Developing a digital marketing strategy and promoting a cryptocurrency wallet and payment card. The applications are available on Apple Store and Google Play Market.
Western European countries covered by the financial regulator's license.
Since the aim was to find the most effective "white" advertising channels to increase budgets in the future, we decided to test several options simultaneously. The client had some licenses and documents, which we thought would be sufficient for Facebook and Google Ads support. Therefore, we quickly decided on the channels for buying traffic. We had prior experience with crypto and blockchain advertising, so we used Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Apple Search Ads, Twitter (they changed their rules on advertising and now only permit blockchain and post-promotion), and Inmobi mobile ads.
Those who have promoted crypto products before know that this is not an easy niche, and some advertising platforms classify it as a grey area if you don't have the appropriate licenses. The client did not want to get involved with "cloaking" and other methods of acquiring "grey" traffic. Thus, we often encountered account and ad blocking during the process. Additionally, it was difficult to change creatives continuously because the approved ads were working, while the new ones were being frequently banned.
Analytics tool setup: Before launching advertising, it is essential to set up data collection. Without this, it would be difficult to evaluate the results and effectiveness of the paid channels. The data was collected in Firebase, Branch, Facebook analytics, and the client's internal CRM. Setting up and testing analytics took a month.
We also attempted to drive traffic to the website, where the user could install the application or register on the site, access the personal account, make exchange transactions and accept/send crypto. The tasks we performed included:
Read more about what is UX audit, why it's crucial, who is it for, and how it will help you to increase key metrics in our blog.
We ran several test GDN campaigns with traffic to the site. Google did not approve the ads immediately, and our attempts to modify the creative led nowhere. Then, we ran ads in the Play Market and Apple Store. For Android, it was running all the time, but for iOS devices, it was banned after a week of ads, and trying to modify the creative/advertisements did not work. Therefore, we continued only with Android via Google Ads. We had the ad groups broken down by country because of the significant price range for installation in different European countries.
Through Facebook, we managed to drive traffic to the site for a week or two and get cheap registrations and installs. However, the ads were blocked because of the cryptocurrency topic, and the support did not accept client documents. We ran ads to install the iOS + Android app.
There were no problems with Apple Search during moderation, and it went quickly. The crucial thing is to gather the semantics well. Here we separated ad groups by country and disabled expensive countries that did not convert. Targeting competitors did not show any fantastic results, so we turned it off.
Life hack: You can make the description of the app in different languages and collect the semantics accordingly, taking into account the language of the country. Thus, the price for the installation will be cheaper than usual.
Apple Search was several times more expensive than Google Ads and Facebook, but the quality of leads was very good – conversion from install to registration was better than on other platforms.
As mentioned above, Twitter has changed the rules for advertising, and promotions related to crypto can no longer be launched, only blockchain advertising. However, the documents provided by the client to confirm their legal entity and financial license did not fit the criteria, and therefore, this tool was not considered.
Here, we acted more as consultants in choosing an advertising platform for promoting the crypto wallet. At the beginning of the contract with the site and the launch of advertising, Inmobi allocated its own account, and the client communicated with them directly.
You can see the big picture in the image below.
Interestingly, iOS installs through Facebook were almost three times cheaper than through Apple Search, and the registration price was also lower. Contrary to common belief, Google Ads and Android app installs performed better, even though iOS users are often considered more promising. In general, Android users showed better results, and we decided to reallocate the advertising budget accordingly for future campaigns.
Times have changed, and Facebook and Google are more strictly moderating crypto-related content. Nevertheless, there are "white hat" ways to promote such products. The main thing is to correctly identify the target audience and build the right communication with them.
As part of our services, we also offer:
Usually, we work with "white" projects that are not fraudulent. We do not work with gambling, porn, dating, suspicious investment projects. We are happy to partner up with the following niches:
For more details, please, book a discovery call with our team and we'll contact you after a small brief.