How to segment users for different verticals

  • Tutorial
In this article, a person from an automated system for mobile applications retargeting Getloyal , we'll show you how to segment users for travel, food delivery, e-commerce , F2P- gaming, subscription service verticals.



Attracting new users to the mobile application (User Acquisition) is inferior to a new strong trend in mobile marketing: retargeting.

User Acquisition trends are not so rosy and optimistic: the number of advertisers is growing with the relatively not growing mobile advertising market. Prices for attracting a new user are doubled. In addition, the consumer’s information field is overloaded, and it is becoming more and more difficult to gain attention by advertising. And the user base of many applications and games has long exceeded millions, which means attracting new users becomes simply problematic.

If you have already encountered at least one of the above points - it's time to think about retargeting. Retargeting technology allows you to “wake up” users who have expressed interest in your service or have already installed your mobile application. That is, only those users who somehow interacted with the brand get into the target audience: they made a purchase or simply looked through offers. Returning such users is much more profitable than attracting new ones.

The success of a retargeting campaign lies in the correct segmentation of the audience. Segmentation largely depends on the topic and type of business. Retargeting is effective for any category of applications that have the opportunity to buy something inside.

Common user segments


An effective approach to segmentation of a retargeting campaign is segmentation based on purchase history and user buying behavior. Users of any service can be conditionally divided into 4 categories:

1. Active payer. It can vary from service to service, but usually it is a user who uses the application regularly and recently made a purchase (at least 30 days ago), or more than one.

2. Active deadbeat. This is a user who actively uses the application, but has never made a purchase.

3. The sleeping payer. Once upon a time, a user made a purchase (more than 30 days ago), but now he either abandoned the application, or sometimes uses it, but does not pay.

4.Inactive deadbeat. The largest layer of users of any user base of any application. Almost or nothing did in the application. The most inaccessible for retargeting. For the price it can do, like attracting a new one.

Each of these generalized segments requires an individual approach and solution. Let's consider segments and approaches of work with them on concrete examples of verticals.

Segmentation in travel, food delivery service





The most popular verticals in retargeting.

1. Users who have already made a reservation, order or payment in the application. For each segment below, you can apply filters by prescription, frequency and amount of payment.

  • Users who recently made a payment (10, 20, 50 days ago) and are active in recent days. Solution: you offer them additional services, special offers, special conditions, new items.
  • Users who made a payment more than 90 days ago and were not active. Solution: a reminder of the existence of the service, special offer, promotional code.
  • Users who bought for a long time (90 days ago) and were recently active in your application (7 or less days ago, for example), but did not buy / order. Solution: most likely they are interested in the service, your task is to sell. It is possible and necessary to split users by search content.

2. Users who have not paid and are actively using recently. Most often, these are new users who need to finalize and resell the service. You can segment by frequency and prescription.

  • Searched for something (10, 20,30 days ago) and did not buy. Most likely, they are interested in buying, it remains only to remind yourself and motivate. Solution: semi-speaker works well. You select a segment of users according to similar search conditions and make advertising content for them. Dynamic banners that are created in real time based on a user request and displayed at the most relevant moment are perfect. This format is best implemented with Getloyal professionals.
  • Have shown interest in one of the categories or added to your favorites / cart in recent days. Solution: you divide the audience according to the general characteristic of the subject of the search or category and remind the user with an advertisement that he was interested in these things (semi-dynamics). Or run dynamic banners with Getloyal.

3. Users who installed your application and did not produce any events. The most difficult group to return. It is worth getting started if you have learned to motivate the second group to make a payment. It is not a fact that the user still has your application installed, so the path to the application content will be built, as for the new one.

Solution: the simplest is to take such users by the prescription of the installation. The user installed (10, 20, 30, 60, 90 days ago) and did not do anything in the application. The closer the installation date, the greater the likelihood that he can still be further discussed about the service: discounts, description of features, promotional code. The farther the date, the lower the conversion to re-attribution.

Segmentation in mobile e-commerce





The experience of payers can be taken from the described segments of travel and food delivery. Only in e-commerce do bundles of products work great. Over the past 7 days, the user has bought product A, with which statistics most often buy goods B, C, D, E. And you create an audience from those who bought A with additional product banners.

As for defaulters, the following segments can be distinguished:

1. Those who recently viewed a certain product or category of goods and did not buy. Solution: select users by search categories and do semi-dynamic campaigns into specific categories. It’s good if the deeplinks will lead directly to the category from which the user was looking.

2. Those who recently added to the cart and did not buy. Retargeting is a great way to resell, especially with working deeplinks leading to the user's cart. Solution: dynamic retargeting with photos of added products on the banner is perfect.
Well, if you get a funnel, and you push the user at each stage. Great if Cost per new customer <LTV.

Segmentation in F2P gaming




The experience of creating segments from paying can be taken from previous verticals. A breakdown by prescription and amount of payment is perfect. It is always more interesting to return the so-called “whales” who abandoned the game. Make, for example, a segment: they paid more than the N-amount and did not enter 30 days. The news about updates in the game, new mechanics, new maps, levels, etc. are great for them.

For non-payers, there are several other solutions:

  • You “drag” the user along the level chain: reached 1, but did not reach 2; reached 3 but did not reach 4 and so on. It works well if you have an understanding of after what conditional “level” the user will most likely continue to play and eventually pay.
  • The same as the first, but with Retention. You, for example, know that after Retention 28 days, the end of users almost stops. Therefore, you train the user on certain days of life (1/7/14/28) and try to raise the Retention and% payers.
  • By residual resources. For example, a user has run out of some resource in the game, and you offer him a gift or share with this resource. Works great with the possibility of customized promotions and gifts.
  • Cool stocks. It happens that in the game there are excellent promotions on very favorable conditions. I didn’t pay to target the advertising of this offer to those who have been playing recently, but haven’t come in in recent days and may miss the action.

Subscription Services Segmentation




How you can work with non-payers, you can understand by reading the above. But almost every service with a subscription has a category of users with a trial subscription. They can not be called payers, because the fact of payment has not yet been, but the card details have already been entered.

This segment can be returned as follows:

  • Trial subscription end date. Assume a trial subscription is 14 days. You create a segment of users who activated a trial subscription more than 14 days ago and did not complete the renewal events. Selling service. You can go further and target those who clicked on the campaign and still did not activate: you can offer a discount if this is provided by the service.
  • The second segment is those who paid after the trial, but did not renew for the second time. Activation date - the duration of your subscription + no renewal event. You are trying to remind the user that he was happy this period, excellent if there are so many users that you can divide them by frequency of use. So you can identify those who will most likely extend + measure the performance on a particular audience.
  • An extensive segment can come from those who installed the application and never entered or showed little activity. It's time to offer them your trial subscription, during which the user will understand that life before the subscription was not life.

Posted by Alexander Yusupov, Traffic Team Lead at Getloyal .

Getloyal is Russia's first automated retargeting system for mobile applications. With the help of advanced data analysis and processing technologies, the system itself selects the most valuable users and shows them a suitable offer.

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