The Challenge
Ground News came to us in January running Android campaigns at $35K/month. The app worked, the product had fans, and they wanted to grow fast. The real risk with aggressive scaling is usually the same: push budget too hard, exhaust your best audiences, watch the cost-per-trial climb. We needed a structure that could handle serious spend growth without that happening.
What We Did
We ran Android and iOS as separate systems with different priorities.
On Android, the structure was: 10% of budget always in a dedicated testing ad set, running inside the same campaign as the best-performing ads — not a separate test campaign. When a creative wins, budget shifts to it immediately without restructuring anything. That setup lets you test constantly and scale winners fast. From January to June, Android spend grew from $35K to $150K/month. Cost per in-app trial start went the other direction, from $32.98 to $27.21.
iOS launched in February at $33K. We scaled it the same way, knowing costs would rise as the algorithm extended reach beyond the highest-intent users. By June, iOS was at $415K/month — the second-largest campaign type in the account — and generating nearly five times the monthly trial volume it did at launch.
The Results
- 5x Android spend growth, lower cost-per-trial — $35K to $150K+/month while cost per in-app trial start dropped from $32.98 to $27.21
- 57% CTR improvement on Android — 0.97% to 1.52%, driven by continuous creative testing
- 12x iOS spend growth in 4 months — $33K at launch in February to $415K in June
- 4.75x iOS trial volume — 2,547 free trial starts in February, 12,090 in June
The Takeaway
You can scale mobile app campaigns hard without the unit economics collapsing — if the campaign structure is built for it. A 10% testing budget inside the same campaign as your best performers means you’re always feeding the algorithm new creative, always identifying what’s working, and always ready to push the winner harder. That’s the mechanism. It’s not complicated, but most accounts aren’t set up that way.