Match 3 Puzzle Games Creative Strategy

Creative is an advertiser’s best opportunity for a competitive advantage in social advertising. Soon, the combination of Facebook’s and Google’s Media buying automation with Apple’s removal of IDFA will make ‘winning’ creative ﹘the five percent of Facebook videos that are successful﹘of paramount importance. Here we break down match 3 puzzle games with competitive trends & creative recommendations, so you can learn from their creative best practices.

Check Out Our Match 3 Puzzle Games Reel

Match 3 Puzzle Games Competitive Analysis

  • Competitors: Competitors: Fishdom, Gardenscapes, Homescapes, Mansion Blast, Home Design Challenge, Wildscapes, Slices, Township Farm & City, Wordscapes, Clockmaker, Meow Match, Home Design Makeover, Jelly Juice, Lily’s Garden, My Home, Paint by Number, Sweet Road, Vineyard Valley, Brain Out, Candy Crush, Cookie Jam, Disney Magic Kingdoms, Fashion Blogger, Fashion Boutique, Museum Story, Sweet Escapes, Tropicats, Tropic Trouble, Choices, Dragon City, Episode, Hustle Castle, Lost Island, Merge Dragons!, Party in My Dorm, The Simpsons, Covet Fashion, Klondike, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, June’s Journey, Panda Pop, Manor Cafe, Home Blast, Hidden Resort
  • Top Competitors: Match 3 Toon Blast, Farm Heroes Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, Toy Blast, Candy Smash Mania, Jewel Crush, Jewel Fever, Candy Blast Mania, Candy Pop, Sugar Blast, Cookie Jam Top Match 3 game.
  • Top Competitors: Building Matchington Mansion, Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Township, Fishdom, Coin Master
  • View competitive videos here

Match 3 Puzzle Game Trends

  • Puzzles: Locks & Gates and other puzzles that challenge users to free a game character (Fishdom, Gardenscapes, Homescapes, many others)
  • Picker Videos: 3D or 2D situations with pickers, often resulting in disastrous fails. (Township, Sweet Escapes, Manor Cafe, many others)
  • Hidden Items: Videos or still images that contain hidden items the user must find. (Meow Match, June’s Journey)
  • Design Challenges: Tasks that must be completed within an allotted time or budget. (Design Home, Sweet Escapes)
  • Real Player Gameplay: Split screen featuring a player and gameplay. (Jelly Juice)
  • Female-Centered Vignettes: Women overcoming adversity and men behaving badly in soap opera situations. (Lily’s Garden, Choices, Vineyard Valley, My Home: Design Dreams)
  • Choose Your Adventure: Series of situations where you choose between two actions. (Choices, Episode)
  • Game Controller: Picker that mimics a game console, guiding character through levels. (Candy Crush, Hustle Castle)

match 3 apps

Match 3 Puzzle Game Trends (cont.)

  • Lifestyle and Gameplay: Showing lifestyle footage and gameplay that matches image (Toon Blast, Farm Hero Saga)
  • Gameplay + Side Character: Gameplay elements leaving the screen to interact with character (Candy Blast Mania, Candy Smash Mania, )
  • Mixing gameplay with narrative: Storybook narration, Coloring book style (Bubble Witch Saga))
  • 3D effect: Characters “floating” above gameplay (Farm Heroes Saga)
  • Funny but still cute: Evil character getting hit by gameplay, mentioning how you can’t get weight by playing candy games (Candy Blast Mania, Bubble Witch Saga))
  • Incorporating game to solve a problem: Using gameplay to find the key to escape a room (Candy Smash mania)

match 3 apps

match 3 apps

 

Player Motivations

Sample motivations for playing:

  • Stress relief
  • Complete levels or beat score
  • Killing time
  • Escape from “real life”
  • Socialize with friends, family, or other people

match 3 games

Player Motivations

The Most Common Primary Motivations for Women are Completion and Fantasy:

  • For women, Completion (get all stars/collectibles, complete all missions) and Fantasy (being someone else, somewhere else) are the most common primary motivations, while Excitement (fast-paced, action, surprises, thrills) and Challenge (practice, high difficulty missions) are the least common.
  • These gender differences seem to align with stereotypes, but as we’ve pointed out before, age differences are often just as large if not more so.

Completion is the Most Low-Risk, High-Reward Motivation:

  • One finding that surprised us was consistently high Completion (get all stars/collectibles, complete all missions) placed across all the charts. Whether we’re comparing gender or age segments, Completion is always in the top 3. In this sense, Completion is a very low-risk, high-reward motivation.
  • It helps explain why games that emphasize Completion, such as Pokemon Go, can be so broadly appealing across different demographic segments, especially when these games also steer away from motivations that are more volatile and polarizing, such as Completion.
match 3
Source: Quantic Foundry, 7 Things We Learned About Primary Gaming Motivations From Over 250,000 Gamers

Player Motivations

Here’s an illustration of what such a motivation map looks like for mobile puzzle games (games like Candy Crush, Pet Rescue, or Bubble Witch):

  • The data tells us that puzzle game players would like to have more Immersion and Creativity in their games. This could provide an explanation to the success of titles such as Gardenscapes or Homescapes, which provide players with some light narrative and decoration options

Puzzle Players, broken down by clusters:

  • 55% of players (Completionists and Solvers) are quite happy with their games as they are
  • 25% of players (Explorers and Designers) are where the narrative/decoration opportunity lies
  • 20% of players (Champions) are interested in a more social puzzle game
  • Written by Ishai Smadja, Product Manager @ King // Player of Games // Contrarian

Concept: Faux Hidden Items Gameplay

Faux “relaxing” games are interrupted by exciting interactions/fights between characters:

  • Begin video with slower games like hidden items or word games, with a header like “Find 5 Bats”
  • Characters breakthrough painting as others chase with a (baseball) bat

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • N/A

Player Motivations:

  • Decorative/creative opening could attract puzzle players

match 3 puzzle games match 3 puzzle games

 

Concept: Locks and Gates

  • New 2D animation style
  • Try characters in “How to Loot?” where a lock releases sweets or allows her to escape
  • Test “What’s Next?” vs FAIL – to appeal to new users Leverage “dumb ways to die” assets

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Gardenscapes: 96%
  • Homescapes: 36%

Player Motivations:

  • Engage puzzle players who want to complete challenges

match 3 puzzle games match 3 puzzle games

 

Concept: Connect The Dots

Create videos where finger connects dots to create Matchington characters:

  • Simple background
  • Engages viewer’s curiosity
  • Can speak to game truths like Clockmaker’s “We know you’re tired of Match-3 ads..”

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Sweet Escapes

Player Motivations:

  • Targets player need for creativity and narrative in games

match 3 puzzle games match 3 puzzle games

 

Concept: Serial Storytelling

Serial storytelling style:

  • Soap opera clichés and adult situations to capture the attention of the 25-54 female demographic
  • Minimal scenes (“UP” style opening)
  • Rival characters fighting over a love interest
  • Female characters overcoming odds and bad male behavior

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Lily’s Garden: 91% SOV

Player Motivations:

  • Targets player need for narrative in games

match 3 puzzle games match 3 puzzle games match 3 puzzle games

 

Concept: Perilous Situations

  • Rescue situations: Feature characters. Leverage pop culture, movies, or just mini-games
  • Character holding rope bridge (Indiana Jones)
  • The character holding a clock (Harold Lloyd)
  • Dumb ways to die concepts
  • HS/GS “in a theme tied to the game”

 

Reveal more Match 3 Puzzle Games Creative Ideas!

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How Facebook’s AAA and Value Optimization Tools Work Together

In September 2020, Facebook introduced “Automated App Ads” or “AAA”, intended to automate Facebook advertising and level the playing field between advertisers large and small. The premise is that you will tell Facebook what is most important to your business. AAA will automatically make the bid and budget changes. Then target appropriate audiences with high-performing creative all on your behalf.

Facebook AAA

The thinking is that, over time, AAA learns what performs best and will continue to make media buying improvements without a human’s involvement. Facebook AAA then helps the marketer manage ads by creating multiple versions of their ad with unique creative to show the best performing version and tailoring audience options based on campaign goals and financial performance.

