Hello everyone!
My name is Yulia, and I am the Head of User Acquisition at Guru Apps, a business that creates mobile applications used by over 80 million users worldwide. I’ve been working in performance marketing for over 5 years. During this time, I’ve progressed from managing a budget of 100 UAH per day to more than 1 million USD per month. Together with my team, I am responsible for the marketing of our apps and user acquisition all over the world. Our goal is to establish our products as market leaders within their categories.
In this article, I’ll take you behind the scenes of the work of a User Acquisition manager, sharing the tools that help me efficiently organize my tasks and handle multitasking.
Who is our user seeker at Guru Apps?
In our team, we really like the phrase: “A marketer is an entrepreneur.”
This most accurately describes the role of a User Acquisition manager, whose main task is to develop and implement a marketing strategy to ensure the success of the product. This could involve finding unit economics (ROI+) for a new product, improving the profitability of an existing product, or achieving rapid growth to become the top app in its niche.
Each of these goals requires the following key qualities of a specialist:
Proactivity: It’s important to always be on the lookout for new opportunities, anticipate risks, and make decisions independently.
Strategic thinking and strong analytical skills: Being able to set goals, develop a plan, and execute it based on data.
Quick learning and flexibility: Marketing is a dynamic field where it’s crucial to stay ahead of trends, respond to market changes, and adapt.
Stress resistance: It may sound like a cliché, but it’s essential to understand that managing large budgets daily means that any bug in the platform systems or market can lead to significant losses. Therefore, one must always act quickly, thoughtfully, and decisively when challenges arise.
But if you take a look at a marketing team, it’s easy to see that they are very active and entrepreneurial individuals who love their work, genuinely fight for results, and even learn valuable lessons from challenging situations while sharing a few jokes along the way
Guru Apps User Acquisition and MarTech teams
What to Do When You Have a Million?
This is a very interesting question, even without considering the advertising budget. But today, let’s specifically talk about how to structure your work so that a million-dollar marketing budget doesn’t lead to fear or stress.
From my own experience, I can say that before I had to work with such budgets, it seemed almost unreal. It was hard to imagine how to organize everything clearly and effectively. But as it turned out, everything is possible — you just need to find your approach.
So, where should you start?
Stage 1. Audit Your Work Time
Start with a definition of the tasks you need to do on a daily/weekly basis. Clustering them into blocks, and determining how much time is spent on each one. It’s important to be honest with yourself and take into consideration even the micro-routine tasks.
Why?
To see your actual workload.
To identify tasks that are a priority and most impactful on results.
To understand what can be optimized, automated, postponed, or delegated.
Stage 2. Structure Your Work with Prioritized Tasks
We often act intuitively, based on our experience. This approach works well until there’s a significant increase in workload or budget in direct management.
Let’s take a routine daily task of a marketer: launching ad campaigns on Meta. We can break this down into the following blocks:
Scaling successful campaigns
Testing creatives
Testing new optimization hypotheses or conducting experiments
The order of these blocks is already arranged by importance and criticality. First, scaling successful campaigns should be prioritized because they have the most significant impact on the results, particularly revenue. Next, launching new creatives is important for future scaling and provides data for the creative team to adjust strategies. Finally, testing new ideas and hypotheses takes the lowest priority, as while it has a lower chance of affecting current results, it sets the groundwork for future opportunities.
Once the task priority is determined, it’s important to use your experience to create your strategy for dealing with it.
Here’s an example from my own experience. Scaling successful campaigns can be done in several ways. Some marketers scale by duplicating successful launches, others increase budgets gradually, while some go all-in with large budgets. The key is to find what works for you by testing different approaches. Regardless of the strategy, these approaches can be systematized, simplifying your work process.
In my case, I initially used the strategy of a large amount of new launches every day. But at some point, I realized that doing over 100 launches per day, alongside managerial tasks, wasn’t effective. It took too much time and didn’t yield the desired results. I began developing a new acquisition strategy: finding and scaling stable campaigns, working on their optimization, and eventually finding a faster way to scale. Of course, this didn’t work at once, but step by step, I moved towards a much more effective and faster strategy. That strategy helped me to scale the budget by 2x+ within a day, maintaining ROI.
In addition to the strategy, it’s also important to systematize your tactical actions. If you have input data X, what steps do you take next?
Example:
Input data: I notice a potential creative with a good funnel based on specific criteria. Next, I have a series of actions to verify its effectiveness:
a) Scaling: I determine what new launches to make.
b) Diversifying the current acquisition: I add the creative to active campaigns.
