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AYI?s mobile ads on Facebook help drive 200pc jump in app downloads

It may be love at first sight for dating site AYI and mobile advertising, with the company seeing more than a 200 percent increase in application downloads since leveraging mobile app install ads on Facebook.

AYI reports that its new subscriber counts increased in May by 91 percent for the iOS platform and by 147 percent on Android compared with the previous month. The dating site?s parent company Snap Interactive says the increases are primarily attributable to increased marketing on iOS and Android through Facebook?s mobile app install ads.

?Mobile advertising wasn?t a big part of our strategy until last month when saw the success of Facebook Mobile App Install Ads to generate positive ROI?s on user acquisition in certain demographics,? said Cliff Lerner, CEO of AYI, New York. ?Now mobile advertising is a large focus.

?Having AYI available as a native app on iOS, Android and Facebook gives us numerous opportunities to target users via mobile app installs on various platforms,? he said.

?Furthermore, being able to measure the ROI in real-time on very granular targeting levels enables us to run dozens of tests simultaneously to see what is converting best and on which platforms for specific demographics.?

Robust targeting
AYI launched its first Android app in April and introduced a revamped iOS app in May.

At the same time, it put more money behind acquiring mobile users through paid acquisition channels.

Leveraging Facebook to drive its mobile strategy makes sense for the dating site because it has native experiences on iOS and Android that are deeply integrated with Facebook and already has a large number of Facebook users. This opens up opportunities to acquire and engage users through organic, social channels.

Additionally, Facebook offers a large user base and robust targeting capabilities for its mobile app install ad units. For example, ads can be targeted by age, gender, location and interests. The ads appear in a user?s newsfeed on their mobile device so they do not disrupt the user experience.

When users click on an ad, they are taken directly to the AYI app download page in Apple's App Store or in Google Play.

Friends of friends
The mobile social strategy has helped the dating site reached 961,000 total Android downloads in early June as well as over four million total iOS downloads. Additionally, AYI's iOS application was the No. 14 top grossing application in the category of US social networking in early June while iOS and Android logins represented approximately 15 percent of daily logins in May.

Going forward, the company plans to continue to build its mobile strategy and will continue to integrate its friends of friends feature into the mobile experience. Additionally, AYI is planning future updates to its apps that will include the ability to display mutual friends in a user?s profile and enabling users to browse friends of friends on their mobile devices.

AYI also plans to launch push notifications for key events on its Android application for the first time.

?We will tweak by running more tests in various demographics - countries, age-ranges, genders - and trying more specific granular targeting, such as interests,? Mr. Lerner said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York