Rarely does “build it and they will come” motto work in today’s world. Acquisition is a very vast field, and includes several different initiatives such as advertising, public relations, marketing, and more.

In my last post I covered the five components under Pirate Metrics - Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue - and their importance to the success of a product. In this post, I will focus on the first metric, i.e Acquisition, and demonstrate how one can use the Firebase suite to not only track, but also improve it.

At Google, our key offering over the years for acquisition has been Adwords. Through an Adwords campaign, you can already reach out to users on not only search results, but also places like YouTube and Google Play. With the new Firebase integration for Adwords, you can turbo charge your acquisition workflow even further.

Firstly, you can automatically ensure if your campaign are getting the right users by tracking the app open events being fired by them.

Say you have created a game, and have multiple campaigns running. Through this integration, you not only know which campaigns are bringing you more users at better rates, but also which ones are providing more engaged users.

You can also attribute acquisitions from more than 30 other networks, and track the campaign performances in Firebase Analytics directly. And, as you’d expect, you can segment users acquired from these different sources into dedicated Audiences.

Additionally, you can also specify which of your in-app events are important, and Adwords would automatically target those users likely to perform them. Continuing with the example of the game from before, let’s assume your game has both single and multiplayer modes. Simply by letting Adwords know of the event for starting a multiplayer game, you could increase the likelihood of acquiring users who want to play multiplayer.

And, lastly, you can target the audiences you have created in Firebase Analytics. This can be tremendously powerful for retargeting, such as bringing back users who might quit after struggling at a certain level with a deal for a special power up.

The Firebase integration with Adwords helps you get the best bang for your buck. Do check out the official documentation for complete details.

Besides Adwords, another nifty tool that we provide as part of Firebase is Dynamic Links. Dynamic Links allows you to create a single URL to share with potential users, who would be redirected to the appropriate stores to download them on either Android or iOS. You can also add some custom data to a link, which will survive the app installation process. You could use this to considerably improve your acquisition from channels such as social media.

For example, say you want to highlight a product that is available for sale on your E-commerce application. Simply create a Dynamic Link, add some information such as an ID that your app can then consume and deeplink straight to the product. Users who have the app would be taken to the product page. Those who don’t would first be taken to either the Play Store or App Store, and can then be taken straight to the product when they open your application for the first time.

We’ll be covering more about Dynamic Links again in a future post, but do go ahead and check out the documentation for yourself as well.

In our next post, we will be covering Activation.