Lian, Author at Consumer Acquisition by Brainlabs

Creative Is King: Creative Trends For Mobile Gaming Ads

Posted on June 2, 2020March 12, 2021 by Lian

UA advertising for mobile gaming has gone through some big changes in the last few years. AI is automating more and more of media buying, as the best practices outlined in Facebook’s Structure for Scale framework demonstrate.

The key elements of the Structure for Scale recommendations are:

Auto Advanced Matching: Accurately attribute conversions and increase your audience size.
Account Simplification: Simplify your ad account set up to improve efficiency.
Automatic Placements: Show ads across the Facebook Network where they’re likely to perform best.
Campaign Budget Optimization: Find the best way to spend across your ad sets.
Dynamic Content & Language Optimization: Auto optimize creative for right placement / person / time.

If that looks different than how you’re managing UA campaigns right now, it’s time to bring your advertising – and your entire UA program – into 2020.

Why Creative Is So Important

Creative is an advertiser’s best opportunity for a competitive advantage in social advertising, and it has been since 2019. As the AI optimizing the ad platforms has gotten better and better, it’s leveled the playing field for advertisers big and small.

Here’s why:

1. Expensive, third-party automated adtech platforms aren’t as much of a competitive advantage as they used to be. Facebook and Google’s platforms have integrated the best features of those tools and offered them as standard features to campaign dashboards. All that fancy adtech is now available in your ad accounts, for free. However, if you are spending over $250,000 per month or running multiple titles, an inexpensive ad management platform like AdRules can greatly simplify your workflow and increase productivity.

2. If you’re spending less than $250,000 per month, you may not need expensive, high-end ad jockeys. Automation features have taken a lot of the controls away from UA managers and ad accounts with smaller ad spends have become easier to manage. However, if you are spending over $250,000 per month or across several networks, you may find it helpful to look for inefficiencies in automated solutions. There are still many levers where a rockstar UA manager will outperform an algorithm.

Not All Creative is Created Equal

Those two factors alone leave creative as the most critical competitive advantage. Because you can now run powerful campaigns without adtech, and lower-spending advertisers can actually get good results, two key competitive advantages are gone. Creative is now critical.

The data backs this up. After managing over $3 billion in ad spend, we’ve seen creative prove itself over and over as the single-best driver of ROAS.

Across our portfolio of accounts, we’ve found that 75% of the ROAS gains we’ve generated for clients can be directly attributed to creative optimization. Compare that to 15% of the ROAS gained from audience expansion, and 10% of the ROAS gained from media buying tactics and optimization.

Audience expansion and media buying tactics are still fantastic tools for the Rockstar UA manager, but creative wins hands down. Creative is king.

But not all creative is created equal.

Just pumping out more and more creative variations from winning ads won’t give you the advantage you need. You need high-performance new concepts and control-beating fresh ideas. Those can be hard to find. Only 1-3 ad concepts out of 20 ever beat the control.

To know which creative assets and elements deliver big results, you need an efficient, accurate testing system. Without efficiency, it’s easy to blow your budget on testing variations that end up generating a disproportionate percent of non-converting spend.

This can be more a challenge than it might seem. Beating the control is surprisingly hard… but more about that in a moment.

Creative Tunnel Vision and How to Overcome It

Even with a world-class testing methodology and creative optimization process, your creative team needs fresh ideas. They have to be aware of all the trends in ad creative that your competitors know about and are already taking advantage of.

To increase the success rate of creative testing while eliminating creative tunnel vision, we are sharing our proprietary creative strategies for gaming genres. We’ve reviewed thousands of Facebook and Google ads to create a “visual taxonomy” of creative trends. We use those trends to generate a list of fresh creative concepts informed by competitive ads, player motivations, and advertiser performance.

As Picasso said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal!” Once you identify your competitors’ best ads, you have an endless supply of “tested” concepts. However, we have found that analyzing competitive creative, as challenging as it is, is not a UA or Design function. It appears to be a cross-disciplinary exercise.

At this particular snapshot in time, in early June 2020, we’re seeing trends like these drive ad performance:

Connect the Dots
Puzzles
Noob vs Pro
Hidden Object
Influencers

Again: These trends come and go faster than fashion, and you need to be in touch with the heartbeat of online advertising across thousands of advertisers to even recognize the trends in the massive number of ads launched every day. Then, once you’ve recognized them, you need to adapt these creative trends so you can use them in your own ads. Get it all right, then test it with a super-efficient creative testing system, and you win the prize: New ad creative that beats the control.

It’s all a little bit like baseball… you’re only as good as your last hit.

Staying Ahead of Trends

Trying to keep up with trends that evolve so rapidly is hard. Trying to do it while you maintain ROAS is even harder. And expecting the same team of people to do it over and over again, week after week… is damn near impossible. Eventually, almost covertly, creative teams learn what works and what fails and then “play it safe” with their creative. They’ll default back to their greatest (and safest) hits of the past, and become just a little bit too cautious about testing any out of the box ideas that might not work. We call this “creative tunnel vision”.

Unfortunately, while many out of the box ideas don’t work, some will. And one or two of those ads – those unlikely, out of the blue winners – could have delivered you a 10-40% leap in ROAS.

But if your team never develops those out of the box ideas, they’ll never test them. You’ll never know how much revenue you’ve missed.

This is why an outside team can be so helpful. And why competitive analysis should be a core skill of somebody in every creative team.

Competitive analysis has two key benefits:

It lets you peer into an almost endless library of tested concepts (tested with your competitors’ ad budgets, not yours).
It increases your success rate for your new concepts, so your entire testing program involves a lot less risk.

Think of all this shared knowledge as the “wisdom of creative crowds.” Fortunately, we have ample resources to make competitive analysis efficient. Creative Trend tools like AdRules are great, as are SocialPeta and AppAnnie and many others. There’s even Facebook’s ad library, which is completely free, though it only lets you see which ads your competitors are running, not how those ads have actually performed.

If that’s not enough, you can also check out our resource of competitive video ads from Facebook and Google AC advertisers. Just remember to check competitive benchmarks data so you can recognize what’s breakout performance and what’s just average for that genre.

Creative Trends for Mobile Gaming & Recommendations

So creative trends for mobile gaming change fast – but they also vary dramatically across genres. And so while it is good to know broad creative trends, you’ll also want to hone in on your particular niche. Of course, you’ll also want to overlay all this with actual performance data. We want to chase trends that boost ROAS, not just chase every trend that comes along.

To get you started with this, we’ve developed seven genre-specific creative trend reports. Here are the highlights of two of them:

Word Games Trends

Paper Puzzle: Mimicking gameplay with a paper version.
Scientific claims: “30 minutes a day sharpen your brain” “Neuroscientists recommend playing this game to stay young.”
Challenges: “What’s Americans’ favorite food?” “Can you find this item?”
Reasons to play the game: Meet friends, upgrades, learn new words, game tutorials.
Whimsical: “The first word you see is your destiny!”
Relaxing themes: “What are you doing to decompress?” Soothing landscapes and music.