This further aligns with what we have seen as a continued shift of user acquisition (UA) day-to-day media buying. Thus, moving away from human-driven marketing teams over to Facebook and Google’s automated algorithms. Effectively, letting the algorithm do what they do best, leaving UA teams with the opportunity to focus less on media buying and spend more time on creative optimization to continually feed the automated algorithms.

That is right, but that is not all…. there is more.

 

Facebook AAA and Value Optimization Tools

Facebook has just announced, “Value Optimization with Minimum Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) Bidding.” The promise is that this feature will provide marketers with more control over the value you bring to campaigns.

So, if Facebook AAA moves certain campaign controls towards automation, and Value Optimization moves certain controls into the hands of marketers, which one wins?

Facebook’s Value Optimization with Minimum ROAS bidding lets you set the lowest acceptable return on ad spend (ROAS). As a result, giving you more control over the value a campaign delivers to your business. After establishing a minimum ROAS, Facebook will automatically adjust bids to deliver the requested financial return of at least the minimum requested value or higher over the duration of the campaign (that is the AAA kicking in).

 

How Value Optimization with Minimum ROAS Bidding Works

  • Define minimum ROAS and the lowest return on ad spend you want. Facebook will adjust bids in real-time to stay above this floor.
  • To optimize ROAS, Facebook observes values passed by the Facebook pixel or mobile SDK. For Minimum ROAS bidding to work effectively, purchase values must be passed back into Facebook.
  • Based on these values, Facebook estimates how much a person may spend over a one- or seven-day period. Of course, the seven-day period is all pre-IDFA loss.
  • The Facebook platform optimizes ad delivery to audiences that are likely to help you achieve at least your ROAS floor.
  • Your minimum ROAS value will influence Facebook by adjusting the bids so that the ROAS performance will always be above your minimum ROAS value.

Pro Tip: If the Minimum ROAS bid is too high, Facebook may not be able to meet this threshold to spend the campaign’s full budget.

 

How and When to Use It

Value optimization works best when you are reaching audiences of at least 2 million people within an ad set. And when you have a business goal of maximizing the purchase value from each conversion or mobile app install. Use the Minimum ROAS bid strategy if you want to reach a specific return on ad dollars. Or, more to keep your campaign running.

To get started using Value Optimization. Look for it within the following marketing objectives: Website Conversions, Mobile App Installs, and Catalog Sales. Once selected, you may elect to use a Minimum ROAS bid strategy. This will adjust your bids within the auction to reach or exceed that goal.

 

Additional Best Practices to Leverage

  • Use recent historical average ROAS as a benchmark. Lower it by 10% to 25% (as it is a floor benchmark, not a target) to determine the appropriate minimum ROAS bid.
  • Use the most recent average purchase value. Or, value as defined by the business/historical average CPA if there is no historical ROAS to reference. These averages should be based on a comparable campaign to the minimum ROAS campaign. And, the average value should be determined based on the conversion window chosen.
    • For example, if you select a 1-day conversion window, then use a 1-day average. Should you use a 7-day conversion window, use a 7-day average.
  • Start with a lower ROAS threshold to accumulate more conversions sooner. You will still retain the ability to increase the bid over time to maximize profitability and scale.
  • Setting your minimum ROAS too high will hinder your ability to scale and perform as well as Value Optimization campaigns set for the highest value.

 

As always, if you have any questions or are looking for support with media buying on Facebook or developing fresh creative for video ads for your campaigns, please reach out to sales@ConsumerAcquisition.com.

The Creative Renaissance For Mobile App Advertising

2020 is the year of change in many aspects, no less in mobile app advertising. It’s been a creative renaissance. Both Facebook and Google have dramatically improved their algorithms for app campaigns for their fully automated solutions in Facebook AAA (Automated App Ads) and Google AC (App Campaigns). TikTok has also opened up the gates to mobile advertisers to engage in a growing variety of app campaign types.

According to Statista, social advertising will be $52B in the US alone by 2024. That means creative production will have to cater to short-form video advertising across social channels such as Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Snap. What’s more, the majority of that spend ($44B) will be distributed via mobile. According to eMarketer, by 2022, US adults will spend 88% of their time within mobile apps.

creative renaissance for mobile app advertising

 

creative renaissance for mobile app advertising

 

Creative Renaissance

The takeaway is creatives will have to increase their time and effort towards social advertising across mobile channels. Many of our clients, such as those in mobile gaming and eCommerce, have been aggressively capitalizing on these trends. What is interesting is that you see commerce brands embracing this mobile-first, app-based experience. From health and fitness brands like Peloton to apparel brands such as Nike and Allbirds to established commerce brands such as Sephora and to app-fueled disruptors across industries such as Acorns, Robin Hood, Calm, and Intuit. Everything is pointing to a creative renaissance for mobile app advertising across social media.

What is holding this creative renaissance back? Well, you have a global economic downturn which is putting more pressure on all aspects of the business to drive performance, even creative. Secondly, social distancing and reduced travel has caused a tremendous impact on the creative process and generating new creative assets via live production and photography. So, the performance pressure has never been higher, the challenges have never been more daunting, and social users are unrelenting in what will make them stop scrolling, engage, and download a brand or publisher’s mobile app.

The answer to tackling this trifecta of challenges to drive performance from digital advertising is to take a whole new approach to creative concepts and testing.

 

Let’s Start with a Few Simple Realities

New creative concepts drive the step change gains in performance. They can create new interest in a brand, game title, or product. Or they can create a “new creative life” that allows for a longer run time before creative fatigue sets in. New creative concepts open new audiences while building off your existing audiences.

85-90% of new creative concepts fail. Meaning, the new creative concepts do not outperform the existing “champion creative” most of the time, which means that the advertiser is making less money on every impression that is not going to the champion. Any “test and learn” process absorbs the cost of expected failure so a learning agenda will be less efficient than a champion creative until you find a new champion.

Iterations have value. The adage suits: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Iterations and multivariate creative testing keep small percentage points of improvement on winning creative to help extend the life of the creative and reduce creative fatigue but they should not be the focus of your creative efforts.

Essentially this boils down to: marketers need new creative concepts to create big gains. But new creative concepts have a high failure rate, so you need to be very strategic and methodical from a concepting and testing perspective to reduce risk in new concept development. And you need to be methodical, outcome-oriented, and tuned to financial performance on iterations in order to create small gains on legacy creative and extend the life of creative assets.

 

How to Approach Creative Concepting in a New Way

We are in challenging times for marketers who depend on new creative concepts, especially those that deal with live photography or video such as within eCommerce, retail, or direct-to-consumer businesses.

It is extremely difficult to guarantee production locations, in addition to assembling production teams and models. Booking travel puts limitations on both the ability to do the production but also the quality of the production. So, the pressure is on for marketers leaning into digital channels because of the increased competition both in terms of media CPM’s, eyeballs, and the ability to break through the clutter.

So, what is the solution?

Creative directors and marketers will need to take a whole new approach to concept development. They’ll need to align creative resources and partners to the goals of financial performance and agility and become experts in testing and learning to extend the life of their existing creative assets.

