Want to learn how to make vibrant Facebook video ads from your static image assets?
In the highly competitive mobile apps market, growth is largely driven by continually acquiring a steady stream of new users to your app, and you must continue achieving profitable user acquisition in order to survive. However, mobile advertising is a constantly changing landscape. What is working for you today may not be working for you tomorrow. Further, 95% of your direct response advertising creative fails to outperform the best-performing assets in your portfolio, so you’re constantly working to find that 5 % of creatives that are successful.
Over the past few years, machine learning on platforms like Facebook and Google has reduced the level of effort by advertisers to manage their ad targeting, bids, and budgets. Automation has leveled the playing field for advertisers, such that producing the best ad creative has now become the key differentiator in campaign performance.
The following are the latest creative techniques and best practices to keep your ad creative performing by producing engaging video assets using still images for your asset library. This will enable you to scale video ad production, and drive profitable mobile user acquisition and growth:
Facebook’s Creative Shop reviewed thousands of top-performing videos and identified top performers that fall into these two four main categories: basic in motion, brand in motion, benefit in motion, and demo in motion. These videos can be created with limited assets as they consist of still images and simple animations of different elements. Here’s an overview of each type of video ad:
Facebook Video Ads
Basics in Motion: A simple video or an animation. You can start from a still image and animate one or two elements of the image such as a character. You can also use music to add excitement.
Brand In Motion: A video with an emphasis on your brand. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating an aspect of your brand like your logo.
Benefit in Motion: A video with an emphasis on your products’ benefits. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating your product’s benefits with typography. Use short copy to make your video effective
Demo In Motion: A video with an emphasis on how your product works. For mobile games, you can screen capture gameplay and place it inside a phone. Not a mobile game? Show a demonstration of your product.
Managing your user acquisition campaigns with the right approach is crucial. These techniques will keep your acquisition team aligned to a formula for continuous, iterative success by producing great video ads. Creative is really the key to user acquisition profitability today. It might be time now to review how you’re driving your campaigns, the volume of video assets you’re using to grow, and make a change.
Over the past several years, machine learning on platforms like Facebook and Google has reduced the level of effort needed by advertisers to manage and optimize their ad targeting, bids, and budgets. Automation and AI have leveled the playing field for advertisers both large and small by simplifying the work required to maintain advertising performance using fewer, less trained user acquisition human resources. Facebook’s new advertising algorithm and AI-backed technology are changing the game for advertising.
Facebook’s New Advertising Algorithm
In the middle of February 2018, Facebook’s advertising algorithm changed how it rewards advertisers who adhere to their best practices. This affected the strategy for user acquisition managers who may have previously relied on trying to game the Facebook algorithm, and the impact of these changes was immediately felt industry-wide. Previously, Facebook did not penalize advertisers for using a media buying strategy that required a high volume of ads with significant overlapping audiences that frequently made intraday changes to bids, budgets, and pausing of ads.
As of mid-February, this all changed with the introduction of a penalty for significant edits and rewards for adhering to Facebook’s published best practices outlined in their “Blueprint Certification” online training. Facebook media buying strategies have shifted. They now benefit by using a low number of campaigns with limited audience overlap. This leverages broad targeting and automatic placements. They also use much fewer changes to ads. But most importantly, an ad’s performance does much better when it is allowed to complete its learning phase. Then it can move into the optimized phase. To complete the learning phase typically requires 50 conversions per ad set per week.
Ad Creative
Now that Facebook’s optimization has been radically simplified, ad creative has become the primary differentiator for advertising performance. As with any display network, ad creative rapidly fatigues with increased spend and audience reach. The more you spend, the larger the audience you are targeting, the fast your ads’ performance will erode. Advertisers are now shifting their focus and resources away from manual bidding adjustments and towards creative strategy, production, and optimization. Cutting edge user acquisition experts now realized that maximizing return on advertising investment (ROI) is better achieved through creative optimization and testing.
Here’s how Facebook’s advertising algorithm and AI-backed technology is changing the game for advertising, and how you can take advantage of these tools:
Improve Your Campaign Structure
The Facebook best practice for campaign structure is to minimize the number of campaigns in the account. This can be accomplished by the creation of campaigns tied to a geography and type of bidding. For example, the common campaign will target the United States with a bidding objective of App Event Optimization (AEO) like a purchase or registration or Value Optimization bidding for high-value payers vs those only willing to pay $0.99.
Ad Sets
Once you have minimized the number of campaigns being used, you will create ad sets that target specific audiences but whose audience does not allow overlap with other ad sets. Following this structure will allow you to efficiently put up to 20 ads per ad set, minimum auction competition, and turn on one of Facebook’s most compelling new newest features, Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). Until Campaign Budget Optimization became available, advertisers were required have to spend hours during the day manipulating budgets to make sure the budget was spent on the best performing ad sets.
With the launch of CBO, Facebook automatically re-allocates the budget without human intervention, to the most efficient ad set. An important by-product of this innovation its impact on the broader Facebook ad tech ecosystem. Facebook has now rendered external 3rd party SaaS / self-service platforms based on proprietary rules or black box artificial intelligence unnecessary. To put it simply, Facebook’s internal tools are now more efficient at bidding and budgeting and they are free.
