What is user freshness?

Before we start, let’s first define user freshness. As we know, Push ads work on a subscription-based model. In other words, in order for someone to receive a push ad, they first must subscribe to receive them from one of our publishers’ websites.

User freshness is then calculated as the amount of time passed between when the user first subscribed to receive push ads to when the ad was delivered. For example, if someone had subscribed to receive push ads 4 days ago and your ad was delivered to them today their user freshness would be 4 days.

Why it is important

User freshness is important because it shows when your ad is being seen relative to other ads. If user freshness is lower it means that the users have seen fewer ads before seeing yours and are likely to have developed less banner blindness. This notion has been verified by our platform data, and we have found user freshness to be one of the strongest conversion factors in a campaign.

The graph below shows the average CPA by user freshness category seen on our platform with 1 being 0-1 hour and 13 being 60+ days. Refer to the full list of groupings in the section below. This shows that is the average CPA within the first day is almost a sixth of the average CPA compared to the older user freshness groups with a clear correlation between user freshness and CPA. The main cause for this is because there are on average fewer clicks per conversion on the lower user freshness groups.

How Pushground stands out from the rest

Pushground is one of the few push traffic sources that offer metrics like user freshness.  The other Push traffic sources that offer something similar only have 2 or 3 defined groups whereas Pushground offers 14.  After realizing the effect of user freshness on the profitability of a campaign, we wanted to offer as many options as possible to target different user freshness groups.  Pushground is also the only source that offers targeting of users within the first 1 hour after subscribing ensuring that your ad is the first someone sees.  Here is the full list of our available user freshness groups.

How to use user freshness to boost your ROI

Targeting different user freshness groups can help you boost your ROI by reducing testing costs and allowing you to set up more precise bidding on the traffic that will bring you more conversion.

Testing strategies

When testing new campaigns, targeting lower user freshness groups can help you better sample feeds by limiting the overall spend to just the most active audience. The idea here is that if the freshest users from a feed don’t convert, it is unlikely that the older users will convert. By only targeting the freshness users you can save a lot of your testing budget that would have been wasted on older users.  After you find the feeds that provide profitable traffic to your campaigns you can then scale up your campaign by targeting older user freshness groups.

We always recommend starting new campaigns by target the user freshness groups of 0-2 days.

Segregated bid strategies

User freshness targeting can also be used to more precisely optimize your bids.  Knowing that each user freshness group can yield different results, you can set your bid to pay more for the traffic that converts better and less for the traffic that doesn’t. By creating different campaigns to target different user freshness groups you can more accurately bid on the traffic you want.

Important notes on user freshness

Volumes are not the same between groups

It is important to understand that the volumes for the different user freshness are not all the same.  It stands to reason that targeting only the users from the 0-1 hour group will result in a dramatic decrease in volumes compared to targeting the group 7-14 day group.

Not all feeds have the same user freshness groups

Another important thing to keep in mind is that not all feeds have the same user freshness groups.  This could be because some feeds are already split based on user freshness groups. For example, feed 86 is already partitioned by user freshness to include only those who have subscribed in the last 7 days.  

There are also some technical differences among some feeds that inhibit user freshness targeting. Some feeds are unable to target based on hour and only by day meaning that the first user freshness group available would be 12-24 hours (day 1). Other feeds like 598 do not show when the users subscribed meaning that the only available user freshness group is unknown.