See our best practices for what’s working right now with Google App campaigns, SKAN Discrepancies, Modeling Delays (pre/post iOS 14.5) and Firebase Events.
According to Google, bidding on Firebase (FiB events) resulted in a median +13% increase in installs and a +20% increase in in-app events with no significant change to cost per conversion.
Advertisers benefit by understanding sources of discrepancies between SKAN data and Google Ads reporting, which may include views, web-to-app, cross-network attribution, attribution windows, and reinstalls.
For iOS campaigns, advertisers should expect at least a 5-day lag in-app campaign modeled conversions and should avoid assessing performance in the first two weeks or before the campaign has generated at least 100 conversions (purchases, events, installs, etc.).
How To Optimize Google App UA Right Now
As mobile app advertisers adjust to an evolving ad ecosystem with the loss of IDFA and increasingly automated media buying across networks, Consumer Acquisition brings you the most up-to-date recommendations for Google App UA Campaigns. As a Google App Preferred Creative Partner Agency, we have market insights and creative expertise from managing over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and web-based performance advertisers.
Here’s how to better understand, measure, and optimize your Google App UA campaigns right now.
Bidding on Firebase (FiB) events increases performance
App campaigns bidding on FiB events performed better than app campaigns bidding on non-FiB events. Google reports that the median campaign that switched to using Google Analytics for Firebase conversions for bidding saw a +13% increase in installs and a +20% increase in in-app events with no significant change to cost per conversion.
Understanding Google Ads Reporting vs. SKAN
Adjust and Appsflyer dashboards now show Google SKAN data. Below are the sources for common discrepancies between SKAN data and Google Ads reporting, including views, web-to-app, cross-network attribution, attribution windows, and reinstalls.
What’s working for us right now on Google:
Strongest performance from English language targeting Germany, UK, France, Canada & Netherlands
French and German language campaigns targeting tier 1 countries in Europe show promise
The key performance lever is the bid, adjusted periodically based on 7D ROAS
Targeting only Android devices; iOS campaigns, when tested in Q1, had low yields
For timely tips and trends, head over to September’s Hot Tips article to see what’s working on Facebook, TikTok, and Snap right now.
Best Practices For Optimizing Google App Campaigns
Target
Use a target CPA (tCPA). If you haven’t tested this bidding strategy yet, start now. We’ve found it to be a very efficient use of ad budget.
Use a target return on ad spend (tROAS). This feature isn’t out just yet, but it will be available in June for App Campaigns on iOS and Android. Once it’s live, you’ll be able to, say, specify that you want Google to find users who will spend three times what it cost you to acquire them. What advertiser wouldn’t want to do that?
Budget
Set your daily budget caps at least 50X target of CPI or 10X of target CPA.
Don’t change target CPI/CPA bids by more than 20% in 24 hours until your campaign is generating 20-30 targeted in-app events per day.
Target CPI campaigns’ bids should start at least $4-5, even if your CPI goal is lower.
Target CPA campaigns’ bids should start at least 20-30% higher than the goal.
Don’t wait until your app has launched to start building your user base: Pre-launch campaigns are available, and they work.
Creative
Be generous with creative assets. Google App Campaigns work best with a variety of creative – both creative formats and messaging approaches. The algorithm will figure out how to mix and match your images, text, and videos… but you’ve got to give it enough assets to find the ideal combination.
Always include video creative. We’ve found that if a campaign hasn’t been using videos, adding just two videos to their creative asset mix can increase the campaign’s conversions by 25%. So yes, maybe videos are a bit more expensive. Maybe they do take a bit longer to create. But they punch above their weight when it comes to ROAS. And besides – if you don’t want to make videos, we can do it for you.
When you get your videos made, make sure they can “flex,” as in that they can appear in different views and devices, and still look good.
Think beyond user acquisition. We’re seeing some really nice returns with retention campaigns. If you do it right, it absolutely pays to advertise to all those people who downloaded your app but then either didn’t use it or never bought from it. They’ve already done the hard part of installing the app – often they just need a little nudge to activate or to make their first purchase.
Why Trust Our UA Tips?
Founded in 2013, we are a technology-enabled marketing services company and creative studio that has managed over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and performance advertisers across Google, Facebook, TikTok, Snap and Apple Search ads.
We provide end-to-end creative and user acquisition services for mobile app marketers via performance-oriented creative storytelling, integrated UA, and creative optimization.
We provide game-changing results driven by quantitative optimization and a relentless focus on increasing your net profit driven by client-specific, creative learning agendas.
For the fourth year in a row, Inc. magazine has named Consumer Acquisition to its annual Inc 5000 list, which recognizes the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.
Consumer Acquisition on Inc 5000 List 4th Consecutive Year
Brian Bowman, CEO, and founder of Consumer Acquisition: “In our fourth consecutive year of being recognized by one of the most important rosters of leading companies, we are again truly honored to be included by Inc. magazine. This recognition is entirely a credit to the people of our organization that continue to drive growth and innovation at Consumer Acquisition year after year.”
Not only have the companies on the 2021 Inc 5000 list been very competitive within their markets, but this year’s list also proved especially resilient and flexible given 2020’s unprecedented challenges. Among the 5,000, the average median three-year growth rate soared to 543 percent, and median revenue reached $11.1 million. Together, those companies added more than 610,000 jobs over the past three years.
