Retention and Expansion
Advertising to people who already pay you: to keep them, to bring them back, or to sell them the next thing. Almost always the cheapest revenue in the account and almost always the last thing anyone builds, because it does not feel like marketing. The audience is small, known and reachable by email for free — so the honest position is that paid should only cover what email cannot: people who stopped opening, people mid-decision about renewing, people who would buy the second product if they knew it existed. If your email list reaches them fine, do not pay to reach them again.
What retention and expansion is judged on
Cost per expansion event (upgrade, renewal, or win-back). The landing page has to ask for An in-account action — upgrade, renew, enable the feature — behind their existing login. Never a marketing page that makes an existing customer re-enter details you already hold. — if it asks for something else, the campaign underperforms for a reason that never appears in the ad account, because people arrive expecting one thing and are shown another.
The offer that fits: upgrade, add-on, renewal, referral, or win-back.
It usually fails by paying to reach people email already reaches for nothing
That is the first entry on the list AdPlaybook checks a generated campaign against. The rest:
- Paying to reach people email already reaches for nothing. Check the email path first; if it works, this loadout is not the answer.
- No holdout, so natural renewals are counted as ad-driven — the most inflated number in the whole account.
- Advertising an upgrade to customers who are unhappy with what they already bought, which accelerates churn.
- Customer list not refreshed, so recent churners keep seeing upgrade ads and recent upgraders keep seeing the same offer.
- Frequency unbounded against a tiny audience, turning a paying customer into someone who hides your ads.
Surfaces it suits, and one it contradicts
Rated highest for meta, linkedin. Rated 0.25 or below for reddit — the app will not offer it there, because the surface contradicts the approach rather than merely suiting it poorly.
What the creative has to do for retention and expansion
Speak to someone who already knows you — no re-introduction, no explaining what the product is. Show the part they are not using, the outcome they have not reached, or the next tier. For win-back, name the gap honestly rather than pretending they never left. Feature-in-use footage beats aspiration here, because the audience can already tell the difference.