App Installs

The app installs objective optimizes to get people to download and install your mobile app straight from the ad.

You connect your app and a measurement partner, then X finds people likely to install and sends them to the store. It bills around installs and, with the tracking wired in, learns which audiences produce people who actually open the app afterward.

Say a campaign drives five hundred installs in a week. Cost per install looks reasonable in Ads Manager, but your app analytics show only sixty of them opened it twice. You stop reading the install number and start optimizing toward an in-app event that means a real user, which the platform can bid toward once it sees enough of them.

An install is the cheapest, emptiest metric in the funnel. People celebrate a low cost per install and ignore that most installs never open the app a second time.

Do not buy installs. Buy users who come back.