Card Games Trends

App Explainers: Videos explaining how the game or app works with users/players, screenshots/gameplay, and rewards. (Caesars Casino, Gin Rummy Plus, Inbox Dollars)
Real Winners/Testimonials: Videos featuring real winners and amounts they’ve won. (Lucktastic, Lucky Day)
Newsreel: Videos showing newsworthiness of the app based on real or fake news coverage. (House of Fun Slots, Jackpocket)
Casino Lifestyle: Videos with colorful slot machine graphics and/or big band music. (Caesars Casino, Gin Rummy Plus, WSOP, Slotomania, Spades Plus, Spin to Win Slots)
Community: Videos featuring gameplay between players, or texts between players regarding the app itself. (IBotta, WorldWinner)
Winners/Testimonials: Videos featuring winning moments and real winner testimonial. (Skillz)

If you’re not seeing your genre, or you want to see the full reports (they go into much more detail) check out our other creative strategy decks:

Mobile Gaming Player Profiles: Market Segmentation & User Motivations

So monitoring creative trends and doing an in-depth competitive analysis is great. But cutting edge advertisers don’t stop there. They also incorporate player profiles and user motivations into their creative strategy.

Player profiles are actually an old idea in game design, but they’re a very new idea for game advertising. As of late last year, only about 10% of the UA teams we reached out to were using player profiles, and they tended to be the most elite advertisers.

So what are player profiles? The way most UA teams are using them is a hybrid of principles from game theory and a concept known as “horizontal segmentation” borrowed from the consumer goods industry.

Here’s the thumbnail version of why this new theory of creative is so powerful: If you can identify certain customer preference clusters within your client base, and if you can then develop products that are designed specifically to fulfill those preferences, you can align your messaging with their motivations for playing your game or trying your service.

Here’s what a fully developed player profile might look like if it was used within a creative brief. This is all fake data, but it gives you an idea of how powerful this approach to creative development can be.

That’s the idea behind player profiles. It’s also a demonstration of another megatrend in UA advertising that we’ve been seeing for a while: The merging of data science and UA teams.

This merger may become more pronounced as UA advertising automation continues to “streamline” teams, and as ad creative and data science teams start to share ideas and assets with each other even more than they do now.

Mobile Gaming Emotional Hooks

Once you’ve got your mobile gaming app’s player profiles dialed in, then you can incorporate these six mobile gaming emotional hooks into your creative so the strategy is complete.

Understanding mobile gaming player profiles and emotional hooks may change how you see ads forever. It’s a wickedly-effective framework for motivating users, but also a great lens to use as you analyze competitors’ creative.

Creative Testing: Why The Control Is So Hard To Beat

So you know creative is the best path to high ROAS. And you know competitive analysis, creative trends, and player personas and motivations should all be shaping your creative strategy. You know all this requires a lot of testing – and efficient testing, at that – to surface the high-performance creative you need to keep your campaigns alive.

Nice start… but you’re not done.

You see, Facebook’s testing algorithm is more sophisticated than it might first appear to be.

We’ve gotten to know it well after performing more than 10,000 A/B and multivariate tests on Facebook and its competitor, Google. We produce more than 100,000 video and image ads every year. We have managed over $3 billion in paid social ad spend.

We’d like to share what we’ve learned from that work.

Testing Mobile Gaming Ad Creative

We test a lot of mobile gaming ad creative, but we test in a unique way. When we test, our goal is to compare how new concepts will perform versus the winning video (control) to see if the challenger can outperform the champion. Why? Because if you can’t outperform the best ad in a portfolio, you will lose money running the second or third place ads. A new ad either needs to beat the best-performing ad (the control), or you haven’t really gained anything.

Keep in mind, also, that we focus on these verticals: gaming, e-commerce, entertainment, automotive, D2C, financial services, and lead generation. So what we have learned is specific to those niches. We have not tested our process beyond the aforementioned verticals.

Our testing process has been architected to save both time and money by:

killing losing creatives quickly
significantly reducing non-converting spend

Our AdRules Software via the Facebook API

While our process can generate both false negatives and false positives (as almost any test can), it is designed to deliver maximum efficiency in exchange for those risks. We typically allow our tests to run between 2-7 days to provide enough time to gather data without requiring the capital and time required to reach statistical significance (StatSig). We also always run our tests using our AdRules software via the Facebook API.

Our insights are specific to the above scenarios and not a representation of how all testing on Facebook’s platform operates. In some cases, it is valuable to retain learning without obstructing ad delivery.

To be clear, our process is not the Facebook best practice of running a split test and allowing the algorithm to reach statistical significance (StatSig), which then moves the ad set out of the learning phase and into the optimized phase.

The insights we’ve drawn are specific to these scenarios we outline here and are not a representation of how all testing on Facebook’s platform operates. In some cases, it is valuable to have old creative retain its learning history to seamlessly A/B test without obstructing ad delivery.

If you’d like to learn more about our creative testing system, and what we’ve learned about Facebook’s testing algorithm, check out our fun explainer video or read our white paper on the subject.

Here’s a summary of what our tests have shown:

1. During our testing, we noticed that Facebook maintains creative history for the current video winner during an A/B test. This makes the control video very difficult to beat when using our IPM testing methodology.

2. Ads that are visually similar to the control appear to be grouped together in terms of how the algorithm treats them. They are also automatically given a higher IPM (impressions per thousand) value, even at the very start of a test.

3. Any new creative that is visually very different from the control does not share this creative history. This “very different creative” will start the test with a lower IPM. As a consequence of this, any creative that is visually very different from the control will require more time and money to “warm-up” its creative history. It will also require more time and money to get out of the learning phase and into the optimized phase before it ever has a chance of competing against the control.

Here’s what this all looks like in terms of the performance of different mobile gaming ads:

If the split-testing did not maintain creative history, the starting value for IPMs would be much closer. But as you can see in the chart above, this is not what our tests show is happening.

This feature causes test results like the one below, where we have set up a brand new test with an existing control, and right at the start, the control is granted an IPM around 8-9, but all the other (visually very different) ads get IPMs around 0-2.

Interesting, eh?

This discovery forced us to retest a lot of creative and re-think our testing methodologies. The good news is that after re-testing a lot of our old creative, 95% of the newly retested creative that had previously failed to beat the control, actually improved its performance to an 85% failure rate (as opposed to the 95% failure rate all that creative had had before). This all resulted in a 29% lift in ROAS thanks to our new approach to testing, which takes into account the “creative history” factor in Facebook’s testing algorithm.

It took us a lot of work… but ultimately we got a 29% lift in ROAS.

So how can you work with creative history being maintained? Watch our video for the step by step process, but basically, don’t use a control video as the benchmark for testing new creative. Don’t put your control inside the split-test of your new creative concepts. Instead, run all your new creative concepts against each other – without the control. Then let these “challenger” videos build up enough learning to effectively compete with the control “champion video.”

Conclusion / What This Means For Your Mobile Gaming App

Once you understand how the social advertising platforms are changing, and you understand the power of testing, it’s clear: CREATIVE IS KING. Creative trends for mobile gaming allow you to effectively steal ideas from competitors. Mobile gaming player profiles extend the audience and performance of your ads, while enhanced creative testing saves time and money. That’s the state of creative strategy and optimization right now. Hopefully, you read this article quickly, because it all changes so fast that a new trend or a new feature may have surfaced even while you read this.

Of course, any time you want help, just contact us.

Facebook Creative Testing: Why Does The Control Always Win?

Posted on April 28, 2020March 29, 2021 by Lian

In Facebook creative testing, why does the control always win?

Check out this FUNNY video to hear our CEO reveal why the control video is so difficult to beat in Facebook ad creative testing.
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Why Does the Control Always Win?