By keeping within the best practice structure of the account, campaign, ad set, and, ad, Facebook will run your ads in a “learning phase,” which can graduate to the “optimized phase” for more efficient results. Typically it takes 50 conversions per ad set per week to graduate from learning into optimization. Most importantly any significant edit to budgets (> 40%) and bids (> 30%) will force the ads out of optimized mode and back into learning up and will result in less efficient spend.
Adopt Automation, the Great Equalizer
Now advertisers can focus their attention away from lots of intraday bid and budget changes. As a result, they can take full advantage of Facebook’s automation. Here are Facebook’s most recent innovations and tools for advertising:
Automated Bidding, Value & Events
When you advertise with Facebook, ideally you want to build campaigns that drive positive ROAS. With a click, you can now have Facebook perform all bid changes for you in real-time. Their algorithm is extremely good at delivering an industry-leading return on investment (ROI). To deliver this new efficiency, Facebook’s new advertising algorithm allows you to train it on which people are most valuable to you.
Beyond the install, app event optimization (AEO) allows you to educate Facebook on the value of a key event, like purchase or registration. They will optimize your ads to deliver to people who are most likely to take those actions. As you may know, not all people who purchase a product or service hold the same to an advertiser. As such, Facebook has enabled value-based bidding by allowing advertisers to send the real values of each user into the Facebook algorithm and they will, in turn, find similar high-value people. On average, we’ve seen an app event like a purchase to be 2-3x the cost of a mobile app install and a valued user is 2-3x the cost of an app event.
Auto Audience Targeting
You can create value-based lookalike audiences on Facebook. These are users who behave similarly to past paying customers based on their value. You can denote a value for different types of paying customers (high spenders, medium, low spenders). Also, by creating these custom seed audiences on Facebook, the platform can target new users that match the respective value of the custom audience.
Dynamic Creative Optimization and Split Testing
Facebook now has bid and budgets solved. So, creative has rapidly become the primary point of differentiation to help companies achieve and sustain profitable spend. Facebook has released two amazing new features to help determine which creative is the best. Their first innovation is Dynamic creative optimization (DCO). DCO selects the best elements to put into an ad based on audience segments and real-time feedback prior to the ad being served. The concept is simply — right ad, right copy, right audience, right time, right language, the right placement, and right device. DCO also works well in conjunction with value-based lookalike audiences to match the right ads with the highest value users.
Further, DCO offers both creative deliveries at scale as well as testing with endless experimentation. This all happens without human intervention required to drive continuous testing and optimization. It’s also possible to enable language testing through DCO to deliver the most efficient language based on performance. Their second innovation is a simple split test that allows advertisers to efficiently do a/b comparisons between videos, images, and ad copy. The real innovation here is that Facebook will split the traffic on the back end to avoid overlap. For example, if you have an audience of 1,000,000 and you want to test 5 videos, Facebook will show each video to an audience of up to 200,000 people. This new feature has radically simplified creative testing of ads for Facebook and allows for much more efficient media spend.
Optimize Your Creative
Facebook’s new and improved automation capabilities in their media buying algorithm give you more time to focus on the one key element that can’t be automated today. That is, winning creative. Constant creative testing – copy, video, and images – becomes imperative to achieve and sustain ROAS. This is so because creative rapidly fatigues with increased spend and audience reach. In fact, 95% of creatives fail to outperform a media buying portfolio’s best ads. So even when you have a high-performing creative, you need to think about replacing it.
Leverage DCO, which automatically optimizes your ad creative based on multivariate testing. By running DCO, Facebook has control over which creative is served. It can more quickly optimize a high volume of creative combinations versus just running many ads per ad set.
Additionally, use split testing for creative, audience, and placement testing to optimize your campaigns.
Concluding Thoughts on Facebook’s New Advertising Algorithm
AI will continue to play a key role in the future of user acquisition. Thus, enabling endless experimentation of ad creative. But, in the future, we can also anticipate that AI will greatly scale creative production beyond human capacity. AI will do this by learning to create videos and develop copy at a greater capacity than people. Further, we can anticipate that AI will be a powerful tool in how we measure the performance of our creatives.
AI can run many key components of UA more effectively and more efficiently than people. This is true outside of scaling creative and powering creative analytics. Marketers can spend more time focused on strategy and creative concepts. For instance, instead of spending time and staffing overhead on tasks such as managing bids, budgets and manually optimizing creatives. As not only Facebook’s AI-powered advertising algorithm and tools improve, but also other key platforms like Google, Snap, and Pinterest. We will further see advertisers focus on building creative expertise and resources. This is used to handle the volume and scale of growing campaigns. It’s a shift that will continue over the next couple of years. Consequently, advertisers must start preparing now to keep up with the adtech industry changes.
Recent advancements in Machine Learning and UA bots are disrupting the future of user acquisition in platforms like Facebook & Google. As a result, creative will be a unique differentiator for performance. For example, Facebook can now determine the method consumers are using their platform and target ads accordingly. Hence, a creative studio will deliver a large volume of creatives at scale, ultimately delivering success.
To learn what you can do to adapt your strategy and to prepare for these changes, watch our CEO Brian Bowman, and CMO Tom Young discuss the future of the industry at MAU 2018 in Vegas.
