Solved: Wasting App Ad Spend in Hamburg? (The Real Reason)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance. Your question about Google App Ads creative for the Hamburg market is a good one, but from my experience running app install campaigns, focusing too narrowly on creative 'best practices' for a single city can often be a distraction. It's easy to get bogged down in finding the perfect background image when the real issues holding back your ad spend are usually more fundamental. Tbh, the creative is often the last piece of the puzzle, not the first.

Let's unpack what really drives effective ad spend and how you can apply it to your specific challenge in Hamburg.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Postcode

First things first, let's throw out the idea of a "Hamburg user." It's a useless abstraction. Are we talking about a student at Universität Hamburg, a banker in HafenCity, a family in Eimsbüttel, or a creative on the Reeperbahn? Lumping them together is the fastest way to create generic ads that resonate with no one.

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's imagine you have a meal-planning app. The nightmare isn't 'what's for dinner?'. The real nightmare is the Sunday evening dread of another chaotic week, juggling work deadlines and school pickups, feeling guilty about ordering from Lieferando for the third night in a row, and watching fresh vegetables rot in the fridge. That feeling is universal, but it's experienced within a local context.

Your job isn't to create an ad that says "Meal Planning for Hamburgers." It's to create an ad that says, "Tired of the weekly shop at Edeka feeling like a battle? Plan a week of healthy meals in 5 minutes on your S-Bahn commute to work." See the difference? One is geographic pandering; the other is problem-solving within a recognisable local context.

Before you spend another euro, do this work:

• -> What is the single biggest, most frustrating problem your app solves?
• -> Who in Hamburg feels this pain most acutely? Get specific.
• -> What does their daily life look like? Where do they hang out online and offline? What local media do they consume (e.g., Hamburger Morgenpost, Szene Hamburg)?

Your creative strategy flows from the answers to these questions. The pain point is the hook, the message, and the entire reason for the ad's existence. Everything else is just window dressing.

We'll need to look at your offer... it's probably broken

Here’s a brutally honest truth I've seen play out in dozens of app campaigns, including one where we reduced a client's Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 down to just £7 for their medical job-matching SaaS. A brilliant ad campaign cannot save a broken offer. You could hire the best creative agency in Germany, but if the user journey inside your app is confusing, clunky, or fails to deliver on the ad's promise, you're just paying Google to send people to a dead end.

The user's journey doesn't end with the install; it begins there. The App Store page and the first 60 seconds inside your app are part of your advertising funnel. This is where most app campaigns fail.

Ask yourself these questions, honestly:

• -> The App Store Promise: Do your screenshots and description instantly communicate the value and solve the 'nightmare' we just defined? Or is it a list of features? Nobody cares about your 'synergistic AI integration'; they care about getting their problem solved.
• -> The Onboarding 'Aha!' Moment: When a new user opens your app for the first time, how quickly do they experience its core value? If it takes more than a minute of navigating menus and tutorials, you've already lost them. You need to deliver an "aha!" moment of relief and value almost instantly.
• -> The Frictionless Path: Are you demanding they sign up, create a profile, and give you their life story before they've even tried the app? This is a huge mistake. The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan with zero friction. Let the product prove its own value. I remember for one B2B SaaS client, we generated 1535 trials simply because the offer was a frictionless, no-card-details-required free trial. The product did the selling, not the ads.

Fixing your offer is the highest-leverage activity you can undertake. A 10% improvement in your onboarding conversion rate is worth more than a 10% improvement in your ad's click-through rate, any day of the week.

You probably should localise for relevance, not just geography

Okay, so you've defined the user's nightmare and you're confident your in-app offer is solid. Now we can talk about creative that's actually tailored for Hamburg. But again, we're not just slapping a picture of a Franzbrötchen on a generic ad. True localisation is about demonstrating a deeper understanding of the local culture and context.

This means going beyond surface-level details. It's about language, trust, and relevance.

Language and Nuance: Simply translating your English copy into German is a rookie mistake. German, especially in a city like Hamburg, has its own cadence, humour, and slang ("Moin" as a greeting, for example). The tone can be more direct and less sales-y than typical American or British marketing copy. A wierd or clunky translation is an immediate red flag that you're an outsider and don't understand the market. If you're not a native speaker, hire a freelance German copywriter from Hamburg for a few hours. It will be the best money you spend.

Visual Cues: Using local landmarks can work, but only if they're relevant.

