About Apna
Apna is one of India’s leading employment websites and professional networking platforms. It predominantly offer services like recruitment, peer-to-peer learning, and opportunities for job seekers. With 26 million users across 70+ cities, the platform facilitates 9 million monthly job applications and enables over 22 million peer-to-peer conversations every month.
Apna’s story
The Apna mobile app is an integral part of the company’s marketing strategy and goals. It is laser-focused on breaking hiring barriers and empowering people to gain financial freedom via employment opportunities whenever and wherever possible. Connecting users across the country to relevant opportunities with an app means Apna continually scales their user acquisition efforts. To drive growth at scale — and become a go-to mobile app for finding relevant, hyperlocal opportunities across India — Apna understands the importance of a reliable, accurate measurement platform that uncovers helpful insights into its paid ad campaigns.
Challenge
As a fast-growing company, Apna’s performance marketing team was looking to optimize its user experience across channels and get an unbiased measurement of their paid campaigns. To drive user acquisition and boost app engagement, the team wanted to capitalize on their existing user base on different organic channels — social media, mobile web, and desktop web.
However, directing users from these disparate sources to the Apna app meant providing users with a seamless transition without losing context. Doing all this while also measuring the true source of attribution — specifically for paid ad campaigns — was challenging for the Apna team.
Solution
Mobile linking platform (MLP): Deep linking combined with accurate measurement for organic channels
To start with, Apna bridged the gap between multiple touchpoints across different organic channels and their mobile app by adopting Branch’s mobile linking platform (MLP). An MLP is a deep linking and measurement tool for owned, earned, and organic channels. Deep linking ensures that users on Apna social media and earned platforms are routed to the right content depending on whether they have the Apna app installed. Then it takes the user to the specific content immediately after the first launch.
In action, Branch’s deep links are baked into Apna’s organic posts on Instagram; Facebook; the YouTube Community Feed; Twitter; push notifications; and referral programs within the app, mobile, and desktop web.
Apna uses Branch’s MLP to drive users from their social media accounts to their mobile app while preserving the link’s context for users.
Apna uses deep links in its in-app referral program so they can measure the true attribution source while enhancing the user experience.
Apna’s mobile site uses Branch deep links in a banner with a CTA to download the app. This then takes users straight to the app store.
Using Branch deep links empowered the Apna team to deliver more personalized user experiences. As a result, it significantly reduced the number of friction points in conversion events like app downloads, engagement, and referrals. This further resulted in decreased abandonment rates and higher user acquisition.
From Q1-Q3 2021 to Q1-Q3 2022 (YOY), Apna saw 73% increase in new users and 4.7X growth in app engagement rate.
Mobile measurement partner (MMP): Unbiased measurement for paid channels
Apna’s performance marketing team also relied on Branch as their mobile measurement partner (MMP) to accurately attribute each conversion event’s true source. They were also able to analyze the channel with the highest return on ad spend (ROAS).
“Branch has helped us solve the problem of cross-channel misattribution. Branch, for us, is the source of truth. Install touch attribution enabled us to optimize our marketing cost.”
Rahul Deorah, Head of Marketing
Apna
Branch’s MMP ensured that Apna continued to work with major self-attributing networks (SANs). Furthermore, it helped them diversify their network with deduplicated insights into ad conversions and campaign ROI across every platform and device.
Branch’s MMP also integrates well with popular marketing stacks and internal business intelligence systems. This made it easier and faster for different Apna teams to export data to the relevant tool.
Fraud detection: Granular visibility into ad spend
Apna used Branch’s fraud detection for third-party and affiliate partners to create custom rules that blocked fraud at the event level based on any attribute. These AI-generated rules helped the team identify fraud patterns as they evolved. As a result, attributions on devices and browsers with potentially malicious behavior were dynamically blocked across the platform.
Result: Enhanced user experience and higher conversion rates
Apna unified all campaign data across organic and paid channels, including conversions, installs, opens, engagements, and key events. The brand identified top marketing partners that drove the most success. As a result, Apna was able to optimize their ROAS even further. In addition, cross-functional team collaboration and seamless tech stack integrations allowed the teams and stakeholders to gain more visibility and control over their campaigns.
Overall, Apna has reached millions of users and is continually helping people across India to access incredible networking and professional opportunities.
“Branch has played an instrumental role in helping us acquire relevant users at scale and has helped us identify high-ROI digital channels. The team has also helped us in setting up fraud detection rules to ensure relevancy.”
Rahul Deorah, Head of Marketing
Apna