MAU 2018
About Consumer Acquisition
Founded in 2013, Consumer Acquisition provides creative services, fully-managed user acquisition services, and SaaS tools for social advertisers. We understand the greatest ROI comes from creative testing and we have an unmatched ability to produce videos and images at scale. Our creative studio supports Facebook, Instagram, Google App Campaign, Snap, Pinterest, and IAB formats and our AdRules platform supports Facebook and Google App Campaign.
In January 2019, we announced that we’re now offering Google App Campaign for managed services and expanded our managed services offerings, and tiered them for advertisers of all budget sizes. We also enhanced AdRules with new workflow automation features: AdBuilder Express & Audience Builder Express. The platform offers the industry’s lowest fees; 60 days free, then 0.7% of spend.
Google Premier Partner
In May 2019, we were awarded a Google Premier Partner Badge; recognizing Consumer Acquisition as a leading social advertising and creative solution. Consumer Acquisition is Google’s only Partner in North America with a Creative and Premiere Certification. The Google Partner Program is a highly selective program designed to help customers identify the highest performing and most reliable companies based on their Google App Campaign social advertising and creative needs.
A company must meet several requirements in order to qualify as a Google Premier Partner. According to Google, “Achieving Partner status means that your company has demonstrated AdWords skill and expertise, met Google ad spend requirements, delivered company agency and client revenue growth, and sustained and grown its client base.” Premier Partners are held to an even higher standard and must demonstrate expert-level AdWords knowledge and performance in order to achieve this badge.
Facebook Marketing Partner
In addition to being a Google Premier Partner, we’re a Facebook Marketing Partner badged in Creative and AdTech. So, we’re uniquely positioned to help you with Facebook and Google App Campaign and creative and UA optimization. Contact us if you’d like to discuss how we can help with Creative or User Acquisition services.
Creative matters in mobile advertising. In the highly competitive mobile apps market, growth is largely driven by continually acquiring a steady stream of new users to your app, and you must continue achieving profitable user acquisition in order to survive. However, mobile advertising is a constantly changing landscape. And, what is working for you today may not be working for you tomorrow. Further, 95% of your direct response creative advertising fails to outperform the best-performing assets in your portfolio, so you’re constantly working to find that 5 % of creatives that are successful.
Why Creative Matters in Mobile Advertising
Over the past few years, machine learning on platforms like Facebook and Google has reduced the level of effort by advertisers to manage their ad targeting, bids, and budgets. Also, automation has leveled the playing field for advertisers, such that creative has now become the key differentiator in campaign performance.
Because creative matters in both mobile advertising and Facebook advertising, here are the latest creative techniques and best practices to keep your ad creative performing. Thus, continuing to drive profitable user acquisition and growth:
Creative Questions to Consider Before Testing
Do you have a creative brand bible? How strict are you with that bible? What’s your tone? Who’s your audience? It’s surprising how few companies have thought through these questions that really set the stage for creative development. The following graphic identifies key areas that will help guide you in those creative conversations.
Brand Assets: Brand Guidelines with do’s and don’ts, logos, fonts, colors, styling and layout, sound, etc.
Likes & Dislikes: Preferred color palettes, simple vs stylized, subtle or elegant vs dramatic.
Brand Mode: Elements to recreate your look, backgrounds, textures, icons, & graphics.
Inspiration: Share videos that worked well, videos you loved, or that bombed.
Campaign Reference: Examples of successful assets and their result, why they worked.
Brand vs Direct Marketing
Are you a brand or are you doing direct response advertising? Often, the CMO will want to run brand campaigns and adhere to their brand bible with guidelines and restrictions. On the other hand, the UA team is incentivized by performance and will lean to direct response. But, there is a way to meet in the middle and get the best of both worlds. Also, it’s important to take into consideration that most of the videos and images in your creative will die in less than 10,000 impressions, so relative exposure of assets that your CMO doesn’t like is already very limited. Thus, if the winning creative does happen to be one of the 5% of successful creatives, you can always revisit the creative and iterate to make it brand compliant. Through this process, you will also see the impact of making your ad creative brand compliant. As a result, if the performance were to drop 30%, your CMO can potentially look to adjust the brand.
Types of Assets to Test
There’s a known approach to asset development of concepts versus variations and why you need one or the other. Concepts are brand new ideas, out-of-the-box thinking to develop something that hasn’t been tried before. And, it’s very difficult to develop fresh, new concepts. While the sky is the limit, we’re also constrained by the assets that we have. In addition, mobile app assets are often limited to what’s in our app, and in an engine like Unity. So it can be restrictive in developing totally new ideas. With variations, we’re taking that one in 5% successful create a winner. We know the creative is going to work, so instead, you will tear it apart like Legos and develop new creative assets, which often have a higher propensity to be successful.
Extend the Life of Your Ads
There’s a lot that you can do to extend the shelf life of your creative. Here are just some of the ways you can keep your creative fresh through testing variations:
Image Formats and Layouts: Showcase your product or service in several layouts like side-by-side, split-screen, grid (2×2, 3×3, 4×4), split-screen (½ & ½), split-screen variation ⅓ or ¼.
Video Length and CTAs: Your video ads need to be in the range of eight seconds or less. Your call to action should be in the first three seconds and it needs to be strong. Remember to tell a story – what is your app and why do people care?
