Case Study: Lovoo

LOVOO is a free app that makes it possible to get to know other people quick and easy. The Live radar shows other users nearby and lets you contact them directly.

With over 23 million users, LOVOO is one of the most successful mobile social networks worldwide and also the app with the most gross-revenue in the German App Store apart from gaming apps. Since 2011 LOVOO is available for iPhone and Android smartphones.

LOVOO were already capturing large portions of the target audience in key markets, in some months growing their user base by hundreds of thousands per week. At these volumes, the typical performance campaigns were saturating in places, and the team looked for new opportunities to engage with their audience. Retargeting and re-engagement — where existing users would be targeted with messages aiming to bring them back — was established as the new frontier. To make these campaigns come together, LOVOO brought in networks specialized in retargeting. As for Adjust, the role of the third party tracker in retargeting and re-engagement is twofold:

• provide partners with the data they need to target users.
• Accurately track the ROI of retargeted users.

The team at LOVOO had already scouted out the key network partners it wanted to integrate. On the Adjust side, a dedicated server module was set up to transmit data over to the network partners. In LOVOO's dashboard, the partner module was activated at the team's behest, and configured to transmit the exact data they wanted to share and no more.

The tracking data for a retargeting campaign is different from standard performance campaigns in terms of how the users' lifetime is considered. Normally, a user's lifetime starts at the install, and the user is permanently attributed to a given segment. In order to analyze the performance of retargeting campaigns, the users responding to the campaign need to be moved into a new segment, representing the users that responded to retargeting.

As the campaigns started to go live, users responded to the CTAs. The conversions from these campaigns, as well as the resulting user engagement, was swiftly recorded in the Adjust dashboard as separate segments.

The LOVOO team had not only the aggregate data at its fingertips, but the conversion data was provided to key partners and LOVOO's own BI systems as well.

LOVOO continues to retarget a percentage of its existing users continuously, using a variety of channels. By experimenting with a few different providers, the team could boil down a few key strategies that provide the most bang for the buck.

Almost every retargeted LOVOO user converts to a paying user within a week of the retargeting campaign. On average, the LTV of users being retargeted increases by 20% after their conversion. Users that respond to a retargeting campaign also return to spend a lot more time in the app — the segment of users that converted from a retargeting campaign have 45% longer sessions than users who found the app from performance campaigns.