• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 8, 2019

Ecommerce in-app campaigns seem to generate the most conversions between the hours of 4:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. in the United States, but internationally there are some variations, with certain countries peaking earlier in the day. Later in the evening ties in with prime-time television, which suggests that people sitting on their couch watching TV have a phone close by.  

The findings, released by Appreciate, a programmatic mobile bidding platform, analyzed “tens” of customer 2018 holiday ecommerce app user acquisition campaigns for retail during the fourth quarter and found that serving more creative advertisements on more app publisher sites in a variety of categories generated the greatest engagement and conversion rates.

Ecommerce in-app campaigns tend to perform best during the weekend, with Saturday the best day for app installs and Sunday the best day for sales. Those sales reached 127% of sales based on the company’s own key performance indicators.

Ecommerce campaigns with between seven and 11 campaigns using different creatives generated 128.6% more application installations compared with those serving between one and four different creatives.

Campaigns with diverse creative pieces tend to do better than other types of campaigns that have a limited number of creatives, said Shiri Lahat, VP of client success in North America at Appreciate.

“In categories such as games, entertainment and utilities, the number of different creatives plays a smaller factor,” he said.

The data also shows that ecommerce campaigns with more app publishers in a variety of categories generate more engagement. The campaigns with more than 500 publishers running ads across five to seven app categories generated 45% greater engagement than campaigns with 100 publishers in app campaigns that ran between one and four categories.

In-app native ads performed best when it came to ecommerce apps, generating the most installs and the greatest number of sales. They also cost less.

Video generated the highest cost per purchase -- about 60% higher than in-app native ads -- as well as the lowest number of installs. Mobile in-app banner ads were nearly as effective as native ads.