Past Sessions

• Event: MAU Vegas 25
• Date: Thursday, May 22, 2025
• Speakers: Polina Ishimbaeva, Senior Head of Growth, SplitMetrics, and Mike Kunz, Digital Marketing Lead, Remitly
• Estimated read time: 6 to 8 minutes

Quick Read Summary

The hardest part of global App Store growth is not buying more installs, it is earning trust market by market, in the seconds between impression and download.

Remitly’s playbook treats the App Store as a high intent marketplace where relevance, proof, and local familiarity do the work that broad messaging cannot.

Remitly operates at true global scale, with customers and recipients in 170 plus countries, billions of dollars sent each year, and revenue up 34 percent year over year in Q1 2025. That scale forces a discipline that many teams only talk about, build globally, then localize where it matters, using data, testing, and automation to keep the system running.

The practical takeaway is straightforward. Use Apple Search Ads to capture intent across placements, use app store localization and custom product pages to translate intent into conversion, then use automation to make that approach scalable across storefronts and languages.

The business problem, global scale amplifies local mismatch

Global expansion multiplies the cost of being slightly wrong. A message that performs in one market can quietly underperform in another, not because the product is weaker, but because the cues that signal trust, clarity, and relevance do not translate. Remitly’s team describes this directly, what works in the US will not always work in Great Britain, Spain, or Singapore, so the operating challenge is balancing global reach with localized customer first strategy.

The proof point is the business they are in. Remitly is moving money across borders, which is inherently high trust, high consequence. Their stated vision is “to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders,” and that trust burden shows up immediately in the App Store.

“We’re not just here to move money, we’re here to move lives forward.” Mike Kunz, Digital Marketing Lead, Remitly

Interpretation for growth leaders, your global growth ceiling is often set by the weakest relevance in your funnel, not the strongest creative in your top market. When the category is trust based, app store localization is not a brand nice to have, it is conversion infrastructure.

Practical action

• Audit your top five non US storefronts as if they are separate products, look for trust cues, local currency, local context, and category language.
• Set a baseline per market for install rate and first meaningful action, then decide where localization will move the needle most.
• Treat every “good enough” translation as a hypothesis, not a final state.

App Store localization is a system, not a translation project

Remitly’s approach starts with customer centric details that reduce friction, local flags, local currencies, and an App Store presence available in 18 languages. Those are table stakes, the leverage comes when localization becomes targeted persuasion, tailored to an audience segment, a corridor, or a seasonal moment.

Custom product pages are the mechanism that turns that philosophy into measurable performance. Remitly frames CPPs as a way to go deeper than geo and language, building more customer centric App Store experiences.

The strongest evidence is that Remitly did not present CPPs as a creative experiment, they presented them as a performance lever. A hyperlocal Filipino custom product page, aligned to Filipino specific keywords, delivered a 36 percent lift in install rate and a 52 percent improvement in cost per first transfer. They repeated the pattern with a regional page designed to speak better to African customers, tying it to specific keywords, and saw a 5 percent lift in install rate and a 7 percent decrease in cost per acquisition.

Interpretation, custom product pages are not just “more variants.” They are a controlled way to match intent to proof. When users arrive from a keyword, your CPP can pre answer the reason they searched, who the product is for, and why it is safe to try. That is especially powerful in categories where hesitation is rational.

Practical action

• Pick one segment where trust cues are obvious, for example a corridor, a community, or a top receiving country, then build a CPP that mirrors that reality in messaging and visuals.
• Tie the CPP to the exact keywords that represent that segment, do not rely on broad traffic to discover it.
• Use seasonal CPPs to create relevance at scale, Remitly launches one to two weeks before the holiday to extend performance runway.

Apple Search Ads works best when you map placements to intent states

Many teams treat Apple Search Ads as one channel, Remitly treats it as multiple intent environments inside one storefront. They have tested every App Store placement, with Search Results as their “bread and butter,” Search Tab as a scaling focus, and Product Pages and Today Tab as continuous testing surfaces.

The underlying model is clean. There are shoppers who know what they want, and shoppers who are still forming preference. Remitly uses Search Results and Product Pages to capture high intent and competitive browsing, and uses Search Tab and Today Tab to create discovery and seasonal reach.

Interpretation, the strategic mistake is forcing one message, one keyword set, and one measurement standard across placements. Search Results is an answer to an explicit question. Product Pages is an intervention during comparison. Search Tab is pre intent positioning. Today Tab is culturally timed attention. Treating them as the same funnel step produces noisy learning and under leveraged creative.

Practical action

• Define your placement roles, Search Results for capture, Product Pages for conquest and comparison, Search Tab for discovery seeding, Today Tab for seasonal amplification.
• Align creative to the job of that placement, do not copy paste.
• Measure each placement on the metric that matches intent, for example downstream efficiency on Search Results, incrementality and reach on discovery placements.

