UK App Campaigns: The Ultimate User Acquisition Guide

Launching a new app is tough. Launching it with paid ads in a crowded market like the UK can feel like you're just setting fire to a pile of money. Lots of people go looking for some secret 'UK best practice' guide, thinking there's a magic formula that only works here. The truth is, there isn't one. The algorithms that power these platforms dont really care if your user is in Manchester or Mumbai. What matters is the process, the fundamentals, and understanding how to apply them to the UK market.

Forget hunting for a silver bullet. Your success won't come from a secret UK-specific setting. It'll come from a relentless focus on testing, solid fundamentals, and a brutally honest look at your own app and offer. If you get that right, you can build a campaign that brings in users profitably. Get it wrong, and you'll just be another statistic.

So, you're sure there's no UK-specific trick?

Honestly, no. I'd take anyone telling you otherwise with a massive pinch of salt. The core principles of what makes a good campaign work are universal. A compelling creative, the right offer, and sharp targeting are the pillars of success anywhere in the world. People are people.

What is different in the UK is the context. You're dealing with a mature, competitive market. That means a few things:

-> Higher Costs: Don't expect to get users for pennies. We're a developed country with high digital ad spend. Based on what we see across loads of campaigns, a click (CPC) will often set you back somewhere in the £0.50 to £1.50 range, sometimes more. That has a direct knock-on effect on your cost per install.

-> Savvy Consumers: The average Brit has seen thousands of ads. They can spot a lazy, generic campaign from a mile off. Your messaging and creative needs to be on point. It has to feel genuine and speak to a real need, not just shout features at them.

-> Platform Saturation: Pretty much every brand that can is advertising on Google, Meta, and TikTok here. You're not just competing against other apps; you're competing against fashion brands, car companies, and your local takeaway for a slice of someone's attention. It's a noisy place.

So the challenge isn't finding a secret setting called 'Target Pasty Lovers in Cornwall'. The challenge is executing the fundamentals of good advertising so flawlessly that you stand out in a very crowded room. The process is the same, the bar for quality is just higher.

Are you sure your app is even ready for ads?

This is where most people trip up before they've even started. They spend ages building the perfect app, then throw it out into the world with a big ad budget, and wonder why nobody is downloading it, or why the ones who do leave after five minutes. Your app is your landing page, your sales pitch, and your product all in one. If it's not ready, you're just paying to show people a leaky bucket.

I've seen so many founders, particuarly in the SaaS world, make this mistake. They'll have a website or an app thats clunky, confusing, and doesn't have a clear offer. One accounting software client we looked at had a tagline about 'privacy', but their target audience of businesses just wanted to know if it would save them time and money. They were selling the wrong thing to the wrong people.

Before you spend a single pound, you need to have honest answers to these questions:

-> What's your monetisation plan? B2C app installs or signups usually cost between £1 and £5, maybe more. If your plan to make money is vague, or if your lifetime value per user is less than what it costs to get them, you have a broken business model. You need to know that for every £2 you spend on an install, you're going to make £4, £6, or £10 back over time.

-> Have you tested demand? The best way to see if people want what you've built is to see if they'll sign up before it's even fully ready. A simple landing page with a waitlist and a special offer for early adopters is a brilliant way to do this. If you can't get people to give you their email for free, you'll struggle to get them to download and use your app.

-> Is the onboarding process seamless? The first 60 seconds a user spends in your app are the most important. Is it immediately clear what they need to do? Does it show them the value straight away? If they have to sit through a five-minute tutorial or fill out 10 forms, they're gone. And you just paid for them to leave.

Advertising doesn't fix a bad product. It just makes more people find out about your bad product, faster.

What objective should I actually be optimising for?

This seems simple, but it's another classic mistake. People get tempted by the big vanity metrics they see on Google's dashboard.

I’d definitely optimise for conversions if conversions are the goal. For an app, that means you should be telling Google's algorithm to find you one of two things:

1. App Installs: This is your starting point. Your goal here is to get people to download the app. The algorithm will go out and find people who have a history of installing apps. It's a good first step to get volume and data.

2. In-App Actions: This is the next level. Once you have enough installs and data, you should switch to optimising for a specific action inside your app that signals a valuable user. This could be completing a tutorial, making a first purchase, signing up for a subscription, or reaching a certain level in a game. This tells the algorithm "Don't just find me people who download stuff, find me people who will actually do the thing that makes my business money."

Whatever you do, stay away from objectives like "Reach" or "Brand Awareness". This is an uncomfortable truth, but when you choose those, you're giving the platform a very clear instruction: "Find me the largest number of eyeballs for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm does exactly that. It finds the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely least likely to ever perform a valuable action. Why? Because their attention is cheap. No one else is bidding for them. You are actively paying one of the world's most powerful advertising machines to find you the worst possible audience. Awareness is a byproduct of a great product that solves a problem, not a pre-requisite for a sale.

Is a Google App Campaign even the right platform?

Just because you have an app, it doesn't automatically mean a Google App Campaign is your best or only option. The best ad platform is always the one where your target audience can be most effectively reached. It's a simple idea, but so many people get it wrong.

Google App Campaigns (UAC) are great when... people are actively looking for a solution like yours. UAC puts your app in front of people searching on Google.com, the Google Play Store, YouTube, and across their display network. If someone is typing "budgeting app for students" into the Play Store, you want to be there. This is for capturing existing demand.

But what if people don't know they need you yet? This is where you need to think about other platforms to create demand.