Types of Images: The vast majority of pictures and videos you see on Facebook are user-generated, shared by family and friends. Professional photos or stock photography can look too perfect and tend to stick out on Facebook. Consider taking your own photos or degrading the quality of the images and videos to make them appear user-generated.
Color Uses in Images and Headers: Test simple and plain backgrounds with soft or blurred out colors or gradients. Allow the viewer’s eyes to focus on bright vibrant foreground colors. Test soft background colors vs bold colors, strong texture vs muted texture, and simple vs clean vs busy and cluttered backgrounds.
Stills to Video
There are four different categories in which all of these ads fell into basic in motion, brand in motion, benefit in motion and demo in motion. These videos can be created with limited assets as they consist of still images and simple animations of different elements. Here’s an overview of each type of video ad:
Basics in Motion: A simple video or an animation. You can start with a still image and animate one or two elements of the image such as a character. You can also use music to add excitement.
Brand In Motion: A video with an emphasis on your brand. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating an aspect of your brand like your logo.
Benefit in Motion: A video with an emphasis on your products’ benefits. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating your product’s benefits with typography. Use short copy to make your video effective
Demo In Motion: A video with an emphasis on how your product works. For mobile games, you can screen capture gameplay and place it inside a phone. Not a mobile game? Show a demonstration of your product.
Final Thoughts on Why Creative Matters
Managing your UA campaigns with the right approach is crucial, and these techniques will keep your acquisition team on aligned to a formula for continuous, iterative success. Creative is really the key to UA profitability today. It might be time now to review how you’re driving your campaigns and make a change.
Learn how to identify and fix your key mistakes if your Facebook as creative is killing you ROI. Many advertisers have a “set it and forget it” approach to running user acquisition (UA) campaigns. Thus, using the same Facebook ad creative for endless months, with only minor adjustments to bidding and deprecating segments with the lowest click-thru rate (CTR). A formula for slowly killing click-thru rates, eventually this approach will result in an ever-declining return on advertising spend (ROAS).
In today’s highly competitive market, the “set and forget” approach isn’t sustainable beyond a couple of weeks. Viewers get fatigued seeing ad creative frequently and need to be visually attracted with new, fresh images and video constantly in order to capture consumer attention. To achieve and sustain the return on advertising spend (ROAS), advertisers can easily cycle through hundreds of creative monthly in order to find winners. And then continue to iterate with new variations to keep winners generating a positive response.
Generating and improving creative at scale can seem like a daunting task. But, the rise of creative marketplaces automates creative scale. As a result, advertisers can focus more on testing and iterate on key areas of their creativity to keep generating fresh imagery that converts:
You’re not preparing for creative testing. How to fix it:
As a Facebook advertiser, creative testing of new concepts is imperative (i.e. a high-performing video or image that you can scale while maintaining ROAS). However, creative testing can also produce significant financial waste, approximately 95% of creatives will fail at outperforming your current portfolio winner. To be more deliberate in your creative testing to surface winners, start by brainstorming ideas that will resonate with your audience and form a hypothesis around numerous creative variables. Forming a hypothesis before you start production, will guide creative iterations.
Before Testing
evelop a plan for testing 1 variable at a time and to avoid data contamination between tests. Ensure your test geo and demos are representative of your audience. Also, establish your key performance metrics (KPIs) upfront – is it impressions, conversion rate, install rate or volume, cart visits, checkouts, etc.
During Testing
If your test is running slow at delivering measurable results or your impressions are under-delivering, increase your bids by a specified percentage. Pause and re-run tests to ensure clean data.
Post-Testing
Consider lift in multiple key performance metrics to determine the winner. Test and iterate further through a continuous improvement approach.
Brand Guidelines
While developing a creative brief for designers to generate your ads, set your brand guidelines. Most large companies have a strong brand image accompanied by strict brand guidelines to represent companies in a consistent manner. Brand-driven organizations consider elements such as color palette, font treatment, logo placements, voice and tone to be used in copy, and more to develop brand-compliant creatives:
Brand Assets
Brand guidelines with dos & don’ts, logos, fonts, colors, styling & layout, sounds, etc
Who You Are
Brand guidelines with dos & don’ts, logos, fonts, colors, styling & layout, sounds, etc.
Likes and Dislikes
referred color pallets, simple vs stylized, subtle, elegant vs dramatic.
Brand Mode
Elements to recreate your look (backgrounds, textures, icons, graphics…).
Inspiration
Share videos that worked well, ones you love, some that bombed.
Campaign References
Examples of successful assets and their results, why did they work.
You’re not employing Facebook’s Best Practices for Videos. How to fix it:
A group of brand marketers, strategists, and creative directors at Facebook’s Creative Shop reviewed hundreds of top-performing ads, identified four different categories in which all of these ads fell into; basic in motion, brand in motion, benefit in motion, and demo in motion. These videos can be created with limited assets as they consist of still images and simple animations of different elements. Here’s an overview of each type of video ad:
Basics in Motion
A simple video or an animation. You can start with a still image and animate 1 – 2 elements of the image such as a character. You can also use music to add excitement.
Brand In Motion
A video with an emphasis on your brand. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating an aspect of your brand like your logo.
