The day Android-only saved a dying campaign
I ran push traffic to a sweeps offer and bled for nine days straight.
— The setup: Tier-1 mainstream push, US, single creative, $40/day cap, broad targeting.
— The move: instead of killing it, I split the campaign by OS and looked at the conversion logs, not the dashboard ROI.
— The numbers: iOS was $0.62 EPC against $0.41 cost — pure loss. Android was $0.94 EPC against the same cost. Blended it looked like -18% ROI. Android alone was +28%.
I had been throwing iOS budget into a hole and the average hid it. Cut iOS, scaled Android from $40 to $180/day over a week. Eleven-day window: $1,420 spend, $1,790 revenue, +26% net.
— The lesson: blended ROI is a liar when one segment subsidizes another. OS split is the cheapest cut you can make and it's the one people skip.
What I'd do differently: I'd have split by OS on day two, not day nine. Those first eight days of iOS spend — roughly $310 — were the tuition I didn't need to pay. Numbers illustrative, but the pattern is real on every push buy I've run.
Arb Files
@ArbFiles