The machines have arrived. Now it’s time for advertising managers to step back from many of the tasks that used to define their jobs. Now, they need to let the algorithms take the lead. If they are smart, they will pivot toward creative development and other areas that only humans can still do best.
If you have been buying ads from Google and Facebook over the last several years, you have likely noticed the ongoing rollout of new features. For instance, features that allow almost any advertiser to use algorithmic campaign management to optimize their campaigns. So you have probably noticed how increasingly difficult it is to beat the machine algorithms at optimizing your campaigns more efficiently.
Both platforms are actively pushing advertisers toward algorithmic campaign management. And new, machine learning-driven features have been rolling out every quarter or so for the last few years.
Let Algorithms Manage Your UA Advertising
What has changed is how efficient algorithms have become at buying media. And just in the last month or so,Google has rolled out Value Bidding, Similar Audiences, Ad Groups, Media Library, and Asset Reporting. Well, two of those new features (Value Bidding, similar to Facebook’s value bidding, aka “target return on ad spend”) take significant advertising management tasks out of the hands of humans and give them over to the algorithm – aka “the machines.”
Facebook recently launched the “Power5” – five tactics it recommends advertisers employ to simplify and improve their advertising results. Each tactic is driven by machine learning. As a result, Facebook is advising advertisers to relinquish control of advertising to an algorithm that doesn’t have a personal bias, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t drink coffee, and never gets tired of re-testing ideas.
One of those power tactics,Campaign Budget Optimization, will become mandatory for most advertisers this year (unless you’re using a tool likeAdRules).
If you’ve been doing user acquisition advertising for a while, this required adoption of CBO may sound a bit like when Google launched Universal App Campaigns (now known as “App Campaigns”) and forced advertisers to use automated media buying that had been controlled by humans. Google is now offering more human-driven controls, butit advises user acquisition managers to step back from granular campaign management and let its algorithm do most of the work:
All you need to do is provide some text, a starting bid, and a budget, and let us know the languages and locations for your ads. Our systems will test different combinations and show ads that are performing the best more often, with no extra work needed from you.
Facebook’s media buying CBO automation may not seem quite as big or as sudden a shift as Google made back in 2017. But it’s just another aspect of how Facebook is pushing advertisers to make use of their machine-managed strategies. Facebook is also setting up its advertising platform so advertisers who embrace machine management will have a distinct disadvantage over advertisers who try to stick to old-school, human management requiring a pool of expensive, highly trained UA managers.
This is a crucial shift. Not only can “the machines” efficiently run advertising campaigns now but if you want optimal performance, you should constantly be testing how to hand over control of your media buying to their algorithms.
That may make UA teams nervous. Usually for one of two reasons:
Reason #1: Are Machine-Managed Campaigns Able to Outperform Human-Managed Campaigns?
Yes. Machine-managed campaigns can perform within 10% (+/-) of the performance of human-managed campaigns. And this performance is certain to get better quarter-over-quarter.
Want proof? Check out the30 case studies Facebook has on its Power5 page.
E-commerce company Kortni Jeane is just one example. Kortni Jeane, a swimsuit retailer, used Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization and consolidated some of their audiences to get a 22x return on ad spend.
That is not a typo. They got 22 times their ad spend back in revenue. And they got 57% higher revenue in February 2019 than they did in February 2018.
Here’s the deal: The algorithms work. They can crunch the numbers way faster than a human can. They’re built to review billions of data points, to calculate and recalculate that data to achieve the haloed goal: Serve the right ad to the right customer at the right time.
Reason #2: Will My Job be Replaced by a Machine?
Yes – part of it. We’ve reached the tipping point where humans have to let go of the intra-day ad management tasks they used to control as part of the value they provided to a company. Machines are quickly becoming better at granular campaign management. The good news is that when the machines’ campaign management capabilities are partnered with a human for idea expansion, the combination is very powerful.
If the bulk of your time at your job is spent running reports and poring over spreadsheets to find small pockets of opportunity, you should be expanding your skills. Because the machines can simply do this faster and better than people can, and by several orders of magnitude.
Does this mean you’re about to be out of a job? ABSOLUTELY NOT! You have an opportunity to expand your skills into new areas of focus.
Learn how the machines do their optimization work, so you can manage them appropriately.
Some experts have compared this to a pilot flying a plane. The pilot has this huge dashboard of data inputs they monitor, even though the plane automates a lot of its own systems. But there’s still a keen need for a human to be there, making sure the machine takes appropriate actions.