Benefit in Motion
A video with an emphasis on your products’ benefits. Start with a still, and add excitement by animating your product’s benefits with typography. Use short copy to make your video effective
Demo In Motion
A video with an emphasis on how your product works. For mobile games, you can screen capture gameplay and place it inside a phone. Not a mobile game? Show a demonstration of your product.
Basics, Brand, Benefit & Demo In Motion
A combination of your basics, brand, benefits, and demo in motion videos.
Additionally, here are some key tips and best practices on how to improve or fix videos to increase your ad’s user value:
The first 3 seconds really matter, so open strong with a visually stunning image or graphic.
Don’t rely on sound, but if it is important to deliver your message, be sure to emphasize it.
Use a clear and concise copy. Text overlaid on a video ad can help support your message.
Shorten the message. Viewers have a short attention span, so only make the message as long as it needs to be.
Leverage your characters. If you have great characters that are recognizable to your brand, use them fully.
You’re not leveraging existing winning creative. How to fix it:
You can develop new winners from existing creative. Ad creative variations leverage pieces of winning images and ads and reposition existing elements to ultimately creative something similar, but new. Create variations of your existing creative by changing:
Image Layout: A simple way to create new concepts is to showcase your product or service in several layouts like side-by-side, split-screen, grid (2×2, 3×3, 4×4), split-screen (½ & ½), split-screen variation ⅓ or ¼.
User-Generated vs Stock Photos: The vast majority of pictures and videos you see on Facebook are user-generated, shared by family and friends. Professional photos or stock photography can look too perfect and tend to stick out on Facebook. Consider taking your own photos or degrading the quality of the images and videos to make them appear user-generated.
Colors/Background: Test simple and plain backgrounds with soft or blurred out colors or gradients. Allow the viewer’s eyes to focus on bright vibrant foreground colors. Test soft background colors vs bold colors, strong texture vs muted texture, and simple vs clean vs busy and cluttered backgrounds.
You’re not writing powerful copy/calls to action. How to fix it:
Once you’ve grabbed the viewer’s attention with an eye-catching ad, it’s time to make the ask for the purchase or the download. Consider testing: different calls to action, language, copy and button color, copy placements, buttons, etc. You can also test variations of short vs long copy, as well as placements of the copy in the upper, middle, lower, left, and right corners of the ad.
You are not testing enough. How to fix it:
Constant creative testing – copy, video, images – becomes imperative to an organization’s objectives. A large volume of creative is needed not only to achieve and sustain ROAS because creative rapidly fatigues with increased spend and audience reach. Moreover, 95% of creative fail to outperform your portfolio’s best, so even when having a high-performing creative, you need to think about replacing it. See the graph below to understand the need and results of successful creative testing.
As the market is increasingly crowded, and automation tools continue to optimize how campaigns are run for efficiencies in delivering viewable impressions, targeting audiences, managing bidding, and budgets – ultimately, your creative becomes the differentiator for performance and financial success. Adopt and develop a testing plan that utilizes all the key variables to optimize your creative, and scale your acquisition program with your winning creative results.
Marketers Won’t Become Obsolete Due to Bots…Just More Strategic. Originally seen on AdWeek.
Recent advancements in machine learning are significantly changing the advertising landscape.
Over the past year, improvements in technology have enabled marketers to start measuring real net profits from ads. As a result, allowing small advertisers to effectively compete with large advertisers on a more even playing field. Thanks to machine learning, advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google can now automate decisions for marketers that have a huge impact on performance as well as time management. Before these advancements, user acquisition managers would have to manually adjust ad campaigns multiple times per day to optimize performance. But, now machines are making the decisions and the actions for them. While it’s a win for performance-based advertising, will bots and automation ultimately replace the role of the UA manager and make marketers obsolete?
One thing is for certain, marketers shouldn’t fear becoming obsolete. Rather, machine learning is opening the door for marketers to become more strategic. UA managers can now focus on strategy and how to address the changing market landscape. Rather than focusing on everyday obstacles like optimizing ad campaigns for marketplace fluctuations.
In particular, Facebook recently rolled out improvements in its automation tools for audience targeting, bidding, and budget management. Also, its app event optimizations and dynamic ad serving. Each of these key new features has a critical impact on UA campaigns. Thus, making them vastly more effective for advertisers around the clock. Here, we deep-dive into these five automation features and how they are game-changers in this highly competitive landscape.
Facebook finds the right audience for you, effortlessly
UA managers can now focus on strategy and how to address the changing market landscape. Instead of focusing on everyday obstacles like optimizing ad campaigns for marketplace fluctuations. Finding the right audience for a product or service can be challenging for advertisers. But now the process is simpler with tools such as Facebook’s lookalike audiences with value-based revenue enhancements. Facebook uses a source audience, a database of existing paying customers, to find and create an audience that will behave similarly to your previous paying customers. Getting ads to the right audience at the right time with the right creative is certain to improve a campaign’s performance.
Around the clock bidding based on your goals
Marketers want to ensure that their campaigns are driving efficient financial returns on advertising spend (ROAS). With auto-bidding, advertisers will not lose any opportunity to reach their financial objective due to a low or high bid. Facebook allows advertisers to set automatic bids that they self-adjust to ensure a campaign’s optimal performance around the clock.