Today’s news of Consumer Acquisition being featured in the Inc. Magazine Inc 5000 list comes just months after the launch of its Creative Studio CA+, led by General Manager Evan Astrowsky. CA+ breaks the mold on creative agency services both in creative development and pricing model. Today’s advertisers need to be nimble and able to reach their audience across a wide array of platforms and mediums. This includes social advertising on Facebook, Google, TikTok, Instagram, Snap, and Apple Search Ads. And also advertising on television, digital out of home, online video UGC, influencer campaigns, and more. CA+ brings together best-in-class creative development, production, post-production, testing, and optimization all in one scalable creative house.
Founded in 2013, Consumer Acquisition is a technology-enabled marketing services company. They manage over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile games and apps. In 2021, the company launched its Creative Studio CA+. Overall, the company provides creative services, user acquisition services, and self-service tools for Facebook and Google mobile app advertisers.
Get top creative trends for RPGs, including for Disney Sorcerer’s Arena
See creative best practices in action
Compare persona-led creative designed for different motivations
Disney Sorcerer’s Arena High Performing Ad Creative
Once considered a messaging app for millennials, Snapchat now reports 293 million people use the platform every day. With Snapchat reaching 75% of millennials and Gen Z, mobile game advertisers willing to test the platform will unlock new audiences with the right ad creative. As we have reported, the loss of IDFA has caused massive disruption to the mobile ad ecosystem, so now is the time for experimentation.
Based on MobileAction Ad Intelligence data, we compared five styles of ad creative for Disney Sorcerer’s Arena, a card collecting turn-based RPG based on assembling a team of Disney and Pixar characters to battle against other players. The broad appeal of Disney’s IP is a perfect opportunity to experiment with persona-led creative designed for different motivations and interests. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the platform, Snapchat creative requires a unique approach; for more on this, read our Snapchat Ad Creative Best Practices here.
Our creative learning agenda incorporates intensive research into game genre, personas, and user motivations as well as understanding what ads our target users are responding to in other markets.
Here are competitor trends we’re seeing for RPG ad creative:
Game Trailer: Overview of the game showcasing characters, gameplay, and graphics. (Marvel Future Fight, Summoners War, Disney Heroes: Battle Mode)
Gameplay: Simple gameplay, sometimes simulated or augmented. (Marvel Strike Force: Squad RPG)
Characters: Concepts built around game character personalities, powers, and origins.
(Raid: Shadow Legends, Looney Tunes World of Mayhem, Rise of Kingdoms)
Player Focused: Player types, player interviews, and PVP gameplay.
(AFK Arena, Marvel Contest of Champions)
Influencers/UGC: Leveraging influencer and player interviews & reviews
(Raid Shadow Legends, Rise of Kingdoms, The Seven Deadly Sins)
Pop Culture: Ads that have pop culture and lifestyle as a primary element.
(Looney Tunes World of Mayhem)
Competitive: Comparing the app against other apps or games. (AFK Arena)
However, without deterministic tracking on iOS or effective lookalike audiences, creative teams can no longer rely on broad-stroke trends. Persona-led creative developed around player motivations, preferences, and interests is the most effective way to sustain profitable user acquisition. Two useful frameworks for mapping player motivation come from Market researcher Quantic Foundry and more recently, Facebook’s Big Catch Playbook.
Now let’s see what style of ad worked better on Snapchat in this creative countdown for Disney Sorcerer’s Arena based on MobileAction data.
#5: Card Collecting
Uses mellow game graphics to appeal to players who value achievement, collection and completion, customization, and challenge.
#4: Theatrical Gameplay
Uses dramatic augmented gameplay, cinematics, and character stats to appeal to players who value immersion, action, surprises, and achievement.
#3: Leveling Up
Uses simplified gameplay through increasing character stats to appeal to players who value achievement.
#2: Influencer/UGC
Uses cinematic scenes with picture-in-picture response narration to appeal to players who value a connection to other players.
#1: Connected Characters
Uses beloved characters connected by their game powers to appeal to players who value story, fantasy, and strategy.
See more of our other high-performing ad creative work:
Applovin: iOS 14.5+ adoption +80%, 35-40% ATT prompt consent
Playtika: iOS 14.5+ adoption +75%, 34% ATT prompt consent
Zynga: warned IDFA will have a material impact; H2 bookings could be down by $100M
Unity: captures 50 billion daily in-app events and sees movement toward a contextual ad model without IDFA; raised 2021 guidance $50m
Ironsource: a platform built to analyze contextual data has 2.5 billion monthly active users; no material IDFA impact loss yet
Skillz: IDFA loss is yet to be determined, but is expected to be neutral; experimenting with engagement marketing rather than UA spend while CPIs remain high
IDFA Impact Q2 Roundup: Public Company Earnings Reports
Over the past three months, Consumer Acquisition data reports have shown the significant impact of IDFA loss throughout the mobile ads ecosystem, including average revenue drops of 15-20%, the erosion of lookalike audience targeting, and skyrocketing CPMs for iOS advertisers, and even impact on Android ads. Overall, we have seen a nuanced impact across sub-genres. This includes a narrowing of audiences, compromised targeting for highest value players, and inefficiencies for in-app advertising. To discuss these insights, I was a recent guest on GameMakers with Joe Kim, CEO at LILA Games, Warren Woodward, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Upptic, and Matej Lancaric, User Acquisition & Marketing consultant. We talked about the implications of IDFA loss with actual data, including tactics for UA and Marketing. We addressed the impact, product and monetization changes, and the likely winners and losers coming out of all of this.
