Noom’s international revenue grows by 80% with help from Google

Health and wellness tech startup Noom offers weight loss and exercise tracking apps, with more than 45 million users worldwide.

Their Noom Coach: Health & Weight app helps users by guiding them through behaviour change programmes, encouraging them to create better lifestyle habits with support for health conditions such as diabetes.

Noom launched its first app in the US on Android through Google Play, and was keen to grow its user base outside of North America. Looking at the reach of the service, the team realized that it also held the key to achieving their international expansion plans.

Through Google Play, app developers can add translations and localized graphic assets for their app's store listing page, as well as translations for APK files, in-app products and Google Ads campaigns. So, with the objective of entering the Korean, Japanese, German and Latin American markets, Noom decided to use Google Play to localize its app in order to better connect with users in a number of areas.

Noom conducted extensive analysis to determine the right financial model for each international market it wanted to expand into. This included evaluating its competition in each market along with the local health and wellness spending behaviour. The company then translated its app into five languages and its Google Play store listing page into 11, followed by the pricing experiments to decide which would work best in each market: subscriptions, in-app purchases, or a premium app.

The Noom app includes recipes and meal plans, so it also had to localize its food databases for each market. Using a combination of local food editors, existing food databases and user suggestions, the app now includes local cuisine and popular packaged food brands for each one.

Support is another important element of Noom’s app, with users allocated a personal coach. For its entry into international markets, Noom hired local coaches for each one, which removed any language barriers, but also reduced response times for app users by putting their coaches in the same time zones. Noom also introduced a variety of notification types. This, combined with the local coaches, has increased user engagement by three to four times.

In addition to growing user engagement, Noom has seen an 80% increase in international revenue growth on Android over the past three years after implementing Google Play localization.

In Japan alone, revenue has increased more than 480% during the same time period. "Android's global focus and great localization tooling made the decision to go global much easier,'' says Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President at Noom. “Localization to new markets has been a consistent growth driver at Noom."

The expansion is not over yet. To identify future opportunities, the team is now looking towards other countries with strong Android penetration, and plans to continue applying these localization methods to achieve even greater international growth.

"Android's global focus and great localization tooling made the decision to go global much easier. Localization to new markets has been a consistent growth driver at Noom." Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President, Noom