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Garrett: So thanks Hubert for coming on the Thalamus Mobile Advertising podcast. If you don’t mind sharing a little more on your background and your role at PSafe, that would be great.

Hubert: Hey, awesome guys, thank you so much for allowing me to be here and spending some time with you on your podcast. It’s a really honor and a privilege to be here amongst friends and also growth marketers. You know, I started off working in the gaming industry and from a demand gen perspective, web based, and also you know, downloaded games. I took a huge interest in user acquisition as you know, you have to focus on performance. And so I got the opportunity to work at Machine Zone and also Warner Brothers and also Kingsoft slash Seasun games. And really experience user acquisition life. And so I love user acquisition, I love demand gen, I love growth types of marketing. And so I ended up at Psafe. There, I’m working on multiple partners, folks who are some well known players in the DSP realm, in the affiliate realm, in the ad network realm and also once in a while stepping in for you know, helping my teammates in Google and Facebook. So with that experience, I hope to kind of share that with you and also your audience today.

Garrett: Awesome. 

Casey: Cool. 

Garrett: And so you mentioned earlier that you worked at places like Kingsoft, Machine Zone, how does UA differ in gaming as compared to doing UA for utility apps?

Hubert: Oh, yeah, no, that’s a great question. A lot of folks really have a challenging time adjusting to both. I have, on my end. You know, with, when you take a look at the history of user acquisition you know, there’s a general consensus that gaming, in app games actually are the precursor to what UA is now. Basically setting up a lot of what the technology, utilizing the technology, and gauging performance. And so I think coming from a gaming background there’s a real strong passion for tying in analytics with games. So basically extracting the data points, turning that into information, and then making use of it. I think in the utility space, there’s a lot to be wanted, because within, having gaming as a standard, you can see what can potentially be done. So a lot of times folks who are developing utility apps and say, Oh, you know, Oh, let’s just create this, but not think about the data points that you want to capture, and then surface too for a lot performance marketers to create campaigns around. You know, that’s, that’s a huge loss. And so a lot of times my teammates and I would say we need to track this data point or we need to actually surface it so that the performance marketers or our team can make smart decisions. What correlates to subscriptions? What correlates to an install or is it fraud? You know, those types of things that kind of come up when you, types of questions that you can answer with data, it’s critical. So I really think that utility apps can really produce the data or at least surface the data for marketers more, using that data, those data points turn into information and make smart buys and make smart decisions in developing the app even further. 

Casey: What are some of those data points that you can use as variables to determine like some of those correlations?

Hubert: So any types of functionality. So for example, usage of, okay, let’s take an antivirus scanner for your, for your mobile phone. You know, how many times are you, are you scanning your phone for viruses or how many times, say for a VPN app, how many times are you utilizing that? And there might be a correlation between the number of initiating the VPN and the amount of subscribers, the ones that become subscribers. So there might be a correlation. So you’re looking for correlations between data points and that tends to help guide your campaigns also. So if you’re setting up events or the number of events you can kind of run campaigns possibly re-marketing campaigns for the specific segments that is – scanning viruses you know, 30 days in a row. Folks who have scanned, scanned their device for 30 days in a row might be one of those points, the usage as a point to correlate with the..

Casey:They Sound pretty scared. (Laughter)

Hubert: Yeah. That’s why, you know, it’s a fun business to be into, but it’s also kind of like understanding, you know, the, user behavior behind it, the person who was behind it. And understanding those personas also is key. Again, you’re using data points or qualitative or quantitative data to basically target your audience or target a specific persona.

Garrett: And how prevalent are viruses on Android right now? I think Google is really cracking down on apps having malware or viruses embedded within the app. So do you think that Android are going to eventually clean up their store, or do you think antivirus apps are always going to be needed?

Hubert: I think antivirus apps will always be needed. There, you know, just having seen a lot of apps that are released and that are freely placed, I would have to say cautiously, freely placed in types of stores. You know, really it’s still very prevalent. And so those are kind of things that we at PSafe see happen. You know, we release updates on viruses, updates for viruses onto the app, we announce it. We do security scans of whether or not your information is on the web, things of that sort. So we do a lot of those types of things and you know, like with malware and, and types of cleaning done by Google, I think, you know, if you can, there are still some open, I would say loose procedures that still occur, that happen.

