Google App Campaigns (UAC) can be a key driver of growth when you’re looking to scale your mobile app’s users and revenue profitably. However, there are some common mistakes that advertisers miss when running UAC. If you’re running UAC and not seeing the expected results, chances are one (or more) of these issues is holding you back.
Here’s a list of the most common UAC mistakes and, more importantly, how to fix them.
1. Using Suboptimal Bidding Strategy & Optimization Event
Mistake:
Many advertisers choose a bidding strategy that doesn’t align with their actual goals, leading to inefficient spending and poor user quality. The most common pitfall is optimizing for Installs. For Android, this is guaranteed to bring mostly low-quality users who won’t start a trial or complete many in-app actions. In fact, in our experience, a lot of this traffic may be bots.
Fix:
Choose the right bid strategy:
- Install Volume: if you want as many installs as possible at a set cost but don’t care about the quality at all (mostly a waste of money).
- Optimizing for Installs with users more likely to complete in-app actions: better than the install option, and can work if budgets are low and very few app event conversions come through.
- Action-Based Optimization (tCPA): if you need higher-quality users who’ll be more likely to complete in-app events.
- ROAS Optimization: if you aim for profitability. The best option, and doable even with 7-day trial windows.
Ensure your in-app conversion tracking is set up correctly to feed Google’s algorithm data about your most valuable users. From our experience, the lower in the funnel you can optimize, the better.
2. Having too low or too high bids
Mistake:
Many advertisers either bid too low (resulting in little to no traffic) or too high (causing overspending with poor ROAS). Too low bids set constraints on the algorithm, not allowing it to experiment with premium placements such as YouTube (which can allow for a lot more scale). Too high bids may cause your campaigns to spend unevenly throughout the day and lead to your campaigns being “limited by the budget” which can also affect performance negatively.
Fix:
- Aim for the sweet spot where the budget does not limit the campaigns but also not bidding too low.
- Start with amoderate bid, around1.5x your actual target to get data in and allow for algo to learn.
- Let the campaign run forat least a week before making bid adjustments.
- Gradually adjust bids based on performance rather than making abrupt changes.
3. Having too low budgets & not enough conversion events per campaign
Mistake:
When optimizing for app events or tROAS, the campaign needs enough conversions to learn from. Aim for at least 5 events per day, ideally more: this gives the campaign more stability and better performance.
Fix:
- If you’re targeting multiple regions, test combining countries with similar GDP together.
- If you can’t get enough events when optimizing only for purchases, try combining trial started + purchase, so that more weight goes to the users who didn’t cancel the trial.
4. Not focusing enough on video assets
Mistake:
While we haven’t seen images getting much scale, videos can have a massive impact on results. Most advertisers don’t seem to put enough effort into those.
Fix:
- We have seen the best results with UGC style videos that are 30+ seconds long and less than a minute. These can perform well in both Display and YouTube (YT shorts)
- Regularly add new creatives, whether in the same campaign or in a separate video-only testing campaign (if new videos aren’t getting any spend in the main campaigns).
- Optimize for multiple orientations (landscape and portrait being the most important ones).
5. Not knowing how Brand searches in Search network (Google Search and Play Store) impact your results
Mistake:
Many advertisers don’t realize that branded searches on Google Search and the Play Store significantly impact UAC performance. Brand searches typically have much higher intent and conversion rates, which can inflate overall campaign performance metrics. If left unchecked, this can lead to misleading results and suboptimal decisions.
Fix:
- Exclude brand keywords from your UAC campaigns and evaluate how the performance changes and if excluding the brand terms has a positive or negative effect on the overall blended results.
- For a more scientific approach, run a test in the US in which you exclude the brand keyword from the main campaign and create a new one specifically focused on the brand with a very conservative bid (so it would mostly target the brand terms). Split the states in half: half will see brand ads, while the other will not. Later evaluate the results by looking at the overall results for the two groups and if one had better performance than the other. We ran exactly this test for a productivity app: see what brand traffic really added.
6. Not testing multiple ad groups & themes
Mistake:
Relying on just one general ad group to do everything limits your ability to test different angles and letting the algo find different pockets of users when scaling. Having everything in one ad group also limits your ability to understand which topics/themes have the most impact.
Fix:
- Run different ad groups with different themes to find different pockets of users and to bring out different selling points of the app.
- Having more ad groups also allows you to diversify your text assets.
7. Ignoring Placement Performance Data
Mistake:
A lot of advertisers still don’t know the benefit of breaking down performance by placement (Search, Display, YouTube), so many advertisers assume all placements perform equally and freak out when some days are much worse than others when in reality the algorithm was just allocating too much spend on YT at high CPA (annoying).
Fix:
- If one network is performing poorly, adjust your creative strategy to fit that placement to perform better. If videos get a lot of spend but have a very poor ROAS in all networks, consider removing them and see how the performance changes.
8. Frequent Campaign Resets or Edits
Mistake:
Making constant bid, budget, or audience changes impacts the algorithm’s stability, preventing optimal performance.
Fix:
- Allow campaigns to runat least 7 days before making significant changes.
- Avoid frequent bid changes and keep adjustments within30% at a time.
9. Not Localizing Creatives for Different Markets
Mistake:
Running the same English creatives worldwide can limit engagement and conversion rates in markets with poor english proficiency.
Fix:
- Translate ad copy and videos for key markets. Dubbing can also work surprisingly well and is easy to implement with AI tools.
10. Relying Solely on Google’s Recommendations and having too much trust in the attribution
Mistake:
Google’s automated suggestions (like budget and bid increases or new creative recommendations) arenot always in your best interest (pretty obvious tbf).
Our incrementality analyses have shown that Meta is often underattributing while Google is over-attributing for Android app campaigns. With iOS however, we have seen Google mostly under-attributing. For iOS, make sure to utilize the SKAN report and check your null conversion rates before killing the campaigns.
Fix:
- Take suggestions with a grain of salt.
- Monitor performance closely after implementing changes.
- Don’t forget to check your SKAN data with iOS.
- Use other tracking methods and your own data modeling analyzes to validate Google Ads impact.
Final Thoughts
Running a successful UAC campaign requiresstrategy, patience, and continuous optimization. By avoiding these common mistakes and implementing the fixes, you’ll set yourself up for stronger performance, higher-quality users, and better profitability.
If you’re still struggling to scale your Google App Campaigns profitably,reach out: we’ve helped apps across multiple industries fix and scale their Google App campaigns.