Introduction

Soft Launch To Worldwide Launch Strategy For New Games Using Facebook Ads

If you have a new mobile game and you want to bring it to a worldwide market, you’ll need an effective launch strategy with effective user acquisition at its core. Read our Facebook Gaming Playbook to learn the three launch phases.

Launching a game is more than getting it into the stores and managing user feedback in the forums. Success is largely hinged on attracting and retaining the right users for your game in each market.

Here, we’re focusing on how Facebook can help you achieve this goal. What’s particularly challenging is that user acquisition advertising evolves fast. What worked for Facebook user acquisition advertising in 2019 won’t work nearly as well in 2020, and here, we’re going to help you focus on the future.

Facebook Gaming Playbook: What you need to know for 2020

Facebook pivoted toward algorithm-driven advertising last February and never looked back. Their new requirement for Campaign Budget Optimization is more evidence of the algorithm taking over, and Facebook’s Power5 recommendations for advertising best practices just drove the
point home further. Both Facebook and Google have simplified and automated a lot of the levers user acquisition managers used to rely on. That
trend will continue and accelerate in 2020. Now is the time for you to prepare your accounts for that acceleration by structuring them for scale
with the best practices we’ll describe here.

The big takeaway of Facebook UA advertising in 2019 is it’s best to let the Facebook algorithm do what it does best: Automated bid and budget
management and automatic ad placements. Let humans do things the algorithm can’t do well (yet), like optimizing creative strategy. If you want to take your game from soft launch to worldwide launch using Facebook’s 2020 best practices, we’ve created this three-part series with our recommendations.

These are the launch best practices we’ve developed by working with hundreds of clients, profitably managing over $3 billion in social ad spend. Based on an awful lot of trial and error (and quite a lot of successes, too), this is how to get the best return on ad spend possible and to launch your app efficiently.

It breaks out into three phases:

1. Early Creative Testing in the Soft Launch

2. Taking Your Campaign to the Next Level in the Worldwide Launch

3. Scaling Worldwide Through Optimizations

Table of Contents

Phase One: Early Creative Testing in the Soft Launch

Identifying the most efficient campaign setup
Structure for Scale
Compliment the Algorithm
Results During the Learning Phase
A word about campaign structure
Testing and optimizing creative
Collect lifetime value data
Shifting Towards The Worldwide Launch

GO TO SECTION

Phase Two: Taking Your Campaign to the Next Level in the Worldwide Launch

Which geographies to use
Testing audiences
Which optimization goal works best
Developing a campaign structure grid
The Learning Phase

GO TO SECTION

Phase Three: Scaling Worldwide through Optimization

Audience Expansion
Creative Testing
Creative Refresh

GO TO SECTION