Gaming and Ad Network Companies
To add to our ongoing data updates, we now have quarterly earnings being reported from major gaming and ad network companies. This includes their own assessments of IDFA impact. We reviewed the respective earnings call transcripts from Apple, Facebook, EA/Glu, Playtika, Skillz, Unity, Applovin, IronSource, Rovio, and others to see how IDFA’s impact is being discussed. Many conversations about fluctuations in user acquisition efficacy actually considered pandemic impacts in tandem with privacy issues. In fact, analysis for these two factors should be separate. As people return to pre-pandemic device habits, year-over-year traffic may decline; but this is only a piece of the story.
Even if ATT prompt consent is as high as 30% to 40%, as some companies are reporting, that would mean 60% of iOS users are not included in deterministic tracking. iOS advertisers losing 60% to 70% of their target audience must be negatively impacting revenue, LTV calculations, and overall marketing stability and efficiency. We have seen inflated organic attribution as users acquired by paid channels fall outside of the severe 48-hour restriction of SKAN reporting, but it is nowhere near enough to cover the -15% to -35% reduction in revenue we’re hearing from our top advertisers.
Below, we have summarized some notable points from the earnings calls. You can read additional excerpts from the transcripts following at the end of this article.
Ad impressions are up 6% and the average CPM is up 47%. Facebook expects increasing ad targeting headwinds in 2021 from regulatory and platform changes, notably the recent iOS updates; they expect to see a more significant impact in the third quarter compared to the second quarter.
Reports 80% of iOS devices are updated to 14.5+ and ATT prompt consent is averaging 35-40%, higher than anticipated. With or without IDFA, scaled first-party data from their 200 million MAU remains intact for reliable LTV models.
They report their “choppy” business performance as a result of reduced COVID-19 restrictions. This drives softness in bookings and Apple’s privacy changes resulting in a higher cost to acquire new players. To compensate for the loss of efficiency, they scaled back iOS UA spend and are adjusting LTV calculations to maintain targeted returns. ROI differences by genre are not material. Though they do see subtleties in some categories, with hypercasual and social casino games doing better than others. They see rising CPMs on Android as more advertisers seeking IDFA relief increase spend there to acquire users in the short term.
Due to broader adoption of Apple’s privacy changes at the end of June, they expect short-term pressure on ad revenue to be more pronounced in Q3 than in Q2, with H2 bookings being down by $100 million as a result; however, they are very confident that the IDFA issue is well in hand and operating within expectations.
ATT prompt consent rate and adoption rates are higher than expected at 34% and 78%, respectively. Successful live ops drive monetization and growth. Due to the operational sophistication required to succeed in a post-IDFA world, smaller companies may see new M&A opportunities.
By capturing and analyzing 50 billion in-app events each day, including one billion in-app events in iOS 14.5, Unity’s scale and depth provide access to a massive amount of end-user engagement and platform performance data. Their movement toward a contextual model that does not rely on IDFA has been successful enough for them to raise guidance by $50 million for 2021.
While there has been no material impact from IDFA loss yet, they say it is still too early to accurately assess and they continue to monitor for short-term effects. Their platform has 2.5 billion monthly active users and was originally built to analyze contextual data. “IDFA changes, we thought that we would see effects in Q1, which didn’t happen, and then in Q2, which didn’t happen. And still, we are conscious and we’re keeping monitoring potential, again, short-term effects.”
The impact of IDFA loss has yet to be determined but is expected to be neutral. They are experimenting with engagement marketing rather than UA spend while CPIs remain high.
IDFA loss has caused concern over revenue impact. However, AppAnnie reports they “haven’t seen anything major” in the data, with only some game categories suffering from the loss of IDFA targetings. Some of these categories include social casino games and strategy games. They remain optimistic about their prediction of 20% growth in the global market in 2021.
MY TAKE ON IDFA IMPACT
Consumer Acquisition’s data representing $300 million in ad spend from January to mid-August 2021 shows that Android click-to-install (c2i) rates remain steady and increase in August, while iOS c2i erodes both for SKAN and non-SKAN tied to IDFA loss. Using c2i as a proxy for traffic quality to avoid the noise generated by CPMs across genres and countries, the erosion of iOS traffic quality is clearly tied to the rollout of iOS 14.5+.
Here’s my take:
Several public companies appear to have tied COVID traffic decreases with IDFA impact as a way to buy time for full impacts to become clear
We see a -15% to -20% average revenue loss for iOS broad audience games and -35% revenue loss for heavy IAP/niche audience games
With only a 35% consent rate to ATT, custom and lookalike audience size has been reduced -65% and effectiveness has dropped
Continued downward pressure on click-to-install (c2i) is indicative of lower traffic quality across paid social channels
Many small and mid-sized mobile app developers have paused spending on iOS or shifted heavily to Android, inflating CPMs
At the same time, while iOS CPMs have consistently been more expensive than Android, we see the gap between operating systems close with a spike in iOS CPMs tied to the launch of iOS14.6.
For mobile app advertising on social platforms, CPMs are up, impressions are up, and click-to-install quality is down. It seems that social platforms are adjusting algorithms to maintain their eCPM (i.e., profit) and the result is less effective targeting and lower traffic quality. Very large companies with significant pools of first-party data are the beneficiaries of IDFA changes while the effectiveness of advertising for smaller companies is heavily impacted.
Here’s what’s working right now
With only a 35% consent rate for ATT, custom and lookalike audience size has been reduced -65% and performance is rapidly eroding, and the highest ROAS audiences—which used to last two to three months—now last two to three weeks with a significantly lower return. As lookalike audiences struggle, we are heavily testing interest groups and focusing on the much smaller ATT opt-in audiences for unique app events in a variety of countries. While these audiences require a lot of work to uncover and they burn out quickly, they offer significant pockets of efficiency for two to three weeks. The strongest performance we’re seeing is coming from top countries with localized ad copy with AEO or broad targeting.
