Hily

The objective

Driving installs and subscriptions during Q5

Hily is an exclusive dating app known for its fresh approach based on compatibility and meaningful interactions. Having already established a strong organic presence on TikTok, Hily’s objective was to boost their acquisition efforts and bring in a high volume of installers and subscribers during Q5: a cost-efficient period between end of year and first half of January.

Q5 is typically a good time for app acquisition because less advertisers are active compared to other months of the year (meaning auction costs are lower). The challenge for Hily was driving acquisitions in a way that would allow them to scale but without competing against themselves in the auction or fatiguing their creatives too quickly.

The solution

Achieving high scale without sacrificing efficiency

Hily decided to begin scaling from mid-December, in order to reach the peak of seasonality (which is usually after New Year) without needing large budget increases that would send ad groups back into the learning phase.

To achieve this, they used Q5 as an opportunity to diversify their campaign structure (usually mostly active on iOS in the United States), creating campaigns in other international markets and Android. They also diversified their bid strategy and optimization mix, achieving a balanced mix of App Install, In-App Event and Value-Based Optimization. This ensured they were reaching a diversified set of people within their broad target audience and maximizing the volume as well as quality of users.

In order to maintain a high volume of creative assets that they could test and swap throughout the seasonality to avoid fatigue, diversify audiences, and keep click-through rates high, Hily utilized TikTok Creative Challenges, where they received a high number of TikTok-first creatives from different types of creators. A lot of the creative testing was done before Q5 to make sure they always had new and fresh creatives to use for the top moments. The team tested more than 500 creatives in total. One of the key benefits of TikTok Creative Challenge is that creators generate videos that feel natural to the platform, based on insights and trends.

Since Q5 also falls during a moment of the year where a lot of people in the company are off, Hily decided to maximize their adoption of automated solutions like Smart Creative and Automatic Targeting for Android. This decreased the amount of effort the team needed to put in over the holidays optimizing campaigns.

The results

Highly compatible performance

The results of Hily’s scale-up during Q5 were significant. They were able to scale their campaign spend by almost 3 times, and doubled the number of installs and subscribers versus the previous month, according to internal performance metrics. The brand also achieved +230% impressions between mid-December and mid-January (compared to mid November to mid December), and TikTok accounted for 60% of their user acquisition spend during the period, according to internal performance data.

Hily’s success with Q5 also reflected on other important areas. For example, they were the most downloaded dating app in the United States on the 4th of January, a difficult thing to achieve considering there are many big players in the industry and they are based in the United States. Additionally, Hily’s number of organic registrations in the app increased by 20% for the month of their Q5 scale-up.