The human is there to overcome the primary weakness of the machines. The algorithms only do what they have been coded to do based on patterns they have seen in the past. They cannot conceive of new creative concepts.
Prove your value to your employers or your clients in new ways.
You are not going to be making bid edits or sifting through dozens of audiences and ad sets/ad groups all day anymore.
Don’t mourn this. You’ve got better things to do. Todevelop better creative, for starters. Every advertiser has access to algorithmic campaign management. So most of the advantage advertisers used to get from adtech is gone. If you want to dominate your market now (or even just survive), creative is key. High-performance creative is the only real competitive advantage left now. And this will become increasingly apparent as Google and Facebook’s advertising algorithms take over more and more of campaign management.
If success hinges on creative, it’s time to get serious about creative development and testing. These four resources can get you started:
UA teams worry about these changes and have one last word about them. Should we really worry about machines taking over granular campaign management? Especially, with the speed and intensity, most of us live at now. That is in addition to the pressures most UA managers are also under. Did you not have enough to do? Were you that one-in-a-thousand person just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs?
Probably not.
Algorithms Manage Your UA Advertising Conclusion
UA managers have an opportunity to stay ahead of the algorithms. They can pivot away from quantitative tasks that can now be automated, and pivot towardcreative strategy and optimization skills the algorithms haven’t mastered.
So let go of the geeky intra-day campaign management and gohave some fun with creative! In this new algorithm-driven environment, creative development and testing is the best way to deliver value to your company and your clients.
Recently, we spoke with AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff about our perspective on the impact to UA managers of Facebook’s and Google’s improving algorithms on targeting and optimizing app campaigns. We were joined by our partners at Jam City, Director of Creative Product Marketing Rhiannon Price, and Senior UA Manager Jon Chew to discuss what is next for UA Managers.
What’s Next for UA Managers?
From the Consumer Acquisition point of view, we see that as the largest ad platforms are introducing more automation and robust UA campaign management features, they’re increasingly designing their platforms to operate best when those automated features are doing the heavy lifting. This is shifting many of the day-to-day operations from UA managers to Facebook and Google’s platforms.
So, what is a UA team to do? Shift focus to creative testing and optimization. Facebook and Google are better at creative advertising than you are. That does not mean you are obsolete. It also does not mean you are out of a job (yet). It just means it is time to let the machines do what they do best, while we humans do what we do best.
Fortunately for us, AI and machine learning algorithms still cannot make good creative assets. They are not that great at strategically testing creative. They also cannot do a competitive creative analysis yet, either. Or develop a creative strategy. So, let the machines handle the quantitative aspects of user acquisition while we focus on what only humans can do.
Creative performance is fast becoming the only lever where marketing teams can have a large impact by testing and scaling. Thus, sourcing effective ad creative is critical. And, the team at Jam City in many ways agrees with this perspective as well. There is an increasing call for media buying teams and creative teams to have better collaboration in order to take a more quantitative approach to creative development and testing in order to boost ROAS (return on advertising spend).
Google App Campaigns launched five important new Google features that will change the way user acquisition managers do their jobs. Here’s how they can help you increase ROAS and save more time.
New Google Features
1. Creative Uploading
UA managers can now upload videos and images for their Google App Campaigns directly to their own dedicated media library.
The benefit: No more excuses about not being able to find the right file for a new ad group or campaign. And no more having to upload the same file over and over. All creative assets can now live within your own App Campaigns’ media library.
2. Asset Reporting
Monitor the performance of individual creative assets including videos, images, ad copy, and playable at the ad group level.
The benefit: If you’re into creative testing (and you should be) this information is gold. You can now easily see which assets are helping your ROAS and which assets are hurting it. And becausecreative is the best competitive differentiator advertisers have now, the more insight we can get into how creative assets are performing, the better.
3. Value Bidding
Facebook advertisers have been able to use value bidding, aka “target return on ad spend” for a while. Now App Campaigns advertisers can optimize their campaigns this way as well.
The benefit: Spend less time managing bids and automate bid management without needing access to expensive third-party tools. Note that this is yet another small step toward advertising automation. More in a moment about how this should change the way user acquisition managers spend their time.
4. Similar Audiences
This is Google’s term for what Facebook advertisers call Custom Audiences. Whatever you call it, Google’s App Campaigns now lets advertisersfind new users similar to their existing users.
The benefit: Once again, this is a move toward automation – we’re letting the algorithm go find people similar to our best customers. And if you’re careful abouthow you define who your best customers are, the algorithm can do an excellent job. Finding similar audiences is also, of course, a way to extend the life of your top-performing creative.
Pro tip: We’ve found these new Similar Audiences can be particularly effective when they’re paired with Value Bidding.
5. Ad Groups
Advertisers can now set up multiple ad groups within the same campaign and then tailor the assets in each ad group around a different “theme” or messaging strategy for different customers.
The benefit: Put the right message in front of the right people without making your campaigns and ad group structures overly complicated. Simplified campaign structures will become increasingly important as the algorithms continue to do more and more campaign management. In fact, Facebook recently came out and expressly recommended advertisers use asimplified campaign structure.
All these new features are good news for advertisers. Google is giving UA managers sophisticated tools to manage their campaigns and to streamline their campaigns and their work. The teams at Google are not going to sit back and let Facebook steal their market share.
How UA Managers Should Use Their Time Now That the Algorithms Are Taking Over
We don’t advise user acquisition managers to sit back, either. Even if it is summer. Facebook and Google are moving toward more and more automated campaigns. And with this latest round of new Google features, the platforms are getting even more sophisticated.
For us, it’s an interesting evolution. A year or more ago, it was Google that stepped in and made something of a black box out of app advertising automation. Now they’re stepping back from total automation a bit, giving UA managers more control and more information.
And this is all happening only a few months before Facebook’s massive new change:mandatory Campaign Budget Optimization for all campaigns (unless you use a tool like AdRules; then you’ve got until September 2020 to still run your campaigns without CBO).
So Facebook started its automation journey by incrementally taking control away from advertisers. And Google started out by basically taking all control away. Now, Google’s giving back some more control, and Facebook is taking control away.
We believe the two superpowers of app advertising will eventually find a middle ground between human-managed campaigns and fully automated advertising. That will probably happen around Q1 or Q2 2020… which is not all that far away.
If you’re a UA manager, and that just sent a shiver down your spine (“pink slip coming, ETA Q1/Q2 next year”), stay calm. The automation isn’t going to put you out of a job – if you can pivot the right way.
Increase ROAS with New Google Features
Instead of spending all the hours you used to spend managing bids, managing budgets, and managing media buying, let the algorithms run all that. You, as a human, can’t crunch the numbers at the speed the computers can.
Let the computers do what they do best. It’s time for humans to switch over to what we do best. And that is… creative.
Facebook and Google still haven’t figured out how to automate creative. They can’t really even automate creative testing yet. Maybe someday they will, but that day hasn’t come. And they definitely aren’t good at analyzing competitive creative, or at generating new break-out,100x creative concepts.
So take all the time you used to spend with bids and budgets and media buying and shift it to creative. Odds are, you aren’t spending even 2-3 hours a week monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ ads. So shift from bid edits and go do that. Or even better, spend 4-8 hours a week monitoring and analyzing competitor’s ads, and even ads from outside your industry. This research can result in blockbuster new creative concepts – the type of 100x ads that rocket ROAS.
Also, put more time into creative testing. This is the secret sauce for better results in 2019. It’s probably one of the highest return on investment actions any business can take – in any department, for any business goal. Creative testing beats out almost everything else when it comes to ROI.
So if you’ve been spending three hours a week on testing, double that. Then double it again. And if you’ve been spending ten hours testing – double that. Then try to double it again. No matter who you are, or how much creative testing you’ve been doing, do more. It’s the single best way to boost ROAS right now.
Before We Go…Learn How We Support the New Google Features
Here at Consumer Acquisition, we’ve got a few new changes, too. Namely, we’ve upgraded ourAdRules tool so it supports all of Google App Campaigns’ new Google features. Creative Uploading, Asset Reporting, Value Bidding, Similar Audiences, and Ad Groups – all those cool new tools work in AdRules.