Here’s how to do new concept development when you are limited in production capability:

1. Rewrite the story behind your existing creative assets to play successfully in social:
  • Great social ads play a fine line between the authenticity of the brand but also piquing curiosity to get a user to take notice, stop scrolling, and find entertainment or fulfillment in your creative.
  • Instead of leaning 100% on your customer research, switch to a 50/50 mindset of clearly explaining your product truths but also incorporating competitive intelligence to understand what will get a user to stop scrolling and engage.
    • Process for finding competitive ads and review: It’s a ripple effect of research. We start with direct competitors to see what they’re doing and what is working, what is driving the most impressions.
    • Then we identify what elements are consistent in those best-performing ads. From direct competitors we move further afield into other categories/genres to identify the best performers, selecting elements of those competitors that will work for our client’s creative. Then we test, test, test.
  • It is okay to leverage insights on what works and what doesn’t work from competitors to identify trends of what is working creatively but also what to stay away from.
  • Take your existing creative assets and photography to rewrite the story and entertain.
  • Imagine that the relationship between your creative is asking the user to dance and the user could have any of the following reactions:
    • No, I have seen you before and you are uninteresting to me (stale creative)
    • No, you do not make me curious and interested (lack of entertainment in the creative)
    • Yes, you have piqued my curiosity (the user is entertained)
    • Yes, you feel vaguely familiar but with a whole new spin (leverage successful competitive concepts but tailored to your brand)
    • Essentially, we are fishing for eyeballs and clicks. If you don’t have a hook, you’re not going to get them
Takeaways:

If you are limited in your ability to produce new creative assets, you cannot let that stop you from generating revenue. Use competitive trends in addition to your own research to create new stories with existing creative assets leveraging proven strategies at scale. Do not put a huge burden on developing the strategy from scratch. Remember the failure rate on new concepts is high, so you want every advantage. Including learnings from your competitors, who have already poured a ton of resources and ad spend and testing time into creating their own high-performance ads and they are failing at 95%, too. Why not “borrow” from their best ads and customize them to create fresh ideas for your campaigns?

  • Personas: We utilize market research from clients, as well as doing our own research, regarding player personas and the types of motivations that will resonate with potential players.
  • Learnings: By connecting with client performance data, we are able to tweak and evolve creative over time. From iterations to testing elements in unique concepts, this is tremendously helpful in focusing our creative.

Facebook’s ads library tool is an aggressive move towards transparency for the ad platform and it will let you see:

  • Every ad that’s active now or that has even been active since May of 2018.
  • How much a page has spent on Facebook ads.
  • Which pages’ ads reference a particular keyword.

And remember the fine line between the story of your product and the action you want to create…. getting a user to take notice, stop scrolling, and click.

2. Align your creative resources to financial performance.
  • Make sure that your creative resources and partners are tuned into the financial performance of the creative and that it is factored into the strategy. For instance:
    • In social advertising, creative that looks good but does not create engagement or drive net profit is money lost.
    • Great creative strategy and financial performance are not just capable of being paired together; the expectation is that they must be.
    • Our creative team reviews the financial performance of all creative, looks at the specific learnings of each creative test, and executes multivariate tests to understand the drivers of success.
    • That is why our clients trust us with visibility into their social media accounts…because it creates performance.
3. Ensure that “test and learn” is fundamental in your creative process.
  • You need to be efficient in finding new concept winners to reduce the risk of new concept failure. For instance:
    • Better research in using competitive trends to understand what social users are responding to at large and what they are not responding to. You can find our definitive guide to the latest game-related creative trends here.
    • Reduce the exposure of your creative tests through a structured approach starting with quick engagement (CTR, IPM / Bounce Rate) then migrating winners to deeper metric performance such as ROAS and LTV score.
    • Once you have a creative winner, use “test and learn” to ride it as long as you can. Use structured learning agendas to find incremental gains (call to action, color scheme, product imagery, etc.) while you are concurrently loading up your new concept test. The goal is no downtime in your creative performance.

Consumer Acquisition as Your Strategic Partner in Creative Concepting

Our Creative Studio, combined with our marketing services teams, has developed a unique approach to scaling creative that is tested and proven with our clients both large and small. We execute creative testing through a combination of art and science to ensure that we help clients find that “creative sweet spot”, by combining data, trends, and breakthrough concepts, in order to find that winning creative.

We are 100% focused on business outcomes and financial performance in service to our customers, and transparent in our strategies and communications to ensure all teams are aligned towards the same goals.

Creative concepts are a key driver for major market growth. We understand that challenge even more so this year during this creative renaissance. We are here to partner with you on this new challenge as we head into 2021.

 

Our Special Offers

Mobile App Creative Optimization For 2021

What is the best way to guarantee success in mobile app advertising? It is not your brand, and it is not your budget. It is great creative testing and optimization. Over the last seven years, we have developed a world-class creative optimization method that’s given a competitive advantage to thousands of advertisers. It is more powerful than machine learning or branding. And ultimately, more valuable than simply spending more ad budget.

Why? Because creative and creative optimization is the last advantage for any mobile app advertiser. Over the last few years, Google and Facebook’s increasing reliance on automation has taken away most of the competitive advantages of adtech tools and the granular campaign management levers used by humans. “Creative is the only major lever remaining to influence performance for mobile app advertisers,” as Dustin Engel explains in his article, The Faster, Better, Cheaper Mandate in Extraordinary Times.

But not just any creative can cut it. Advertisers need high-performance creative that can perform as well or better than their current winning ad. And being that only one in ten or twenty ads are good enough to beat a winning creative, that means advertisers need a lot of new creative concepts – not variations – and a cost-effective way to test and optimize creative.

Creative Optimization: Why Efficiency is Essential

So efficient, accurate, scalable creative testing is the single best competitive advantage any advertiser has.

But it is harder to do than you would think.

Take efficiency: Anyone who has ever run a simple split-test knows there is a downside to running tests. Ad variations that do not convert as well as your control cost money to test and lose you money. Sometimes a lot of money.

If you test a lot of ads, you can cumulatively lose a big chunk of budget simply by testing ads that do not perform as well as your control.  We recommend that advertisers allocate 10-15% of their monthly budget to A/B testing and assume that 85-95% of that test budget will produce a ROAS of $0.00 – zip – nada – nothing!

This is why we recommend you pay close attention to competitive trends and player profiles.  Paying attention to competitors increases your success rate above 5% to 17%. And when done properly, will provide you an endless supply of tested concepts to try. This approach allows us to find the big new ideas that can lead to huge improvements but to find them in a way that minimizes failure.  Why Pablo Picasso said “a good artist will borrow but a great artist will steal”, you can’t rely on simply coping with competitive concepts.  You need to look broadly across the Facebook / Google / TikTok ecosystem to understand which creative trends are gaining momentum and filter those concepts through user profiles/motivations and a title’s universe of assets and creative restrictions to come up with original ideas.

But that is only half the battle.

Not only do underperforming ads lose money, but just testing itself requires a certain amount of ad spend. The example below shows how getting to statistical significance can cost $20,000 for each version of creative tested. But our shortcut method, IPM creative testing, can find a winner for 1% of the cost that statistical significance would require.

creative optimization

 

 

How do we do this? Basically, our internal creative testing methodology is designed to look for big wins early on. If the tests are managed well, and we can control when the algorithm tries to play favorites, we can cut the time it takes to find a new winner. This means we save money by not running ad spend through underperforming ads, but more importantly, it means we can test more creative and test it faster.

This means we can have fresh, high-performance creative running always, with minimal dips in performance between one top-performing ad and the next. We can side-step most of the uneven performance triggered by creative fatigue.

creative optimization

These are some of the tactics that allow us to test more creative faster. They’ve led to the bulk of performance improvements in our clients’ accounts.

Basically, we know creative testing has the single highest return on investment of any other activity in-app businesses. And therefore, we tell every advertiser to do more testing. No matter who you are, or how much you are testing, do more.

Betatyping: Facebook’s New Framework for Creative Optimization

So, given how powerful creative optimization can be, we were eager to see Facebook reveal a new update of their own creative testing framework. They call it “betatyping.”

“Betatyping is a way to intentionally experiment, uncover fertile creative territories and drive success. Looked at from a different angle, Betatyping is a creative and measurement framework to equip advertisers to answer their most pressing business questions, the building blocks of a campaign, by directly tapping into the pulse of their audiences on Facebook.”

Facebook breaks its betatyping framework down into four elements: Ask, Make, Learn, and Adapt.

Here is how they describe each element:

  • Ask: Craft hypotheses based on what you are trying to learn and the outcome measures that will determine success.
  • Make: Design experiments and creative assets based on your hypothesis and what you are trying to learn.
  • Learn: Analyze results and insights from the experiment based on primary KPIs and secondary diagnostics.
  • Adapt: Strategically and creatively determine how the learnings will be implemented.
Facebook Betatyping Framework
Image is from https://www.facebook.com/business/news/insights/how-betatyping-enables-advertisers-to-increase-the-creativity-and-impact-of-campaigns

 

So, does betatyping work? Yes. Facebook draws on a case study from McDonald’s to show how powerful betatyping can be.