How to survive IDFA Impact and thrive
Focus on persona-led creative to drive performance advertising at scale without deterministic tracking.
Adjust onboarding to identify consumers that indicate a propensity to spend within the first 48 hours of gameplay to effectively operate within SKAN’s restrictions.
Test contextual advertising techniques by combining interest group targeting with persona-led creative tied to customized onboarding flows to help educate the paid social algorithms to deliver better audiences.
How we can help
We have spoken with twenty large spenders, and they agree that fully loaded costs of internal UA teams are 6-8% of media spend. Consider leveraging the expertise and optics that an external agency provides to gain a broader understanding of the highly evolving IDFA impact.
Founded in 2013, ConsumerAcquisition.com is a technology-enabled marketing services company that has managed over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and web-based performance advertisers. We provide a creative studio and user acquisition services for Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Apple Search social advertisers.
We can provide your internal user acquisition team a perspective on iOS14+ impact across paid social providers and our Hollywood-based team of storytellers can produce a steady stream of persona-driven creative ideas to stay ahead of creative fatigue.
For more on this, check out this new episode of GameMakers with Joe Kim, CEO at LILA Games, Warren Woodward, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Upptic, and Matej Lancaric, User Acquisition & Marketing consultant. We discussed the implications of IDFA loss with actual data, including tactics for UA and Marketing to address the impact, product and monetization changes, and the likely winners and losers coming out of all of this. Watch the video below.
“We’ve seen about 80% of iOS devices are now updated to 14.5 or later. And consent rates are coming in quite a bit higher than I think a lot of the folks in the industry had projected. It’s different app by app, but anywhere between 20% to 25% on the low end and 60% to 65% on the high end, and it lands on an average of around 35% to 40% are opting into sharing information.”
—-
“Great. So, the software side, obviously, is seeing a lot of acceleration, and we touched on its last quarter when we highlighted what we thought IDFA’s impact would be. The changes really govern how third parties share data with first parties and how that data is used for advertising. And in our case, we have a lot of first-party data, both scaled 200 million users a month playing our game, scaled across engagement data, and then also scaled transactional data, which is very unique.
We’ve got millions of customers paying and having paid in our games. And then that data, we’re able to put in our machine learning engine, AXON, to come up with really ad recommendations that drive much better performance for the advertiser. We rolled this out in Q4 of last year. And you’ve seen immense amounts of growth on the software side, both in terms of the dollars that people are spending on our platform, which is reflective of the performance, and in terms of new clients coming on, which doubled year over year.
We’re very confident in this trend going forward.”
—-
“So, business apps, just to be clear, is advertising from third-party, typically, ad networks within our own mobile game applications. And then business software is obviously our app discovery solution and the MAX solution, and now, Adjust, so the software net revenue that we report. That business grew exceptionally quickly with the advantages that we thought we had going into the changing landscape. One of the things we touched on in the first-quarter earnings call is our other prediction on IDFA changes where the prices in the ecosystem would drop on iOS, and that flows through to business publishing.
Now despite that, business publishing had quite sizable growth. The mobile gaming ecosystem doesn’t tend to grow that quickly on a year-over-year basis. So, despite the lower pricing in the ecosystem, we still were able to generate outsized growth in that business as well.”
—-
“So, if you recall, we touched on in first-quarter earnings, our advantage we felt like going into the IDFA change was — compared to our peers, is that we weren’t going to fall back from a completely personalized solution to a completely contextual solution that lacked the personalization you get with data. Our advantage truly comes from very scaled first-party data. We’ve got 200 million users playing games every single month that we’ve got good engagement data on.
We’ve got millions of customers who have paid us over the history of our gaming business. All that data remains intact and is in our models with or without IDFA. And so going into the quarter, we felt like we had advantages. We articulated it for you all in Q1.
And then obviously, you’ve seen in the step-up in performance that 3x growth in the software business and up 40% quarter over quarter and the huge ramp-up in clients that we’re able to outperform in the marketplace because of those investments we’ve made over the last couple of years.”
“The weakness that we saw starting to emerge in late May in July and June was from cohorts that joined our network in 2021. So, these were cohorts that were recently acquired. And as the COVID restrictions started to lift, we saw people starting to play less or obviously other things to do.
The economy has opened. And that was an area where we started to see the weakness. That was compounded by the fact that IDFA was also hitting at the same time, so we weren’t acquiring new players because we weren’t seeing the paid returns. And so that is what dampened a little bit of that part of the business.
Now at the same time, players that had been with us before COVID hit, even early cohorts in COVID, are playing as much, they are engaged as much, if not more, and also monetizing more. So, for the vast majority of our revenue, that audience base is very resilient, very strong. And even through this period of weakness in these new cohorts, they have held in there.
That has been a very encouraging thing for us to see. And as we have moved through July and started to move into August, and we are starting to see more networks respond to the changes in IDFA and starting to be able to demonstrate improving returns that give us encouragement for why we think these are short-term in nature.”
—-
“Yes. I think if you look at the two factors that we are dealing with in terms of the reopening with audience choppiness and then IDFA when we talked about IDFA before, we had said that it was going to be a short-term headwind that we would work through because of our advantages in scale in advertising and product management. We remain committed to that. Well, we are already seeing an improvement in early UA trends.
Really, what had to happen was new tools, new ad products, the networks need to retool. We needed to look at real data in terms of the supply and demand factors. And that is what when iOS hit 80% in June, that June period in July is really working through that, and we have seen that improvement in late July and going into August, where we feel very confident that IDFA is something that we are working our way through.
