A consumer fintech app helping people reduce credit card debt. How iExcel built the mobile growth infrastructure — ASO, keywords, paid, creative, attribution — for a scaled launch.
Relief is a consumer fintech app — iOS and Android — built to help people reduce and resolve credit card debt. The product logic sits in a category with real emotional weight: the person opening the app has usually done a lot of quiet math before they downloaded it. That reality shapes every downstream decision — the store copy, the ad creative, the CTA, the tone.
When iExcel picked up the engagement, Relief wasn't asking for a campaign. The team was preparing for scaled mobile acquisition — the moment when paid budget, install volume, and store visibility all have to sync up on the same day. What the product needed underneath that moment was the operational layer nobody sees on the app store: the ASO package, the keyword universe, the paid buildouts across every channel, the creative library, and the attribution stack that tells you which of the above is actually working.
Foundation, not fireworks. Everything below was built, approved, and staged to publish — the launch-readiness posture a fintech app needs before it turns the ad spend on.
App Store Optimization is where a mobile app's growth story either compounds quietly for years or leaks quietly for years. For Relief, we built the full ASO package end-to-end — iOS and Android — anchored on keyword research pulled from app-store intelligence and a final keyword set the product, legal, and unit teams could stand behind.
The deliverable set included the app name — "Relief - Payoff Your Debts" — the subtitle "Credit card debt relief," the promotional text, the iOS long description, the iOS keyword field, and the Android title, short description, and long description. Every string was drafted, reviewed against category-sensitive language rules, and re-checked against the approved keyword set.
The package cleared Relief Legal on 11/13/2023 and UNIT on 11/15/2023, marked "Ready to Publish" — the sign-off state a fintech ASO submission needs to reach before it ever ships.
That legal-approved package moved the moment it went live. The primary competitor term climbed from rank five to rank two — a +60% relative position gain — while the core category term advanced from rank 14 to rank eight, a +43% gain in the same window. Organic movement the fintech category rarely sees before paid spend even launches.
A mobile app doesn't launch — it goes live across a dozen surfaces at once. Store listings, ad accounts, attribution partners, creative libraries, tracking SDKs. The Launch-Readiness Board is the way we tracked whether each of those surfaces was actually ready when the ad spend flipped on.
A mobile app in the debt-relief category has to compete on the exact language a consumer types into their search bar — often at a hard moment. The keyword research had to reflect that reality. We built one connected universe across four layers: what the paid team would bid against, what the organic team would target, and what the store listing itself needed to be discoverable for.
The result was a single, sized keyword file every workstream could pull from without contradicting each other — the PPC team, the SEO team, and the ASO team all reading off the same map.
~129K monthly search volume across the paid search footprint — sized for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads bidding.
~150K monthly search volume in the non-branded layer — the queries a consumer types before they know Relief exists.
~42K monthly search volume in the organic footprint — content-and-page-worthy queries prioritized for the site side.
Store-visibility keywords tied back to the iOS keyword field and Android descriptions — the ones we'd watch move.
The paid layer isn't one campaign — it's an interlocking set of ad accounts, taxonomies, targeting rules, and creative slots that all have to be reviewable in one place. For Relief, we built the whole buildout as a set of connected workbooks and one live launch-status tracker.
Creative for a debt-relief category isn't loud. The person seeing the ad is usually alone with their phone at a moment they didn't want to be in. That posture has to shape every asset, headline, and CTA — softer imagery, clearer promise, no urgency theater, no fear framing.
We scoped 55 creative placements and asset requests across the channel surface — sized against the paid buildout so the media team wouldn't run out of assets a week into a launch. And we drafted a CTA library aligned to the moment: verbs that promise action without shaming the reader for needing to take one.
Nothing in the workstreams above pays back without an attribution layer that actually answers the questions leadership asks after a launch — which channel drove that install, which creative pulled the CPM down, which keyword surfaced in the store. For a mobile app, that layer starts with a mobile measurement partner, an SDK integration, and a cross-channel event schema that agrees with itself.
We wired the AppsFlyer integration across the paid stack — Meta, Google, X, TikTok, and Microsoft — with a launch-status tracker sitting on top so every channel's integration state was reviewable in one row. The SDK plumbing, the event schema, and the deep-link posture were staged in the same order the ad spend would need to flip them on.
Once that wiring went live, the tracked install mix told its own story: non-organic channels drove 59% of every tracked install during the attribution testing window — the read that confirmed the SDK and event schema were routing paid-channel activity correctly, not just counting noise.
The point wasn't to launch fast. The point was to launch measured.
Mobile Measurement Partner wired across the paid stack. SDK integration, event schema, and channel handshakes prepared for the launch surface.
Paid search workbook, ad-copy library, BOFU workbook, and conversion tag map prepared for both engines against the same keyword universe.
Targeting workbooks, creative slot logic, and the Special Ad Category constraint applied where the platform requires it. One taxonomy across all three.
App-store keyword research feeding both the ASO package and the ongoing 100-keyword tracking list — the ones we'd watch move once live.
Email and lifecycle consulting scoped to sit downstream of the install — the retention layer a fintech app leans on once the acquisition motion is on.
One tracker across AppsFlyer, Meta, Google, X, TikTok, and Microsoft — every integration state marked as "ready / not ready" against the launch calendar.
If you're a consumer fintech preparing for scaled mobile acquisition — with a category-sensitive category, an ASO package that has to clear legal review, a keyword universe that needs to be sized across paid, organic, and store surfaces at once, and a mobile-attribution wiring problem sitting under it all — the Relief engagement is the shape of what to do about it before the ad spend turns on.
ASO first. Keyword universe second. Paid buildouts staged against a live tracker. Creative scoped for the actual moment your consumer is in. Attribution wired so the launch doesn't happen twice.
Most agencies sell the media spend. iExcel builds the launch-readiness posture underneath it — so when the spend does turn on, the acquisition data is actually trustworthy.
An ASO package that clears legal. A keyword universe your paid, SEO, and ASO teams can all read off. A paid buildout staged across every channel with attribution wired to match. Book a 15-minute sanity check on your mobile launch posture — we'll tell you what's under-built.
Book a 15-min sanity check →