We are also proud to announce our new status as a Google Premier Partner. This makes us one of only two Google North American Creative Partners and Premier Partners. It’s a privilege to gain this much trust from a company and a platform we admire so much.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — August 13, 2019 — ConsumerAcquisition.com, a Google Creative Partner and Premier Partner, today announced that its AdRules self-service platform now supports Google App Campaigns new features: Value Bidding, Similar Audiences, Ad Groups, Media Library, and Asset Reporting. AdRules works in parallel with Google and Facebook’s platforms helping to automate repetitive tasks. Giving mobile app advertisers the ability to easily upload and analyze creative assets across Facebook and Google. Also, giving them the ability to quickly generate thousands of audiences, build and launch ads, and adjust budgets. Starting today, Google and Facebook advertisers can leverage AdRules for 60 days free. Then pay only 0.7% of spend for any connected account.
Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said, “Google is continually enhancing the features of its App Campaigns to provide advertisers more control and better ROAS. And we’ve expanded our AdRules platform to offer these new features. We are excited to release support for creative uploading, asset reporting, value bidding, similar audiences, and ad groups in AdRules. In addition, we offer the most affordable rate in the market so advertisers of any size can use our platform to simplify their Facebook and Google advertising.”
Alexander Potichnyj, Director of Marketing with Checkout 51, said: “Consumer Acquisition has been a true partner in helping us scale our user acquisition efforts through Google’s App Campaigns. AdRules makes it fast and easy to do creative testing and the integration with Google’s platform makes them the obvious choice when it comes to optimizing our campaigns. Their platform is all about delivering performance and I would recommend AdRules to any company that would like to grow their business.”
Google is reinventing its App Campaigns with several new features launching this month.
Consumer Acquisition is currently supporting:
Creative Uploading: easily upload videos and images directly into a dedicated media library for Google App Campaigns
Asset Reporting: asset reporting of videos, images, ad copy, and playables available at the Ad Group level
Coming soon, Consumer Acquisition will support the following:
Value Bidding: Facebook advertisers have been able to use value bidding, aka “target return on ad spend” for a while. Google App Campaigns advertisers will now be able to target this way as well.
Similar Audiences: In a similar vein to Facebook’s Custom Audiences, Google App Campaigns will now let advertisers find new users similar to their existing users powered by Firebase. Pairing this new feature with value bidding could radically improve return on ad spend (ROAS).
Ad Groups: Advertisers will be able to set up multiple ad groups in the same campaign and tailor the assets in each ad group around a different “theme” or message for different customers.
With these new features in Google App Campaigns, advertisers are expected to receive even better results. Similar to Facebook advertising, creatives will be the primary driver of performance. Even with Google’s AI and its ability to optimize creative elements for different placements and users, it’s essential to provide the algorithm a constant supply of creative assets. AdRules’ workflow automation capabilities provide advertisers with the most efficient way to source creative, upload, test, and iterate new creative concepts. The platform seamlessly integrates with Google’s media library for running App Campaigns.
Google Premier Partner Badge
In addition to today’s AdRules news, Consumer Acquisition also announced that it has been awarded a Google Premier Partner Badge; making Consumer Acquisition, one of just two Google North American Creative Partners and Premier Partners. Google’s App Preferred Creative Partner program is a highly selective program. It is designed to help customers identify the highest performing and most reliable companies. Which are based on their Google App Campaign and creative needs. According to Google, “Achieving Partner status means that your company has demonstrated Google Ads skill and expertise. In addition, your company met Google ad spend requirements and delivered company agency and client revenue growth. Also, while sustaining and growing your client base.” Premier Partners are held to an even higher standard. They must demonstrate expert-level AdWords knowledge and performance in order to achieve this badge.
Founded in 2013, Consumer Acquisition provides a creative studio, fully-managed user acquisition, and SaaS tools for Google App Campaigns and Facebook social advertisers. We have managed over $1.5 billion in social advertising spend for the world’s largest mobile games, apps, and performance advertisers. For more information, visit www.consumeracquisition.com.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
Facebook advertising has changed. It’s time advertisers changed with it. Let’s learn more about Facebook Power5.
Over the last few years, Facebook’s advertising algorithm has gotten so much better at automating campaign management that it can now easily outperform a human manager.
The change has come through a series of updates, best practices, and new features. Following all those changes one by one can make the evolution of this platform seem complex and even overwhelming. But once you step back, and use a new framework to understand the new Facebook, it all makes a lot more sense.
Here’s a detailed look at the new Facebook Power5.
Facebook Power5
Facebook’s new “Power5” set of advertising tactics is that framework. It distills all the current best practices of social advertising and incorporates all the key changes that have happened over the last few years. So if you’ve been asking yourself, “What do I have to do to make Facebook work in 2019?”, this is the answer.
