How Apple Search Ads brought incrementality, volume and qualified users to Globoplay’s acquisition strategy, becoming the most profitable channel in its portfolio.

Imagine you’re channel surfing, looking for the perfect show. That was the situation for Globoplay, the Brazilian streaming giant, in its search for a media mix to acquire qualified users at a lower cost.

Until April 2024, when Globoplay ads were launched on Apple Search Ads, nothing was the same.

What were the results? First, let’s rewind a bit.

Globoplay belongs to Grupo Globo, the largest media conglomerate in Latin America and one of the largest in the world. In terms of annual revenue, it’s the second-largest commercial television network, just behind the American ABC.

Globoplay leveraged its parent company’s positioning to gain a user base that competes with international giants. It has over 10,000 titles, including original productions and live TV programs.

Therefore, it bets on an acquisition strategy as varied and attractive as its content.

Transformation in the customer acquisition strategy:

The big goal for the Growth team at Globoplay is to reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and increase the volume of conversions of high-value users to ensure sustainable growth.

To achieve this, they established:

• They needed to implement a scalable programmatic channel strategy to compound their search and social media mix;
• Develop a plan to test different channels in their media strategy so as not to be so dependent on old channel results;

Now we resume the story where a partner intervenes to achieve the objectives:

Although historically, the results were good and the strategy aligned, there was always an expectation that we could lower our CAC by bringing in users who were as valuable and engaged as before.

Both teams decided to think outside the box and establish focus points on the following aspects to ensure they didn’t stray from the main objective when launching ads on different channels:

• Distributing and managing the budget consciously;
• Develop a methodology to avoid fraudulent channels and partners;
• Optimization based on increasingly qualified events and signals;
• Regular audience and creative testing.

Invest con-scientiously:

The first action to optimize the budget involved conducting incrementality and attribution studies (Click and View) on the channels with active ads to determine exactly how many conversions were due to the campaigns and how many would have occurred anyway.

Also, through our Budget Allocation tool and saturation analysis, we understood the ideal budget for each channel, considering the possibility of scaling, performance, and incrementality.

The results were immediate:

Similarly, we also use Budget Allocator to understand the initial investment in new channels.

Precautionary insurance:

The assurance that we will only pay for non-fraudulent conversions is a priority in all the projects we collaborate on because we genuinely believe that fraudulent conversions can ruin the entire media ecosystem.

Every month, we conduct protection audits through Appsflyer (Winclap’s MMP Partner) to share the real volume of conversions (not fraudulent ones) with the channels and only pay for these.

With these points established, we moved on to implementing the strategy, which could be phased in as follows:

Act 1: Channel Competition

Globoplay, together with Winclap, ‘held a contest’ with various acquisition partners: a sort of Big Brother.

While there is a winner in the following competition, it doesn’t mean the other channels don’t work or shouldn’t be tested (quite the opposite; we have other projects where some of these channels perform exceptionally well). 

While the cast was much broader (more than 6-7 channels were tested per month), the most notable ones from the last year were:

• Liftoff
• Jampp
• ShareIt
• Moloco
• Amazon
• Apple Search Ads
• DGMAX
• Lemmonet

Act 2: Advancing to the Playoffs

At a certain point, we saw that we had three channels with excellent results, generating conversions with a CAC within the target and bringing users close to our ICP:

We would have three finalists. Still, we had to remove ShareIt from this final because although it delivered one of the best CACs, the converted users from this channel were not as qualified, with lower retention rates and a less attractive LTV.

Everything was heading for a final between Jampp and Liftoff, but as if by magic…

Act 3: Apple Search Ads Stole the Spotlight

In April, Apple launched the Search Ads platform in Brazil, and on April 23rd, we launched Globoplay’s first campaign on the platform. The results were already incredible in less than 7 days, even during the first week of operation.

The Globoplay team had high expectations because Apple Search Ads is a search channel, and Google Search is one of the channels with the best conversion results.

However, there was a general concern about the CPA it could bring because, historically, iOS users have been more expensive than Android users.

It was quite the opposite.

“We knew that Apple Search Ads had the potential to deliver solid results, but we were surprised by the speed,” Lucas commented when asked about the team’s reaction after seeing the first numbers.

“Usually, there’s a learning phase for platform algorithms to reach their full potential. But this time, in just 7 days, Apple Search Ads outperformed all the other channels we tested.”

As we said at the beginning, the Globoplay team’s goal was more ambitious:

To acquire quality users at a reasonable cost who remain active and have a high Lifetime Value.

“But why were we able to achieve these results? Lucas, reflecting on this, shared some interesting insights:”

“iOS users are only 18% of all device users in Brazil, but they represent 35% of all revenue generated in the app ecosystem.”

It couldn’t be more straightforward, right?

The most important result (beyond this discovery) is that a 45% decrease in Performance CAC was achieved in 7 months in Brazil.

While this success story demonstrates that testing different channels can work when the goal is to reduce CAC or CPA, a key principle is a leitmotif throughout this narrative: the necessity of being present during the user’s decision-making process.

To put it more clearly: