Plata reached 1050% Install Growth with 12% Lower CPI in Apple Ads within 2 weeks

Summary

Plata, one of Mexico’s fastest-growing fintechs, turned to Asapty for a breakthrough in its Apple Ads performance. Using Asapty’s proprietary optimization strategy, Plata became the leading Apple Ads performer in the Mexican fintech category in just two weeks.

Within the first two days, with Asapty’s unique approach and expertise, Plata managed to increase brand traffic impression share from 11–20% to over 91-100%, and acquire 1050% more installs while dropping CPI by 12%. Competitors that had been highly active in Apple Ads couldn’t match the strategy, leaving Plata as the clear category leader.

Background

Plata launched in 2021 as a Mexico-based fintech dedicated to building a full-stack digital bank from the ground up for a young, digitally-oriented audience.

From the start, Plata applied the principle of Hard Things First — beginning with credit cards, the most complex product in consumer finance, to prove its operational strength and risk discipline. But its vision extended beyond product challenges.

In December 2024, Plata obtained a full banking license in Mexico, gaining a strong edge in the crowded fintech space. The license brought the credibility and consumer trust that many digital lenders in the region still lack.

At the same time, rising smartphone adoption created fertile ground for mobile-first banking. However, traditional banks, constrained by outdated or missing digital tools and poor UX, left a clear gap in the market. Plata seized the moment by building its own AI-powered, cloud-native core system and mobile app — ensuring full control over performance, security, and user experience. With this, Plata positioned itself between two extremes: traditional banks with regulation but no digital agility, and fintechs with innovation but no formal credibility.

This strategy brought unparalleled success. By early 2025, the company secured $160 million in Series A funding, reaching a $1.5 billion valuation and unicorn status. The flagship Plata Card now counts over one million active users who manage their accounts directly through the Plata mobile app.

Yet, the mobile banking market is one of the most rapidly evolving niches globally, increasingly competitive, with digital-first players and traditional banks worldwide racing to innovate, and Mexico is no exception. With high growth ambitions for its app, Plata acknowledged Apple Ads as an essential acquisition channel to reach high-intent users directly in the App Store.

Challenges

Before working with Asapty, Plata had already been running Apple Ads, but couldn’t turn them into steady, scalable growth. They focused on generic and competitor keywords — a common tactic for fintech apps trying to capture broad intent in the App Store. But those campaigns didn’t perform as expected. Users searching for general terms like “credit card” or “mobile bank” converted inconsistently and at higher CPIs, making it hard to reach meaningful scale.

Brand campaigns were also underperforming, with branded traffic share of voice stuck below 11-20%. Competitors were bidding aggressively on the Plata name, driving up costs and intercepting users who were already looking for the app directly. The result was a fragmented traffic mix — expensive to maintain and too unstable to drive consistent results.

How Asapty helped unlock the Apple Ads potential

Plata needed a dramatic change and boost in their Apple Ads performance - the change that Asapty could bring with our unique approach, which no other solution can offer in the market. With Asapty’s proprietary strategy, Plata’s team increased the brand traffic share from 20% max to over 91-100% within just two days, while decreasing CPI by 12%. Asapty platform helped Plata reclaim high-intent traffic from competitors and secure top visibility for its own brand name. At the same time, generic and competitor keyword volumes expanded from 0 to 100% of category share across the fintech segment, maintaining a stable CPA.

Plata had been running competitor and generic keyword campaigns before partnering with Asapty, but most were switched off after only a few days due to their low performance. As a result, there wasn’t enough historical data for us to run a statistically meaningful before-and-after comparison. However, we were able to identify a few keywords from the old campaigns that had decent traffic volumes — and for those, Asapty reduced CPA by 3-4 times.

Finding relevant Apple Ads keywords and creating a proper account structure

First, we used Asapty Keyword Suggester, a proprietary keyword research tool designed for deep, 360-degree discovery. It identifies every relevant keyword for an app, from brand and generic terms to direct and indirect competitors, while also capturing multilingual variations, local phrases, and common typos.

With the Keyword Suggester, we mapped the entire fintech keyword landscape and uncovered every search term relevant to Plata. We then clustered campaigns by keyword type and intent, giving the team granular control over category performance and enabling strategic scaling across volumes. This laid a strong foundation for the next step — a precise and fully scalable account setup.

After collecting all keywords, we rebuilt Plata’s account using a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) structure within the same Keyword Suggester tool. This setup allowed the team to see impression share and Cost per Event for each keyword in one dashboard. Plata’s team could now see this data clearly and identify which keywords still had growth potential and which reached the limit, balancing visibility and costs.

Optimizing Apple Ads campaigns for higher efficiency

At this stage, we focused on maximizing campaign performance while keeping costs under control and maintaining traffic volume. Goal-based optimization proved to be the ideal framework for this task, enabling Apple Ads algorithms to prioritize cost-efficiency without compromising scale. At Asapty we developed own proprietary goal-based optimization feature designed for optimizing Apple Ads.

The goal-based optimization feature from Asapty Platform improves results in three key ways:

• It tweaks your bids to get you the results you want at the price you're aiming for.

• By automating the process, it frees the team from manual bid-by-bid adjustments and allowing scale without loss of efficiency.

• It integrates end-to-end analytics on each account level, giving visibility into which campaigns, keywords or audiences deliver real value — enabling better decisions and elimination of low-value traffic.

Because of these three factors, the feature helps you balance reach (impression or traffic share) with profitability (unit cost, conversion quality) and achieve optimal outcomes.

This tool allowed Plata’s team to track and manage cost-per-event across all keywords, ensuring campaigns targeted users with real engagement intent. This enabled Plata’s rapid and controlled scaling aligned with performance KPIs.