Betatyping in Action: McDonald’s Sweden Case Study

McDonald’s Sweden wanted more app downloads. They hypothesized “that app installs would be higher for creative featuring relatable, real-life moment-based deals versus their business-as-usual straightforward deal offers.”

So, they ran an experiment and got some impressive results: an 82% cost reduction per app install compared to previous campaigns.

But that is only the first step. Per Facebook’s new testing approach, McDonald’s Sweden went on to learn from the results of this survey and to adapt their creative development strategy going forward so it reflected their new “relatable, real-life moment-based deals” creative strategy.

They have been loving it ever since. Betatyping that, is. This is one of the core aspects of this new framework: It is ongoing. As Facebook explains, “It’s that continual cycle of hypothesizing, testing, learning and adapting that uncovers fertile creative territories and drives long-term success.”

Facebook Betatyping
Image is from https://www.facebook.com/business/news/insights/how-betatyping-enables-advertisers-to-increase-the-creativity-and-impact-of-campaigns

 

We could not agree more. Mobile app creative optimization cannot be a “one and done” exercise. It must be built into the creative development process from the ground up. But with betatyping, this idea of ongoing optimization is central. It is a creative testing framework that “leads to accumulating valuable insights about a brand and business, beyond what works in one single campaign.”

That last part is key. Betatyping is a far more strategic, and even “meta” approach to creative testing than standard A/B split-tests. What Facebook is describing here does not come from just running split-tests that compare the performance of a hundred different creative elements, like colors, hero-shots, call to action, and the like.

What Facebook is talking about here is on a different level. They are describing a test of an entire creative approach, not just optimizing one isolated ad.

That said, this framework could be used to optimize different creative elements. A company could posit a hypothesis like “bold colors will outperform muted colors.” A company could do that with this framework, but they would be missing the larger opportunity here.

This is both the power of this framework, but also a reason to use it carefully. We advise using betatyping very carefully. Because the whole framework hinges on something that many advertisers have not nailed yet.

The ultimate success of betatyping comes down to posing the right hypothesis and to choosing the right KPI to measure it with.

Betatyping Still Needs an Underlying Creative Strategy

Without understanding the goals of your advertising, and your best plan for how to achieve those goals, the betatyping model might not help as much as you would hope.

Therefore, one of the first things we do when we work with a new account is to see:

  1. what they have done in the past (creative audit)
  2. what their competitors are doing (competitive audit)

This sort of historical analysis and competitive research gives us a framework for a data-driven creative strategy. It also gives us a deep enough understanding of their account so we can pose hypotheses worth testing.

For example, another creative strategy best practice we like to use is the concept of “player profiles.” “Player profiles” are basically a way to segment gaming audiences not so much by demographics, but by what motivates different audiences to play a game.

This sort of creative strategy analysis would be an ideal complement to Facebook’s betatyping approach. You could use each player profile as the hypothesis for the test. Then run your experiments to see if the data from creative performance proved you had defined each player correctly.

If the creative experiments showed you had done those player profiles correctly, you could then confidently adapt all your current creative strategy to align with those player motivations and the six “gaming emotional hooks.”

Gaming Emotional Hooks
Image is from https://www.consumeracquisition.com/creative-trends-for-facebook-mobile-gaming-ads/

 

Left brain and right brain thinking for creative optimization

There is one other reason why we like this new betatyping framework so much. It marries data and creative so well. This is exactly the left-brain/right-brain mindset we’ve been advocating for user acquisition managers to embrace.

So welcome to yet more evidence of the blend of data and creativity in current user acquisition advertising – and the proof that this is where UA is heading. With this new betatyping framework, we have been given yet another tool to shift into User Acquisition 2.0.

 

Consumer Acquisition Special Offers

Social Casino Games Creative Strategy

Creative is an advertiser’s best opportunity for a competitive advantage in social advertising. Soon, the combination of Facebook’s and Google’s Media buying automation with Apple’s removal of IDFA will make ‘winning’ creative ﹘the five percent of Facebook videos that are successful﹘of paramount importance. Here we break down social casino games with competitive trends & creative recommendations, so you can learn from their creative best practices.

Social Casino Games Competitive Analysis

  • Competitors: DoubleDown Casino, Jackpot Party Casino, Slotomania, House of Fun, Goldfish Casino, Heart of Vegas, Hot Shot Casino, Hit it Rich!, DoubleU Casino, Quick Hit Slots, Slotomania, 21 Blitz, GSN Casino, Caesars Casino Slots, Lucky Lottery Scratchers, Worldwinner, WSOP, SpinToWin Slots, Jackpocket, Huuuge Casino, Wizard of Oz Slots, Big Fish Casino, Cashman Casino, Pop! Slots, Bingo Blitz, Coin Master, FaFaFa Gold Slots Casino, June’s Journey, Cradle of Empires, Coin Kings, Coin Runner, VeryDice, Lucktastic Match, Crazy Coin Pusher, Lucky Day, Piggy Go – Clash of Coin, Bricks n Balls, Bricks Ball Crusher, Casino Coin Pusher, Pirate Kings, Disney Emoji Blitz, Match to Win, Wordscapes.
  • View competitive videos here.

social casino app ads

Social Casino Games Trends

  • Game Overview/Gameplay: Gameplay with an overview of the game, levels, and rewards. (Big Fish Casino, Jackpocket, many more)
  • Bonus: Gameplay focused on offering free rewards, coins, and bonuses when you sign up. (Cashman, Double Down, many more)
  • Players/Gameplay: Split screens showing players enjoying the game with gameplay. (21 Blitz, WSOP, Heart of Vegas)
  • News Report: Real or fake news clips showing the importance of the game. (Jackpocket, Casino Slots)
  • Celebs: Celeb spokespersons advocating for the game. (Coin Master, Jackpocket)
  • Puzzles/Hidden Object: Brain teasers designed to engage viewers. (June’s Journey, Cradle of Empires)
  • Mortised Gameplay: Gameplay shown with backgrounds and licensed characters. (Wizard of Oz, Game of Thrones, Hit it Rich!, Hot Shot Casino)
  • Seasonal: Gameplay with seasonal additions reflecting Halloween, Christmas, and other holidays. (Huuuge Casino, Quick Hit Casino, Slotomania, many more)

scial casino games

Social Casino Games Trends (Cont.)

  • Fake Text: Two characters or “real players” interacting via text, discussing the game, or daring them to play
  • Split screens: Noob vs. Pro, Winner vs. Loser, Comparing screens with highlighted part of the screen, explosive elements
  • Players with UI elements: Showing “players” using elements of the game in real-life situations (Game buttons, coins, interacting with characters)
  • Coin, Money, and Gift Cards showers: Big wins are seen often with luring monetary elements and prizes/ overtaking the screen or as transitions
  • Spinning wins with prizes: Faux Spinning wheel with Prizes and mascot encouraging the user to spin
  • Connect the dots: A drawing outline is presented and the final picture is revealed at the end, connecting drawing to gameplay
  • Color by numbers/Draw: Replicating old coloring books, a simple drawing is colored one color at a time until a character or game scene is revealed
  • Matching Cards: Faux matching/pairing game where two correct cards reveal a prize or game feature
  • Save the character: Obstacle, a puzzle-like concept where I character in peril needs to be saved.
  • I Spy/Found the Object: Find one or several objects that are directly associated with the game
  • Relaxing Themes: Adding a touch of escapism and relaxation to an otherwise challenge-based game

Player Motivations

Demographics: As of the last estimate, there were currently over 170 million active social casino gamers worldwide, with millions of players playing on any given day (Martin, 2014).

  • To put this in perspective, social casino gamers outnumber online gamblers 4:1
  • The average social casino gamer is a 40-year-old middle-class woman and women make up over 2/3rds of social casino gamers (Superdata, 2016).
  • Social casino games seem to be a popular form of entertainment across all stages of life, including among adolescents and young adults (Kim, Wohl, Gupta, & Derevensky, 2016, 2017; Griffiths & Wood, 2007)

Motivations: Motivations for playing social casino games are likely similar to motivations for engaging in gambling (Wohl, Salmon, Hollingshead, & Kim, in press).