And it is had an impact, but again, a short-term nature type thing that we communicated in the long-term, we don’t see it as a negative. It is something that we just have to adjust for, and we have started to do that by looking at different networks.
Unity Network
We have started to buy on networks that we weren’t buying on before because they have done a good job improving their products. As an example, Unity is a network that has done a good job adjusting to IDFA.
In addition to that, we have used some other techniques in terms of how we value a player, what types of calculations we are doing in terms of looking at the spread between install and LTV. So, it is a variety of different techniques that you experiment against you see the results, you see if they are predictive and then we start deploying those.
So, I’m very confident and feel very good that the IDFA issue is well in hand and operating within expectations. The softness in the cohorts that we acquired in 2021, that choppiness has had more of an impact on the run rate. That has been where we have seen a little bit more of an adjustment that we have had to make with regards to how they were operating versus earlier cohorts in COVID.”
“You know, we feel confident about our positioning regarding [IDFA] for a couple of reasons. As you mentioned, our ad revenues are only 3% of our business, and so our top line is minimally impacted by this. Second, the data we’ve seen on the media buying side has been encouraging. Our effective CPI’s have been stable in pre-and-post-IDFA periods. And our current consent rate and adoption rates are higher than we expected at 34% and 78%, respectively.
In other words, 78% of the impact has been absorbed, and we haven’t seen an increase in our effective CPI’s. Just to be clear, effective CPIs include organic and unattributed traffic acquired. Third, this is a type of event where Playtika’s excellence really stands out. We’ve become very effective in our offline and non-performance marketing campaigns. And we buy traffic from a larger number of networks. So, we’re more diversified in that respect as well.
In addition, with our live ops, we’re very successful at monetization, which means we have more tools to drive growth, and we convert users faster, so our feedback loop is stronger since we get data faster. We also use sophisticated AI and our proprietary [indiscernible] tool that allows us to optimize our media buying and budget allocation based on ROI.
On the upside, we think that IDFA will create more M&A opportunities, given the level of operational sophistication needed to succeed in this environment has just increased dramatically, and many smaller companies are not able to meet that bar.”
“The team has been preparing for IDFA for at least the last two years. I was part of several of these conversations as a board member before joining Unity, and I was always very impressed by the quality of the thinking. But now that I’m on the other side, I’ve been even more impressed and see the plans in detail. Let me try to dimensionalize this for you. Our operating organization captures and analyzes 50 billion in-app events each day.
If you do the math, that’s about 35 million in-app events every minute, and we do this across 20 platforms. This includes roughly 1 billion in-app events in iOS 14.5 each day. We believe that the ability to analyze this data positions us very well in the industry. So, as we talk to the teams, there are probably five key takeaways that I would like to leave you with.
First, spending on our platform is very strong. There is a shift toward ROI-based campaigns on our platform through Audience Pinpointer, which is when advertisers determine the outcome that they want from the campaign, and we determine the right channels and price for them to achieve their KPIs. So that’s point number one. Point number two, our contextual model, which very importantly does not rely on IDFA, is working well.
Privacy
We need to perform for our customers even in a more privacy-aware environment. Unity’s game engine leadership is a strength, and it provides us with deep context for our ads business. Third point, our scale and depth provide us access to a vast amount of end-user engagement and platform performance data, which is the point I was mentioning earlier. It’s about these 50 billion in-app events every day and across these 20 platforms.
The fourth point, which is probably one of my favorites, is the customer feedback we’re getting is very strong, Chris. Let me read to you three quotes that I got from the team which is coming from our customers. Quote number one, “Out of all our partners, we’re most happy with Unity as we’re having a lot of problems with others.” Quote number two, “We partner with every single network available, and Unity’s readiness and guidance are far above the rest.” Quote number three, “We work with every network and none of them are able to compete with Unity when it comes to iOS 14.5 readiness and reactiveness.”
So, if I look at everything with this customer feedback, I’m confident that we’re in a very strong competitive position. And the last point I wanted to make on this is we’re raising our guidance by $50 million, and the driver of that increase is the Operate business.
We have momentum, we beat Q1 expectations, and are raising our forecast for the year. So IDFA will most likely impact the ads industry, but we believe that our data and analytics advantage plus this advanced preparation that I was mentioning, position us very well to manage the IDFA. And we’ll obviously keep you informed as we learn more.”
“Before moving to our guidance, I wanted to spend a minute on IDFA. I also have invested extensive resources in preparing for Apple’s changes, which require apps to ask users for permissions for tracking them across applications. We believe our investment and preparation will help our platform and technology to adapt to Apple’s changes.
While we have not yet seen any material impact for Apple’s changes, it is still too early to accurately determine the full impact. Our guidance takes into account some potential short-term uncertainties related to the change while still reflecting the ongoing success and momentum of the platform. In the long term, we believe that our technology gives us a competitive advantage and position us to provide additional value to our customers in the context of this industry change.”
From Tomer Bar-Zeev
“Look, so I think a lot has been said about IDFA in the last few months. And with a few months already into the rollout of IDFA, I think we have a much better view of the current impact and, I think, a fair estimate on how it will look going forward. And I would say that when we last talked, we said that the ironSource platform is probably best geared to cope with the IDFA changes, among other reasons because it was originally built to provide contextually — to analyze contextual data.
So, by definition, the platform was built with a lot of — taking into account a lot of privacy issues. So, we thought that we would potentially be one of the beneficences of the IDFA changes. That’s not to say that we still might see some short-term effect from IDFA in the very short term, but we remain very positive about our estimation that long-term IDFA is a net-net benefit for ironSource because of the way we deal with contextual data and the way the platform has built from the get-go.”