Find out what we just uncovered (Jan 2020) that has radically improved our custom creative testing and creative strategy for Facebook ads. We will deep dive into how we tested creative prior to our recent discovery. In addition, we’ll share our actionable tactics and strategies for new concepts and variations that are sure to reshape your creative testing processes.

Your creative and UA teams will be forever grateful you have this information.

High-Performance Creative

High-performance creative is a rare thing for social advertising. In our experience, after spending over $3 billion dollars driving UA across Facebook and Google, usually only one out of twenty ads can beat the “best performing control” (the top ad). If a piece of creative doesn’t outperform the best control, you lose money running it. As a result, losers are killed quickly, and winners are scaled to the moon.

Facebook Creative Testing

The reality is, a vast majority of ads fail. The high failure rate of most creative shapes creative strategy, budgets, and ad testing methodology. If you can’t test ads quickly and affordably, your campaign’s financial performance is likely to suffer from a lot of non-converting spend. But testing alone isn’t enough. You also must generate enough original creative concepts to fuel testing and uncover winners. Over the years, we’ve found that 19 out of 20 ads fail (5% success rate), you don’t just need one new creative: You need 20 new original ideas or more to sustain performance and scale!

New Concepts for Facebook Creative Testing

And you need all that new creative fast because creative fatigues quickly. You may need 20 new creative concepts every month, or possibly even every week depending on your ad spend and how your title monetizes (IAA or IAP). Also, the more spend you run through your account, the more likely it is that your ad’s performance will decline.

Download Our Creative Testing Whitepaper Today!

Offering Full Access To Creative Research & Ad Management Software to Help Workers At Home

Posted on April 22, 2020March 29, 2021 by Lian

We are offering full access to creative research and ad management software to help workers at home. While most of us are required to work from home, we understand this may bring inefficiencies to your regular way of optimizing Facebook and Google ads and performing creative research.

We would like to help make working from home a little easier. Starting today, advertisers have full access to AdRules creative research and competitive benchmarks and all-new advertisers have full access to our full AdRules platform to automate and streamline Facebook and Google media buying through July 31, 2020.*

Full Access To AdRules

Our AdRules self-service platform uses workflow automation to help you build ads quickly and improve reporting capabilities over Facebook and Google’s native tools. For instance, AdRules makes it easy for you to discover creative trends and quickly launch new ads to keep creative concepts flowing.

Our in-house Creative Studio has produced over 300,000 creatives and we’ve managed over $3 billion in social advertising spend. As a result, we can deliver ad creative at scale for your campaigns.

Consumer Acquisition’s Creative Studio

Here are some of the features you can explore:

Build Your Own Competitor List, See Their Video Ads, and Sort Creatives By Impression & Network
See How Your KPIs Compare To Your Competitors: CPC, CPI, CTR, CPM, ROAS, Bidding Strategies, Audience & Country Targeting, Creative, and More.
Full Facebook Bidding: App Event Optimization, Value And Min ROAS
Robust Creative Analytics and Ad Building To Automate Workflow For Facebook & Google.
What’s Hot In Q2 2020? Check Out Cur Creative Strategy Decks!
View Unified KPIs In One Dashboard, Facebook, Instagram, Google, MMPs, and First-Party BI Data
MMPs We Support: Adjust, Appsflyer, Branch, Kochava, Singular, and Tenjin

Let’s make working from home a little easier and more productive together. Please follow this link for more information, AdRules FREE Until July 31, 2020.

*Some restrictions apply.

The Definitive Guide to Facebook Advertising in 2021

Posted on April 13, 2020May 24, 2021 by Lian

Facebook Advertising in 2021 (Instagram and Messenger advertising) is an exciting endeavor. Every quarter, and often every month, there’s some major evolution in the platform.

While the changes are constant, if you understand the fundamentals of how the algorithm works and what Facebook wants for its users, the changes become more understandable. They have context. In this big picture, Facebook is automating much of campaign management through dozens of iterations. Its algorithm is getting smarter all the time.

So when Facebook rolls out things like structure for scale or automated placements, that’s just another example of the platform encouraging advertisers to let the algorithm do data analysis, rather than having human advertisers figure things out themselves.

Same with campaign budget optimization, the concept of “significant edits”, and the simplified account structure Facebook now recommends. Both of those changes are just examples of how the Facebook advertising algorithm can now optimize our campaigns for us.

Facebook’s Goal of Automation

Once you understand this overarching goal of automation, all the “big changes” Facebook rolls out every few months are brought into context.

“Be a giver,” as the saying goes. Create engaging, helpful ads and you’ll probably get better ROAS (return on ad spend). And as you understand all the myriad ways people use Facebook (from Messenger to the Marketplace and via videos and interactive games), all the different ad formats make sense, too.

Creative strategy, especially, makes more sense when you take this larger view. For larger advertisers, especially, well-optimized ads are the difference between success and failure. This is especially true now.

As the algorithm has evolved, any benefits advertisers have gotten from third-party tools or fancy analysis are diminished – the algorithm automates the most advanced features, and better than the tools. So the last best advantage to be had is through creative.

This makes two things essential to success on Facebook right now: Understanding our audiences, and learning how to test creative as efficiently and as effectively as possible. We’ll cover both as we work through the different sections of this guide. The time you’ve finished reading this guide, you’ll have a working understanding of Facebook advertising.

What App Advertisers Need to Do Before They Start Advertising on Facebook

If you’ve been running Facebook (or Instagram) ads for a while, you may already have the basics set up. If so, jump ahead to the next section, Competitive Analysis and Creative Strategy for Facebook Ads.

But if you are among app advertisers just getting started, or you’re launching a brand new account or project, you’ll need to do a few things before you start Facebook advertising. Skipping these steps will either literally block you from launching a campaign, or it will impair your ability to track results.

First, you’ll need to:

1. Create a Facebook advertising account (Assuming you don’t already have one).

2. Create a Facebook advertising business page (Again, assuming you don’t already have a Facebook page for the project you want to advertise).

Boosted Posts

That’s all you’ll need if all you want to do is boost posts from your Facebook advertising page to your existing audience on Facebook. Boosted posts are technically ads, but they don’t have any of the customization features available in Facebook’s Ads Manager. In fact, you’ll need Facebook Ads Manager even if you want to create a post that doesn’t appear on your Page’s timeline or in News Feed.

But boosting posts is simple, which is why so many people do it. Just go to the post you want to boost on your Business page and click the blue “Boost Post” button. Facebook’s interface will guide you through the information required to boost the post. Note that not all posts can be boosted; Facebook’s information page about what can’t be boosted is here.

Promote Your Business

If you’re a local business, you can also promote your business from your Facebook advertising business page. Just click the “Promote” button near the bottom left of your business page, and Facebook’s interface will guide you through all the settings to Promote your business from there.

Use Facebook’s Ad Manager

While boosted posts and business promotion are certainly very easy to use, they are too simplistic for most advertisers, and we generally don’t recommend them. To get far better results from Facebook (and Instagram) ads, you should use Facebook’s Ads Manager. And to do that, you’ll need a Facebook Business page.

Note that you do not need to create an account in Facebook’s Ads Manager. One is automatically created for you when you create a business page.

3. Install the Facebook Pixel

Before you ever turn on an ad campaign, it’s critical to install the Facebook pixel. If possible, it’s actually best for you to install the Facebook pixel even months before you launch your first campaign. This is because the Facebook pixel can track everyone who comes to your website (or to other apps and tools), so it will allow you to target your ads to people who have been to your website ever since you installed the pixel. Being able to create a custom audience of everyone who’s been to your website in the last six months is a beautiful thing.

