Google App Campaigns, paid social, and TikTok

“When you hear about start-ups,” said Bogdana, “one of the first things people look at from a business perspective is the growth model and for Sweatcoin, this model was mainly based on influencers, referrals, and viral loops.”

On the back of this model, Sweatcoin already boasts an impressive 60 million registered users. For all of its success, however, there was room for improvement in terms of making the mechanics of growth more predictable and scalable. As a first step, Sweatcoin and Kurve developed a tailored growth and campaign structure that gave them much more visibility on targets. It also uncovered the channels the company could leverage to add greater cohesion to its growth.

Paid advertising as the key integrator

The first of those new channels were Google App Campaigns and Paid Social, which allowed Sweatcoin to both fuel and combine growth loops across platforms. Specifically, Sweatcoin considered these as growth channels, meaning that they were more focused on reaching new audiences at scale with the core Sweatcoin value proposition: “It pays to walk”.

The key, here, was that paid advertising allowed the team to control campaign volume and CPI. It also meant that they could run low-level experiments to see which ads worked and which didn’t and later scale their campaigns much more effectively.

Using TikTok and micro-influencers to reach target demographic

With its paid advertising in place, Sweatcoin and Kurve then turned their focus to social media. Since 2019, the number of health and fitness app downloads has increased by more than 25% to over 2.48 billion at the end of 2021. The largest demographic behind this increase has been Gen Z, who are also the largest audience on TikTok.

Prior to restructuring the growth campaigns, Sweatcoin had already been creating their own social media videos. However, over the course of the experimentation phase, the team quickly discovered that the creative content didn’t align with the platform.

There is a general mindset for TikTok that advertisers should “create TikToks, not ads”. With that in mind, the team went back to its influencer-based model – this time reaching out to micro-influencers – who created their own highly-visual, ‘user-generated’ videos that saw an immediate increase in engagement.

TikTok and the power of viral loops

The first benefit of letting TikTok users generate their own content was that it drove down Sweatcoin’s creative costs. The second advantage was that it helped create viral advertising loops.

An important point to remember about TikTok is that it’s built on an unconnected distribution model. This means that the content goes to everyone – not just someone’s followers – and can therefore lead to exponential growth as more and more people share that content.

For Sweatcoin, this meant:

• Reduced CPI
• Reduced advertising costs
• Greater visibility in target expansion markets (and worldwide)

And perhaps more importantly, these viral loops helped Sweatcoin rank 1st in the UK within just a few weeks and make the top 5 Health and Fitness chart in App Stores globally.

Training Google to target ideal users

On the other side of the integrated campaign was Google Ads. Google ACi campaigns, however, doesn’t allow for targeting based on audience, interests, or demographics and, as Bogdana said, “It’s important for us to monitor user quality, essentially to see whether they’re engaged and become high-value users in the long term. And one of the main ideas behind paid ads was to control that quality.”

Combined, targeted strategy