Gain long-term value from your app
While marketers are heavily focused on the first install or the first click, ultimately advertisers should focus on acquiring users who bring value to their businesses by meeting specific financial goals. Facebook’s app event optimization, for instance, delivers ads to users who are most likely to take valuable actions within apps, like subscribe or pay for a feature. This optimization feature allows advertisers to target users that will bring long-term value to their business.
Campaign budget optimization
Machine learning can analyze and process vastly more data in real-time than an army of UA managers. Just like automatic bidding, overall ad budgets can be automated to increase and decrease based on performance goals set by marketers in real-time, around the clock. As a result, marketers get increased performance with a decreased need for human intervention and error by allowing algorithms to automatically set and adjust ad set budgets.
Your ad delivered to the right audience at the right time and place
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) selects the best combination of elements to include in ads based on audience segments and real-time feedback. The concept is simple: right ad, right ad copy, right audience, right time, right language, and right device. DCO offers both creative delivery at scale as well as endless experimentation, all without needing a human tasked with the analysis of continuous testing and optimization.
Facebook’s newest automation tools are now enabling UA managers more time to focus on the one key element that can’t be automated by machines today: high-performing ad creative. Constant creative testing—copy, video, images—all becomes imperative to achieve and sustain a positive financial return from the advertising. Audiences quickly become bored with seeing the same creatives, and just as you’ve found a high-performing creative, you still need to plan to quickly replace it. UA managers will continue shifting their time away from campaign execution and more toward strategy and creative development.
Artificial intelligence plays a key role in the future of user acquisition
Looking ahead, artificial intelligence plays a key role in the future of user acquisition. Thus, enabling endless experimentation of ad creative. But, we can also anticipate that AI will greatly scale creative production beyond human capacity. AI will eventually learn to create videos and develop copy in a greater capacity than people. However, we are still years away from that reality or becoming obsolete. Moreover, the majority of this work still falls on creative teams and UA managers.
Outside of new creative, AI can run many key components of UA more effectively and more efficiently than people. So, where does this leave UA managers? Obsolete? No! Instead of spending time and overhead on quantitative tasks such as managing bids, budgets and manually optimizing creatives, they’ll be able to spend quantitative time focused on strategy, storytelling, and creative concepts. For agencies, they’ll also be able to focus more on bigger impact, like campaign strategy and creative development, rather than task management. It’s never been a better time to start experimenting with AI and automated tasks to up-level your UA program strategy and creative delivery.
Filmmaker and Animator from Disney Feature Animation, DisneyToons, and Warner Bros., brings entertainment industry expertise to in-house design studio providing creative services to Facebook and Google UAC Advertisers
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – April 25, 2018
ConsumerAcquisition.com today announced that filmmaker and animator Mike Merell has joined the company as Creative Director. Merell brings over 25 years of visual design experience, spanning both computer animation and live-action, in the entertainment industry. With over 15 years at the Walt Disney Co., Merell worked as a CGI character animator and supervisor, and in development on such films as Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Atlantis, and Chicken Little. At Disney Feature Animation he helped transitioned Disney’s 2D iconic characters, such as Ariel and Donald Duck, into the 3D world of animation for the theme park film Mickey’s Philharmagic. Later atDisneyToons Studios, he provided animation on Planes, Planes 2, and co-supervised animation on Tinkerbell’s ‘The Pirate Fairy’.
Merell was an animator at Starz/Arc on Gnomeo and Juliet and has also supervised animation at Warner Brothers and animated live-action films for ILM and the Orphanage. More recently at Mattel, he was in development for a future franchise, and following that he was at The Third Floor Inc., where he provided pre-visualization for major studio films yet to be released by Disney, Marvel, Fox, Sony, and Prime. At Consumer Acquisition, Merell will oversee the company’s professional in-house design team and its scalable Creative Studio, which delivers creative videos and images to Facebook and Google advertisers.
Brian Bowman
Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said: “Mike’s breadth of animation and filmmaking experience at top entertainment studios, including Walt Disney Feature Animation and Warner Bros., will be invaluable as he joins as Creative Director to lead our in-house design studio. He will be instrumental in driving the creative innovation of our design services team and we’re thrilled to have him on board.”
Mike Merell
Merell said: “I’ve always strived to push the envelope on creative techniques in visual design, animation, and filmmaking. The world has gone mobile and I look forward to this creative challenge and to collaborating with the advertisers and design team at Consumer Acquisition to drive innovations in short-form mobile advertising.”
This month also marks the 5 year anniversary of Consumer Acquisition. Since founding the company in 2013, the company has acquired over 150 million app installs and leads for publishers including Glu Mobile, Ford, Lucktastic, Yelp, Checkout51, EBATES, and many more. In its fifth year, the company is investing further in creative development to deliver quality and performance for mobile advertising campaigns. Advertisers receive a high volume of fresh creative concepts from a professional creative team experienced in Facebook and Google advertising best practices.
About Consumer Acquisition
Founded in 2013, Consumer Acquisition offers managed services for Facebook user acquisition, a creative studio that delivers a high volume of fresh creative concepts for Facebook and Google UAC ads, and a self-service campaign management platform for Facebook. We’ve created over 300,000 videos and acquired over 150 million app installs and leads for Glu Mobile, Ford, Lucktastic, Yelp, Checkout51, EBATES, and many more. For more information, visitwww.consumeracquisition.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.
