9Now is a premium Australian destination for live streaming and on-demand video content from the network’s TV channels. 9Now content is consumed via mobile and connected TV apps, and has over 13 million signed-in users registered for its free advertising-supported service across Australia.
The Challenge:
9Now strongly focuses on driving audience growth and engagement to increase the amount of time spent on the platform. Increasing the volume of video content users watch increases the amount of advertising that is served. The Cost Per Active (CPA) metric — the cost of finding a user and driving them to stream content — is the most useful conversion metric to allow tracking and optimisation of performance across channels, audiences, and TV shows. However, the 9Now team faced the challenge of how to measure the performance of paid marketing efforts driving users to the mobile app.
Without being able to connect in-app activity to ad performance across the user journey – from 9Now ad to App Store to app to video play – the team faced difficulties measuring the success of specific marketing activities. In addition, the marketing team was unable to scale audiences costeffectively or consistently. To resolve these challenges, 9Now partnered with Branch.
The Solution:
By leveraging Branch, 9Now can deep link users straight into the app and simultaneously measure performance. Because Branch is integrated with over 2,000 ad partners globally, the team at 9Now can test new channels and platforms to quickly gauge if they drive effective CPA. By implementing Branch’s Universal Ads, 9Now can now scientifically run tests on shows that they know will increase audience watch time. This helped them to grow their base of Daily Active Users and drive greater LTV. By boosting the number of video streams and the number of minutes shows being watched, 9Now managed to increase the number of ad impressions shown on their platform.
The Results:
After partnering with Branch, mobile as a paid performance channel has been completely unlocked to better understand where conversions are occurring.
9Now was spending up to 140% more per conversion before using Universal Ads and deep linking to help push users to the 9Now mobile app from paid, owned, and organic channels including but not limited to: Facebook, Tiktok, Google, streaming search engines and video feeds. Since partnering with Branch, 9Now has also witnessed a 3X increase in trackable conversions and a 35% increase in app installs.
Furthermore, increasing the number of ads being shown has boosted 9Now’s revenue, and, as of April 2021, 9Now garnered a massive 50% share of minutes consumed among its broadcaster videoon-demand (BVOD) competitors. With Universal Ads, Branch has transformed the black box of a mobile app into a well-oiled engine that can effectively discover new users and re-engage existing ones, resulting in consistent, scalable, long-term revenue growth for 9Now.