“I would say that one element that we’re very conscious about is how to best anticipate and to be able to adjust the model for potential IDFA changes, which I think we and the rest of the industry initially thought that we would see some effects in Q1, which really didn’t happen, and then in Q2, which really didn’t happen. And still, we are conscious and we’re keeping monitoring potential, again, short-term effects. And those are budgeted already in the guidance that we’re giving for Q3 and the rest of the year. But I would say, very consistent with our views and our expectations going forward. So, I would say, luckily, no surprises so far.”
“So IDFA is still relatively early in terms of the rollout of iOS 14.5% has been relatively slow. And so, it’s pretty early to read the impact of it. So, I would say we continue to expect that the impact of IDFA will be neutral. On the one hand, cost per install likely decreases as advertisers lower their bids in response to less efficient targeting and attribution. On the other hand, this potentially decreases conversion rates as well.”
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“In terms of what we’re seeing in July for CPI, we’re starting to see the pace of industry pricing increases begin to stabilize, and we expect that pricing to flatten before decreasing later this year. We think that decrease is going to be driven by market dynamics, pushing down industry pricing as a whole, but also as a result of the investments that we’re actively making in our distribution costs, Aarki, other traffic initiatives, brand distribution partnerships, things like that.
In terms of user acquisition versus engagement marketing, what we saw in Q2 was rising CPIs. In the face of that, we maintain the financial discipline and we reduced our UA investment.
This is something that we typically plan for in Q2 as a result of seasonal pressures, but it’s also something that we can allocate dynamically based on what we’re seeing inside the market.
And with that — with the bandwidth that came back to the team as a result of reducing that spend, we were able to increase our experimentation with engagement marketing. You hit it quite right, we’re looking for the most effective way to drive dollars that bring our users back that increase their customer lifetime value. And so, as we look at the path ahead, if CPIs stay up, we’re going to chart a very similar course and we’ll eliminate the experiments that don’t work. We’ll keep the ones that do, but we’ll continue testing as we build for the long-term future of the business.”
“Because of the impact of the pandemic on year-on-year over comparisons, it’s helpful to compare this quarter with the pre-COVID Q1 fiscal 2020 to better understand underlying growth. On that basis, FIFA Ultimate Team is up 47%; Madden Ultimate Team, up 115%; equivalent to CAGRs of 21% and 47%, respectively. Similarly, sales, including Codemasters from our broad portfolio of catalog titles are up 55%, a CAGR of 25%. Mobile, excluding our Glu acquisition, is also up 16% organically over the same period 2 years ago.”
Facebook says persona-led creative based on understanding a user’s interests, motivations, and desires is a “future-proof solution.”
As deterministic insights into player behavior deteriorate, UA teams that understand the motivations and desires of their target personas can get quality top-of-funnel installs without deeper event tracking.
The first 48 hours of gameplay should identify consumers that indicate a propensity to monetize.
With creative paired to onboarding events, the algorithms will learn what changes to make to deliver better audiences.
Competitive analysis for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes built around player personas and motivations unlocked new ad creative opportunities. Most notably a new way to attract female players.
Minimizing IDFA Impact With Persona-led Creative
While playing a new hidden object game, a player is served an introductory offer
that unlocks premium gardening land and doubles experience points to unlock the story faster.
Will the player buy a gem pack to claim the offer?
Not so long ago, game devs and UA managers had effective and reliable ways to anticipate this purchase and create LTV models around user behavior. But with the loss of IDFA, deterministic tracking and visibility into deeper funnel revenue events are eroding at an alarming pace. In our data analysis of $322 million in paid social ad spend, Consumer Acquisition has shown how IDFA loss is reducing the effectiveness of lookalike audience targeting, increasing CPMs, causing revenue drops of 15-20% for iOS advertisers, and even impacting Android ad performance across social platforms.
Motivation Inspired Creative
But while so many UA and creative teams are being tossed around in what Facebook has called “an evolving ads ecosystem,” now is the opportunity for mobile app advertisers to adapt. As reliance on upper-funnel campaigns increases, ad creative optimized to appeal to discreet personas is the most efficient lever for sustained profitable user acquisition. Whether we call it motivation-led, profile-based, or intention-driven, Facebook suggests this approach is a “future-proof solution.”
As consumer marketing has grown up, we have learned there is no perfect Pepsi, but there are perfect Pepsis for unique palates. The same goes for gamers. Based on data from over 500,000 gamers, market researcher Quantic Foundry developed a statistical method that identifies how gamer preferences cluster together, which they call The Motivation Model. Their research revealed 12 motivators that drive gamers, ranging from destruction and excitement to design and discovery. Similarly, in their Big Catch Playbook, Facebook identified 8 motivators for players, from self-expression to escapism.
In a recent competitive analysis for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, we found ad creative that included gameplay graphics, achievement concepts, and promotions was generally effective. However, by going deeper into personas, we uncovered opportunities to reach new upper-funnel audiences through tailored creative. Players motivated by achievement and completion would get creative that highlighted collections and leveling up. For RPG fans not explicitly interested in Star Wars, ad creative would highlight turn-based action, PVP, raids, and player control of their characters. Players interested in the narrative would see story progression for an individual character, rival pairings, and late-game action. And by capitalizing on the wealth of great female characters in the Star Wars franchise, gameplay videos of all-female teams and female character countdowns could attract new female players.
