With summer right around the corner and lockdowns disappearing, people are paying more and more attention to their bodies as well as their minds. Accordingly, one of the most popular categories is the health and fitness apps genre, especially meditation/self-help-based applications.
So how do these apps keep up with increasing competition and demand? And which of them are the most aggressive on the paid growth aspect in their user acquisition strategy for apps?
Using our Mobile Ad Intelligence tool, we located the top 10 advertising health and fitness apps in the App Store and the Play Store. We examined 2 meditation apps and their paid strategy in detail.
BetterMe: MentalHealth is the top advertiser in both stores according to their impression score. In terms of the number of creatives, Mediotopia is leading the App Store with 2145 unique creatives during May 2021, while in the Play Store Fabolous published the most creatives with a count of 902.
BetterMe: Mental Health: Paid User Acquisition
BetterMe: Mental Health is a self-help app with meditation and relaxation based
Starting out with mobile ad networks, we can see that BetterMe is focusing its efforts on Facebook channels.
Even though the user acquisition process got harder after the deprecation of the IDFA, Facebook advertising channels are still a good way to advertise health and fitness apps.
When it comes to their creative strategy, we can see some A/B testing. Similar creatives are published with different colors, images or shapes.
Here we can see the exact same creative just in two different colors. Color choice is an important factor when designing creative assets.
BetterMe mostly prefers image creatives which make up 86% of their assets. Finding more effective creatives through testing is one of the profound ways to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
Due to high conversion rates and ads that allow for demographic targeting, Apple Search Ads is becoming increasingly popular amongst Health & Fitness apps.
BetterMe is also using Apple Search Ads as a user acquisition channel. They are using Apple Search Ads in 44 countries! Although the number of keywords they bid on is not very impressive.
In addition to brand keywords of their competitors, BetterMe is also getting impressions from generic keywords. Notice that the generic keywords that they get a good chunk of impressions are keywords that they also organically rank for, once again demonstrating the relationship between Apple Search Ads and App Store Optimization.
Meditopia
Meditopia is one of the biggest brand names in the Health and Fitness category. They have been using paid growth tactics effectively for quite some time, which helped them to take their place amongst the top Health and Fitness apps.
During May 2021, they published over 2,890 creatives through 3,826 publishers. Unlike BetterMe, Meditopia is also using conventional mobile ad networks in addition to Facebook channels. Additionally, they are also using mostly video creatives instead of images.
In today’s app marketing world, it is crucial to localize your creatives for different regions. Serving creatives with different content and translated text in different languages will help you to keep user acquisition costs as low as possible. Seeing an ad in their local language increases the chances of people clicking on your ad. 
Meditopia is very active in the localization aspect as can be seen in the above chart. Their creatives are being published in 9 languages!
They are also supporting their mobile ad network activities with Apple Search Ads. Meditopia is using Apple Search Ads in 18 countries. Meditopia is also using Creative Sets for conversion optimization, as you can see through our Search Ads Intelligence tool.
Creative Sets allow app marketers to customize their product page according to different variables. By presenting the right content to the right users, apps can lower their user acquisition costs and increase conversion and tap-through rates.
As you can see, for the keyword ‘sleep sounds free’, Meditopia is using 3 Creative Sets. While one of these sets is a more general one with the theme of ‘meditation’, the other creative sets are specifically about sleep. This way, for users who are searching for a sleep related keyword, Meditopia is able to present a more convincing asset.
That is it for the Top Advertising Health and Fitness apps of May 2021. If you would like to draw your own insights from our all-in-one tool, sign up today!
