Decreasing User Acquisition Costs With UGC

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Ariana Munroe
September 9, 2022
5 mins
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Providers is a free, #1 rated app that five million households now use to manage their EBT, WIC, SSI, unemployment, debit, and other benefits. Built with the intention of lessening the administrative burden that make benefits hard to obtain, the Providers App aims to give back the time and emotional resources of those who need help. Whatever gets your family through the month, Providers helps you make the most of it.

Key Results from our testing period:

68%
Decrease in cost per app registration
15%
Increase in ad engagement click-through-rate
20%
Increase in paid social ad spend

Challenge

In the ever-evolving social landscape, we are often challenged to find new ways to showcase the value of the Providers App through attention-grabbing creative and authentic messaging. Our team hypothesized that diversifying our creative output with Bamboo’s user-generated content (UGC) offering, would build more brand trust with users. Our goal was to use video testimonials to increase app interest and lower user acquisition costs.

Approach

With the UGC launch on Meta, we aimed to capture the attention of more qualified users within our existing top-performing Android campaigns. This initiative was supported by the following elements: 

  • 2-week A/B test through Meta’s experiments function 
  • Evergreen Android campaign that was our top-performant at the time
  • Demographic audience targeting that attempted to reach our core persona

Our campaign optimized towards an event that preceded the main KPI to ensure we would gain enough volume for the algorithm to learn quickly. We monitored both events throughout the test so we could be confident in the results. 

*Due to the limited iOS targeting options and the skew of Android users on the app, we chose to not replicate this test for iOS initially.

Results

We immediately saw positive impacts during the initial two week test. These results would end up being a catalyst for expansion of the UGC offering and the Providers’ paid social program. 

The UGC launch led to a 68% decrease in cost per registration, which is our main KPI, as well as an increase in ad engagement click through rate by 15%. In the first 2 weeks of the A/B test, the UGC creatives made by Bamboo Creative Studio (BCS) quickly became more efficient than our historic top performing ads.

About Bamboo Creative Studio (BCS): Bamboo Creative Studio has been writing, casting, and editing UGC-style ads for several years now and due to the surge in demand on platforms like TikTok & Meta, we began offering a UGC subscription in late 2021. Producing new UGC-style ads on a monthly basis has increased performance for our clients and increased efficiency within our production workflow. UGC is relatively inexpensive to produce, when compared to live or studio production, and has that platform-native, genuine feel that hooks viewers.

If we’ve learned anything through this process, it’s this: authenticity is key. It’s the number one request from clients and thus the number one thing we focus on in writing and casting new productions. Since UGC ads can often come across as scripted or contrived, like an actor reading lines in an infomercial, we’ve dedicated ourselves to becoming authenticity experts. We do everything we can to make sure our ads look, sound, and feel like they’re just another content creator’s post on the platform. We’re excited to continue developing this offering and make ads that stand out amongst the infinite scroll…by not standing out ;)

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Ariana Munroe
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