  • People may play for fun and entertainment, to pass the time, to relax, relieve boredom, or to distract themselves from negative emotions
  • A portion of gamers may be attracted to the social feature of social casino games, such as seeing their scores on leader boards and sharing their achievements on Facebook
  • Some social casino gamers may use free-to-play simulated gambling games to practice their ‘skills’ before playing for real money gambling
  • Social Casino Games: Current Evidence & Future Directions, Hyoun S. Kim, University of Calgary

Gaming Psychology of Near-Misses

“…Near-misses have some intrinsic appeal for our reward circuitry, tricking those brain cells into believing that we won even though we actually lost… This suggests that from the perspective of our dopamine neurons, near misses are virtually indistinguishable from actual wins. Both forms of feedback tickle our reward circuitry, which is why Vegas invests in games and algorithms that are full of close calls. For a casino, the beauty of a near miss is clear: Although we’ve lost money, it feels as if we won. – The Near-Miss Effect, Jonah Lehrer, Wired Magazine, 3.28.11

Although no studies have investigated the ramifications of Candy Crush near-misses, one can make reasonable inferences based on near-misses in other scenarios. In slot machine games, near-miss outcomes encourage the urge to continue to play despite the absence of reward (Côté et al. 2003; Kassinove and Scharev, 2001; Clark et al. 2009; Billieux et al. 2012). In general, the idea of falling just short of a big win appears to facilitate players wanting to continue with the game in the belief that practice makes better, or more spins will eventually lead to success (Kassinove and Schare 2001). – The Candy Crush Sweet Tooth: How Near Misses in Candy Crush Increase Frustration, and the Urge to Continue Gameplay: Journal of Gambling Studies, Volume 33, Issue 2, pp 599–61

Concept: Faux Hidden Items/Puzzle Gameplay

Faux “relaxing” games interrupted by exciting gameplay:

  • Begin video with slower games like hidden items or word games, with the header: “Need something more exciting?”
  • Slot gameplay bursts into the frame, obliterating slower game and showing exciting slot gameplay
  • Slot gameplay shows jackpots, wins, and bonuses

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • N/A

Player Motivations:

  • Targets women with “relaxing” ad; women represent 2/3rds of all social casino players

social casino app ads social casino app ads

Concept: Mortised Gameplay

Feature slot gameplay in mortised environments that take advantage of the beautiful game animation:

  • Showcases game graphics
  • More eye-catching than simple gameplay
  • Positions game as premium “Vegas-type” slot play
  • “Wall of Wilds!”, “10x”, etc

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Goldfish Casino: 9% SOV
  • Hit it Rich!: 73% SOV
  • Wizard of Oz Slots: 7% SOV
  • Hot Shot Casino: 14% SOV

Player Motivations:

  • Engages players looking to distract themselves from negative emotions or to relax

social casino app ads social casino app ads

social casino app ads

Concept: Comedic Voice Over

Videos that juxtapose slot play with a comedic voiceover:

  • Showcases slot play and graphics
  • Mimics player dialogue
  • Uses subtitles

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • 21 Blitz: 56% SOV
  • Rise of Kingdoms: 72% SOV
  • Questland: 8% SOV

Player Motivations:

  • Mirrors social nature of slot play

social casino app ads social casino app ads

social casino app ads 

Concept: Picker Jackpot

Leverage success from Match 3 games test simple pickers to game situations, such as picking coins to match 3 Fur Babies:

  • Increase engagement with viewers
  • Showcases slot play, game graphics, and characters

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Cradle of Empires: 16% SOV

Player Motivations:

  • Engage players looking fun & entertainment

 

Concept: Near Misses

Create videos of slot gameplay in which near misses happen repeatedly:

  • Slot wheels should tease an almost win
  • FAIL or ALMOST supered on near-miss slot play

Competitor/Share of Voice:

  • Multiple games using this technique but it has not been used in social casino games; missed opportunity given the psychology of near misses

Player Motivations:

  • Capitalize on near-misses motivating players to keep playing as much or more than wins

social casino games

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Consumer Acquisition Named a Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Company in Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times

The San Francisco Business Times named Consumer Acquisition to its annual list of the top 100 fastest-growing private companies in the Bay Area. This is the second consecutive time that Consumer Acquisition has been recognized as a FAST 100 company by the San Francisco Business Times.

Each year, the San Francisco Business Times reveals the Bay Area’s fastest-growing private companies based on percent revenue growth. Companies on the Times’ Fast 100 list represent extraordinary organizations. In addition, they are companies that have shown meteoric growth and potential over the past three years. These businesses also reflect the diversity of industries in the Bay Area. For example, from software and fintech to construction, health care, professional services, and food manufacturing.

Since its initial founding in 2013, Consumer Acquisition has grown tremendously. They manage over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend, helping the world’s largest mobile games, apps, and performance advertisers. Additionally, the company provides a creative studio supported by an elite Hollywood-based creative team, user acquisition services from tenured acquisition specialists, and self-service tools for Facebook and Google mobile app advertisers. All contributing to its growth recognized by the San Francisco Times this year.

Check out the full list of companies recognized by the San Francisco Business Times this year: Fast 100: Meet the fastest-growing private companies in the Bay Area in 2020

5th Quarter 2020 – Are You Ready!?

Q5 2020 is coming. That is right! We believe there will be a 5th Quarter in 2020 for Facebook and Google mobile app advertisers!

It is an understatement to say that the 2020 mobile app advertising market has been unique. From COVID a surge in mobile app usage and a decline in advertising CPMs March through June, to Apple’s IDFA removal announcement in June, to the September launch of Facebook’s Automated App Ads (AAA), to the current massive spike in Facebook 2020 election spending. This year has been full of tremendous change and we are not done yet!

Every year about this time, we publish a post discussing how to maximize your Q4 app ad budgets (here is our 2019 post). This year, we are not talking about Q4, we are talking about Q5 2020. Q5 refers to the 10-day period starting between the last Amazon shipping day before Christmas through New Year’s Eve. In which retail and eCommerce pull back on their marketing budgets and other mobile app advertisers can take advantage.

  • The 2018 graph below represents a normal year. CMPs spiked 30-40% between Black Friday & Christmas and then dropped around Amazon’s last ship day.

5th quarter 2020 black friday

  • 2017 vs 2018 were similar (note we pulled back more in 2017), CPMs spiked 30-40% between Black Friday & Christmas and then dropped around Amazon’s last ship day

Facebook CPMs

  • Below are a cluster of 2019 mobile app advertisers, notice the large CPM increases between Black Friday & Christmas, and then the drop in costs for what we are calling – “Q5”.

Q5 2020 – Here’s Our Take:

 

(1) UA in mobile app advertising will be fiercely competitive, but pricing should be less volatile in late December.
  • COVID-19 has significantly reduced foot traffic to stores throughout the year. We anticipate this will accelerate the move to online advertising for retail businesses for the holidays. Ecommerce brands we have spoken to appear locked and loaded to go bigger sooner and advertise as long as possible on Facebook and Google this holiday shopping season to make up for the loss of foot traffic.
  • Volatility may be more evenly distributed throughout November and December versus the mad dash that traditionally kicks off with Black Friday shopping and runs until a few days before Christmas.  If people are not coming into stores, why should retailers wait?  Why not start special offers after the election?
  • To capture this opportunity, we are advising mobile app advertisers to plan their budgets and creative production carefully.  Advertisers should produce holiday creative early to capture a potentially extended online shopping season. They should also bulk up production and testing to capture CMP drops related to Q5 – (e.g. the post-holiday CMP hangover).
(2) Mobile app advertisers should have their biggest November / December / Q5 ever!
  • Due to this unprecedented holiday season, eCommerce will give it everything they have got between Black Friday and Christmas. Then pull back severely after December 22nd.
  • This effect will be felt more significantly in 2020 due to the overwhelming amount of first-time eCommerce spenders forecast to be participating this year. Thus pulling back near Christmas.
  • This year more than ever, mobile app advertisers should be ready to capitalize on an influx of ad inventory primed for non-eCommerce shopping. We are advising gaming, entertainment streaming apps, meditation and fitness apps, DTC, and others to GET READY!
(3) Travel industry demand will flow into other verticals instead.
  • The travel industry has been hit extremely hard in 2020 by global quarantines that started in March and show no signs of slowing.
  • Holiday gatherings this year are advised to remain small. And travel discouragement is causing travel advertisers to forecast a low spend season.
  • This poses an additional opportunity for mobile app advertisers to reach millions of people staying home, finding gaming, entertainment, health, and fitness as a means to “escape or enhance” their at-home time.
(4) People are much more likely to connect more this holiday through shared experiences via social sites vs in-person traveling.
  • Gaming with friends has never been more important. We expect that social platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok that offer a way to play and engage with friends and family will continue to surge through the winter season and well into 2021.

