Pop Ads Case Study for E-Commerce: How to Profit from Shopee App in Vietnam

Why We Chose Pop Ads for This Shopee App Offer

The client was promoting the Shopee app offer, Asia's largest online platform, and required a traffic source that could deliver volume without burning through their budget. Pop ads in Vietnam seemed like the perfect match.

Pop traffic is commonly used for e-commerce offers because it ensures a massive reach and doesn't bring creatives headaches you face in banner or native formats. Plus, pop ads are cost-efficient, which made it realistic to hit our client's bold CPA target of $0.32 per app install.

Сhallenge

As already mentioned, the goal was to drive as many app installs as possible while maintaining the tight $0.32 CPA. We needed high volume and a low price at the same time, which required a methodical approach to testing and optimization. Fortunately, RichAds provided all the necessary tools to scale this Shopee app advertising campaign: premium traffic sources, detailed source-level data, and whitelisting capabilities.

Solution

We built a simple funnel: Publisher’s site → Pre-lander → Shopee App and tailored the pre-lander for the Vietnamese audience. We used visual blocks showcasing trending Shopee products (Electronics + Beauty categories), a limited-time discount timer to create urgency, and strong CTAs to boost engagement.

We tested several CTA variations, ultimately sticking with the three most converting options:

"Shopee App Sale — Install to unlock hidden discounts"
"Flash Deals active → Open the app"
"Free Delivery inside the Shopee app — install"

To maximize efficiency in this pop ads Vietnam case study, we split our approach into two phases:

Phase 1: Testing on Premium Sources for Pop Ads

Campaign Setup:

Strategy: broad targeting on Premium sources

Offer: private

Format: pop ads

GEO: VNM

Duration: 1 week

Budget: $1,000

CPM: $1

Targeting: mobile, no OS limitations

Frequency cap: 1 click per user

We launched our first campaign with a $150 daily budget to test the traffic.

We targeted mobiles without specifying OS since pop ads capture both Android and iOS users well and set a frequency cap at 1 visit per user per day.

We selected only RichAds' premium sources and left targeting wide with no additional filters.

The goal of this first Shopee app advertising campaign was to collect data, so we didn't expect any profits yet.

This broad test brought us 1,000,000 clicks and 650000 clicks to store, which means 65% of users got to the last stage of our affiliate funnel – Shopee app. We got 1,850 installs total. The CPA came out to $0.54 with a 0.28% conversion rate and 60% win rate. As expected, the price was higher because we were testing a large pool of sources – that was fine. We have now identified our best-performing sources for the whitelist and can move to the second phase.

Phase 2: Launching Pop Ads with a Whitelist

Campaign Setup:

Strategy: targeting on the whitelist of high-converting sources only

Offer: private

Format: pop ads

GEO: VNM

Duration: 1 week

Budget: $1,500

CPM: $1

Targeting: mobile, no OS limitations

Frequency cap: 1 click per user

We paused the first campaign and launched a new one using only the top 20 sources from Phase 1. Now, our goal was to lower the CPA while maintaining the traffic volume and quality. We kept the same targeting settings (mobile traffic, 1 click frequency cap) but slightly increased our daily budget to $220.

The second e-commerce pop ads campaign delivered 1,500,000 clicks and 4,400 installs in one week. The CPA dropped to $0.34, the conversion rate jumped to 0.42%, and the win rate decreased from 60% to 45%. The lower win rate is normal and actually demonstrates that we were being selective, buying only from quality sources.

Results

In two weeks, we got 6,250 app installs at $0.34 CPA – only $0.02 above the target, which is great considering the volume we delivered. The whitelisting strategy proved that pop ads can absolutely work for e-commerce app installs, even with tight CPA goals.

Comparing the results of two campaigns in this Shopee app case study, you can see how we lowered CPA by 37% and increased installs by 138% simply by cutting out underperforming sources.

If you're running pop traffic for e-commerce campaigns, it may be worth trying the same approach: test wide, find your winners, whitelist them, and scale. With the RichAds managers' help and advanced optimization tools, you can achieve even greater results.

App installs

6250

Cost per conversion

$0.34

Impressions

2.5 million

Clicks

2.5 million

CPM

Spend

$2500

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Pop Ads Case Study: How to Promote Shopee App Campaign in Vietnam