Skidos is an ed-tech company developing learning games for toddlers and kids between the ages of 2 and 11. The Company’s mission is to make learning fun. Skidos has a portfolio of 40+ apps and a freemium business model, allowing users to try all the apps for free for a limited time and then subscribe to access the whole collection.
“Our most profitable channel, being in the app business, is of course the App Store and for this reason we started to combine organic reach with paid campaigns through Apple Search Ads. Given the consistent number of apps and locations targeted, the platform offered by Apple didn’t meet all our requirements and objectives,”
According to the Skidos Team, the structure of their business didn’t fit well with the functionalities and user interface of Apple Search Ads. Skidos was promoting more than 10 apps out of the 40+ in the portfolio and wanted to target all their main markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, plus other European countries like France, Italy, and the Netherlands.
In addition, the Client wanted to target different categories of keywords (branded, learning-related, competitor-related, game-related) in separate campaigns, in order to better track the performance. Therefore, the Skidos Team needed to handle over 200 campaigns of different kinds (for new users and returning users, exact and broad match), targeting different markets and different keywords types. Skidos quickly found that the Apple Search Ads dashboard had too few functionalities to manage so many campaigns and required too much human involvement in the decision-making process.
“We needed an easy, friendly interface, with well-thought-of functionalities to categorise campaigns, which could give us a clear overview of the performance of campaigns promoting a specific app in a specific location. Also, it was important to find a tool that could take away some recurring time-taking tasks from the team: for example, automating the process of adding negative keywords in discovery campaigns or pausing keywords with low performance, which would take a long time for us to detect, having to go through more than 200 campaigns. What we needed was an effective, fast platform able to reduce manual work.”
— Giulia Millefanti, Marketing Associate at Skidos Labs
After testing multiple Apple Search Ads management platforms, Skidos selected SplitMetrics Acquire (formerly SearchAdsHQ) and started using it in fall 2020. Managing 200+ campaigns with limited resources was not easy, but Giulia says that SplitMetrics Acquire made her daily life at work much easier from the beginning.
According to the Skidos Team, what they appreciated from the start was the user interface, rich in functionalities but intuitive. It made it possible to filter campaigns, visualize metrics and performance only of those Skidos were interested in, and group them with the label function. Also, to separate campaigns by keywords’ semantic and easily split campaigns promoting Skidos’ apps for preschool kids and those ones promoting the apps suitable for 6+ years old kids.
“Automation rules were another hit feature: thanks to the constant support and review of the SplitMetrics team, we managed to create 200+ rules; the most useful ones were those that allowed us to automate time-consuming processes. For example, adding search terms from discovery campaigns to negatives if the performance wasn’t good enough, or adding new keywords from exact match campaigns as negatives in discovery campaigns.
Other rules were created to notify me when the performance of a certain campaign wasn’t hitting the goal in terms of click-through rate, download rate or CPA for a certain period of time, so I could take action upon it without losing time discovering it myself. Also, other useful automation rules we created were to progressively raise the bid for keywords outperforming our target CPA; each rule was built for a specific country, campaign and according to the targeted metric for the specific app promoted, which helped us to scale up.
What I like about SplitMetrics Acquire is that they keep adding new features that are built to satisfy the requests of the customers.
It’s easy to communicate with the team, they are just a Slack message away and they really take their customers to heart. They are very prone to provide us support if we need suggestions to scale or optimize our campaigns, they keep us updated about the latest releases and are very flexible to help in case of troubles.”
According to Skidos, SplitMetrics Acquire eases the steps to reach their goals: “whether our desire is to scale our spending or optimize, the SplitMetrics Team has a solution to help us get there.”
In the first 3 months Skidos started using the platform, they managed to more than double their monthly spend: from 31k in November 2020 to 73k in January 2021.
“SplitMetrics Acquire has been a great help in eliminating time-consuming practices from my daily working life. We managed to invest our monthly budget in a smarter way, by cutting bids on those keywords that were not performing according to target metrics and increasing bids on keywords that were more profitable. Plus, working with their team is a pleasure, as everyone is always available, helpful and easygoing”