 

How We Can Help?

  • Cheaper, Better, Faster: we are expanding our creative capabilities to deliver “Cheaper, Better, Faster” (Sir Martin Sorrell). We believe this will be the new marketer checklist during the economic recovery.
    • We produce Hollywood-level creative at a fraction of the cost of holding company creative shops. And at high velocity of production with proprietary testing methodology tied to business outcomes.
    • Check out our new Gaming Reel & Non-Gaming Reel.
    • We have sharpened our teeth in immersive digital storytelling (gaming) and bring that storytelling to new brands, verticals, and markets.
    • Our creative and platform are geared towards performance and business outcomes instead of awards.
    • Our capabilities lend themselves to emerging digital media such as OTT, DTC, Mobile Web, and DOOH. As established brands are forced to adapt to post-COVID digital transformation.

The Faster, Better, Cheaper Mandate in Extraordinary Times

We live in extraordinary times. In just the last few decades, we may have thought we had already seen it all. Like the rise of new business models. Business models ahead of their time. Stock market bubbles. Economic downturns. Economic recessions. The rise of Google. The rise of Facebook. However, now we are experiencing something entirely new. It starts with a simple concept that we preach all the time at Consumer Acquisition, which is Faster, Better, Cheaper. This is what we believe is the mandate for marketers in this era of change.

However, this is the first time we have seen this industry take massive steps backward. Even beyond the external pressures of a pandemic, economic slowing, and division running rampant. As a result, the challenges of privacy regulation and privacy as a feature in hardware and software are shaking up the industry. An accelerated path to media buying automation, driven by Facebook AAA and Google AC, will disrupt workflows and human capital. But we have never been more excited. Wait, what? That is right. Even though this is the first real step backward for our industry, we feel like it represents two steps forward. We will stumble in those two steps and we may fall, but we will rise.

 

Faster, Better, Cheaper

It sounds simple and is intentionally devoid of jargon. But Faster, Better, Cheaper is key during this accelerated rate of change in the industry. Every business model will have a variation of Faster, Better, Cheaper, so let me explain what it means to our industry and social advertisers.

Faster

Accelerated learning to identify which creative will win the day and increase media return on investment.

Better

Enable our clients to avoid their own creative limitations and breakthrough into “new stories”. Essentially, creating new and immersive stories that create action in the 15-30 seconds allowed by social media user behavior.

Cheaper

A new working model that is powered by our 100% remote and globally diverse workforce. Which is also paired with proprietary technology to ensure high quality creative. Plus, a high velocity of output and the pairing of creative assignments to the right individual. An individual based on their bandwidth and unique skills.

Faster, Better, Cheaper is all about balance. You cannot lean into one and forsake the other two. “Cheaper” can make some cringe, especially when speaking about creativity. However, “Cheaper” does not mean lower quality or less creativity. It is about improved costs and economies of scale. This is balanced by the concept of Better. Always be in a state of Kaizen and continuous improvement. Increasing quality, paired with increasing efficiency and speed. This is the formula for success.

Two Steps Forward

Back to the “two steps forward” mentioned at the very beginning of this blog post. For both privacy and automation, winning creative, paired with innovative use of quantitative analysis, will be the determinant of success. The industry has become commoditized in terms of achieving success. The same metrics and the same general approaches. The same general approach and accepted limitations of deterministic measurement.

As measurement becomes opaquer and media buying automation increases, marketers will have to look internally to gain market share. This relies on a deeper and more actionable understanding of their customers and their motivations. A deeper ability to connect media investments to positive customer experiences and revenue-generating behavior. Most importantly, marketers will have to tell an authentic and compelling story. More so than their competitors. We are moving from a world of marginal gains to something more like The Red Queen Effect. An arms race of insights activated in storytelling and compelling creative.

Are you prepared to take two steps forward? Are your organization, mindset, and processes aligned to operate in a Faster, Better, Cheaper model?  If not, let us talk about getting your organization ready to succeed. Not despite the changes coming in the months and years ahead. But built to capitalize on this exciting time of rapid evolution in the industry.

Our Business Model

As a quick primer, our business is made up of three necessary parts for marketing success for brands and developers. Which are in the business model of discovery. Discovery of new audiences for the brand and discovery of the brand by existing audiences looking for a change.

  • A Creative Studio that creates compelling, story-enhanced digital ads that compel users to stop scrolling, engage with the ad, and take action towards a business outcome.
  • Experienced user acquisition and performance marketing services team that executes creative testing through a combination of art and science to ensure that impressions are weighted to “winning creative”  In addition, every impression allocated to lower-performing creative is lost money in our minds. This team supports clients on an outsourced model. Or provides consulting and coaching to internal teams to improve efficiency and modernize strategies and tactics.
  • Lastly, we create unparalleled efficiency and analysis capabilities through our proprietary software platform, AdRules. Essentially, creative workflow, testing activation, reporting, and analysis are automated. They are also supported by machine learning. Therefore, this is to get to business outcomes faster and across a geographically dispersed and diverse creative team.

We have proved our mettle in the high-velocity and highly visual world of gaming and entertainment. Also, we have evolved and sharpened our model in the world of eCommerce, digital services, and fintech. As a result, we believe our unique business model is the right model for these extraordinary times.

better faster cheaper

UA Is Dead – Long Live Automation

Full-scale automation is here for mobile apps. Google’s AC (App Campaigns) is now a necessary and substantial part of most paid acquisition strategies. Therefore, is this the long-heralded end of active user acquisition (UA) management? Is it the beginning of a low-touch portfolio management model?

Well no, not exactly. The full rollout of Facebook’s Automated App Ads (AAA) product actually represents an opportunity for buyers savvy enough to develop a successful strategy early in its life. Unlike Google’s AC, for now, Facebook’s standard auction buying still exists and can thrive alongside AAA campaigns. Formulating a tandem strategy for automation (AAA) and standard “business as usual” campaigns is key for 2020 and 2021. In addition, there are several important layers to consider.

Building a focused campaign structure within your Facebook non-AAA traffic alongside evergreen AAA campaigns will ensure maximum scalability soon of fewer allowable ads and IDFA obsolescence. So think of AAA as a “helper” – a second UA manager running light-touch campaigns to your top identified geos and creative. There are three considerations to building a successful tandem strategy: high-confidence geo bundles, a data-driven creative testing process, and a future-proofed approach to ad/campaign limits with multiple regional Facebook pages* for your app.

Geo-Strategy

AAA is unique in that only one campaign may be used for each optimization type and geo. However, this means that if you have a AAA Value campaign running to the UK, Canada, and Australia, you cannot also have a Value campaign running to Canada only.

Instead, utilize the flexibility of standard campaigns to test optimization/geo combinations with small budgets. For instance, does Brazil monetize best with App Event Optimization (AEO) purchase or Level Achieved? Or, is Brazil better suited as a cluster with other Portuguese countries or combined with a South American group? Either way, identifying the best path to monetization requires having your tiered geo framework known in advance of AAA launch.

Most developers will have already identified high-LTV countries. Including some geos like the US and Canada warranting their own dedicated AAA campaigns for each platform. Because of this, we suggest you test AAA in these dedicated country campaigns first with multiple optimization types being prioritized in a down funnel sequenced test.

