Nowadays, app developers and marketers can advertise directly on OEM devices. Previously, we have explained why Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are going to take the leading role in User Acquisition channels in the next few years. Now, we’ve decided to take a deep dive and explore OEM market potential. Here, we share some valuable insights from our latest OEM Market Research that will help you understand OEM advertising better.

“The Ultimate Guide to OEM advertising” whitepaper outlines one of the 2022 user acquisition trends — OEM advertising. This whitepaper is especially relevant for those who already work with traditional traffic sources like Meta and Google Ads, but do not know how to increase installs. We believe that OEM ads can help brands boost their app installs and will be an essential part of mobile marketing strategy in the next few years.

In this guide, we have shared OEM market growth prospects, as well as recommendations for launching and maintaining OEM campaigns. Also, you will find information on how to work with OEM platforms, our case studies, and things that you need to know before launching an OEM ad campaign.

You can download “The Ultimate Guide to OEM advertising” whitepaper here.

OEM advertising won’t help your strategy for reaching your target audience, but it is a great tool for performance campaigns where accuracy and measurable results matter. Mobile apps promotion on Android is the only thing currently available in OEM sources.

Another distinctive feature of OEM advertising is OEM traffic. Here, some benefits of leveraging OEM traffic:

1. OEM source technology determines high transparency of OEM traffic and makes it fraud-free.
2. OEM traffic is highly predictable, which improves the performance of OEM campaigns.
3. OEMs offer marketers to promote their apps in a user-friendly way. Thus, OEM advertising format inspires user trust, and OEM campaigns CR can reach almost 90%.

Here, we put together a list of recommendations to follow for anyone who wants to test OEM sources.

1. Build a core user base before turning to OEM sources to promote your app. On-device campaigns are not suitable for apps with a small number of users. OEMs learn how to promote an app by analysing users’ behavior and buying patterns, their preferences, and other insights. So for a recently published app, OEM sources would not have enough data to produce an informative and reliable estimate. If you need to create a core user base for your app, try Meta or Google sources first.
2. Run OEM campaigns for scaling your app when customers can recognise your brand. To drive better performance of your OEM campaign, you need to have an eye-catching and recognisable app icon. That way, your app will stand out from other recommended applications.
3. Before launching an OEM campaign, analyse local Android market capacity. It’s especially important when you have a big budget for your campaign. It’s likely that the budget that you want to allocate for the OEM campaign is excessive, as there are simply not that many devices in a specific region to invest in.
4. Test different OEM sources to see which one performs best.Don’t mix up the sources while testing. Each of the three OEM platform categories has individual mechanics, an optimisation process, traffic attribution analytics, and attribution time. That’s why testing different OEM sources at the same time may affect the performance of your campaign.
5. Don’t compare OEM testing results with other performance sources. However, it’s a good idea to compare ad placement results in different OEM sources. If Meta is the place where you analyse creatives first, then the OEM platform is the one where you analyse ad placements. Most OEM platforms don’t offer ad placement for creatives. The most common ad format is your app icon that appears as a recommendation in different user on-device touchpoints. That’s why it’s crucial to analyse ad placement results in different OEM sources.
6. Ask OEM platform managers to help you launch a campaign. It can be useful and effective to reach out to people who know a platform inside out, who can and would be willing to help. The OEM platform managers can provide you with legal information, guide you through technical features of the platform, as well as advise on launching a campaign.
7. Attribute the results of the OEM campaign correctly. For some sources such as Huawei and recommendation platforms, the average validation track for OEM advertising results is at least 30 days due to the nature of user experience.
8. Choose vendors that have direct relationships with managers from different categories of OEM platforms. They will be able to ensure that you will achieve the business goals you have, relying on their work experience. Also, they can advise you on how to mix sources, as they are in direct contact with the platforms. When working with contractors, don’t give one source to several agencies; this will make traffic generation much harder and harder to control.

Check out “The Ultimate Guide to OEM Advertising” whitepaper, and find more information on how to launch and run an OEM campaign.