Promoting a food delivery mobile app in a foreign market: Wolt case study

The IT company Wolt was founded in 2015 with its headquarters located in Helsinki, Finland. This technology firm offers a service for ordering and delivery of food from restaurants, and today it works in more than 70 countries across the globe. Around 7,000 restaurants are represented on the platform, and the number of users is over 2 million. In 2020, the company expanded its range of products and now also offers delivery of cosmetics, pet food, and pharmaceutical products.

In February 2021, the company began to use the myTarget advertising platform to communicate with Russian-speaking users from Kazakhstan in order to attract new clients and also increase sales. A campaign was considered effective if it attracted more new users at a reduced cost.

To reach the maximum number of users and optimize the ad creation process, multiformat was chosen as the main advertising format. This allows you to broadcast ads on all Mail.ru Group platforms and the advertising network. The Wolt team uploaded the necessary images, headlines, and ad copy, and the system automatically adapted them for the different formats of the platforms on which the ads were placed. Creatives were shown both on mobile and on desktop platforms.

Within the campaign, app install optimization with payment for impressions (oCPM) was employed. This allows you to show your ad to the users who are most likely to take the targeted action. After the team entered the targeted cost per installation, the algorithm automatically chose the right audience to attract the maximum number of installs while sticking to the prescribed cost. Cost per click (CPC) was also used.

To reach the most carefully suited audience, the Wolt team used socio-demographic targeting. To reach available users in the quickest time, they chose a fast plan for budget allocation.

While developing the creatives, it was important to understand which of them worked better. They were helped in this by A/B testing. The highest results by clickability rating were achieved by the following three ads:

The number of new users, meaning those who placed an order within one day after installing the app, increased month on month. So, in February 2021, the figure increased by 34%, in March by another 19%, and in April by 25% compared to the previous month. In May, the number of new users also increased, and in June it dropped insignificantly – by 3% compared to the previous month. These results show the advertising campaigns became better and better in terms of audience targeting.

The team also achieved their other set aim – reducing the acquisition cost of a new user. This went down by 14.3% in March, by a further 36% in April, and by 6.7% in May compared to the previous month. Finally, the figure was reduced by a further 6.9% in June.

Using myTarget, Wolt managed to optimize their campaign and also attract new users to their app at a reduced cost. Their successful experience with the tool inspired the team to scale up their project and enter new markets in the Baltic States and Israel, again using the advertising platform's tools.