Casey: Do you guys use push notifications for some of those ways you notify users on updates for viruses or what’s out there? And if so, how do users respond with those push notifications? Does that increase retention or?

Hubert: Definitely. We focus a lot on retention these days, as you know, the utilities market is highly competitive. We want to make sure that our users are engaged, updated, notified, and are aware of what’s going on. So there’s a couple of ways we kind of do that. One is, you know, through, we do a lot of notifications, so we’ll notify folks of things that any type of new virus that’s hitting phones or virus alerts to be aware of, or things that are kind of just beginning to kind of pop up, creep up. You know, Trojan or something of that sort from the past or are currently that are currently happening. So we do a lot of those notifications to basically keep our users aware. Second, we have reminders of, Hey scan your phone or we gamify checking your phone. So that also increases retention. Those are very critical types of engagement points to show value that you add to your consumers lives. So, you know, we want to make sure that they’re highly engaged and they’re educated. We put in, I think one thing we really do is we strive to put content into the app. And so that they’re informed what are best practices or what’s going on within the world.

Garrett: And how do you gamify the app?

Hubert: So we kind of have celebrations for seven day checks. You know, you’re getting like a badge, a some type of, you know, reward system that we kind of implement into it. And I think that’s going to be more and more prevalent and especially in, in the utility space since it’s such a competitive area.

Casey: And do you think the gamification of these utility apps is helping? I know that gamification and game apps are obviously a big deal. But it seems odd to gamify like a utility type of app.

Hubert: Yeah. So part of it is to understand that there is a core value that we’re providing and you know, cleaning your phone or any type of phone repair or anything of that sort that deals with cleaning the caches. The view for that is that it’s monotonous. Like, Oh, cleaning is with a broom. Cleaning is with a vacuum cleaner.

Casey: Yeah, it’s a chore.

Hubert: Yeah. It’s a chore. Right? But what happens if it’s not a chore? You helped a person revisit, well, we’re using this app because it provides this value. It keeps my phone clean and running optimally. And so why not make it more fun? You know an honorary badge, it’s not going to be like Disney or anything of that sort, but a little thing to incentivize. Kind of like a cool, you know, I did it today. And it becomes part of a habit and the value you get is, you know, a clean running phone that’s not going to be full of junk or spam or any type of virus in there, so that your phone is running optimally. And so that’s the benefit that we wanted to kind of convey.

Garrett: Yeah. And do you see more and more apps outside of gaming using gamification to get users to engage with their app more?

Hubert: I think like with that perspective, I think there’s a lot of folks that actually have taken that on. It’s a balancing between the brand and also usage. You know, gamification is like, you know, people get the idea that it’s a video game and that you know, you can make it, you know, make it like a fun game that does something. But it’s also like a singular action that makes us… eases or provides relief to a concern. And so by saying, okay, you did this, here’s a badge you checked today, that’s great, you know, thumbs up. And that’s kind of like you’re, you’re building that behavior. So it really gamification means more or less to me, more about creating a healthy behavior, you know with some incentive.

Casey: Okay. So let’s kind of jump into some of the channels for paid media – native, social, search, networks, programmatic, pops, things like that. What channels work for you the best. And where do you see most of the, like the retained users on?

Hubert: What’s really neat is that- -I think for PSafe is that we spend a decent chunk of money and we get the quality we need. Our retention with, I mean this is for ad networks and affiliates and pops. Our retention is pretty good. I mean, I can’t specifically say it a number, but across the board, very very good. The challenges, how we get more of that based on what we pay. I think we’ve identified a lot of sources, and we work very, very closely with, with our partners in ensuring that fraud is limited or next to none. And happy to say that we’re close, we’re pretty clean. And we do a very diligent job of keeping the traffic clean. So we found, you know, pop to be, to be working well, non-aggressive, you know, none aggressive types. They’re doing really well. We follow guidelines very, very, very strictly with our ad networks. We’ve scaled, we’re slowly scaling. I think that, from within two months we doubled the amount of installs we have, retaining the same quality and paying very limited CPIs for it. So both of those have been very, very healthy for us. And again, the quality is there. We measure, we utilize our in-app events for gauging retention. So we’re not using specifically a attribution platform or whatever, but we, those are the data points that we capture in surface for marketing.