The Facebook Power5 is made up of these five advertising tactics:
Auto Advanced Matching
Account Simplification
Campaign Budget Optimization
Automatic Placements
Dynamic Ads
Here’s a quick explanation of each tactic, and how it can drive better results for user acquisition campaigns:
Auto Advanced Matching
You’re only as good as your tracking.
User acquisition managers live and die by how well they can track their campaigns. They have to track every click, know where every sale comes from and set a value for each action. And while today’s advertisers have better tracking tools than their predecessors could ever dream of, tracking is still an imperfect science.
Auto Advanced Matching makes it much more accurate. Once you’ve turned Auto Advanced Matching on, Facebook can use data you’ve collected on your website (like email addresses) to find lookalike audiences across their user base.
But that’s not all AAM can do. It adds more data parameters to each action, and each person tracked, so tracking is far more accurate than other solutions. This helps you manage your campaigns better and usually results in significantly better ROAS because you can more accurately pinpoint where your results are coming from.
That doesn’t save you from naming all those Ad Sets – the real benefit of a simplified campaign structure is that Facebook’s advertising algorithm can manage all the tests and settings you used to manage with dozens (maybe even hundreds) of ad sets. So you can let the algorithm handle all that complexity. You just tell it the results you want, and let it run.
If you’re hesitant to let go of all your carefully constructed campaigns and Ad Sets, we get it. We used hundreds of campaigns and Ad Sets ourselves until February of last year, when Facebook rolled out their Best Practices update. But after that change, tests started to show it was more effective to just hand this optimization work over to the AI. With the simplified campaign structure, campaigns also get put into “Learning Mode” less often, which saves a lot of ad spend. And campaigns become more likely to hit their target CPA goals.
Campaign Budget Optimization is a best practice now, but you’ve got less than two months before it becomes mandatory. Facebook will switch most campaigns over to CBO as of September 1, 2019. If you’re not using one of their API tools (like our AdRules tool), your campaigns will automatically be shifted over to CBO. And any new campaigns you create will use CBO, too.
Fortunately, once you know how to use it, CBO is great. You just need to pick smart goals, give it enough creative elements to do its thing, and get used to having a few hours of free time every week.
Smart advertisers know the right placement can make the difference between success and failure in a campaign. So they test placements every chance they can get.
Trouble is, there are 14 possible placements across Facebook’s current ad inventory. Testing all those placements takes a lot of time and blows through a lot of ad budgets… unless you’ve got a world-class advertising algorithm to do it all for you in the background.
Which is exactly what automatic placements can do. So not only do you have less work to do, but you’ll also get better results. Nice.
Dynamic Ads
Relevancy is one of the power laws of advertising. Relevant ads – ads that are aligned with consumers’ interests – will always crush the performance of irrelevant ads.
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads leverage that relevancy power law. They let you show ads that feature whatever products people have looked at on your website or in your app.
To use Dynamic Ads, upload your product catalog and set up a Dynamic Ads campaign. After that initial setup, your ads will continue to run without any intervention. Any time someone has been on your website or in your app and looked at products there, the Dynamic Ads campaign will automatically show ads that feature those specific products to that specific visitor. You can manage any pricing, availability, or product updates for your ads by updating your product catalog.
According to Facebook, Dynamic Ads have increased click-through rates by 280% and reduced CPAs by up to 60% for some advertisers. So this is definitely worth a test.
Conclusion
It’s time to change how you’ve been advertising on Facebook. Thanks to the platform’s machine learning algorithm, user acquisition managers can now step back from certain parts of campaign management.
This doesn’t mean anyone is out of a job (yet). It just means it’s time to shift gears and put more time into things only humans can do, like creative development and competitive analysis.
Of course, there’s still a need for humans to supervise the machines. Many of the day-to-day tasks of campaign management can be automated now, but the overarching strategy of user acquisition still requires people – smart people. People who can see where advertising is headed, and pivot as quickly as the algorithms evolve.
There are digital advertising channels, and then there’s Google App Campaigns. The platform is a breed apart in many ways. It does most of the heavy lifting for advertisers, from building ads to automating routine tasks to fine-tuning campaigns. It also offers unbeatable reach.
The only thing Google App Campaigns won’t do is design creative elements (images, video, and HTML5), which it wisely leaves to humans.
