The world’s leading learn-to-code app for kids — codeSpark Academy — was already a well-recognized brand when they reached out to Hop Online. codeSpark Academy introduces children to programming with visual code blocks and progressively challenging drag-and-drop puzzles. It boasts a global community of young creators from every country on Earth.
codeSpark was seeing good organic results along with App Promo Campaigns and small-scale Apple Search Ads (ASA). They aimed for more growth but had few in-house resources. The objective? Double subscribers and achieve 20%+ ROAS from paid marketing channels by year’s end.
We achieved it 2 months ahead of schedule. Here are the challenges we faced and what we did to get the results in this mobile app case study:
Here was our initial strategy:
Expanding internationally helped us grow beyond the main markets at a much lower cost. We researched the audiences, but also the product-market fit. We analyzed the market for similar apps across different countries and mapped our product to see if it was a good fit for the market. Better reporting was needed too, to determine the max CAC for each new country.
The iOS 14 update with IDFA removal put us in a precarious situation and threatened our main acquisition channels – App Promo Campaigns iOS and Facebook App iOS. We quickly launched Android campaigns and managed to make Android profitable, bringing about 20% of subscription volume and about 80% of install volume.
We also introduced new acquisition channels – Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, and Microsoft Advertising. Those channels brought over 15% more incremental trials and contributed incremental profit to the digital media mix. Still, as codeSpark is an app, it was hard to funnel the user experience into these web platforms, and costs remained high.
To ensure growth, we audited and expanded the existing top-performing channels. We increased the bids for both App Promo Campaigns and ASA, restructured the campaigns on ASA, and adding new keywords and segmenting for iPhone and iPad to have different bids based on device. For Google App Promo campaigns, we test new bidding strategies, optimizing for trial vs subscription, and diversified the creatives — including direct-response creatives that our team produced.
Next, we introduced translations for the App Promo Campaigns campaigns, for both iOS and Android. Some of the foreign markets were quite expensive with English ads, but when we introduced translated ad copy and video, we expanded dramatically at much better costs.
We had great success with timely promos and creatives. We launched campaigns around summer camps, homeschooling, back to school, and Halloween – all supported by custom videos, ad copies, landing pages, and offers.
On data, attribution, and reporting, the biggest challenge was reporting on online and offline conversions – we needed to forecast how many people were going to subscribe, based on the trial starts. This was a crucial metric, as it was dictating our room for expansion.
We were using the average conversion rates of the past few weeks to forecast the conversion rate of current trial users, in order to stay at or above the 20% ROAS target. As ROAS rose, we could expand more. We did that not only on an account level for all campaigns, but also on a channel level. For example, we’d notice that on Apple Search and App Promo Campaigns, we’d get a lot of trials from a country, but none of the trial users convert to paying customers. So we might stop the channel for this country, despite the well-performing campaigns. In other cases, we’d expand Android or iOS campaigns.
Our efforts paid off and codeSpark achieved remarkable results – they expanded their user base exponentially and had triple-digit growth within a year.
On May 25, 2021, codeSpark was acquired by BEGiN, the company behind the proven early learning program, HOMER. Mission accomplished!
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