Nova Water sought to go beyond third party retail channels and grow sales by building a direct line to its customers.In an ambitious move to take control of its sales channel, leading Saudi bottled water brand Nova Water has successfully transformed its mobile app into a high performing commercial engine, through a results-focused performance campaign executed by Platformance in collaboration with Mindshare KSA.
The problem and the business objective
In the bottled water category, brands compete in a saturated, commoditised environment. On shelves and in marketplaces, visibility is expensive, customer loyalty is limited and price becomes the only differentiator.
Amid fierce shelf competition, Nova Water needed to bypass these constraints. To achieve this, the brand sought to go beyond third party retail channels and grow sales by building a direct line to its customers, improving margins, and gaining control over the end-to-end experience.
The brand’s goal: boost app orders, increase customer acquisition and enhance margins through a digitally led sales model.
Platformance and Mindshare KSA: campaign plan and execution
Platformance and Mindshare KSA responded with a full-funnel strategy centred on business outcomes.
The agencies devised a strategy that would support Nova’s digital growth ambitions. This campaign was designed to shift the brand app from a secondary channel into a core driver of commercial performance.
The agencies unfolded the campaign in two phases:
Phase one: Acquire high-value users:
- Targeted lookalike audiences based on Nova’s highest spending customers.
- Activated seasonal campaigns aligned to peak buying intent.
- Prioritised quality installs from audiences with high conversion potential.
Phase two: Convert installs into orders:
- Shifted optimisation from app downloads to completed purchases.
- Measured performance based on install to order rate.
- Used flexible budget allocation to reinforce what was working.
The execution:
- Custom creative built for seasonal and high intent moments.
- Integrated real time data from Nova’s mobile measurement partner.
- Weekly campaign optimisation based on performance signals.
- Scaled investment behind the audiences and tactics driving the strongest outcomes.
Why the Platformance and Mindshare KSA campaign worked
Custom creatives, real-time performance data, and weekly optimisation cycles allowed the team to continually refine the campaign.
The campaign was engineered to drive outcomes, not activity. Every stage, from targeting to creative to optimisation, was aligned to sales, not engagement.
In coordination with the Nova’s agency, Mindshare KSA, Platformance agreed to a cost per acquisition (CPA) buying model and committed improvement of the install-to-purchase rate.
This alignment of incentives laid the foundations for Nova’s self-owned growth engine around the app, with which Nova Water was able to acquire high value customers at speed, convert them efficiently, and create a repeatable path to revenue.
Results of the campaign
As a result, the campaign was successful leading to:
- 4x increase in app installs.
- 200 per cent uplift in conversion rates.
- 26 per cent install-to-order rate — far exceeding the industry benchmark of 10 per cent.
- 55 per cent of orders came from new customers within four months.
Praising the effectiveness of the campaign, Najem Awar, Senior Marketing Director at Nova Water, said, “Platformance proved to be an essential part of our activation, driving results for our performance campaign. The attention to detail with their data-driven strategy allowed our brand to reap results.”
“These outcomes were driven by aligning every media dollar with business goals,” said Waseem Afzal, Founder and CEO of Platformance. “Rather than optimise for engagement, we focused on what really matters: acquiring and converting high-value users at scale.”
The campaign stands as a testament to how brands in the region can reclaim control of their digital sales channels by integrating media, data and business KPIs.