Very quickly, Instagram advertising has become a high priority for marketers. As Instagram has continued to mature as a platform, a variety of new ad formats have been introduced – Story, Carousel, Slideshow, Video, and Single Image – and with strong effectiveness among audiences.
Instagram has become a compelling platform for social advertisers because it is connected to the larger Facebook ecosystem, which provides rich data and audience targeting capabilities. There is also Facebook and Instagram’s undeniable scale. The more discoverability of Instagram profiles and scale from existing followers has encouraged a significant number of publishers, influencers, and brands to prioritize Instagram. As a result, this has created a content-rich environment that complements a variety of content-driven advertising.
Instagram Stories hold a strong advantage in its ability to scale quickly, given its immediate plugin to the existing and proven Facebook to Instagram ad infrastructure. Thus, making it a highly popular format among advertisers. These full screen, high-resolution single image or video ads appear between Instagram user stories for up to 15 seconds, or until the user dismisses the ad. The shorter video format has become increasingly effective among consumers who want concise ads with an immediate call to action.
How can you stand out? For Instagram story ads, you’ll want to take advantage of the following elements:
Visually compelling ad with bold colors, clean fonts, and a prominent logo
Ad copy using four to six words
A focus on your product offering
Music or audio features
Swipe up feature directing users to your target web page
Be sure to pay attention to the ad specs when creating Story ads or any other creative for Instagram campaigns.
See this example from The Gap, which includes all these elements.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads leverage the popularity of the swiping action on phones, which have made it a likable ad format offering for users. Currently, Facebook is testing a new carousel ad format that can include three photos or videos in the same post instead of just one. Tripling the images in an ad gives marketers greater creative freedom. Also, the ability to show a sequence of three static images or 15-second videos that maintain a narrative or lead to a call to action.
Here are some elements to consider when creating carousel ads:
Utilize high-quality photography or cinematography
Add as many images as possible
Include clear CTAs
Tell a cohesive story
Demonstrate your brand identity
Slideshow Ads
Slideshow ads are looping video ads with up to 10 images and music. It’s similar to a carousel ad, but the content scrolls on its own along to the music. You can upload an existing slideshow or create a new slideshow using the Facebook Ads Manager. Simply upload your images, arrange them to your liking, adjust the settings, and select your music. Just like a video ad, you can also choose a thumbnail and upload video captions.
Given the volume of ad creative that you’ll need to create and test to keep your campaign engaging and achieving ROAS with audiences, you can conveniently leverage winning ads and posts from Facebook. Posting them into Instagram slideshow ads can help you get the most out of your creative.
Slideshows work really well for products and services with high-quality photography or cinematography, including, but not limited to:
Beauty products
Travel and tourism
Entertainment
Here’s an example from the Montana state tourism board, where a slideshow of visually stunning photos and videos are used to showcase the reasons that visitors should come to the state.
Single Image Ads
Single image ads are what they say they are — ads with a single image. If you choose this format, you can create up to six ads with one image each. Single image ads are much easier to create than carousel ads. The first thing to do is to select the images for your ad. Next, you’ll want to be continually testing hundreds of images monthly to find winners. Then select the text field with your caption for the ad. The caption may include up to 300 characters and Facebook recommends using 125 characters. Finally, if you want to drive traffic to your site, select “Add a website URL” to fill in your website URL and select a call-to-action button.
In addition, to add more eye-catching action to single image ads, you can add clickable calls-to-action such as, to your download page, your website, an online shop, and more.
Alternatively, you can add animations. For instance, in this Volkswagen ad. What you can’t see in this still screenshot is the animation of the car entering and then exiting the screen. Keeping the ads simple, using less text, and adding movement will be more effective in attracting attention.
How to Create A Winning Instagram Ad Strategy
Instagram’s pure scale, evident in its reach, targeting and retargeting capabilities, has made it an attractive platform for social advertisers. As a result, moving millions in marketing dollars to run ads on it. At the same time, maintaining ROAS is important for performance advertisers, and it’s achievable with frequent creative testing. Throughout your campaign, constant creative testing is necessary to uncover winning ads, because high-performing creative can rapidly improve and increase ROAS.
Your best-performing Instagram ad creative may have a lifespan of fewer than 30 days. So you’ll need to continue your ad creative testing. Thus, producing wins that offset performance degradation that happens naturally as creative fatigues. Creative testing is absolutely required to maintain ROAS at scale. And it never stops — but the results will be worth the continual campaign and creative management.
Learn about our Creative Studio, which can help your team produce 100x ad creative at scale.
Consumer Acquisition’s social creative production platform for advertisers achieves a major milestone, celebrates success by offering advertisers FREE services! Facebook & Google advertisers get 300,000 videos & images from the Creative Studio.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – March 21, 2018
ConsumerAcquisition.com, a Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner offering an end-to-end solution for social advertising user acquisition, announced that its Creative Studio platform has delivered 300,000 video and image creatives to Facebook and Google advertisers. To celebrate this major milestone, Consumer Acquisition has simplified its pricing to a flat, per-unit price structure. This pricing is available today to all Facebook, Instagram, and Google App Campaign advertisers.
