Vandle Card

Shoppers pay without cash.
Vandle Card grows brand.

Vandle Card customers can set up a prepaid card in one minute and make purchases instantly. With Apple Search Ads, the finance app increased brand awareness, downloads, and payers in Japan while driving incremental organic growth.

The Results

3.4x more new registrations.

3% increase in overall
App Store download rate.

9% higher install-to-payment rate than other similar platforms.

The Challenge

The Vandle Card team wanted to raise brand awareness and educate potential customers about their product offering in Japan, a historically cash-based society where the prepaid card category is still new. Focused on driving high-quality acquisition, they needed to tap into strong intent on the App Store and reach motivated mobile shoppers when they were ready to make a purchase but searching for a payment solution. Continuing to drive strong organic growth as they built their brand reputation was also a key priority.

Apple Search Ads had a significant impact on maximizing acquisition in a completely new product category while also improving organic downloads and
membership registrations.

Akira Chiku,

COO at Kanmu

The Solution

Create a campaign structure to maximize impressions.

To drive impressions with as broad an iOS audience as possible, the Vandle Card team set up Apple Search Ads campaigns based on keyword themes. A discovery campaign with Search Match uncovered new, relevant search terms beyond their existing keyword lists. They captured high search volume from finance-related search terms with a category campaign as well as interest in similar apps with a competitive campaign.

With a brand campaign, they attracted customers actively searching for their brand terms on the App Store. After actively monitoring cost per acquisition and impression share, they optimized bidding on top-performing keywords specifically separated by brand and non-brand terms. “We gained extremely valuable understanding about the pain points and needs of our customers with Apple Search Ads. This feedback helped us evolve our marketing as well as the app itself to be more attractive to potential customers,” says Kanmu COO Akira Chiku.

Optimize performance with creative AB testing.

Changing App Store assets from a horizontal to vertical orientation improved both tap-through rate and cost-per-tap. “We were able to have a stronger impact on consumers by having the space to better explain our product to consumers,” says Kanmu Marketing Planner Shuhei Tada.

The team at Vandle also benefited from an ad creative rule that enables an Apple Search Ads advertiser to show more images and previews whenever their app is the first organic result and is also featured as an ad. This gave the team at Vandle Card a prominent way to showcase their app on iPhone screens, helping build deeper user engagement with an unfamiliar product. “Displaying multiple creatives enhanced understanding of the product for our audience, and improved both new installs and postinstall performance,” shares Shuhei Tada.

Complement organic growth.

The team was initially concerned about the impact of Apple Search Ads on organic downloads. But they quickly found that customer growth from Apple Search Ads was incremental to organic growth, and the quality of customers was as good as organic installs. In fact, while running Apple Search Ads organic conversion rate increased by 5 percent and organic registration rate increased by 18 percent.

“We found that the postinstall performance of organic search also improved by running Apple Search Ads. Brand keyword campaigns did not damage organic download growth in any way but rather boosted our overall install-to-registration rate. The marketing strategy with KPIs of increasing awareness and search volume has been expanded,” shares Akira Chiku.

Company Snapshot