, you know, figuring out more info on that.

[00:25:02] Connaugh McLaughlin: But in terms of bidding, you know, the, the approach that I've been taking is so, you know, I'm taking our client's a MER target and then I am applying the average incrementality factor that we have of a hundred and. 51%, you know, and then I'm getting a platform for me to set in the in AppLovin, and then I'm pushing as much spend to that as possible.

[00:25:25] Tony Chopp: Yeah. What are you noticing on the differences in delivery or performance? Not like good or bad, but just like stability potentially, or like scale potential between cost per purchase bidding and. Row biddings or anything that stands out.

[00:25:40] Connaugh McLaughlin: Mm. Nothing that I've noticed right now. I've been, I've been testing out both and kind of leaning towards the target raw bidding. I think I've seen a little bit more efficiency and scale from, from that. I definitely gotta get back over to cost per purchase and probably test it out a little bit more as the platform evolves and gets better.

[00:26:00] Connaugh McLaughlin: But right now leaning towards the target rises.

[00:26:02] Tony Chopp: Cool. I have a. I've had one experience using the prospecting campaign and we actually had north Beam in this situation. So North Beam's pretty cool. One of the cool things about North Beam is they pixel the site and they develop a metric for all the, all the traffic from all the channels.

[00:26:21] Tony Chopp: That's new customer percentage. And it's, it's pretty useful actually. So in this particular experience, we, we got to demo the, the prospecting, the new customer acquisition. Function in AppLovin, and we saw like a three x increase in the north beam percent new customer traffic. So it's a pretty good signal that, that, that optimization goal is leading to the, the outcome that we're, that we're after, which is net, net new eyeballs for sure.

[00:26:52] Tony Chopp: Mm-hmm. The, the new customer percentage in North Beam for this particular account was, was already, already, in a pretty good spot, but this setting actually helped to push it, push it even further. That one was an interesting one as well because it was it was a, it's a larger client that had a pretty significant customer file.

[00:27:11] Tony Chopp: And I think for, just like with all of our brands that we work with, if you're a big business that has million, hundreds of thousands or however many people in your, in your customer file, you have to be even more thoughtful about what's happening in your media accounts versus a newer brand that doesn't have a large customer file. There's less of a, there's less concern for, for that there. Mm-hmm. But yeah. So is the effectiveness of that new customer percentage optimization or whatever, do you feel like that's due to the richer data set from the pixel? Like is this something that feels unique, Tolo and like its ability to do this?

[00:27:44] Tony Chopp: Or is it just you're just saying like they're able to do it Well? Yeah. No, the latter I think, able to do it well, the, the, you know, I think the idea of like. The media platforms, whatever media platform you're, you're talking about, being able to reach net new people is, is something that we always are working to dial in and tighten up and, and there's, there's sort of a connection to how we. For, for most of our media stack, how we do bidding. So we use conversion optimization across media channels like 95% of the time, with the exception of some brand media stuff where we're using like CPM or CPB or whatever, bidding. So anyway, the point being is like the media platforms are getting this signal from us.

[00:28:33] Tony Chopp: Very strong signal. Not a mixed signal at all. Like, Hey, give us conversions. And then people that have interacted with the brand in some way, shape or form, whether they're an existing, whether they've purchased at some time in the past or, you know, remarketing 'cause they've been to the site, are, have a higher propensity to convert.

[00:28:47] Tony Chopp: So there's this tension in in everything that we do where we are trying to reach new eyeballs, but we also have these efficiency goals. And so the answer to your question succinctly, Richard, is that the AppLovin folks are. Aware of what's important to us as performance marketers. They, they're giving us tools that appear to be effective in helping us walk that line. Alright. Anything else you guys wanna hit on bidding, segmentation stuff?

[00:29:11] Tony Chopp: No. Oh, go ahead.

[00:29:13] Connaugh McLaughlin: One more thing to add. Correct me if I'm wrong, Tony, but I think that a lot of our incrementality tests so far, like averaging out to that 151% are using the universal campaign. So we have a new, we have a new client that is running prospecting only from the start running an incrementality test.

[00:29:32] Connaugh McLaughlin: Don't have the read on that yet, but it'll be interesting to kind of look back on and say, okay. Does. What is the difference between these reads? Right. Expecting, you know, that prospecting campaign to be higher, so yeah.

[00:29:46] Tony Chopp: Yeah, we could, we, we will make a, make a gentleman's bet right now. There you go. Richard is betting the other side, by the way. Okay. All right. Wait, so what's your side of the bet? Me and Connor are both on the side that the, the, the prospecting bidding is gonna have an incrementality readout that's higher than our, than the ones we've done so far.