Keyword strategy at global scale requires structure, not just volume

At Remitly’s scale, keyword strategy is not a list, it is a repeatable operating model. The team describes three pillars, differentiation, localization, and expansion, spanning brand, competitor, generic, and regional or audience centric keywords, then continuously expanding through discovery campaigns and tooling.

The point is not that every app needs tens of thousands of keywords. The point is that global keyword coverage breaks when it lacks taxonomy. Differentiation prevents you from being trapped inside brand demand. Localization prevents you from copying search behavior assumptions across markets. Expansion prevents stagnation, because the semantic core shifts constantly in fast moving categories.

Interpretation, the fastest way to waste Apple Search Ads budget is to treat global as “translate US keywords.” The fastest way to miss growth is to treat localization as “translate UI strings.” Remitly’s framing makes both failures explicit, global, but do not forget to be local.

Practical action

• Build a three tier keyword taxonomy for each priority storefront, capture, competitive, generic, then layer in region and audience centric terms.
• Require every new market launch to include a localization pass on keyword intent, not just language.
• Use discovery campaigns as an always on mining layer, but only if you have a promotion process that moves winners into core structures.

Automation is not a growth hack, it is how small teams behave like global teams

The most practical part of Remitly’s story is that they are candid about operational limits. When you run multi market programs, manual bidding becomes a tax that steals strategy time. The Remitly and SplitMetrics approach uses automation to reduce workload, then redirect attention to testing and bolder bets.

The evidence is concrete. From January 2023 through April 2025, automation executed more than 8,000 changes, more than 200 automation rules ran in the background, and discovery campaigns surfaced more than 19,000 high potential keywords that Remitly began bidding on.

They also describe a practical automation pattern that matters, using competitive keyword intelligence to identify terms competitors may be using, then automatically adding those terms into test campaigns to move faster and avoid missing opportunities.

Interpretation, automation is not about replacing judgment, it is about protecting judgment. It creates a stable baseline of execution so the team can spend its scarce human attention on strategy, market insight, and creative learning.

Practical action

• List the ten repeatable actions you do weekly, bid adjustments, pausing waste, promoting winners, adding negatives, then automate those first.
• Separate “rules for safety” from “rules for growth,” protect efficiency with guardrails, and pursue expansion with controlled test budgets.
• Use automation to enforce process discipline, not just to chase CPA, this keeps learning clean across markets.

If you cannot test cleanly, you cannot localize confidently

Localization creates variants, variants create questions, which version works, and why. Remitly highlights a testing method that addresses the real issue, traffic imbalance. Switch testing sets up two ad groups with the same keywords but different custom product pages, then automation turns them on and off so each receives equal samples and the result is statistically meaningful.

The supporting benchmark is compelling because it generalizes beyond one brand. SplitMetrics reports that, across its customer base, custom product pages drive an average tap through rate uplift of plus 30 percent versus default product pages, and that 75 percent of the apps they work with have already implemented CPPs in their creative strategy.

Interpretation, teams often abandon localization because results feel inconsistent. The real failure is measurement design. If you cannot attribute lift to a specific CPP variant with balanced traffic, you will default back to global creative, even when local relevance is what wins.

Practical action

• Use switch testing for CPP evaluation when the business decision is meaningful, do not rely on uneven split tests.
• Define one success metric tied to your funnel reality, install rate for top funnel, cost per first transfer for fintech activation, then hold it constant.
• Promote only the variants that win with statistical confidence, then document what changed, messaging, proof, partner cues, so the learning scales.

Conclusion, global growth is earned locally, then scaled mechanically

Remitly’s App Store success is not presented as a trick, it is a system. Build globally, then localize where trust and relevance decide conversion. Use Apple Search Ads across placements to match intent state to message. Use custom product pages to make that message feel made for the customer, not adapted for them. Then use automation and disciplined testing so the program scales faster than the team grows.

If you want a single sentence summary, it is the one they return to, be global, but do not forget to be local, then build the operational engine that lets you do both at once.

About the Speakers

Polina Ishimbaeva, Senior Head of Growth, SplitMetrics. Polina leads global growth strategy at SplitMetrics, an ecosystem of AI powered tools and services built for mobile app marketing. With more than a decade of experience across EdTech and MarTech, she helps top brands design data driven global growth strategies grounded in testing, automation, and customer insight.

Mike Kunz, Digital Marketing Lead, Remitly. Mike oversees global user acquisition at Remitly with a focus on App Store advertising, mobile app localisation, and performance strategy. He leads multi market growth initiatives that support Remitly’s mission to help customers move money across borders with clarity, confidence, and trust.