Fortunately, installing a Facebook pixel is easy. Just go into the Facebook Ads Manager, click the top-left hamburger menu to the left of “Ads Manager.” A pop-up menu will appear. Choose “Ads Manager” from the selections on the left, then look in the third column of the second pop-up menu under “Measure & Report”. Under “Events Manager,” select “Pixels”.

Next, you’ll see a screen like this:

If you click “Set up Pixel”, you’ll be given three options:

Add code using a Partner Integration

Connect your site using one of our many partners including Squarespace, WordPress, Shopify, and others. Learn More

Best for: Sites using a CMS, minimal technical support needed

Manually add pixel code to the website

Follow guided installation instructions with detailed developer documentation. Learn More

Best for: Custom sites, some technical support needed

Email instructions to a developer

If you don’t have direct access to your site’s code, send instructions and documentation to your technical support. Be sure to include the pixel ID in your email.

Best for: No current access to the website codebase

If you’re comfortable working with code (at least enough to copy it and paste it into the right spot), choose “Manually add pixel code to website”. After you select that, Facebook will show you the code you need to add to your website. Note that if you’re using a third-party tool for your Facebook pixel, you would have wanted to pick the first option in the prior screen, “Add code using a Partner Integration.”

Insert Headers and Footers

Once you’ve copied the code, paste it into your website’s header area. If your site is on WordPress, there’s a free plugin called “Insert Headers and Footers” which makes this very easy to do.

Once the code is installed, turn on. There are several benefits to Automatic Advanced Matching, including:

More accurate conversion attribution
More people in your Website Custom Audience
Reduced cost per conversions

Note that you can also set up “manual Advanced Matching,” but you’ll need the help of a developer to do it. is also available for app advertisers if you have Facebook SDK set up. More about SDK in a moment.

Tracking

After you’ve got the Facebook pixel installed and Advanced Matching turned on, then you can tell Facebook specifically what you want to track in the Event Setup Tool. You can also manually edit the pixel code yourself, but the Setup Tool lets you do this without any coding on your part.

Events you might want to track include:

Leads
Views
Orders

Facebook has more information about installing and configuring Facebook pixels here. How you set up your pixel will depend on your business, though the chart below will show you what’s possible for different industries.

4. Optional: Create a Business Manager account.

If you haven’t created a business manager account yet, it’s a good idea to do it now. You can technically still run ads without a Business Manager account, but a Business Manager account will allow you to add:

People to your account (very helpful if you have even a few employees, or an ad agency or other contractors you work with).
Pages to your Business Manager.
Ad accounts to your Business Manager.

For ad agencies and marketing services, in particular, having a Business Manager account is essential. Specifically, agencies and Facebook Marketing Partners (like Consumer Acquisition) can specify which accounts they use on behalf of other businesses. Mobile app advertisers will also want to create a Business Manager account as part of the process of registering their app for mobile app ads.

Business Manager accounts are free and easy to setup. To go to. Click “Create Account” and follow the instructions.

Additional setup tasks for mobile app advertisers

Mobile app advertisers have a couple of extra steps to set up their accounts completely. It is a bit more work, but you’ll be glad you did it.

5. Create [or integrate] a Facebook developer account.

Many advertising and marketing tools require you to set up a Facebook developer account to ad features to your Facebook page or ads. Creating a developer account is free and takes only a few seconds.

Go to developers.facebook.com.
Log in with your Facebook account.
Click on “Create Developer Account”.

And you’re done.

6. Create a Facebook application.

You may also need to create a Facebook application for some third-party tools or to do certain things with your app. Again, this is free to do and takes only a few seconds.

Go to developers.facebook.com.
Log in with your Developer account.
Click on “My Apps” and then on “Add New App”

Name your new app.
You’ll be brought into the dashboard where you can begin the integration of your new app.

Settings

After this is done, you’ll want to go to your App Dashboard and go to settings.

In the “Basic” settings area:

Fill out your app’s Display Name, Namespace, and Domain.
Enter the URLs to your app’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
Upload your logo as a 1024×1024 pixel ‘App Icon’
Choose a category for your app and its “Business Use”.
Select the Business Manager account you’ll be managing the app ads from.
Complete the Data Protection Officer contact information form.
Specify which platforms you’ll be delivering your app on.

Submit App for Review

Finally, submit your app for review, paying close attention to what information Facebook expects you to include in your request.

Set up the Facebook SDK (Software Developer Kit) with your app and activate App events.

Facebook’s SDK lets you pass app event data from your app to Facebook. This allows you to accurately track and measure the actions people take in your app, and it allows you to use app event data to optimize your Facebook Advertising campaigns in powerful, lucrative ways.

You’ll set up SDK in your App Dashboard (where you just filled out the Basic and Advanced settings). To begin, go to the Settings > Basic page and scroll down to platforms. You’ll be setting up an SDK for each platform your app will use.

Implement SDK

Facebook’s instructions for implementing the SDK on each available platform are here. That page also includes the official Facebook guides for all of Facebook SDKs. Setting up an SDK is a fairly technical task – for example, in iOS, you’ll be using the Swift Package Manager to set up a development environment in Xcode. It’s a job best left to a developer or a mobile app advertising service or agency.

Congratulations. You’ve got the functional elements of Facebook’s advertising platform set up, whether you’re a new advertiser for a local business, or you’re launching a new app to a global market. But it’s still not time to start boosting posts or creating videos. Before you spend a dime on advertising, we recommend you think carefully about your creative strategy.

Competitive Analysis and Creative Strategy for Facebook Advertising

According to Facebook, this is what you need to start creating Facebook ads:

Your business goal—the reason you’re running the ad
An understanding of who you want to reach
A daily or lifetime budget for your ad
Photos or videos to feature in your ad

Let’s walk through each of these, and talk about the strategy behind them. The decisions you make at this strategic level of your Facebook advertising will make or break the success of your ads. So while this might seem like background work, please: Don’t skip this step. Your smartest competitors won’t.

Why Competitive Analysis and Player Profiles are Worth Your Time

Creating great ads in 2020 requires a blend of data analysis, psychology, and technical skill. But ultimately it all comes down to knowing your audience inside out.

One of the most interesting advertising developments in 2019 was the emergence of “player profiles” – customer profile mockups that define what drives different types of game players to play certain games.

These new customer and player analyses are based on the concept of horizontal segmentation, which has been used in consumer goods for decades. Basically, it’s a way to tailor games, advertising creative, and even product development to specific, high-value market segments, thus generating more revenue and happier players and customers.

We have a detailed that’s worth the read. And while this might seem like extra work for you and your team, we’ve found that most of the top advertisers are already using player profiles in their creative strategy and development. So it’s extra work, sure – but it generates better ROAS.

Competitive Analysis

One other essential best practice for creative strategy is competitive analysis. We’ve written about competitive analysis in detail, but don’t just read about it: Do it.

Even if you only do a competitive analysis for a few hours, and it’s done with just a few screenshots and some links and pasted ad copy in a spreadsheet, that’s enough to make a difference. It will teach you which ads your competitors are running. Analyzed well, that information can also tell you which messaging is working well for your audience and what you should be testing in your own ads.

