What’s in Your [Growth] Stack? Thomas Hopkins, Lyft

Every mobile marketer uses a range of technologies and services to help them market their apps. We catch up with our Mobile Heroes to learn what’s in their mobile marketing growth stack.

What channels do you use for marketing your app?

I head passenger acquisition strategy for Lyft’s growth marketing team. When evaluating channels, our focus is on channels that provide both efficiency and scale; in other words, a good CPI/CPA at scale. Because of this, we end up gravitating towards the larger channels such as Facebook, Google and Apple. We are also in the process of revisiting buying from DSPs and partnerships that we believe might be a good fit.

Why did you choose to work with your attribution partner?

We work with Singular because of their cost attribution capability. There is no other partner that has as good cost attribution. All other partners are trying to set it up but we haven’t found their offerings to be as accurate as Singular’s. Singular is way ahead of the game with cost attribution.

Do you use any tools for app store optimization (ASO)?

For app store optimization the best tool out there is Google’s experiment platform. After that is SplitMetrics which has the ability to look at performance starting from a search page and not just our app store page. When you’re a large brand with high intent customers, a large percentage of installs and activations are organic and you need to be able to optimize within search. SplitMetrics helps with that.

What mobile marketing automation (MMA) tools do you use?

We use Kenshoo as well as have built our own in-house tools.

What A/B testing tool do you use, if any?

We A/B test almost every part of our ads on every channel. The most important one for us is the ability to A/B test incrementality to see the true incremental impact of a channel. We work with our individual account reps to design and launch the tests.

What analytics tools do you use?

Our in-house analytics team builds dashboards for us. We have analysts assigned to different channels, allowing the analyst to really embrace their channel, whether it’s social or search, and understand the levers that drive performance.

Do you use any other tools?

One of the tools that we use for ASO, is Tune’s ASO tool. They have a built-in app store optimization tool that we use to help with impression optimizations.

As for other tools, we do all of our creative design in-house. It’s an interesting world in that once your company gets to be a certain size, you make the switch and bring everything in-house so you can have more ownership and more learnings.

What mobile marketing conferences do you attend?

I would definitely recommend MAU, number one. Then I really like the Postback conference up in Seattle. For me that’s probably the best conference of the year. MAU is great for its size. And Postback is great for the intimate experience where you get to meet people and build deeper relationships. MAU is a great place to meet a lot of people and have a lot of conversations.

Do you attend any events or meetups outside of conferences?

I highly encourage people to try to network with other media buyers and create small groups. I’m involved with a group of people that meets monthly to talk about trends and find ways of helping each other. This is useful because you can only test and do so much with limited bandwidth. I highly encourage marketers to be more open and share insights and best practices with each other to help move the industry forward and make it a more efficient marketplace. The only way we get there is by having conversations and creating transparency.

What marketing websites, podcasts, books, social media channels, or other publications do you consume?

First and foremost, for industry trends I highly recommend Eric Seufert’s blog Mobile Dev Memo. In terms of day-to-day operations, I would recommend everyone goes out and looks at the data that large ad networks share at the end of each quarter, as well as case studies. That’s where you will find some of the best information. I would suggest taking a look at the top ad networks and DSPs, as well as Google and Facebook. They all offer really good case studies on their websites.

Lyft is hiring growth, engagement, and martech marketers. Please visit Lyft.com/jobs to learn more.

What’s in your growth stack? Let us know and we might feature you and your company on this very blog!

Thomas Hopkins is the Passenger Acquisition Strategy at Lyft. Previously, Thomas joined PIV by way of their acquisition of Rocket Games, Inc, a popular social gambling company, where he worked as the User Acquisition Director managing all mobile UA efforts. Learn more about Thomas from his Mobile Hero profile.