300,000 Videos & Images
Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said: “Since launching the Creative Studio, we’ve driven a tremendous volume of high-performing creatives to mobile app advertisers and lead generators on Facebook and Google. In addition, we analyzed our performance and discovered that our in-house team produced the most profitable results. We also expanded and trained our in-house team on direct response advertising best practices while also simplifying our pricing. Finally, we’re so confident advertisers will like our platform, we are offering free services to new advertisers.”
Quality & Performance
Quality and performance matter most with digital advertising campaigns. To achieve this, a considerable investment in creative development offers advertisers the best chance at achieving campaign performance goals. Advertisers can receive a high volume of fresh creative concepts from a hand-picked creative team that is experienced in Facebook and Google advertising best practices. Additionally, the white-glove service offering of the in-house professional design teams will streamline creative brief generation to deliver the highest quality assets for advertiser campaigns.
Free Services
10-second video for all new advertisers.
Best practice audit on any Facebook ad account.
Access to Shutterstock’s library of over 180 million images and videos.
Whitepaper, “Creative Ideas for Facebook Advertisers”.
About Consumer Acquisition
Founded in 2013, Consumer Acquisition is a badged Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner that offers the world’s first end-to-end user acquisition platform with fully-managed services or self-service platforms for ad management and creative optimization. The company has acquired over 100 million app installs and leads for Glu Mobile, Lucktastic, Nordcurrent, Checkout51, Ford, EBATES, and many others. Solutions include fully managed services where our user acquisition and creative experts execute all creative production and campaign management and our SaaS campaign management and creative platforms to optimize ads and refresh creatives. For more information, visit www.consumeracquisition.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.
Media Contact: Kate Pietrelli for Consumer Acquisition
This article was originally published on Forbes. User acquisition within the mobile landscape is highly competitive, and media-buying agencies are always under pressure to perform for their clients. However, agencies can become complacent, which leads to underperformance on campaigns — click-through rates dropping and user acquisition costs rising. A stagnating media-buying initiative is ultimately costing the marketer considerable sums of the budget. How do you reset the cycle of agency underperformance? Introducing: “bake-offs” — agency versus agency competitions designed to increase digital media performance for brands in both the short- and long-term.
How To Drive Agency Performance
High stakes, high pressure. Bake-off-style agency competitions offer marketers a way to generate greater performance and transparency across their digital media ad campaigns. These head-to-head competitions between two or more agency teams (internal or external) can reap greater benefits than simply an uptick in performance. They can also lead to better communication and relationships between brands and agencies that provide value for the long run.
For instance, a brand could match a new potential agency with a current, well-performing agency and ask the two teams to acquire the highest-quality iOS and Android users for 30 days. Each agency will then have the opportunity to showcase its expertise in acquisition strategies, planning, and execution to achieve a set target and reap the client rewards based on performance.
Structuring Your Bake-Off
Once you’ve selected your agency teams for the competition, set your ground rules and goals. It should be very clear which metrics and performance results you’re using to evaluate performance among your agencies. For instance, performance can be measured on return on advertising spend (ROAS), volume, click-through rates, or other key performance indicators (KPIs).
Also, set the frequency and transparency of communication on results between your agencies to ensure consistency and to remove bias between them. We recommend exchanging metrics twice a week, such as Tuesdays and Fridays, to ensure all parties are informed of performance.
Competition Ground Rules
Your bake-off should have a limited period of time to run, such as 30 days. This will generate returns quickly for evaluating performance. Set a goal for spending, as well. For instance, a budget of $100,000 per partner with the requirement of spending 90% of the budget within the timeframe will demonstrate an ability to drive scale and volume. You can also distinguish how you’d like the budget set between platforms and which types of ads to test (e.g., display versus rewarded video).
To create a level playing field, seed your agencies with a fresh account. Also, with the same creative and audiences at the start of the campaign. After the first day, allow your agencies to optimize creative and audiences separately to gauge ability.
Maintain transparency between your competitors by distributing performance reports across the teams twice weekly, such as click-through rates, install rates, and revenue generated. But do not share creative or other best practices. Communication of results through the campaign is a motivator for driving greater performance.
The Stakes
You guessed it — the winner takes all, gladiator style! The outperforming agency with the highest net profit driven by their media buying campaign in this competition will gain access to the brand’s accounts and acquisition budget going forward — clear and simple.
What Brands Can Expect To Gain Through Agency Performance
Bake-offs will generate the best practices of each agency in developing creatives. Also, the winning creative concepts and new variations will seed into campaigns. As a result, this will further reduce spend on non-converting ad creatives.
Further, marketers will gain best practices for user acquisition from each agency and more data to identify issues. Shifting budgets weekly between campaigns based on performance throughout the competition will also increase performance. An uplift in the acquisition, revenue, and ROAS can certainly be anticipated in an intense competition such as this.
Too many cooks in the kitchen? An additional, unexpected benefit for advertisers is that the process will make transitioning from managed to self-service campaigns far easier. Thus, trimming down overhead to run campaigns.
It’s a competitive mobile market and brands must think creatively about how to optimize their resources to drive performance. The bake-off should be a strategy within every marketer’s arsenal for more effective results this year.
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Creative & UA Best Practices For Facebook, Google, TikTok & Snap ads.