Garrett: OK yeah. What are the in-app events like the lower funnel KPIs that you guys watch closely?

Hubert: Yes. so number of scans. So I mean, KPI for us specifically not shared with, with some of our partners basically. But what we do surface sometimes is basically trial. Trial tends to have a tendency to bring someone in, whether or not within that, you know, for a trial for Apple, basically you have your credit card there and a trial for Google pay. Things as sort that tends to, those are the type of users who we want to kind aim for who typically, you know, ones that have their credit cards in there that’s ready to kind of buy and who are tech savvy. So we tend to target, you know, higher end types of users of devices. And so that tends to lead to a subscription. So more or less we look at a number the trial starts, you know, when you’re looking at sources and number of trial starts, you get to the, to the purchases. Those are kind of very bottom of the funnel, but more of middle and looking at the type you’re buying, like the number of scans they’re doing, number of features that they use. So you tend to create a profile at a different stage of the funnel.

Garrett: And just to continue on that are you guys tracking that with a proprietary in-house built system or are you guys using like a third party technology platform to track all this data?

Hubert: We have our own internal BI system, you know, so that data surface to us. So we make decisions off this. Second, we use an attribution platform. We use AppsFlyer. So our events basically are surfaced also on the dashboards. So we have different places for different usage. Then sometimes we want raw data, which I actually prefer more than anything and stick it in Excel sheet and then start, deep diving in, and you’re able to control the variables and view, view how things go. So those are kind of like the core usage of platforms and things of that sort.

Casey: Cool. So I was wanting to go back a little bit and talk about paid users. Do you find that there is a high correlation with users who end up subscribing, that you end up paying maybe a higher cost per install for or higher CPA for from an ad network? Or is there no correlation and it just happens to be you get lucky and you pay maybe like, you know, 25 cents a CPI and they happened to be like you know, LTV of like a hundred dollars down the road or something.

Hubert: Yeah. So we took different tactics, we take a different approach to how we kind of target subscribers. One, we did some tests on incent, and we actually have found what our costs per subscriber would be for, for life – LTV. And that’s one way of how we found out, we utilize tests, we utilize incent leading to subscribership. Then we took non-incent to subscribership, and we found that the amount is the same. The cost is the same. What we’re doing on our end is that we’re, our team is always looking to, in the last I would say four months, re-tune that. And so it’s a learning experience. We’re a startup. We’re looking at tuning the experience and actually converting more subscribers. We’re making money, which is great. And so we had that time to fine tune the app for easier onboarding, which is what we’re doing right now. Before we had a little bit too many you know, steps. And so we’re cutting that down. Actually we have cut that down. We are looking at adjusting the trials. We’re testing out trials, and looking at, okay, you know, at what price point will they kind of convert to subscriber, which one has a higher conversion for that. And what we’ve seen actually has been quite an amazing improvement. We increased the trial conversion to paid by one and a half, I think, one and a half percent or something of that sort. And that makes a huge difference. I mean, on the bottom line it makes a huge difference. So we’re excited to kind of, you know, continue to kind change that and start those tests. We have our product marketing team that’s actually involved in those tests in Brazil. So we’re working hand in hand and providing recommendations for things such as retention and also the development of the processed onboarding process. 

Garrett: Got it. Okay.

Garrett: Yeah, so I’ve heard that Brazil is actually your largest market, interestingly enough.

Hubert: Yes. We were founded in Brazil, and so we moved our headquarters to the US approximately two, three years ago I think. And so we’re looking to break into a majority of the tier one markets.

Casey: Okay. So just with Brazil specifically, are you guys running any other types of media there where you’re able to grab more organics or how do you kind of build a brand there rather than just, you know, your typical paid media outlets?

Hubert: Yeah, no, that’s actually a very good question. We do a lot of content. We build a lot of content. So there’s a couple of things, we work on a lot of press coverage. So we’ve gotten press coverage from mainstream news a lot. And so that’s always announced in our feed. So we’ll say, Hey, you know, we’re mentioned here, mentioned there we do a lot of timely content. So when something, you know, if there’s a virus outbreak on mobile phones or things that are kind of, that folks have to be aware of about their information, we’re on it. We’ll definitely communicate that to the public and news outlets will come to us because we have that size and we’ve worked hard to develop those relationships to get that coverage. And those three even YouTube we’ll get influencers. But we don’t pay our influencers. We get mentions based on folks who have tested or compared and we get decent, you know, high reviews. And so all of that generates a more or less unpaid portion or organic traffic to build that reputation for us in Brazil.