Competitive analysis probably only second to creative testing on our list of things advertisers should do more of. If you’ve got any spare time, we highly recommend you do more of it.

Setting up your first Facebook advertising campaign

Whew! We’ve done a lot of foundational work so far and now’s the fun part – actually setting up your campaign. Follow along with the screenshots and these instructions. Your ads will be running in no time.

Your business goal—the reason you’re running the ad

Let’s begin with the end in mind: What do you want from your Facebook advertising?

If you aren’t sure about that, or you have a long list of things you want but no one priority, it’s best to get clarity about this until you move forward. Your ads won’t be as effective as they could be until you know what you really want.

This isn’t just a philosophical theory, either. The very first thing the Facebook ad platform will ask you about when you create a campaign is what that campaign’s objective is.

Campaign objectives will vary depending on your business model, obviously. An e-commerce store might want catalog sales, whereas a gaming app could want app installs.

But that’s only the first level of how sophisticated Facebook advertising and campaign objectives can be. For example, some advertisers who want leads may find that their lead generation ads do much better if they’ve warmed up their audience/s with a few reach ads.

Reach Ads

The reach ads can also be used to expand a potential audience; you can show your first video ad to a large audience, see who’s interested enough to watch the first ten seconds of a video, and then show a second more conversion-oriented ad only to the people who watched the first ten seconds of the video. You could even create a lookalike audience of people who watched the video and show more conversion-oriented ads to people like them.

This is, in part, why Facebook ads are so powerful. By blending the different ad objectives, ad types, and the incredibly sophisticated audience targeting capabilities available, advertisers today can do things that advertisers 20 years ago would have been blown away by.

These types of capabilities are also exactly why Facebook has leveled the playing field for advertisers. You don’t need $30,000 worth of third-party ad tech software to do sophisticated audience nurturing and targeting like we just described. It’s all free, right there, on Facebook.

Campaign Objectives

Campaign objectives are particularly important in light of how much control we’ve given over to the algorithm. Picking the right campaign objective is one of the last levers we’ve got to manage our campaigns with, so choose it wisely.

You should also consider picking campaign objectives based on the idea of the customer journey. This is described in detail in Facebook’s “Structure for Scale” best practices – a set of techniques Facebook recommends for all advertisers now. Structure for Scale is basically the new playbook of how to advertise so you maximize the algorithm’s capabilities, rather than stunting its performance.

For more information on Structure for Scale and how to understand it and apply it, see our blog post, Facebook’s Structure for Scale: How to Prepare for Automated Media Buying. We’ve also got a FAQ page on Structure for Scale.

After you’ve chosen a campaign objective, you’ll be asked if you want to use Campaign Budget Optimization or if you want to create a split-test.

Campaign Budget Optimization

No matter which campaign objective you pick, you’ll be asked about split-tests and Campaign Budget Optimization. If you’ve picked an engagement objective, you’ll also be asked whether you want Post engagement, Page likes, or Event responses.

Both we and Facebook recommend you use Campaign Budget Optimization, but if you want to set up a test, it’s done in the setup interface. You can circle back later and turn Campaign Budget Optimization on in the campaign’s settings after you’ve published it.

Testing

Returning to testing, if you choose split-test in the setup interface, you can pick one of four options:

Note that you can test almost anything within a campaign by creating more than one ad set within the campaign and then changing just one thing, or “variable” (the A/B/C of the a/b test) across each ad set.

Incidentally, this is how Facebook automatically sets up a/b tests:

Testing Ad Creative

If you’re testing ad creative, it is also possible to put several different ad creatives within one ad set. This is common practice, and it can work well, but be aware that creating a large number of ad sets is not Facebook’s recommended best practice right now, especially if you want your campaigns to scale.

Per the “Structure for Scale” best practices we mentioned earlier, Facebook recommends a simplified campaign structure like this:

Rather than using many ad sets in a campaign, like this:

So what do you do?

Follow Facebook’s Simplified Campaign Structure to the letter, or just ignore it and create dozens of ad sets for the testing you know is so critical.

Actually, you compromise. This works out best because it’s not usually a good idea to try to test everything all at once. Just as “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” high-performance ad campaigns aren’t built in a day, either (though there are a few shortcuts you can take).

So do create enough ad sets to test creative, but not too many. Seven would be the maximum, and four would probably be better.

Just be patient!

In our experience, advertisers have to test about 20 new pieces of ad creative before they identify a new “control” or top-performing ad. We’ve built a rigorous, high-performance ad testing methodology over the course of the last few years. If you want to know more about our advanced creative testing techniques for high-volume Facebook advertising accounts, start with our blog post, 5 Facebook Best Practices For A|B Testing New Ad Creative, then read the section Hidden Challenges in Creative Testing of our whitepaper, 2020 Definitive Guide of Facebook Ads.

We believe creative strategy and testing is the single best way to achieve success with Facebook advertising (or with any type of social advertising). After profitably managing over $1.5 billion worth of social media ad spend, if we could give only one piece of advice, it would be this: Test. Test again. Test more.

An understanding of who you want to reach: Setting up Facebook Advertising Audiences

So now you know what you want from your ads; what action you want people to take. Now let’s get specific about who you want to take that action – who your audience is. Who you pick for your audience (or, who Facebook picks for you) is arguably as important as your ads.

Because of the way the algorithm works now when you set an objective for your campaign, you’re already picking your audience, at least in part. This is because the algorithm will take your defined audiences and then go find people within those audiences who are most likely to complete the objectives you want. In other words, Facebook will show your ads to the people who are most likely to take action – to complete the objective you’ve defined – first.

So logically enough, the very next screen you’ll see when you set up a new campaign and decide about testing… is the audience settings.

Audience Selection

Audience selection, like ad creation, is an art and a science unto itself. But if you’ve never run a Facebook ad before, and you don’t have a list or customer file, here’s where to start:

Pick a demographic profile that’s well-defined but not too specific.
In the “Detailed Targeting” section, search for some of your larger competitors. Add one major competitor for each audience, using the same demographic profiles.

Audience Testing

This is your first test of audiences. Pick 3-5 competitors that are large enough so you can target their audiences and use the demographic profile you’ve selected. Most Facebook experts recommend a minimum “potential reach” for each audience of 1-2 million people. Create those 3-5 audiences so the only difference between them is your competitor. The demographics, geographic targeting, and even your ad creative should all be the same across each ad set.

From there, use the reporting within your Facebook Ads Manager to show you which placements, demographics, and other variables might be worth additional tests. And remember ONLY TEST ONE THING AT A TIME. Otherwise, you won’t know what’s actually driving results. Facebook’s testing platform has some quirks, so the cleaner your testing methodology is, the better.

If you do have a customer file with email addresses or an email subscriber list, upload that and use it as a Custom Audience or as the basis for a Lookalike Audience.

To do this, go to Business Manager > Audiences. Click the blue-button in the top left and select “Custom Audience”.

Create a Custom Audience

You’ll see a pop-up screen like this:

Clearly, there’s a lot to choose from! Now you’re starting to see how powerful audiences and audience selection is… and why you want to proceed carefully as you test new audiences. It’s great to have so many choices, but that can make for disorganized testing.

If you wanted to advertise a gaming app, you’d have several options here: The “App activity” option might be the most interesting. Also, if you’ve set up SDK, you could advertise to, say, only people who had installed your app, or only people who have completed a purchase event. In addition, if your advertising budget was limited, even severely limited, you could still grow your user base if you only advertised to super-high value people.

