italki: Amplifying Conversions while Minimizing Their Cost

Challenge

italki is a popular language learning app, providing vast community of qualified tutors and offering instruction in over 150+ languages.

Screenshots of the italki app, taken from the Apple App Store. — Screenshots of the italki app, taken from the Apple App Store

While running Apple Search Ads search results campaigns in numerous regions (like US, UK, FR, DE, etc.) with in-house team and resources, italki encountered a few challenges connected to increasing the number of conversions while reducing the associated costs. That’s why they decided to partner with SplitMetrics Agency and leverage the Team expertise on both Apple Search Ads and ASO.

Solution

Research is the first and very important step that can’t be omitted, and always conducted by SplitMetrics Agency when working with a client. Upon analyzing italki’s Apple Search Ads search results campaigns, several issues were spotted:

Discovery campaigns accounted for the majority of traffic from non-branded keywords.
Identifying the best-performing search queries was challenging due to the prevalence of low volume search terms.
Not all keywords from other campaigns were added as negative keywords to the discovery campaign, potentially causing overlapping.
The cost per conversion exceeded the target KPI.

To address these challenges, Agency’s experts decided to implement various strategies, including updating Brand, Generic, Competitor, and Discovery campaigns with relevant keywords. They also added exact match negative keywords to the discovery campaign to prevent traffic overlap.

Additionally, UA Team decided to set CPA goals at the ad group level in the generic, competitor, and discovery campaigns with the main aim was to reduce cost at the upper stage of the funnel and obtain higher traffic at a lower rate.

Results

We’ve been really satisfied by the outcomes of our partnership with the SplitMetrics Agency team. They were very professional and transparent throughout the process, and always made sure to keep us updated on their findings and recommendations. Thanks to their extensive expertise we were able to optimize our Apple Search Ads campaigns and increase the number of conversions
Xinyi Li, App Growth Manager, italki

All the above mentioned Apple Search Ads optimization efforts led to the significant results for italki in their target market, being the most important one for the client:

The number of installs increased by 74.59%.
CPI decreased by 50%.
The number of events (conversions) grew by 77.08%.
The cost per event (conversions) reduced by 50.76%.