Propel your mobile app growth with Universal App Campaigns

Throughout the day, when people want to go somewhere, watch something, or buy something, they reach for their mobile phones for help. And it's often a mobile app that delivers what they need — whether it's a new pair of running shoes or puzzle game to pass the time during a flight delay.

We launched Universal App Campaigns (UAC) two years ago to make it easier for you to grow your app business. UAC uses Google’s unique machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals — across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.

Since then, UAC has delivered unprecedented growth and app engagement for developers and marketers. Advertisers that optimize for in-app actions with UAC, on average, drive 140% more conversions per dollar than other Google app promotion products.¹

To help more advertisers take advantage of these benefits, we'll be focusing our efforts and moving all AdWords app install campaigns to UAC later this year. Starting on October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC. Existing Search, Display and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running on November 15th, so it’s important to start upgrading to UAC as soon as possible.

Three easy steps to help you move your campaigns to UAC

1. Review your current AdWords app promotion campaigns: log into AdWords > click the Ads tab and identify your top performing text, banner and video ads.
• Tip: export your campaign performance to make it easy to determine baseline UAC bids.
2. Create a new UAC and set the right performance goal: build a new UAC by clicking the +Campaign drop-down menu from the "Campaigns" tab > select Universal app. Copy and paste any top performing creatives, especially images and videos, into your new UAC.
• Set up AdWords conversion tracking through Google Analytics for Firebase, Google Play or one of our third-party App Attribution Partners to find more of your high-value users. Learn more
• Then, choose the bidding option that best supports your business or campaign goals:

3. Set the right bids: calculate the average CPI, CPA or ROAS of your existing campaigns as the starting point for your UAC performance goal. Then, monitor your new UAC and adjust bids over time to meet your goal, as there may be some natural changes in performance as you transition between campaign types.

Check out more Best Practices here.

How UAC helps you find more of the right app users

UAC uses machine learning to make the smartest decision for each ad, analyzing hundreds of millions of potential signal combinations in real time — like where people are engaging with your ads and which creatives and keywords perform best.
For example, we may learn that active PayPal users tend to search on Google Play for apps to transfer money to their friends. So, we’ll show more ads on those types of queries and related content.

Over the coming months, we'll deep dive into new features and continue to share best practices to help you get the most out of UAC.

Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising

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1. Google Internal Data, July 2017