Motivator-led Creative
Krystel Bitar, Global Gaming Product Manager at Facebook emphasized in a recent article about Automated App Ads (AAA) how critical creative diversification based on motivation is: “it’s time to make different creatives inspired by these motivators. The more unique these are, the easier it will be to ultimately determine what has attracted its audience.” While it seems obvious that ads should be tailored to appeal to different audience motivations and interests, many UA managers rely on the crutch of behavioral targeting to solve for one-size-fits-all, middle-of-the-pack creative (and those are ads that are generally effective).
But as insights into player behavior deteriorate, understanding a user’s interests, motivations, and desires is critical to attracting high-quality top-of-funnel installs. Beyond the install, the first 48 hours of gameplay should identify consumers that indicate a propensity to monetize. With creative paired to onboarding events, the algorithms will learn what changes to make to deliver better audiences.
With this approach in mind, let’s reconsider our new hidden object enthusiast who installed the game through a social platform ad. Even without deterministic tracking or an obvious indicator of a hidden object affinity, our new player had already provided information advertisers needed to find her. She was interested in gardening (design motivation) and mysteries with strong female leads (story motivation).
The persona-led ad featuring a fashionable detective and her customizable manor brought this otherwise undiscovered player into the game. Within the first 48 hours of playing, the offer to unlock premium land and a deeper story appealed to her interests and motivations. Consequently, driving a purchase. This early event begins to train the algorithm to find and deliver more players like her.
Agile Persona-led Creative
At scale, agile persona-led creative is the most efficient way to support the ongoing experimentation now required for profitable user acquisition. 85-95% of new creative concepts will fail to outperform the best ad. As a result, 20-50 new original concepts are necessary to find a new winner. Winning ads last only 10 weeks, then fatigue and die, requiring fresh creative concepts. UA teams that understand the motivations and desires of their target personas can scale efficiently and profitably. And while growing high-quality top-of-funnel installs.
Click to view our other persona-led creative work:
September 2021: What’s working for Facebook, Google, TikTok and Snap UA? Check out our HOT TIPS for tactics and strategies to test right now!
September 2021: Smoking Hot UA Tips!
Check out our Q2 IDFA Impact Report to see how major gaming and platform companies are communicating the impact of IDFA, in their own words. Get insights from Apple, Facebook, EA/Glu, Playtika, Skillz, Unity, Applovin, IronSource, and Rovio.
IDFA Impact: Here’s what we’re seeing
We see a -15% to -20% average revenue loss for iOS apps targeting broad audiences and -35% revenue loss for apps with niche audiences
With only a 35% consent rate to ATT, custom and lookalike audience size has been reduced -65% and effectiveness has dropped
Continued downward pressure on click-to-install (c2i) is indicative of lower traffic quality across paid social channels
Many small and mid-sized mobile app developers have paused spending on iOS or shifted heavily to Android, inflating CPMs
Several public companies appear to have tied COVID traffic decreases with IDFA impact as a way to buy time for full impacts to become clear
IDFA Impact: Here’s what public companies said
Apple: revenue from ads will be down
Facebook: +6% ad impressions, +47% CPM avg
Applovin: iOS 14.5+ adoption +80%, 35-40% ATT prompt consent
Playtika: iOS 14.5+ adoption +75%, 34% ATT prompt consent
Zynga: warned IDFA will have a material impact; H2 bookings could be down by $100M
Unity: captures 50 billion daily in-app events and sees movement toward a contextual ad model without IDFA; raised 2021 guidance $50m
Ironsource: a platform built to analyze contextual data has 2.5 billion monthly active users; no material IDFA impact loss yet
Skillz: IDFA loss is yet to be determined, but is expected to be neutral; experimenting with engagement marketing rather than UA spend while CPIs remain high
Here’s what’s working right now:
With only a 35% consent rate for ATT, custom and lookalike audience size has been reduced -65% and performance is rapidly eroding, and the highest ROAS audiences—which used to last two to three months—now last two to three weeks with a significantly lower return. Long-running lookalike audiences 1%, 3%, 5% have all declined in performance, as has Facebook’s AAA.
As lookalike audiences struggle, we are heavily testing interest groups and focusing on the much smaller ATT opt-in audiences for unique app events in a variety of countries. While these audiences require a lot of work to uncover and they burn out quickly, they offer significant pockets of efficiency for two to three weeks. The strongest performance we’re seeing is coming from top countries with localized ad copy with AEO or broad targeting. We see CPMs rising. No CPM discounts from lowering spend.
Facebook UA: Here’s what’s working
Strategy
Best performance coming from VO campaigns, particularly with international campaigns
AAA campaigns leveraging AEO or VO found to be stronger performers over AAA Installs + App Event
Strongest performance from CBO campaigns, leveraging FB to find the best performing segments
Combining Geos for greater reach and lower CPMs, also allowing for tactics like City Level targeting
Using Facebook activity to create Lookalike Audiences (ex: Page Engagement, IG Engagement, Video Views)
Creative
AAA campaigns are most successful when loaded with a wide variety of creative and copy
Testing and finding static asset wins allows for lower CPMs
Longform story-based copy is attention-grabbing
Google UA: Here’s what’s working
Strategy
Strongest performance from English language targeting in Tier 1 Countries for Android
Localized campaigns targeting French & German speakers in Europe shows promise
ATT implementation has weakened iOS campaigns further causing performance fluctuations
tCPA with lower-funnel events mitigate SKAdnetwork conversion reporting delays on Google App Campaigns
TikTok UA: Here’s what’s working
Strategy
Strongest performance with behavior targeting, but greater scale with interest targeting
Timezone targeting is used to scale best interests
Custom LALs are better than app activity and engagement lookalikes but can be hit or miss
Strongest performance from country targeting vs. geo grouping, low inventory in Canada
Auto placement is more cost-effective than TikTok Only
Creative
Feature UI for stronger performance
UGC content performs better, looks more native
Combine UGC with gameplay/features for extended life of creative
Headlines in a solid block lettering, shown for the entirety of the ad, enhances performance
Snap UA: Here’s what’s working
Strategy
Best performance: AEO Purchase and Max Conversion bidding
Highest ROAS from country targeting vs. geo grouping, low inventory outside the U.S.
