Western Union Leverages Localization to Attain 65% Organic Users

Challenge

Western Union needed a way to comprehensively measure its apps’ visibility to a segmented customer base, optimizing them for targeted global audiences while also keeping tabs on big-name competitors. The company could rely on conversions from a strong percentage of its loyal customer base, but leveraging new users on a global scale became a challenge. In addition to competing for visibility against big-name fintech apps such as Paypal and Venmo, Western Union had to differentiate from the pool of new and novel financial apps cropping up in the mobile ecosystem.

Competing with these names requires Western Union to quickly and precisely measure its own apps’ visibility while keeping track of how they stack up against the rest of the industry. For a brick-and-mortar store, the adjustment to an agile workflow for mobile proved to be a challenge — its data alone simply couldn’t help it keep up with the speed of the competition. After examining several options, Western Union turned to Sensor Tower’s Mobile App Insights solutions to keep tabs on mobile performance.

Solution

First, the company picked a few metrics that represented its apps’ overall visibility -- keyword rankings, downloads, and more -- to combine into a comprehensive report. From there, the team extracted data into a CSV file before creating an internal dashboard to track the impact of app metadata changes from build to build. This allowed Western Union’s marketing team to quickly identify how changes to keywords, screenshots, and other elements affected organic downloads — for competitors as well as their own localized services.

The Western Union team was also able to apply Sensor Tower data for important global experiments. For example, the company dug into Traffic Scores to create supporting data for localization efforts in different markets. When considering developing an app in a new language, they would estimate a particular language’s prevalence within a certain country. Were users in the U.S. more likely to search for keywords in French, or German? Answering those questions were integral to growing Western Union’s global audience.

Result

Within a year of experimentation, the Western Union mobile team built a rigorous and dedicated ASO process, delivered a clearer app product, and drove an immediate increase in organic installs. Throughout this time, the revenue split between organic and paid users increased, with a rise in organic users representing 65% of total app installs. In order to further understand market trends, Western Union expanded its Sensor Tower access to the entire suite of products -- giving them more insights into how to grow its global user base.