Garrett: I’ve seen a lot of other VPNs, like let’s just say, you know, some of your competitors do content marketing where they have different blogs that will rank highly for VPNs or want to get rid of viruses on my phone or my computer. And you know, they essentially have these blogs that rank highly in Google and when a user clicks on it, there’s all these different VPNs that the bloggers reviewing. And then the blogger has all these call to actions that say, you know, download this VPM now and to get an affiliate cut. Are you guys doing a lot of that or are you looking into that?

Hubert: No, we don’t do that. One of the things that we, we really strongly believe is in the experience. And that a regular user who loves what we do will continually generate the love for us and the downloads for us. And we focus a lot. That’s why we spend so much time kind of reviewing, onboarding retention and engagement to build that brand that we focus on people, the regular users and that they’re, that we’re trusted. I think I, I like those reviews. I think it’s great. And it does it’s job. We typically don’t pay for that. Yeah, we don’t pay for those positioning product positions in reviews.

Garrett: Cool. And has there been any interesting third party data or targeting that you’ve come across?

Hubert: We, I think third party targeting… Can you give me an example of that?

Casey: You know, for example some vendors will say, we’ll do sweepstakes and they’ll provide the user with an Amazon gift card for taking an action. And so that’s more incent. Or maybe people say that, Oh, we’re going to geo-fence all, you know, certain locations like schools or airports and you know, pitch them on a certain value proposition so that they’ll download the app. Have there been any vendors that have approached you with like, you know, truly unique kind of targeting or value propositions?

Hubert: I think the thing with geo-fencing for us is that, you know, it’s limited. We’re not a brick and mortar store. We don’t tie that as much. We, the type of geo-fencing we’re looking at, is that we target countries basically. And I think more or less we’ve approached and thought about influencers, paid influencers in the US, and we haven’t taken that approach at this time. The amount of money that’s spent on it actually is quite a lot at a chunk. And so our budget’s rolling monthly. We check on our budgets every month. We can’t, we are not able to kind of allocate a single packaged at like $30k to $50k for it.

Casey: Attribution is kind of, iffy right now with influencers like, you know, where do you, how do you click on a link? I think with Instagram or Snapchat you can swipe up. But I think there’s no real core solution yet for attributing an install or something to all these campaigns.

Hubert: I think the only thing that I heard was basically clicks, right. Clicks and possible matching with an install, and even that is quite risky for us as our CPIs are very, very limited.

Casey: Could you go into bit about maybe what your day to day look like in terms of, you know, setting up, are you guys media buying yourselves or just like talking to different vendors or ad networks or affiliates and setting those deals up. What does that look like? Just kind of like a day to day of.

Hubert: Yeah. You know what’s funny is that at PSafe, we’ve used in one year over 52 partners, that’s logged in. So at that time we, you know we had to kind of scale back because we had so many partners. And so we have around 10 to 15 at this point. And we’re much more focused on working closer with our partners to really scale rather than by, you know, not by having a much more distanced relationship. So we’ll work very closely at this point and we work with very trusted folks also. What the day to day there really is no day to day sometimes, you know there are day to day, I guess more like week to week types of actions we take. And you know if I can imagine, I wake up…

Garrett: There’s a fire. (Laughter)

Hubert: Yeah, everything’s blowing up (Laughter). We’re very fortunate that things don’t blow up and it’s, and it’s a testament to how smart the UA team is. Our day to day is like, we come in Monday, we look at what’s gone through, you know, for the, for the last 14 days. So last month, we look at the budgets and how a lot of our partners performed on Monday. Tuesday we get, you know, the full week. We look at the last 14 days full 14 days of what happened. We basically send out emails, Hey, you know, it’s low. Hey, it’s high. Hey, that’s great. You know, we give feedback. And sometimes we’re freaked out and we say, Holy crap, what the hell is this? You know? And so that becomes kind of like something that happens at least once a week.

Garrett: Click spamming or something.