Custom Audiences

Also, note that we’re looking at Custom Audiences here. You can always create a “Lookalike Audience” from any Custom Audience, and you can also segment these audiences out in very strategic ways.

We do so much audience targeting and selection that we’ve actually built a tool that lets advertisers create potentially hundreds of super-defined audiences with just a few clicks. We can even target people based on their expected lifetime value, and we can adjust those lifetime values in such a way that we can direct the algorithm to go find us, super-high-value users.

This level of audience targeting and audience fatigue management gives us a lot of control. It also lets us extend the life of creative assets, and it lets us squeeze every dime of performance out of ad budgets. See how we do it.

After you’ve picked an audience, Facebook will ask you where you want your ads to show. Per Facebook’s Structure for Scale best practices, we recommend choosing “Automatic Placements”. This will let the algorithm pick from more than ten possible places where your ads will show. And as the algorithm knows more about what works or doesn’t work, and it has a far better able to analyze the data available, it’s best to just let it pick where your ads will show.

Delivery Optimization

The next thing you’ll have to decide is delivery optimization. Do you want your ads to be charged by:

Link clicks (you are charged every time someone clicks the link in your ads)
Impressions (By CPM, or “clicks per thousand views”. In other words, you are charged based on how many of thousands of people see your ads)
Post Engagement (Choose from likes, shares, or comments)
Daily unique reach (you are charged based on how many people see your ad once per day)

This is also where you can decide if you want to run your ads on a schedule. For instance, if your reporting shows that your ROAS (return on ad spend) is terrible after 9 pm and before 6 am, you might want to schedule your ads so they don’t show between those times.

Delivery Type

Finally, you can choose the delivery type: Accelerated or Standard. Standard spreads out how often your ads show across the day. Accelerated spends your ad budget as soon as possible.

So by now, we’ve got an objective for our ads, and we know who we want to show those ads to. Next up is how much we want to spend.

A daily or lifetime budget for your ad

The best advice here is the same advice we’ve given before: Give the algorithm what it needs to do its job. That means bidding high enough and allocating enough budget.

And now, finally, we can get to the ads themselves.

Setting your ads up for success

There are five areas of ad setup:

Identity
Format
Media
Links
Tracking

Identity is straightforward. Just tell Facebook which page you want to be associated with your ads. If you’re running ads on Instagram, you’ll also need to assign an Instagram page.

Format

The format is where things get interesting. You can choose from a single image ad, video ad, a slideshow ad or an “Instant Experience” ad (which used to be called “Canvas”). Instant Experience ads are for mobile devices only and used the least. They typically require considerable creative development, but for the right brands, they can work well.

Image Ads

Single image ads are the bread and butter of Facebook advertising creative. They can work extremely well and – depending on your audience and your objectives – it’s possible they could even outperform a video ad.

Here’s an example of a simple image ad:

Video Ads

Nice, right? But for our money, video ads beat every other ad type. We’ve created tens of thousands of video ads, and we have quite a lot to say about best practices for video ad creative development and testing.

If you wish you could do video ads but you don’t have the resources to make videos, there is a clever shortcut: Adding motion to still images.

Carousel Ads

You can also create “Carousel ads” that are like a slideshow of static images. Here’s a screenshot of a carousel ad. These can work well for lead generation ads or for e-commerce sites.

Add Media

Once you’ve chosen the ad format, you’ll add your media, which will be either an image or a video. The specifications for images are here. The specs for videos are here.

Media Upload

When you upload your media, make sure you include multiple aspect ratios so your ads look good on all the different placements.

Media Review

Once you’ve uploaded your media, you’ll be given another chance to review how it will look in different placements, and to make any edits as necessary.

Ad Copy

Then you’ll set up your ad copy. Use the icons in the center of the panel to view your ad copy across all the placement settings. You may have to adjust your copy quite a lot so it makes sense in every placement.

Conversion Tracking

Next, you’ll have the option to turn on conversion tracking (which you’ll do, of course). For app advertisers, they’ll want to turn on App Events as well.

That will conclude the setup for your first ad. Continue this for each ad you want to test. When you’ve gotten through all the ads, click the green “Confirm” button to finalize your new campaign. This will submit it for review, which shouldn’t take much more than a few hours.

Congratulations. You’ve launched your first Facebook Advertising campaign!

Check the performance of your ads in the Ad Manager, or, if you want, through third-party reporting tools. And no matter what, keep testing your ad creative. We’re available if you need help with creative strategy and development, or if you want to outsource the whole process.

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Don’t Mess With The Algorithm: What Every Advertiser Needs To Know About Facebook’s Significant Edits

Posted on April 6, 2020February 10, 2021 by Lian

What every advertiser needs to know about Facebook’s Significant Edits…

Don’t mess with the algorithm.

That’s the fundamental idea behind significant edits. There’s a lot more to it, of course, and we’ll get into all that, but here’s the primary reason why you don’t want to make a change that Facebook construes as a significant edit: Because it will move your campaigns into “the learning phase,” which in turn will require your campaigns to relearn and temporarily become less efficient.

The learning phase isn’t some kind of punishment. It’s built to communicate that your campaigns are being optimized by the algorithm. Once it’s triggered, you’ll see a temporary drop in your ads’ performance until the system has accrued enough data to shift your campaigns or ad sets out of the learning phase and back into optimized mode. Usually, getting out of the learning phase requires at least 50 conversions per ad set per week.

So what is the “learning phase,” exactly? Here’s how Facebook describes it:

The Learning Phase

The learning phase is the period when the delivery system still has a lot to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set – so performance is less stable and cost-per-action (CPA) may fluctuate more frequently. The learning phase occurs when you create a new ad or ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one.

And here’s what it looks like in Facebook’s native tools:

An advertiser who doesn’t understand the principles behind significant edits could erase the benefits of any improvements they had been making with manual changes.

Here’s an example of how an advertiser could inadvertently hurt their performance:

Say an advertiser makes five changes to their campaign over the course of 30 days.
Each of these changes triggers a significant edit and moves the campaign into the learning phase for three days.
While in the learning phase, the campaign may lose efficiency by 30%.
Those five significant edits have forced the campaign into the learning phase for a total of 15 days out of the 30-day period.
Over the course of those 30 days, the campaign has lost a sizable chunk of ROAS due to too many changes.
The five changes the advertiser made will have to generate more than a reduction in performance to overcome the losses incurred by being in the learning phase.

Now, does that mean it’s never a good idea to go in and make a change that could possibly trigger a significant edit? No.

But it is smart to make strategic and limited changes to your campaigns. For example, don’t just try one bid strategy for a week and then switch back. Give the algorithm enough time to gather the data it needs to optimize your campaigns.

Preserve Performance

Another well-tested trick is to just leave well enough alone. Instead of changing an ad set, duplicate it, and test out your optimization changes, and see how well they work, this preserves the performance of the original ad set. While this is not recommended by Facebook’s structure for scale process of avoiding audience duplication it is viable for testing and could mean:

You’re spending more money
You’ve just created an audience overlap
Your new campaign or ad set will also have to go through the learning phase too

Of course, you can always just go ahead and make the change to the existing ad set or campaign. But before you do, at least understand which changes are most likely to trigger Facebook’s significant edits.