I remember one campaign we worked on for an events and sports app. They needed to get a massive volume of signups quickly. We didn't just stick to Google. We ran a multi-platform strategy. We tested Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok, Apple Search Ads, and Google Ads all at once. By testing different platforms, creatives, and audiences, we found pockets of users everywhere. The result was over 45,000 signups at an average cost of under £2 per signup. If we'd just stuck with Google, we would have missed out on a huge chunk of that audience.

-> Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Brilliant for visual apps and for targeting based on interests and behaviours. If you have a fitness app, you can target people interested in Gymshark, running, and healthy eating. You can build powerful lookalike audiences from your best users.

-> TikTok: If your audience is younger and you can create engaging, short-form video content, TikTok can be a goldmine. It's all about authentic, non-salesy content.

-> Apple Search Ads (ASA): If your app is iOS-only, this is a no-brainer. It's like Google Search for the App Store. The intent is incredibly high, and while it can be expensive, the quality of users is often fantastic.

Don't put all your eggs in the Google basket just because it seems like the obvious choice. Test where your audience actually spends their time.

How do I structure a campaign to actually find winners?

Okay, so you've got your app ready and you've decided to go ahead with a Google App Campaign. You can't just throw a bunch of videos and images at it and hope for the best. You need a structured approach to testing. In UAC, the key is using 'Asset Groups'. Think of these as themed containers for your ads.

The goal is to test different angles, messages, and creatives against each other to see what resonates. Don't mix all your ideas into one big asset group. Isolate your variables.

Here's a simple, hypothetical structure for a UK-based recipe app:

By structuring it this way, you let the algorithm test these different themes. After a week or two, you'll clearly see which angle is delivering the lowest cost per install. You can then pause the losers and double down on the winners, creating new variations of the successful theme.

What do good results even look like in the UK?

This is the "how long is a piece of string" question. It depends massively on your app's niche, your price point, and how well you've done everything we've talked about. But we can create a rough ballpark figure based on the data.

Let's do some back-of-the-napkin maths.

As we said, a click (CPC) in the UK will likely be £0.50 - £1.50. From that click to your app store page, not everyone will install. A decent install conversion rate might be between 20% and 40%. People who click are interested, but they might be put off by bad reviews, a large file size, or just change their mind.

So let's calculate the potential range for your Cost Per Install (CPI):

-> Best Case Scenario: £0.50 CPC / 40% install rate = £1.25 per install.
-> Worst Case Scenario: £1.50 CPC / 20% install rate = £7.50 per install.

Your actual results will likely fall somewhere in that range. For the events and sports app I talked about earlier, we got the blended cost across all platforms down to under £2, which shows you what's possible when things are really optimised. We also worked with a medical job matching SaaS where we took their cost per user from a painful £100 right down to just £7. That's the power of relentless optimisation.

Don't be disheartened if you start at the higher end. Your first job is to get a baseline. Your second job is to beat it, relentlessly.

My creatives are rubbish. What now?

If your campaign is sputtering, nine times out of ten it's the creative. Your assets—the videos, images, and text—are doing the actual selling.

Look at your metrics. They'll tell you the story.

-> Low Click-Through Rate (CTR)? This means your ad isn't grabbing attention in the feed or search results. Your main image or video hook is failing. It's not interesting enough to stop the scroll.

-> High CTR but Low Install Rate? People are interested enough to click, but something on your app store page is putting them off. Are your screenshots clear? Is your main description compelling? Are your reviews terrible?

-> High Installs but Low In-App Engagement? You're getting them in the door, but the app experience itself is failing. This isn't an ad problem anymore; it's a product problem.

When it comes to making better creative, stop thinking like a corporation. We've seen fantastic results for clients, even B2B SaaS, with simple, user-generated style (UGC) videos. They feel more authentic and trustworthy than a slick, polished corporate ad.

Use the Before-After-Bridge framework. It's simple and powerful.

-> Before: Describe the user's current pain. "Tired of endless scrolling through Netflix, finding nothing to watch?"

-> After: Paint a picture of the ideal state. "Imagine getting perfect movie recommendations every night, tailored just for you."

-> Bridge: Position your app as the solution. "Our app is the bridge. It analyses your taste and finds hidden gems you'll love. Download for free and find your next favourite film in 2 minutes."

That message speaks directly to a problem and offers a clear solution. It's infinitely more powerful than just listing your app's features.

Your UK App Campaign Plan

It's a lot to take in. So if you're feeling a bit overwhelmed, here's the main advice I have for you, broken down into a simple plan. This is the process we follow.

When to stop tinkering and get some help

You can absolutely do all of this yourself. But it takes time, a lot of learning from mistakes, and a significant budget for testing. The reason people hire specialist agencies or consultants isn't for a secret trick; it's for experience and speed.

We've run hundreds of these campaigns. We've seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of different niches. We can often spot the problem with a campaign in minutes because we've seen it ten times before. That experience allows you to get to the profitable stage much faster and with less wasted ad spend.

If you're spending hours every week trying to figure out Google's dashboard, if your costs are spiralling, or if you've just hit a wall and can't seem to scale, that's usually the time to consider getting an expert opinion. You're probably too close to your own project to see the obvious fixes.

Getting a fresh pair of expert eyes on your campaigns can make all the difference. If you'd like to see what that looks like, we often do free, no-obligation strategy sessions where we'll go through your ad account with you and give you some actionable advice on the spot.