21+ targeting strong performance. Ad inventory is heavy 13-21 users. No age targeting, impressions will serve to younger users unlikely to monetize
Creative
Story Ads often outperform Snap Ads.
Snapchat CTA “Swipe Up” enhances performance.
How to survive IDFA impact and thrive
Focus on persona-led creative to drive performance advertising at scale without deterministic tracking.
Adjust onboarding to identify consumers that indicate a propensity to spend within the first 48 hours of gameplay to effectively operate within SKAN’s restrictions.
Test contextual advertising techniques by combining interest group targeting with persona-led creative tied to customized onboarding flows to help educate the paid social algorithms to deliver better audiences.
Need More Scale?
Do you want to get additional scale and pockets of efficiency from your Facebook apps that run multiple languages? Try the following:
AAA + AEO + Single Country + Localized creatives for that country + language targeting for that country.
Example: AAA+AEO Purchase targeting France. Use French text, images, and videos. Set language targeting to French. Set ample budget to exit learning phase within 1st week.
Identify top creatives from your AAA campaigns. Then, launch a new test campaign with CBO+AEO Purchase + France + French language + Top Interest Groups and LALs. Note: Be careful with LALs as recent performance is significantly fluctuating. Use your top 2-3 videos/images and top 1-2 copy variations. Aim to have 4-6 ads per ad set.
Why Trust Our UA Tips?
Founded in 2013, we are a technology-enabled marketing services company and creative studio that has managed over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and performance advertisers.
We provide end-to-end creative and user acquisition services for mobile app marketers via performance-oriented creative storytelling, integrated UA, and creative optimization.
We provide game-changing results driven by quantitative optimization and a relentless focus on increasing your net profit driven by client-specific, creative learning agendas.
Clients we’ve helped grow: Roblox, Glu Mobile, Disney, SuperHuman, Rovio, Jam City, Wooga, NBA, MLB, Ford, Sun Basket, Lion Studios, MobilityWare, and many others.
This month, see how major gaming and platform companies are assessing the impact of IDFA loss in their own words, in our August 2021 Q2 Earnings Roundup & IDFA Impact Report. In related news, listen to a discussion on the IDFA impact in a new episode of the GameMaker’s podcast with Brian Bowman, CEO at Consumer Acquisition. Joe Kim, CEO at LILA Games, Warren Woodward, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Upptic, and Matej Lancaric, User Acquisition & Marketing consultant. And for the fourth year in a row, Inc. magazine has named Consumer Acquisition to its annual Inc 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
As deterministic tracking erodes on iOS, UA teams that understand the motivations and desires of their target personas can get quality top-of-funnel installs without deeper event tracking.
Get the data on how IDFA loss is killing lookalike audience targeting and causing a rise in unattributed organic revenue, resulting in a sustained negative impact on ROAS.
See how major gaming and platform companies are assessing the impact of IDFA loss, in their own words in our Q2 Earnings Roundup & IDFA Impact Report with insights from Apple, Facebook, EA/Glu, Playtika, Skillz, Unity, Applovin, IronSource, and Rovio.
IDFA Impact: Here’s what we’re seeing in August 2021
We see a -15% to -20% average revenue loss for iOS apps targeting broad audiences and -35% revenue loss for apps with niche audiences
With only a 35% consent rate to ATT, custom and lookalike audience size has been reduced -65% and effectiveness has dropped
Continued downward pressure on click-to-install (c2i) is indicative of lower traffic quality across paid social channels
Many small and mid-sized mobile app developers have paused spending on iOS or shifted heavily to Android, inflating CPMs
Several public companies appear to have tied COVID traffic decreases with IDFA impact as a way to buy time for full impacts to become clear
IDFA Impact: Here’s what public companies said
Apple: revenue from ads will be down
Facebook: +6% ad impressions, +47% CPM avg
Applovin: iOS 14.5+ adoption +80%, 35-40% ATT prompt consent
Playtika: iOS 14.5+ adoption +75%, 34% ATT prompt consent
Zynga: warned IDFA will have a material impact; H2 bookings could be down by $100M
Unity: captures 50 billion daily in-app events and sees movement toward a contextual ad model without IDFA; raised 2021 guidance $50m
Ironsource: a platform built to analyze contextual data has 2.5 billion monthly active users; no material IDFA impact loss yet
Skillz: IDFA loss is yet to be determined, but is expected to be neutral; experimenting with engagement marketing rather than UA spend while CPIs remain high
Consumer Acquisition CEO Brian Bowman discussed IDFA’s impact on a new episode of the GameMaker’s podcast with Joe Kim, CEO at LILA Games, Warren Woodward, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Upptic, and Matej Lancaric, User Acquisition & Marketing consultant. They talked about the implications of IDFA loss with actual data. The data includes tactics for UA and Marketing to address the impact, product and monetization changes, and the likely winners and losers coming out of all of this.
For the fourth year in a row, Inc. magazine has named Consumer Acquisition to its annual Inc 5000 list, which recognizes the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent businesses. We are again truly honored to be included by Inc. magazine. This recognition is entirely a credit to the people of our organization. They continue to drive growth and innovation at Consumer Acquisition year after year.
