A publicly traded financial services company acquired an online brokerage firm with an existing customer base that was much different than their current customers. This new prospect customer was much more digitally savvy and more importantly, preferred mobile devices to desktop when logging in and monitoring their account. In contrast, the company’s existing customer base skewed slightly older and mostly logged in on their desktop device. When determining the go-to-market strategy for the acquired brokerage firm, these different usage habits had to be considered. 

After confirming through data and analytics that over 70% of the brokerage firm’s users were using mobile devices, I worked with product development teams to install a new mobile device tracking code to track individual actions on the firm’s app, laying the groundwork for a larger paid marketing campaign aimed at encouraging potential customers to download the app as the first step in their signup process vs. driving account signups through the desktop site. We piloted a marketing campaign type, Google Universal App Campaigns, which was an entirely new tactic for the publicly traded financial services company. This campaign type showed to users who matched the brokerage firm’s existing customer audience profile on the Google Play and Apple Store, in addition to Google Search, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. 

Cost-per-acquisition for new accounts fell by 60 % during the 3-month period after the launch of Google Universal App Campaigns. Furthermore, with the newly installed tracking code, product teams were able to determine points of confusion for app users, and improve the customer experience by removing friction points and eliminating superfluous steps in the signup process.