As an example, your first six weeks of AAA might be:

 

  • Week 1: AAA US Install + AEO purchase
  • Week 2: AAA US AEO Registration
  • Weeks 3-4: AAA US AEO purchase
  • Weeks 5-6: AAA US Value (only applicable with iOS 14 + IDFA)

Based on the data below, for some apps, Facebook’s Ads Manager algorithm (normal algo) currently outperforms AAA. As such, we recommend a dual approach of using both algorithms as they continue to evolve. But also bear in mind that AAA campaigns typically have a learning phase period in the first week. Therefore, you will want to be patient while moving down the funnel when killing the previous campaign.

UA is Dead Long Live Automation

The separation point for geo-bundles comes with tier 2 and ‘rest of world’. So, while AAA in the US/tier 1 is being tested, consider aggressively testing tier 2 geo groups organized by top languages with Dynamic Language Optimization (DLO). Now you are ready for AAA expansion. Post-AAA activation, standard campaigns will continue to exist as a sandbox for creative testing. Because of this, scale AAA to the top tier ‘rest of world’ and allow for your mature standard campaigns to complement AAA. Then, graduating creative winners emerging into the AAA mix.

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Creative Testing

Unlike Google’s AC, the text/video/image inclusion cannot be broken into separate ad groups to measure and organize the effectiveness of creative concept types. The method is to fill and pray. This means 50 videos/images with 10 text assets are set loose to give the Facebook AAA algorithm full control to determine to spend allocation. Facebook’s initial recommendation is to load up your campaign with the max number of assets. However, using your standard campaigns to isolate creative winners first will avoid wasted spend against concepts that fall flat. Identify 20 resonant videos and a handful of images before moving headlong into AAA.

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Time To Prepare for Automation

We also want to be planning for the long-term with our tandem approach. Other waves are on the horizon in the tide of consolidation:

iOS14 Automation will impose Facebook ad limits soon.

advertiser size

  • Perhaps the most curious workaround we’ve found so far for ad limits is Facebook page proliferation. The limit lives at the page level. So, set up separate pages for each key geo group. (App Main – US, App Main – Japan, etc.) This is a clever way to expand your ad limit number. It also avoids running into the platform limitations. You will also want the additional flexibility the page hack provides to maintain the creative testing pace in standard campaigns. Consider breaking your Facebook page into multiple pages where the traffic is unique and will not compete:
    • Primary post-iOS 14 traffic
      • 1a: post-iOS14 + US only
      • 1b: post-iOS14 + CA, UK, NZ only —etc
  • Pre-iOS 14
    • Primary Android Page
      • Android + the US only
      • Android + (CA, UK, NZ only) —etc
  • We still have work to do, too.
    • Global Market Pages – we are still unclear on the impact of global market pages and it needs more research.
    • Develop a strategy for DCO/DLO

Facebook Advertisers Should Prepare for iOS 14 Automation

  • Estimated iOS14 Adoption Rates: assuming Feb 1, 2021 launch
    • 50% 30 days post-launch
    • 70% 120 days post-launch
    • 90% 180 days post-launch > Assume August 2021 nearly 100%
  • Facebook Suggested Actions To Take Now:
    • Update to the latest Facebook SDK. Advertisers are not required to run app ads on iOS 14.0. However, we recommend as a best practice to update to the newest version of the Facebook SDK. This will integrate the latest features and performance improvements. Version 8.0 will be released in the coming weeks.
    • Update to the latest Audience Network SDK (v 6.1) when it is released in October. This update is not required for advertisers to run app ads on iOS 14.0. But, updating will ensure they have the latest SDK features and performance improvements.
    • Do you work with a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)? If so, we recommend you check specific requirements you may have to run app ads on iOS 14.0.

Final Thoughts about Automation

Plan now, with lean testing through standard campaigns. This will also build a stable of winning videos, images, and copy messaging, tied to a wide variety of geo bundles. In addition, grouping countries by LTV and behavior remains best practice. Prepare for limited campaign count on iOS by giving preference to larger country sets.

As always, the two rules of app marketing remain unchanged. Know your product and Know your users. Tailor a tandem AAA/standard campaign strategy. Base it on existing user data from live campaigns and chart the unknowns with extensive testing. Thus, the time for thoughtful AAA/human campaign integration is now.

Please reach out to sales@ConsumerAcquisition.com. We can help with fresh creative for video ads or media buying on Facebook and Google.

Game Over – Apple’s iOS 14 & IDFA Loss Will Drive Layoffs!

Game over! If released in the next month, Apple’s iOS 14 with the loss of the iOS Users’ Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) will be catastrophic to the mobile app advertising industry. It will also usher in a Version 2.0 of how the industry will operate from an economic perspective without clear deterministic attribution.  As Paul Romer once said, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”  As a result, the mobile app industry will be in a forced reset and with any economic reset. There will be winners and there will be losers.  As if 2020 hasn’t been a cruel reminder of that fact day in and day out.

Like the 2015 movie, “The Big Short” starring Christian Bale, which showed how the financial crisis of 2008 was triggered by the housing bubble unless our ad tech juggernauts find a mutually unacceptable solution, we need to plan for the end game of Version 1.0 of the industry.  Could I be wrong? Anything is possible. Just like Michael Burry who recognized that the U.S. housing market was an enormous asset bubble inflated by high-risk loans, Apple’s changes will burst the mobile app advertising bubble — sure, I could be wrong, but I’m not.

Apple's iOS 14

But before digging into the likely scenarios, we at Consumer Acquisition are ready to stand by our clients and the industry we love with a unique offer and learning agenda to help through these unsettling times.  Our unique blend of Hollywood blockbuster-creative, user acquisition expertise, and perspective fueled by more than $3B in media across industry leaders. Also, our uncompromising test and learn agility will be paramount to turning catastrophe into an opportunity for our clients.   Agility, a deep expert bench, and having the best information in your hands will make all the difference during these extraordinary times.  So if you have questions on how to proceed in this new reality, please contact us at support@consumeracquisition.com.

Back to the scenarios I see playing out if the juggernauts do not operate in a cooperative effort to keep the mobile app advertising industry moving forward:

Scenario 1: Apple Delays SKAdNetwork 6-12 months

  • Apple delays the rollout of iOS 14’s required use of SKAdNetwork (SKAN) with App Tracking Transparency / IDFA being opt-in for 6-12 months.
  • The mobile advertising ecosystem hasn’t had enough time to prepare for the biggest change in 10 years.
  • Based on numerous conversations with major traffic sources, ad networks, mobile measurement partners, and CTOs, like iAd, Apple’s SKAN product isn’t ready for prime time and there is a sustained level of confusion on the best attribution substitution – probabilistic or deterministic.
  • Perhaps Apple will allow a year grace period for companies to use a combination of fingerprinting + IDFVs + App Tracking Transparency along with SKAN and refine their monetization models. With a defined rollout date of SKAN, this would provide the industry with both times and defined end date to update their business models.
  • [Update 10:30 am 9/3: Apple confirmed it is delaying the change until early next year. In a statement, Apple said, “We believe technology should protect users’ fundamental right to privacy, and that means giving users tools to understand which apps and websites may be sharing their data with other companies for advertising or advertising measurement purposes, as well as the tools to revoke permission for this tracking. When enabled, a system prompt will give users the ability to allow or reject that tracking on an app-by-app basis. We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year.”Apple laid out its views on privacy and the issue today.]