• -> Bad: Your productivity app ad with a random glamour shot of the Elbphilharmonie. It's irrelevant and lazy.
• -> Good: Your fitness app ad showing a jogging route around the Alster. It connects the app's function directly to a real, lived experience for a Hamburger.
• -> Bad: Your dating app ad with a stock photo of a couple in a generic café.
• -> Good: Your dating app ad with a headline like, "Find someone to share a drink with in the Schanzenviertel this weekend." It’s specific, timely, and speaks to a known social hub.

Trust Signals: German consumers are particularly concerned with data privacy and security (thanks to DSGVO/GDPR). Highlighting your privacy features, any TÜV certifications, or secure data handling isn't a boring feature—it's a powerful trust signal. If you've been featured in any local German media, even a small blog, showcase that logo. It provides crucial third-party validation.

Here's a simple breakdown of how to think about it:

I'd say you need to structure your campaigns properly

Google's App campaigns are a black box by design. You feed the machine assets (headlines, descriptions, images, videos), and its algorithm does the rest. You don't pick keywords or placements. This makes the quality and diversity of your assets the single most important technical lever you can pull. The goal isn't to find one 'perfect' ad; it's to provide Google with a rich portfolio of options to test.

Here’s how you should structure your approach for a city-level test like Hamburg:

1. Create a Seperate Campaign: Do not just add Hamburg to your existing Germany or Europe campaign. Create a new, dedicated App campaign targeting *only* Hamburg. This gives you clean data and control over the budget for this specific test.
2. Focus on Actions, Not Just Installs: In the campaign setup, you can optimise for 'Installs' or for 'In-app actions'. If you can, definitly optimise for actions. An install from someone who never opens the app again is worthless. A better goal is a key action like 'tutorial completed', 'first item created', or 'subscription started'. This tells Google to find people who are not just likely to install, but likely to become valuable users. This single choice can change everything.
3. Build Diverse Asset Groups: Within your Hamburg campaign, create multiple asset groups. Each group should test a different angle or hypothesis based on the 'nightmare' ICPs you defined earlier.
   • -> Asset Group 1 (The Commuter): Headlines and images focused on using the app during the S-Bahn/U-Bahn commute. "Make your commute productive."
   • -> Asset Group 2 (The Parent): Creative focused on solving a problem for busy parents in neighbourhoods like Eimsbüttel or Winterhude. "Organise your family's week in minutes."
   • -> Asset Group 3 (The Student): Creative using visuals and language that appeals to students at local universities. "The ultimate study hack for Uni Hamburg students."

For each asset group, you MUST provide a full suite of assets: landscape and portrait images, square and vertical videos, and multiple headlines and descriptions. Don't be lazy here. The algorithm needs variety to work its magic. One campaign we worked on for an app client achieved over 45,000 signups at under £2 each by rigorously testing different creative angles across multiple platforms.

You'll need to know what you can afford to pay

This brings me to the most critical question in all of paid advertising: How much can you afford to pay for a new user? If you don't know this number, you are gambling, not marketing. Chasing a low Cost Per Install (CPI) is a fool's errand if those cheap installs churn immediately and never generate any revenue.

The metric that matters is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). It tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average user over their entire time using your app. Once you know your LTV, you can set a rational Target CPI.

Here are the components you need:

• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): What's the average revenue you make per active user, per month? (This could be from subscriptions, in-app purchases, etc.)
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after app store fees and other direct costs?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your active users do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPU * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate %

A healthy business model often aims for an LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio of 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to one-third of your LTV to acquire a new customer. So, your maximum affordable CPI is roughly LTV / 3.

Suddenly, a £5 CPI might seem expensive on its own, but if your LTV is £60, it's an incredible bargain. This math frees you from the tyranny of cheap installs and allows you to bid confidently to acquire high-quality users.

I've built a simple calculator for you to play with these numbers and see for yourself.

These are the main reccomendations I have for you:

To wrap this all up, effective advertising in Hamburg isn't about finding a secret creative formula. It's about a holistic approach that starts with your user and works backwards. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can see, there's quite alot to it. Getting this strategy right—from the core user psychology to the technical campaign setup and financial modelling—is a complex process. It involves a mix of marketing strategy, data analysis, and creative testing that can be difficult to manage alone, especially when you're also trying to run and improve your app.

Working with an expert can help you navigate this complexity, avoid costly mistakes, and accelerate your path to profitable growth. We do this for clients every day, implementing these exact frameworks to turn their ad spend into a reliable source of high-quality users.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this thinking to your app in more detail, feel free to get in touch to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation. We could walk through your current setup and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh