Case Study: Monzo

Monzo is revolutionizing the way we bank. By offering a completely app-only banking experience, they are an exciting and remodelled alternative to the banking systems of the past. Instead of solely focusing on selling financial products, they are instead focused on improving the user experience by offering easy to use, mobile adapted banking services. Monzo is a smart bank for the mobile generation.

Find out how Monzo grew and optimized its user base by utilizing Adjust’s deep integration with Facebook.

Monzo's current strategy is focused on acquiring new quality users, who actually start using prepaid cards. Other key metrics for Monzo are whether or not users are delighted enough with the service to refer the app to their friends. As Monzo is now going to be able to offer full-fledged checking accounts, it ultimately wanted to have as many active users as possible who will use banking services once live.

The ability to quickly test new marketing messages against a variety of audiences has meant Monzo was able to have a bullseye approach with its user acquisition strategy and successfully convert downloads into active users. While running several marketing campaigns through Facebook at once, Monzo's marketing team needed to have deeper analytical insights into the campaign performance in order to pinpoint the best performing campaigns and creatives and to optimize accordingly. It also needed a way to evaluate how different targeted customer groups are likely to become loyal users.

Monzo started working with Adjust because of our deep integration with Facebook, which allowed it to measure and attribute every app install and dive deeper into user engagement and activation levels. From the moment Monzo activated the Adjust SDK, all its data was instantly streamed to the Adjust dashboard. Here, they were able to see each campaign, creative, and ad group and the associated group of users that were driven from their marketing activities. Adjust sums up all of the sessions, events and other user activity for each Facebook ad campaign, displaying it either in the dashboard or in CSV reports. Monzo’s team also made use of Adjust’s callbacks for every install of the app. These callbacks send granular Facebook campaign data, allowing the company to sync this additional user meta data for further analysis. Callbacks allow Monzo to do deeper onsite analysis of its user base and make more informed decisions on which campaigns are driving their most activated user.

“Facebook is one of the most important communication channels for us, Adjust’s deep integration made our work fast and easy. We were able to unlock and reach new targeting groups and increase our growth tremendously,” says Tristan Thomas, Head of Marketing at Monzo.

Ultimately, Monzo’s marketing team were able to quickly log into their Adjust dashboard and using cohorts, were able to see which Facebook campaigns resulted in the highest long-term user engagement. Simply put, the company knew which campaigns were delivering results, and the ones that weren’t. This insight has allowed Monzo to optimize its marketing campaigns and spend the budget more effectively.

Monzo rapidly increased its active user base and customer activation. By tracking marketing campaigns in such detail it’s been able to target the right users and keep them activated, cutting campaigns that didn’t deliver high value users, and investing in those that did.

Monzo’s cost-per-acquisition (CPA) decreased by more than 50% as a result of constant evaluation and tinkering with the ad creatives the team ran on Facebook. The marketing team also noticed that if it used creatives showing the in-depth app reporting capabilities they were able to attract users who activated and used a prepaid card, versus using creatives that just showed the app. Having this type of performance data at its fingertips, meant the team was able to quickly evaluate results and experiment.

Monzo has created a viable product, proved not just by the sheer volume of active users it has amassed in a short time, but for the fact that it will now be an independent bank in its own right. Monzo has big plans for the future which include rolling out new account features on top of continuously acquiring users who are tired of brick and mortar banking.