I also make sure to pass this information along to the team during the process. Depending on the results, I have a plan of action for the next step.
So, with a clear decision-making framework, you won’t get lost — you act based on this approach.
Important: Over time, this approach may change and evolve, as marketing is extremely volatile.
In short, this stage is about setting priorities for tasks and creating decision-making scenarios based on the results.
Stage 3. Optimize Your Work
If, in the first stage, you identified that you're overloaded, it’s time to change the prioritization of certain tasks and postpone them to a specific time. Then, go through your priority tasks and determine where you can optimize or automate your work.
We’re lucky to have our own MarTech team that develops custom solutions for our tasks and context. At this stage, we’ve implemented the following automation:
Auto-uploading creatives into ad accounts
Daily export of creative test results and ranking them based on effectiveness
Auto-launching tests: We can launch new creatives in a few minutes instead of hours of manual work
Additional tools for evaluating campaign effectiveness, which help set auto-rules
Creating an alert system to notify us about critical changes
How to Optimize Your Work?
Build a reliable data source to assess your actions’ effectiveness in real-time. This could be any analytical tool or a custom dashboard that fully covers your needs. It is crucial that you can quickly assess the situation (within 1 minute), as this saves time on consolidating data from various sources.
Research supplementary services that can cover your needs. For example, my team uses a platform for managing active campaigns and new launches. It automatically increases budgets, includes/excludes campaigns, and duplicates settings based on specific conditions. If you don’t have access to additional services, you can use rule-based systems on advertising platforms. Though their functionality is limited, they will reduce manual work and help save budget.
Build close collaboration with сross-functional teams. It’s crucial to be in sync with the creative, product, analytics, and technical teams. Share insights, react to changes, and solve complex cases immediately. Ensure quick communication via joint chats for different needs. We have a chat where we post urgent issues to ensure the team knows when it’s time to join in and help. This has often saved us in critical moments and allowed us to stabilize quickly.
Revise routine tasks. This may sound general, but any task can be done in different timeframes. For instance, if you need to submit a support request, use GPT chat to make the process faster and available in any language. Leverage AI tools for ad copy, creative ideas, presentation structure, and more.
The same goes for launching ad campaigns. If you’re preparing a launch for a new geo and need to create 20 ad sets, there are several options:
Create each group from scratch, filling in all the fields and then duplicating them
Make 20 copies of an existing ad set and change the geo
Make one copy, change the necessary settings, and then duplicate the rest based on that.
Believe me, the time spent will differ in each of these approaches.
If you have tasks identified as low-impact on results – consider their necessity.
Flexibility and Crisis Management
This block is important not only considering the budget you are working with but also in the overall structuring of the User Acquisition manager's role. In your work, you need to establish support points that will help you both in favorable and critical situations.
Let’s go through the main aspects I have learned from my own experience.
Single Source of Truth
As mentioned above, it is important to have a reliable data source for quick traffic evaluation. This data should be updated in real-time and provide a complete picture of the situation (with a 99% confidence level). This will help you understand in a few seconds whether everything is fine, determine the potential for scaling, or identify critical situations that require urgent intervention. You need to understand where the information comes from, what may affect its accuracy, and also have additional sources for validation.Monitoring System
Identify which additional parameters and systems need to be periodically checked. For example, we monitor the hourly dynamics of user acquisition volumes on a daily basis. This helps us quickly spot significant changes in metrics — whether drops or increases — and take immediate action to investigate. We also use an alert system that notifies us of different trends and deviations.Technical Expertise
When you notice any deviation, you should know how to proceed and what to check. In other words, you need to have a defined course of action. It’s important to be technically proficient and able to independently investigate various cases, understanding the interconnections between systems. The marketer is responsible for quickly identifying the problem and involving other teams in resolving the situation, providing full context.Framework for Handling Anomalies
Create a checklist with essential actions to take in a critical situation. Be sure to outline key contacts, processes for critical situations, and other important aspects that may slip your mind during stressful moments. My team and I have recently done this after encountering a case where an advertising platform redirected 90% of the traffic to an ineffective placement, causing us to lose money in real-time.Networking
Communicate and exchange experiences with other marketers, both within your team and externally. This will expand your perspective and provide you with new interesting insights. Build a close network of contacts you can reach out to at any time. Often, you can learn about various issues with advertising platforms from colleagues.
And finally
A User Acquisition manager is a professional who must always react quickly and flexibly to changes around them and be able to handle stressful situations. So, if you manage to thoroughly prepare yourself and your working platform, accounting for all possible nuances, no challenge will be too daunting. And if you’re excited by this approach to work, join our team!