[00:30:04] Tony Chopp: So one 71%, somewhere in there. Okay, well, I don't like my odds. I'll just say that. But all right. Well, so speaking of placing bets on the future, let's talk about what we feel like is coming up next. So I know, Tony, you have some predictions maybe for where, where AppLovin's gonna go the next little bit.

[00:30:18] Tony Chopp: But talk us through some of that. Yeah, I mean, we we're just, there's no, there's no doubt in my mind that we're gonna see material, like orders of magnitude investment into this channel for, for our clients in, in 2026. It on Black Friday, cyber Monday, the holiday. Like, it, it was really fascinating to watch this investment.

[00:30:37] Tony Chopp: So a couple things. Number number one, it, it turned out to be the third, the third largest investment out of all the channels that we, that we run for our clients over that period, which is wild. And that the new kid on the block, popped up into the third, third spot. Number two, the, the curve of the investment, like bucked the trend.

[00:30:55] Tony Chopp: So Black Friday, cyber Monday sort of always follows this. Pretty normal pattern where the investment on Friday's the largest. The weekend comes down a little bit and then Monday comes back up. But, but it's not as high as Friday. So the the AppLovin trend was peak not the peak on Friday, high high levels on Friday. Down a little bit on Monday, Tuesday, the peak was actually on Monday. And the indication, like, the reason why is because number one, we can deploy a lot of media dollars really fast 'cause there's so many impressions available. And number two, it's performing. So the media dollars actually flowed into AppLovin towards the end of that period, which is a an incredible signal.

[00:31:38] Tony Chopp: So my, my prediction, one last point on Black Friday. Third largest investment channel, but still a relatively small portion of the, of the whole for the weekend. Little less than 5%. So, but my prediction for this coming year in 2026 is that app 11 is going to be 15%, 20% of the, the total investment in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on this year and AppLovin proves to be a material. Percentage of our total media investment across our whole stack, which would be which would, which would be real. It would really be something. 'Cause forever we've had meta and Google ads represent the vast majority of where we, of where we invest the dollars mm-hmm.

[00:32:30] Tony Chopp: With some exploration in, into other channels. And, and YouTube's been growing as well. But if I could sort of, kind of comment on that, like, YouTube has been tougher to measure. The incrementality bands are wider. It makes for more uncertainty. The money did not sort of flow like that on Black Friday, cyber Monday.

[00:32:46] Tony Chopp: So yeah, prediction it's gonna be a good year for, for APP 11 or Axon and, and for, for all the, all, all of our clients that we get to go explore. That's right. So get on board. I remember, you know, when this conversation first started, which was more than a year ago, October, right? 2024. That what you said?

[00:33:01] Tony Chopp: Yeah. The initial conversation was like, what if this could be the third platform? Similar, our, as these sort of incrementality tests went through, that sort of just seemed to be coming to fruition. And I think what we're saying here is like, that's basically. Yeah. Is the AppLovin is the 30 platform now, and so it's time to get on the

[00:33:22] Tony Chopp: boat. I mean, if you were asking me like if I, I, if I'm running my own e-comm brand and I, I feel like, you know, you should have never done with meta. Not sure, but so like I had that resourced correctly. What I mean when I say resourced correctly, I mean correct amount of creative production for the necessary volume to continue to scale and meet my goals. I felt pretty good about where I was at on the Google Ads platform. I, I was starting to explore in YouTube my, my third bet would absolutely, absolutely be on AppLovin and I would figure out like, how am I gonna make, if I was running an econ brand, I would, I would say to myself, how am I going? How am I gonna make this 20% of my media investment this year? Yeah. All right. Well, I will not be on the other side of that, but I'll be on your side of that one, so, all right folks. Well, I think that's gonna do it for us, Conna. Anything else you wanna add about any thoughts for 2026? No.

[00:34:10] Connaugh McLaughlin: No, I mean, I think the only thing I'll say is with the available impression share. With the incrementality results, we gotta be pushed and spend here.

[00:34:19] Tony Chopp: Alright, I like it. Con's. Asking for more budget. So big, big AppLovin guy con. it. Cool guys, well appreciate you joining us Tony Conna and everybody else out there. If this is something you're interested in working with us on and you're a eight or nine figure brand, you know where to find us.

[00:34:32] Richard Gaffin: commonthreadco.com. Smash that high risk button. Let us know that you're interested in having Connaugh go do some exploring for you on AppLovin, and we'd love to work with you. So till next time, folks, take care everyone.