Adjust hosts Duolingo for a Fireside Chat at Advertising Week New York 2021

Advertising Week, the world’s largest gathering of marketing, media, and technology professionals, held its flagship New York event in-person last week after a virtual-only event in 2020. The hybrid event brought together marketers and thought leaders from top brands, agencies, and technology companies to discuss industry trends both virtually and face-to-face for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Adjust is proud to have hosted a Fireside Chat with Arthur Jun, Head of Performance Marketing at Duolingo, on "How to Successfully Scale Your Business With Performance Marketing Metrics And Better Optimize Marketing Campaigns." In case you missed it, here are some of the takeaways from the session:

Arthur talked about how Duolingo relies on Adjust as a “single source of truth” internally when it comes to their mobile marketing data. “As a mobile-first business, we really rely on data parity and a deep understanding of user behavior based on attributed sources and confidence in our numbers,” he explained. By using Adjust attribution in conjunction with their internal BI stack, they’ve been able to make smarter decisions and test, learn, and act with agility as they scale.

He also discussed how through using Adjust Measure, Duolingo has been able to visualize, optimize, and improve key metrics such as Day 1 and Day 7 retention, as well as monetization events and behaviors for subscription tracking. They’ve also been working with Adjust's Fraud Prevention to tackle ad fraud. Next, they are looking to use Adjust to further understand their user lifecycles in order to drive more qualified DAUs and subscribers.

This summer, Duolingo became a public company, and as a result, Arthur said they have more aggressive goals than ever. He discussed Duolingo ABC, a spinoff app specially designed for teaching young children how to read, as well as Duolingo English Test, a competitor to TOEFL and IELTS for English language proficiency testing. “We want to continue our mission to make learning free for everyone.”

At the top of every mobile marketer’s mind this year are the recent user privacy changes, starting with iOS 14. So how has Duolingo been handling the change? “It’s definitely an industry shock, that’s been highly anticipated for the past year,” Arthur said.

“Absorbing all of that, we worked closely with Google, Facebook, and Apple on the buy side and the App Store side, and kept our ears on the ground to really understand what the changes really mean, what the implications really are, and how that relates to how we look at our attribution, goals, and KPIs.”

Arthur explained that another component is understanding and educating Duolingo’s internal partners on how big this change really is. “There’s a lot of work ahead, and we’ll continue to evolve and be agile when it comes to SKAdNetwork.”

In light of the changes to iOS, many mobile marketers are exploring new channel possibilities as well as blurring the boundaries between traditional brand and performance marketing — and Duolingo is no exception.

“Brand marketing is huge for us, and we’re integrating our awareness media and down-funnel metrics,” he said. “With Adjust as a partner, we’re able to use tracking URLs and understand in a directional way what our CRM is doing, what partner affiliates are doing, what our newsletters are doing and understand our larger marketing picture. We really are exploring the intersection of true brand and performance marketing.”

Arthur also discussed the potential of Out of Home (OOH), radio and podcasts, and particularly CTV as a channel to learn, test, and grow into. CTV was a hot topic across the event as a whole this year, with CTV ad spend rapidly growing and CTV measurement solutions beginning to become available. For more information and the latest from Adjust regarding CTV, check out our groundbreaking measurement solution CTV AdVision, download our ebook exploring how mobile advertisers can master CTV, or request a demo today.