How Facebook’s Significant Edits Get Triggered

There are four guaranteed ways to trigger a significant edit. Any changes to these campaign or ad set elements will do it:

Targeting
Bid strategy
Optimization events
Ad creative (including adding a new ad to an ad set)

Also, pausing an ad set or a campaign for seven days or longer will also be interpreted as a significant edit. As a result, this will shift the ad set or campaign into the learning phase once the ad set or campaign is restarted.

These are changes that may or may not be interpreted as a significant edit, depending on how large the changes are:

Switching your campaign bid strategy. This may cause multiple ad sets within the campaign to reenter the learning phase.
Increasing or decreasing the spending limit amount of an ad set.
Changing bid control, cost control, or ROAS control amounts.
Altering an ad set or a campaign’s budget amount, unless you’re using the target cost bid strategy within Campaign Budget Optimization. Then any budget changes aren’t considered significant edits.

So what’s enough to be interpreted as a significant edit, and what’s not? Is a 39% increase to a campaign’s budget okay, but 41% is not? The correct answer is, “It depends”. The actual processes of triggering significant edits on the backend are much more complex. They also factor in many things like bidding type and spend level. Even small changes could still impact your performance. Therefore, we recommend advertisers use true budgets and cost restraints. Rather than treat budget and cost controls as levers for performance.

How to See Which Changes Have Triggered a Significant Edit in the Past

Concerned about how much performance you’ve lost due to significant edits and the dreaded learning phase that follows them?

You can see which changes have been designated as significant edits in your account by using the Inspect Tool at the ad set level and looking at the well-named “Significant Edit History” report.

Like this:

On the Inspect Tool page, scroll down to the bottom where the “Significant Edit History” report is:

Facebook’s Significant Edits are Just Part of Increasingly Automated Facebook Advertising

The principle behind significant edits should be familiar. Especially, if you have been paying close attention to the announcements from Facebook over the last few years. The algorithm is increasingly taking over tasks that human UA managers used to do. And that’s a good thing.

So per the Structure For Scale best practices released late last year, the more data we can give the algorithm to work with and the less we restrict its learning, the better our campaigns will run. Instead of crunching numbers and trying to squeeze every drop of quantitative optimization out of your campaigns, we recommend you focus on creative and creative strategy.

COVID-19: Mobile Ad Traffic & ROAS Up, CPMs Down, Opportunity To Scale

Posted on March 25, 2020January 29, 2021 by Lian

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, while undeniably tragic, have resulted in an increased global need to stay connected online. This need to connect, to distract, and to occupy time while isolated at home has resulted in opportunities for mobile games and mobile apps across the online advertising ecosystem.

The “pause” created by people staying at home is allowing us to spend more time with close family and loved ones while setting aside time to stay connected online to our communities and interests. Some experts have even predicted that the current situation could lead to a baby boom early next year.

What’s happening to the stock market, travel, retail, and services businesses have been difficult, to say the least. But as some of those businesses have pulled back ad spend, it’s opened the ad marketplace for other advertisers to step up.

Notably, mobile app advertisers have a unique opportunity.

We’ve been watching trends for a couple of weeks, and it’s no hiccup: CPMs for mobile games and apps have decreased markedly.

We can all understand why: People are spending more time playing games, and advertising has reduced for COVID-19 impacted advertisers. This has created a significant buying opportunity for online companies.

COVID-Impact To Mobile App Ad Spend

We’ve seen this across multiple mobile app niches, and geographies and it’s been steady since early March starting in Italy.

To illustrate the scope of this opportunity, below is data collected by ConsumerAcquisition.com during the period between February 21 – March 23, 2020, it is a representative snapshot from over $100 million in global ad spend from top mobile ad networks compiled from 50 mobile app games and apps.

Data varies slightly from country to country, of course, but our data show countries that have been required to shelter in place, like Italy, appear to be temporarily less competitive for mobile apps and gaming advertisers than they were a month ago. We seem able to leverage learnings from the Italian mobile ad marketplace to forecast CPM reductions about to occur in other geographies where we expect a new shelter in place restrictions to occur in the future. In the U.S. shelter in place is being rolled out on a state-by-state basis, that allows for additional geographic segmentation and time offsets.

Company Grouping #1: Italy, UK, US. CPM reductions vs Italy.

Company Grouping #2: Italy, Germany, Spain, UK US. CPM reductions vs Italy.

Representative ROAS vs CPM: CPMs decrease, ROAS increases.

This makes sense: When required to shelter in place, people seek a distraction with Netflix, YouTube TV, Hulu and of course, they play games and they spend a bit of money on entertainment. Between Saturday, March 14, 2020, and Monday, March 16, 2020, the number of Disney+ signups more than tripled compared to the same period from the week prior, according to data provided exclusively to Forbes from streaming analytics firm Antenna.

And because one in three Americans now have a stay-at-home or shelter-in-place mandate as of this writing, the US ad market appears ripe for mobile app and gaming advertisers.

Ad spend and CPM patterns like the ones shown above do not happen often. In fact, we typically only see CPM drops of this magnitude for the 2-4 weeks following Christmas. As we’ve never seen the impact of a pandemic on CPMs, these cost fluctuations may not last more than a few weeks from the start of shelter in place in each geography (state or country).

However, if the current “stay at home” and similar protocols last for 10 or more weeks, these reduced CPMs may last all the way into early summer.

Or maybe not. With the wildcard of the economy and job insecurity, the ad spend crystal ball gets murkier. If severe financial distress sets in broadly across states and countries, some people may cut back expenses, including fun distractions.

No one really knows how long this opportunity will last. Because of that, if you can, we recommend an increase to your mobile ad spend to close out Q1 and front load as much ad spend as possible into early Q2. If CPMs normalize, at least you’ll have captured market share and net profit while it was available.

Suggestions for Advertising During COVID-19

As you know, one of the best practices for advertising during the holidays is holiday-themed creative. It’s also a best practice to hook ad creative into cultural themes and trends.

You should avoid those overt messages with COVID-19. Maybe there’s a joke or two to be had around the toilet paper phenomena, but otherwise, people are probably playing games as an escape from what’s going on. So, consider softening your creative strategy according to these guidelines:

Stay upbeat, positive, and respectful.
Showcase your game or app as providing stress relief during the current situation (perhaps as an alternative to the news?)
Avoid direct mentions of the pandemic in general.
Don’t offer medical advice, guidance, or recommendations of any kind.
Keep things light and whimsical; avoid sardonic humor.
Everyone is experiencing COVID-19 in their own unique way. Refrain from creating ads that some people might consider offensive.
Fake news bulletins, breaking news imagery, or aggressive creative shouldn’t be used.
Make sure to tune up your creative testing best practices by reviewing our post, Why is the Control Video so Hard to Beat?

There is always opportunity in change and challenges. If you are in the mobile app and mobile gaming space, we believe the opportunity to scale during the current situation is one you should strongly consider.

Please reach out if we can be of help with creative services or user acquisition services.

COVID-19 Tracking Resources

Focus on What Matters: Here are the 3 Drivers of UA Campaign Performance

Posted on March 23, 2020March 31, 2021 by Lian

There are dozens of ways to improve campaign performance. Everything from the color on a call-to-action button to testing a new platform can give you better results.

But that doesn’t mean every UA optimization tactic you’ll run across is worth doing.

This is especially true if you’ve got limited resources. If you are on a small team, or you’ve got budget constraints or time constraints, those limitations will preclude you from trying every optimization trick in the book.

Even if you are the exception, and you have got all the resources you need, there’s always the issue of focus.

