Success Story

• +318% Subscriptions during peak season.
• 200% Increase in app installs.
• 15.5% Average CR from install to subscriber.
• 960M+ Impressions delivered during peak season.

OnXmaps, Inc. is a Montana-based company whose app, OnX Hunt, connects lovers of the great outdoors with detailed offline maps. Granting access to 1.12 billion acres of public and private land, OnX Hunt makes it possible to explore while staying legal, safe, and ethical. Over 400,000 user-designed trails available on the app are accessed by over a million hunters and hobbyist subscribers. Onx Hunt offers a number of other features for hunting, fishing, and camping enthusiasts.

OnXHunt partnered with Smadex to run programmatic user acquisition campaigns for OnX Hunt and increase the number of app subscribers. The niche app faced extreme seasonal fluctuations in subscriptions, with deer season being the peak opportunity for the app. Their goal was to reach high-intent users who would not only install the app but also become subscribers during these key periods of time.

OnX Hunt was assigned a designated team, including a programmatic strategist, an account manager, and an ad operations representative, to build a programmatic media buying strategy on Smadex. Leveraging their knowledge on seasonal fluctuations and users’ behavior, the team developed a UA strategy to make the most out of peak times of the year.

To decrease risks associated with exponential growth, Smadex temporarily switched the pricing model from a dCPM to a CPA model during the prime deer hunting
season. This period of less than 8 weeks is immediately followed by winter, which is the app’s slowest season. The aim was to accelerate learnings and increase OnX Hunt’s access to inventory by increasing spend and CPM bids.

The hypothesis was that by the end of the period, the increased spend would substantially decrease the raw CPA costs. By operating on a reduced risk CPA model, the campaign managers planned to feed the machine- learning algorithms with more aggressive early-on testing, in order to speed up the exploratory phase at
the most strategic times.

The Insights

Running campaigns on a CPA model enabled OnX Hunt to increase ad budgets without taking on unpredictable financial risk (ROI).

The ability to scale spend during strategic high and low periods allowed OnX Hunt to take advantage of seasonal increased demand and react quickly to
fluctuations in the market. State targeting made it possible to home in on key hunting events and geographic areas.

Advertising with Smadex’s team has not only been a great working relationship, but from a performance perspective, Smadex met and exceeded our expectations right out of the gate and continues to drive sustainable growth in subscriptions.”

Ryan Watson | Lead Product Marketing Manager at onXmaps