Hubert: Yeah, click spamming or, you know any type of, of fraud activity things, sources that gives us a zero day one from like maybe 85 installs, like I’ve seen 85 installs with zero retention. So that causes alarm. You know, by the time we hit a Wednesday, we communicate from Wednesday to Thursday, Thursday, we finalize as much as we can because somewhere in the world it’s already, folks already gone home, you know. So we get as much done as we can Thursday and by Friday we start planning for the, for the next week. I feel like because our team is so smart and savvy we’ve gotten a real good handle on, on fraud and click spamming spoofing, things of that sort. You know we’ve been able to kind of lock it down within the last three months of 2018. And we’ve worked closely with, I have to give credit to AppsFlyer for stepping up on their game and working with us on providing a solution to the fraud that we faced. And that basically shrank a lot of our fraud from 900, and we’re already down to, to only a minimal fraud.

Garrett: And were a lot of those fraudulent attributions driven from a core number of partners or just maybe one or two or a lot. And how did you guys approach them and interact with them once you’ve kind of figured all this out?

Hubert: Well, it came from many partners and we suspect that there’s multiple folks that were buying on different, through different partners or buying for PSafe through different partners and kind of spreading that out to basically hide the fraud.

Garrett: Re-Brokering a little bit, maybe.

Hubert: Possible re-brokering, but…

Casey: Just like maybe spreading out all the publisher IDs, sub IDs to mask.

Hubert: It was horrendous. And I can tell you that you know, we, we first spotted it with like retention data, then came, you know, well, you know, retention for day one is minimal. Why are there such high installs? Right? And then it came to be you know, another parameter, that wasn’t basically firing you know, for retention. And then we had to dig very, very deeply for those types of, those types of data. When we finally figured out that, you know, it was being spoofed or installs were being spoofed. And so we work closely with AppsFlyer on getting a solution together for that. And we were able to kind of minimize that aspect by, by cleaning that up. Our retention jumped 5 to 10% because of those installs you know for the day, the retention amongst the rest of the cohorts around there basically went up. So we’re very fortunate to have that, you know, a solution from AppsFlyer.

Garrett: And what are some must use tools that every UAE manager should use.

Hubert: (Laughter) A good attribution platform… (Laughter) I think one of the things that coming from, depending on what your scope of work is, you know having worked a little bit in ASO, my job at this point doesn’t involve that, but I think for every type of performance marketing team, especially for mobile, is to have a solid relationship with an attribution platform. That means you have to work very closely with your CSM to know what’s going on, what updates are coming up and how to resolve the issues, or how to find data within the platform, or even how to educate your partners on how to utilize their own, the attribution platform you’re using. And so that’s kind of critical for anyone. It’s basically the most important one you’re going to use, especially when you’re trying to buy from different sources and different partners are making sure that credit is correctly given to someone.

Casey: Okay. Are you guys using any Programmatic media to do some of the buys? And how about retargeting? Maybe users who dropped off the funnel somewhere or installed but never subscribed or didn’t click on the trial button or something?

Hubert: We use a couple of DSPs to, to buy Programmatic. You know I rarely have any issues with the type of traffic we’ve gotten from programmatic. I’ve managed like five years ago, and I was able to work with, manage again with my time here at Psafe, another one where utilizing was liftoff. You know, we didn’t pay at a CPI level. We pay at a CPC level with a focus on a CPI target, and we got a really good scale. And we also got very helpful data along the way that we’re trying to buy, as they kind of prune sources that might’ve not been doing too well or that we’re able to kind of target a specific placements which were much more cost effective for us. So those were, you know, we get a lot of traffic from those from the exchange, from those two partners. In regards to retargeting, we’ve utilized Remerge once. I think for us it wasn’t as beneficial as we thought it would be, based on the cost and also the data that was utilized for targeting. So we hope to kind of re-approach that, I think in approximately four months when we actually will have a much more solid campaign that, that will allow us to do so.

Garrett: Okay, cool. And so, last fun question: When you meet people that are not in ad tech, how do you explain your job to them?

Hubert: I sell sh*t (Laughter) Digital products and mobile device, you know, on your phone, I sold sh*t on your phone, basically. That’s going to kind of say you have a virus. It saves lives from viruses. It’s a health concern on your phone. Digital Superman (Laughter) . Okay. Thank you guys.

Garrett: Yeah, thanks for coming on. 

Casey: Take care. See you soon.