OR… hold on to your revenue because scenario 2 is direr…

Scenario 2: Layoffs, Consolidation, & Business Darwinism

 

Layoffs

  • Unless Apple and other tech titans reach a compromise, with the launch of Apple’s iOS 14, SKAN with App Tracking Transparency, layoffs will happen industry-wide to mobile app advertisers of all sizes by the middle of November due to revenue compression and companies being forced to manage costs relative to their new revenue reality.
  • Layoffs won’t be restricted to a vertical like gaming, nor will they be restricted to marketing staff with expertise in one network like Facebook or Google.
  • In preparation for iOS 14, many companies are adjusting down revenue projections and refining P&Ls by fully loading costs for marketing and user acquisition teams and factoring in salaries, rent, benefits, etc to get a “true cost” of advertising profitability and then comparing against external solutions from agencies and third parties.
  • User Acquisition teams will get significantly downsized. This will be driven by a lack of certainty and disruption to existing LTV models (12-36 months) and by the elimination of monetization sources and remarketing capabilities. With this reality, User Acquisition teams will have to do more with less which will limit their ability to create real tradecraft and IP within the new post-iOS 14 world.  Essentially, it will feel like consistently swimming upstream without marked improvement day by day.
  • Layoffs will be fueled by simplification in the structure of iOS 14 accounts and a reduction in the complexity of work required to manage media buying with Google UAC and Facebook’s just-announced Automated App Ads. Don’t get me wrong, both of the aforementioned platforms are amazing advancements in helping to simplify and automate media buying which levels the playing field. Advertisers large and small will see a life raft in a perceived strategy of reduction of staff to maintain and optimize accounts.  However, tradecraft in maximizing UAC and AAA will manifest with advertisers who have the resources and partnerships in place to double-down on the new automated reality and will differentiate these advertisers using the solution in an advanced manner.

Consolidation

  • Advertising budgets will be cut for mobile app advertisers to minimize risk, but steeper in mid to small size companies that don’t have large IDFV pools and/or monetize mainly with In-App Ads (IAA) and therefore expect a significant reduction in monetization as iOS 14 adoption increases.  Also, cash on hand will allow the larger players to weather the disruption better than smaller companies that have yet to achieve stable cash flow.

Darwinism

  • Large/public companies will need to maintain user growth, but I expect a Darwinistic-like streamlining of their legacy catalog of titles so the reduced marketing budgets and teams can focus on driving growth for their primary titles.
  • Creative is King! Companies will 10x creative optimization and production of fresh creative concepts as this is the primary lever for sustained financial success across networks.
  • Agencies that offer a compelling solution for outsourced creative ideation and production with exceptionally skilled, cost-effective user acquisition will grow. They can offer a unique ability to look broadly across networks like Facebook, Google, etc, and across many mobile app advertising businesses and can transparently communicate the best practices and strategies in this rapidly changing post iOS 14 world.

Before reading how I surmised these two scenarios, I would like to share that we are currently offering our current and new clients 50% off of managed service fees on their iOS 14 accounts.  We believe our creative strength and ability to look across Facebook and Google will empower us to quickly formulate, document, and share comprehensive learning agendas across our client’s organizations.  Agility, a deep bench, and having the best information in your hands will make all the difference during these unsettling times. If interested, please reach out to support@consumeracquisition.com if you would like to schedule a conversation.

How have I surmised these two scenarios?

Below is a summary of key points from an article published on August 31, 2020, by Eric Benjamin Seufert, titled, “Analyzing Facebook’s iOS14 advertising changes”.

Overview

  • Facebook’s Ads Manager only (no support for Marketing API to create and edit campaigns targeting Apple’s iOS 14)
  • One iOS 14 ad account per app.
  • Nine published/created campaigns at a given time
  • One ad set per campaign; but no limit on the number of ads
  • Android and iOS 13 & older campaigns for all three products – app install ads, app engagement ads and dynamic ads can continue to run through existing ad accounts.

One iOS 14 Ad Account Per App

  • To advertise to iOS 14 users, an advertiser will need to set up a new dedicated Facebook ad account.
  • You cannot combine iOS 14 traffic and traffic under iOS 14.
  • For the early September timeframe, this new ad account will only apply for App Install ads for iOS 14 users.
  • All other products, app engagement ads (using traffic, conversion objective), and dynamic ads (using product catalog sales objective) will continue to be supported through existing ad accounts, without reliance on the SKAN API.

Apple’s iOS 14 Advertising Requirements / Restrictions Overview

  • If you are driving UA with an in-house team and an agency or FMP, both teams must share one iOS 14 accounts.
  • iOS 14 accounts may only have – 9 published/created campaigns at any given time.
  • One ad set per campaign; but no limit on the number of ads.
  • In FB native tools, cross-account reporting can only be done within the same account type. Not across iOS 14 and non-iOS 14 accounts.
  • Facebook loses the timeliness component of its knowledge of its users’ monetization histories after iOS 14. Because it will no longer receive user-specific events streams from all iOS apps. While it might know that a user has monetized heavily in the past. But it won’t know whether they have done so recently.
  • Facebook currently targets at the user level using event histories; in iOS 14, Facebook will have to target much broader segments of users using demographic and interest data. The loss of granularity at the targeting layer, in addition to the sparseness of event signals in iOS 14 (only one conversion value is possibly sent per acquired user in the campaign), means that the two campaign types (iOS 13 and iOS 14) require totally different parameter sets.

Apple’s iOS 14 Optimization / Measurement / Reporting / A-B Testing

  • We will not be able to provide 1D, 7D, or 28D click-through or view-through attribution window breakdowns.
  • Will report back data aggregated at the campaign level. Reporting at the ad set and ad levels will be modeled unless there is a 1:1 mapping with the campaign. We will not be able to support reporting at the creative level for those using multiple creatives within an ad.
  • Does not allow for support of any breakdowns (age, gender, region, country, impression device, platform, placement, product ID, etc.) for app install or post-install event metrics.
  • Report back data that is several days delayed. Will not provide support for real-time data.
  • Will not be able to support impression-time or conversion-time reporting. Due to the delay of reports and lack of visibility into when the ad clicks happened, we can only support reporting based on the time the data gets returned through the SKAN API.

SKAdNetwork Limitations

  • The SKAN API will report back data aggregated at the campaign level. Reporting at the ad set, campaign, and account levels will match results returned by the SKAN API. While reporting at the ad level will be modeled based on aggregated data received from the SKAN API. Unless there is only one ad for a given campaign.
  • Demographic breakdowns will no longer be available
  • The SKAN API will not provide support for real-time reporting. Data will be reported with a randomized delay of up to three days.
  • The SKAN API will not provide support for attribution window breakdowns (1D, 7D, 28D).
  • Cross-account reporting can only be done within the same account type, not across iOS 14 and non-iOS 14 accounts.
  • A/B testing Mobile App Installs and post-install events from iOS 14 devices will be only available at the campaign-level. There will be no impact on reporting for Android and iOS 13 campaigns.

Added Context, “Facebook Announces Plans for Apple’s iOS 14 Impact”

  • Facebook announced plans for the impact of Apple’s much-anticipated iOS 14 release, in a detailed blog post. Apple’s deprecation of the iOS Users’ Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) will require apps to ask users for permission to collect and share identifying data going forward.
  • Facebook will not collect the identifier for advertisers (IDFA) on its own apps on iOS 14 devices. But it may revisit this decision as Apple offers more guidance.
  • The company will remind its users that they have a choice about how their information is used on Facebook. Also, about its Off-Facebook Activity feature. This allows users to see a summary of the off-Facebook app and website activity businesses send to Facebook and disconnect it from their accounts.
  • For partners, Facebook will release an updated version of its Facebook SDK to support iOS 14. This will provide support for Apple’s SKAdNetwork API. Facebook is asking businesses to create a new ad account dedicated to running app install ad campaigns for iOS 14 users. This will mitigate the impact of the efficacy of app install campaign measurement.
  • The company believes that Apple’s changes will disproportionately affect its Audience Network given its heavy dependence on app advertising. The expectation is that advertisers’ ability to accurately target and measure their campaigns on Audience Network will be impacted. As a result, publishers should expect their ability to effectively monetize on Audience Network to decrease. In fact, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14. Facebook is however expecting less impact on its own advertising business.
  • In testing, Facebook has seen more than a 50% drop in Audience Network publisher revenue when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns. Facebook says the impact to Audience Network on iOS 14 may be much more. So, they are working on short-and long-term strategies to support publishers through these changes.
  • Facebook is encouraged by conversations and efforts already taking place in the industry to get this right for small businesses – including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the recently announced Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM).

Game Over: We Can Help!

Please reach out to support@consumeracquisition.com if you would like to schedule a conversation to discuss any of the above items.  Also, we will be frequently our Mobile App Industry Benchmark page with a dedicated section designed to identify issues with IDFA roll out.

We’ve been talking about the “Death of UA” for over a year.  Check out our prior posts:

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