12,161 app downloads at 25 cents each. A $3,000 trial that wrote the scaling plan.
MTN Sudan wanted two numbers before it committed a budget to its self-care app: what does a download cost, and what does a registration cost? Five weeks and $3,000 later it had both, and a plan priced to the registration.
Period: 26 August to 28 September 2022, a paid trial. Every figure is taken from the client report and labelled with its source. No figure has been rounded upward.
The client
MTN Sudan is the local subsidiary of the MTN Group. MyMTN is its self-care app: balances, bundles, support. The brief was a trial to establish unit costs before scale.
Where they started
No reliable view of what acquisition cost. Registrations were happening organically, no unique tracker separated campaign registrations from the baseline, and the reporting had gaps that had to be closed before any number could be trusted.
What was wrong
Committing a large budget without unit economics means buying volume you cannot price. The right first spend is the one that produces the two numbers everything else depends on.
What we did
A five-week app-install campaign across thousands of apps and websites, with daily spend increased in steps only after the data and reporting issues had been fixed.
Registration attribution built honestly: 5,192 registrations in the period, against an estimated organic baseline of 132 a day, leaving 1,576 attributed to the campaign. The report says plainly that a unique tracker would have done this better.
A scaling recommendation priced to outcomes: campaigns of 10,000 registrations at $19,100 each, six to eight weeks, roughly 76,400 downloads per campaign.
What changed
2,777,147 impressions, 55,386 clicks, 12,161 downloads at $0.25 each, and a cost per registration of $1.91. Both objectives of the trial were met, and the client left with a plan it could budget for in units of registrations rather than in units of hope.
The evidence
Every number on this page carries one of three labels, and the period it covers is stated above the figures.
Spend a little to learn the two numbers. Then scale the one that matters.
The sector was telecoms. The move was a bounded trial with honest attribution, then a plan priced per outcome. It is how every paid programme we run begins.
Read the next case, or find out which pattern your marketing fits.
Pro Partner Group: Organic search traffic up 528 per cent in a year. The programme ran until the day the firm was acquired.