The focus may actually be our most precious commodity. Amid all the noise of day-to-day campaign management, choosing the right thing to focus on makes all the difference. There’s no point in clogging up your to-do list with optimization tactics that won’t make a significant difference.

UA Campaign Performance

Fortunately, it’s not hard to see which areas of focus are worthwhile. After managing over $3 billion in ad spend, we’ve seen what really makes a difference, and what doesn’t. And these are, irrefutably, the three biggest drivers of UA campaign performance right now:

Creative optimization
Budget
Targeting

Once creative, targeting, and budget are working and aligned, your campaigns’ ROAS will be healthy enough that you won’t have to chase after every optimization technique you hear about for barely-noticeable improvements.

Let’s start with the biggest game-changer:

Creative Optimization

Creative optimization is hands down the most effective way to boost ROAS, period. It crushes any other optimization strategy, and honestly, we see it delivering better results than any other business activity in any other department.

But we’re not talking about just running a few split-tests. To be effective, creative optimization has to be strategic, efficient, and ongoing.

We’ve developed an entire methodology around creative optimization called Quantitative Creative Testing. The fundamentals of it are:

Campaign Performance

Only a tiny percentage of the ads you create ever perform.

Usually, only 5% of ads ever actually beat the control.

But that’s what you need, isn’t it – not just another ad, but an ad good enough to run, and to run profitably. The performance gap between winners and losers is massive, as you can see below. The chart shows ad spend variations across 600 different creative assets, and we allocate spend strictly on performance. Only a handful of those 600 ads really performed.

We develop and test two core types of creative: Concepts and Variations.

80% of what we test is a variation on a winning ad. This gives us incremental wins while allowing us to minimize losses. But we also test concepts – big, bold new ideas – 20% of the time. Concepts often tank, but occasionally they do perform. Then sometimes, they get breakout results that reinvent our creative approach for months. The scale of those wins justifies the losses.

We don’t play by the standard rules of statistical significance in A/B testing.

In classic A/B testing, you need at least a 90-95% confidence level to achieve statistical significance. But (and this is critical), typical testing looks for tiny, incremental gains, such as a 3% lift.

We don’t test for 3% lifts. We’re looking for at least a 20% lift or better. Because we’re looking for an improvement that big, and because of the way statistics works, we can run tests in a fraction of that traditional a/b testing would require.

This approach saves our clients a ton of money and gets us actionable results far faster. That, in turn, allows us to iterate far more rapidly than our competitors. We can optimize creative in dramatically less time and with less money than traditional, old-school a/b testing would allow.

Be flexible about brand guidelines.

Branding is critical. We get it. But sometimes brand requirements stifle performance. So, we test. The tests we run that bend brand compliance guidelines don’t run long, so very few people see them, and so there’s minimal damage to brand consistency. We also do everything possible to adjust creative as quickly as possible, so it complies with brand guidelines while still preserving performance.

Those are the key points of our current methodology around creative testing. Our approach is constantly evolving – we test and challenge our testing methodology almost as much as the creative we run through it. For a deeper explanation of exactly how we develop and test 100x ads, see our recent blog post, Facebook Creatives: How to Produce and Deploy Mobile Ad Creative at Scale, or our white paper, Creative Drives Performance in Facebook Advertising.

Why It’s Time to Rethink Creative as the Primary Driver of Campaign Performance

Naming creative as the #1 way to improve performance is unconventional in UA and digital advertising, at least among people who have been doing it for a while.

For years, when a UA manager used the word optimization, they meant making changes to budget allocations and audience targeting. Due to the limits of the technology we’ve had up until fairly recently, we simply didn’t get campaign performance data fast enough to act on it and make a difference during a campaign.

Those days are over. Now, we get real-time or near real-time performance data from campaigns. So, while targeting and budget manipulations are powerful ways to improve performance, which you need to use with creative testing, we know creative testing beats the pants off both of them.

Google itself has acknowledged this, citing a study that found “on average, media placements only account for about 30% of a brand campaign’s success while the creative drives 70%.”

Automation

But that’s not the only reason to get laser-focused about optimizing creative. Possibly, the best reason to focus on creative is that the other two main drivers of UA performance – budget and targeting – are becoming increasingly automated. The algorithms at Google Ads and Facebook have taken over much of what used to be a UA manager’s daily tasks.

This has several powerful consequences, including that it levels the playing field to a large extent. So, any UA manager who had been getting an advantage thanks to third-party ad tech is basically out of luck. Their competitors now have access to the same technology.

That means tougher competition, but more importantly, it means we’re shifting towards a world where creative is the only real competitive advantage left.

All that said, there are still significant performance wins to be had with better targeting and budgeting. They may not have the same potential impact as creative, but they have to be dialed in or your creative won’t perform as it should.

Targeting

Once you find the right person to advertise to, then half the battle is won. And thanks to fantastic tools like lookalike audiences (now available from both Facebook and Google), we can do incredibly detailed audience segmentation. We can break audiences out by:

“Stacking” or combining lookalike audiences
Isolating by country
“Nesting” audiences, where we take a 2% audience, identify the 1% members inside of it, then subtract the 1%ers out so we’re left with a pure 2% audience

These sorts of super-targeted audiences allow us to optimize campaign performance at a level most other advertisers can’t do, but they also allow us to avoid audience fatigue for far longer than we would otherwise be able to do. It’s an essential strategy for maximum performance.

We do so much audience segmentation and targeting work that we built a tool to make it easier. Audience Builder Express lets us create hundreds of lookalike audiences with incredibly granular targeting in seconds. It also allows us to alter the value of certain audiences just enough so that Facebook can better target the super-high value prospects.

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/314918396″ width=”640″ height=”560″ title=”Audience Builder Express: Building Facebook Audiences in a Flash”]

While all this sophisticated audience targeting helps performance, it has one other benefit: It lets us keep creative alive and performing well for much longer than without our advanced targeting. The longer we can keep creative alive and performing well, the better.

Budgeting

We’ve come a long way from bid edits at the ad set or the keyword level. With campaign budget optimization, AEO bidding, value bidding, and other tools, now we can simply tell the algorithm which types of conversions we want, and it will go get them for us.

There is still an art to budgeting, though. Per Facebook’s Structure for Scale best practices, while UA managers do need to step back from close control of their budgets, they do have one level of control left. That’s to shift which phase of the purchase cycle they want to target.

If a UA manager needed to get more conversions so that the Facebook algorithm could perform better, they can move the event they’re optimizing for closer to the top of the funnel – to app installs, for example. Then, as the data accrue and they have enough conversions to optimize for a more specific, less frequent event (like in-app purchases), then they can change their conversion event target to something further down the funnel.

This is still budgeting, in the sense that it’s managing spend, but it’s managing spend at a strategic level. Now that the algorithms run so much of this side of UA management, we humans are left to figure out a strategy, not individual bids.

Bottom Line, Creative is King! UA Campaign Performance is NOT a Three-Legged Stool

Each of these primary drivers is critical to campaign performance, but it’s not until you use them in concert with Creative that they really start to stoke ROAS. They are all interconnected. Ignore one, and suddenly the other two won’t hold you up.

This is a big part of the art of campaign performance and management right now – bringing creative, targeting, and budgeting together in just the right way. The exact execution of this varies from industry to industry, client to client, and even week to week. But that’s the challenge of great user acquisition management right now. For some of us, it’s a lot of fun.