| I have built ad network tech from scratch and worked for several large networks. Here is my tip. Always hire specialists to do these sort of ad campaigns for you. It is not something you can figure out easily and lessons here are expensive. OP learned some of the very basic principles of this industry for a price tag for $20K. I have seen people do even worse. 1. Whatever Ads are one of the options you have. Other options are paying users cash to install your app, billboards, tv ads, radio ads, asking teens to distribute app install stickers and what not. I would recommend trying the cheaper method first that do not change much with scale. 2. Ignore the network reported stats. What matters is your business. What is the true cost of acquiring a user that meets all you requirements ?(e.g. paying user) In OPs case this number could be in $00s now. Totally not worth it. 3. Learn that number with smaller spend. (Smaller spend = around $2K for Google) 4. Optimize on that number using different strategies. Chances are that for most apps your cost to acquire a user would always be more than the revenue generated by that user. Making these ads always a losing proposition. Then why do folks do it ? * If you spend $0000000 at scale (like Uber, FB in early days) even though you are making a loss per user, the large number of users with network effects snowballs bringing organic growth. This is compounded if the app itself deals with real money (Uber ) or has deep network effects (Signal, Instagram, Snapchat) which bring in organic growht. * A meal prep app is never going to be profitable in this manner. If I was OP I would have probably tried to find all the instagram influencers who talk about meals and then emailed them about a partnership. Would have paid $500 or so to tier 2 influencers to make coiple of posts about the app. |