Marketing for technology and digital businesses in Vietnam
SaaS · Apps · Platforms · Fintech · Digital products
The one category where marketing reads the numbers as well as product does. The problem is not missing data — it is optimising for a metric that does not lead to revenue here.
Short answer
Technology and digital businesses have better data than any other category we serve, so the problem is not measurement but measuring the wrong thing. Two failures are specific to entering Vietnam: optimising for installs or sign-ups rather than paying users, and carrying a metric set from the home market into one that behaves differently. MWY feeds revenue data back to the ad platforms and rebuilds cost per paying customer.
How the money is made
We group these categories because the money travels the same path, not because they sell the same thing.
1
Buy reach
Meta, TikTok, Google, and advertising inside the marketplaces themselves.
2
Convert to orders
Marketplace storefronts, the web store, livestream, affiliate, discount codes.
3
Bring customers back
Where profit is decided, and the most commonly neglected step.
Five questions this category hears most
What is your cost per paying user, not per sign-up?
Sign-ups are unusually cheap in Vietnam and the conversion to paid is lower than in most markets. Optimising on cost per sign-up drives budget straight into the worst source.
Which market is your metric set from?
CAC thresholds, retention curves and lifetime value from the home market rarely transfer. Keeping them means your Vietnam team is graded with someone else's ruler.
Do the ad platforms know who pays you?
Not unless revenue is fed back through offline or server-side conversions. Right now they optimise for sign-ups, and sign-ups are cheap.
What share of users arrive through channels you do not pay for?
This category usually has strong owned and organic channels that nobody separates out, so paid budget takes credit for users who would have arrived anyway.
Where in onboarding are you losing them?
For a digital product, most of the advertising money is lost inside the product rather than in the advertising. Fixing one onboarding step is usually cheaper than raising the budget.
Metrics worth tracking
And the measurement mistake that usually comes with each.
Profit after ad cost
Per product, not in aggregate.
Common mistake: using ROAS in its place.
Cost to acquire a new customer
New and returning kept separate.
Common mistake: blending them, so returning customers flatter the figure.
Repeat purchase rate
By cohort of first purchase month.
Common mistake: measured across all customers, hiding the trend.
Customer lifetime value
Only trustworthy after two quarters of clean data.
Common mistake: extrapolated from one good month.
Platform concentration
Share of revenue from the largest channel.
Common mistake: nobody tracks it until that channel changes its terms.
What MWY does in this category
- Feed revenue data back to the ad platforms
- Build cost-per-paying-customer reporting by source
- Review the metric set and separate what transfers from what has to be reset for Vietnam
- Separate the contribution of owned channels from paid
- Identify where onboarding loses users and size what fixing it is worth
Other categories, same revenue mechanism
Start by learning the real number
The audit reviews your entire digital operation in Vietnam in four weeks.