GrowthDataProduct

Growing an insurance app without overspending on ads

Organisation: iLyF · Easy, Instant Insurances
Role: Co-founder & Chief Product Officer · Owned acquisition end to end
Period: Malaysia

Connected paid campaigns, app-store discovery, and retention to lower acquisition costs. The case study shows monthly results, with peak performance labelled separately.

At a glance

Situation: A once-a-year insurance product where every customer starts as a paid install and lifetime value is capped at one annual premium at a fixed margin.
Stakes: Unless installs came in cheap enough for year one to pay for itself and year two to cost near nothing, the acquisition engine was a subsidy, not a business.
My role: Co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Owned acquisition end to end, including channel structure, store listing, instrumentation and the renewal loop.
Constraints: Finance apps are the most expensive category to acquire in. Margins were set by insurers, and a cohort in a once-a-year product is unreadable for twelve months.
What changed: Cost per install ran RM0.20–1.92 monthly, under the published Android and APAC averages every measured month
LTV:CAC reached 4.4–4.9 in Q4 2024, with acquisition cost recovered in ~0.6 months
Category visibility climbed from near zero to second among every insurer app in Malaysia
Read this if: Your growth spend keeps rising and you cannot say which part of the funnel is earning it back.

cost per install, monthly actuals across the measured period: RM0.20–1.92cost per install, monthly actuals across the measured period
blended cost per install on the single day the dashboard below shows: RM0.19blended cost per install on the single day the dashboard below shows
monthly click-through rate, against a 6.66% cross-industry average: 3.9–9.8%monthly click-through rate, against a 6.66% cross-industry average
of ad clicks became installs, monthly: 15.7–21.3%of ad clicks became installs, monthly
LTV to CAC in Q4 2024, against a 3:1 healthy benchmark: 4.4–4.9LTV to CAC in Q4 2024, against a 3:1 healthy benchmark
to recover customer acquisition cost: 0.6 monthsto recover customer acquisition cost
return on ad spend, Q3 to Q4 2024, with net crossing 1.0 in Q4: 1.21 → 1.65return on ad spend, Q3 to Q4 2024, with net crossing 1.0 in Q4
category visibility against every insurer app in the market: Near-zero → top 2category visibility against every insurer app in the market

The dashboards, and what I read off them

Growing an insurance app without overspending on ads, figure 1 — One day across the live app campaigns. Read down the cost-per-install column rather than the click-through column: RM0.12 on the best campaign against RM0.26 on the worst, for the same product on the same day. The blended RM0.19 is the number the business felt, and it is an average hiding a 2× spread I could act on.

Growing an insurance app without overspending on ads, figure 2 — Store visibility against every insurer app in Malaysia, tracked in AppTweak. iLyF is the dark red line starting near zero. The shape is the tell: incumbents hold a flat high line on brand, challengers spike and collapse when a burst campaign ends, and a steady eight-month slope is what listing and review work looks like when it compounds.

Growing an insurance app without overspending on ads, figure 3 — Estimated daily downloads over the same window. Early on, every peak of ours is a campaign we paid for and the floor between peaks is near zero. By the end the floor has risen underneath the peaks, so the same budget lands on an audience that now finds the app on its own, which is why the peaks got taller without the spend getting larger.

Stack & practices

Google Ads app campaigns
ASO and store listing
AppTweak
Mixpanel
Cohort and ROAS dashboards
Lifecycle automation

The dashboards, and what I read off them

Stack & practices

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