This summer, Google App Campaigns will start to look a bit more like Facebook in terms of what advertisers can do to tailor their bidding, creative, and targeting. Below, we’ll explain how you can take full advantage of these new features to optimize your user acquisition campaigns.
3 New Google App Campaigns Features Designed to Enhance Return on Ad Spend
Coming July 2019, these new features will allow user acquisition managers to tailor their campaigns even more and ensure the best possible use of their ad spend.
1. Value Bidding
Value bidding, or target return on ad spend (tROAS), has been available to Facebook advertisers for some time. With this new Google App Campaigns feature, you’ll get more value out of your ads by paying more for users who will likely spend more and paying less for other users. You’ll also be able to set multipliers for tROAS bids so you can target users who are likely to spend at least twice the cost of acquiring them. If your daily budget is $200 and tROAS is 20%, your goal is to get about $40 of value from your ads.
2. Similar Audiences
This is similar to Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which allows advertisers to target new users who are similar to existing users. Google App Campaigns will use machine learning to update similar audience lists in real time. Pairing this feature with value bidding could radically improve your return on ad spend.
3. Ad Groups
An ad group features multiple ads with similar target audiences. Soon, Google App Campaigns will allow you to create multiple ad groups as part of a single campaign, with each ad group promoting a different theme or message for distinct customer groups.
Ensure Google App Campaigns Success with These 5 Best Practices
Getting started with Google App Campaigns is easy. The hard part is knowing how to maximize ROAS. It’s a complex equation with many variables: strategic priorities, timing, value targets, creative quality, and more. These expert tips will help you lay the foundation for a winning campaign.
1. Deploy Ads Before You Launch
Start building your user base before launch day. Google App Campaigns’ pre-launch campaign tool allows users to register before an app is available and sends push notifications when the app is ready to download.
This is an excellent tool that delivers big returns: higher D1 and D7 install volumes, 38% conversion to install on average, and higher conversion than with external pre-registration sources.
2. Refine Your Google App Campaign Bidding Strategy
With a target CPA (tCPA) bidding strategy, you can maintain a set cost per acquisition while still getting as many conversions as possible. AI will automatically optimize your bids, but you can tailor your bids with auction-time bidding.
Here are a few things you’ll need to consider before setting a CPA/CPI bid or making any changes.
Consolidate all campaigns to snap to Google App Campaign best practices and separate campaigns according to:
Country Tiers (US, T1, ROW)
Language (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean)
Mobile OS (iOS, Android)
Bidding strategy (tCPA, tROAS)
Set bids early in the day.
This will allow you to be competitive, but you’ll also have room to begin tapering the bid down once your campaigns have achieved enough event volume each day.
Start tCPA bidding at a minimum of 10X.
This will let you ramp up your campaigns quickly. Also, test a bid-to-budget ratio of 20X once you’ve got some campaign history established. 20X bids will often show stronger performance.
Set CPI budget caps at 50X the target.
If you’re running a CPI (cost-per-install) campaign, bids should start around $4-$5. Aim for that even if your CPI goals are lower.
Cluster your budgets.
If you can’t increase your daily budget, try clustering your budgets together into a single campaign. You’ll want to make sure your tCPA campaign bids start around 20–30% higher than your ultimate goal.
Cluster your markets.
Markets, tiers, languages, and other factors should inform how you structure your campaigns and campaign strategy. That said, if you’re starting with a small budget, it’s helpful to combine ad campaigns if they are in one language and have low bids. You’ll have a higher bid-to-budget ratio, along with more events firing every day. You can also control delivery a little better.
Use caution when changing target bids.
If you have a smaller budget, keep bid changes small. Don’t change target CPA/CPI bids more than 20% in 24 hours until the campaign is generating 40-50 targeted in-app events per day.
Geo expansions can wait.
You need to prove success in Tier 1 markets before uncapping your budgets. As you increase your bid-to-budget ratio over time and get closer to 20X, you can begin to consider expanding your reach.
3. Be Generous with Creative Elements
Now that Google App Campaigns’ AI-enabled features have leveled the playing field and made so many ad tech products unnecessary, creative is the new battleground for developers. We’re proud to be a Google App ads creative partner dedicated to making world-class creative affordable and scalable for every budget.
To take full advantage of Google’s owned and operated (O&O) inventory on display (YouTube, Google Play, etc.), you must add images to your campaigns. But images alone won’t be enough. You’ll also need video assets and HTML5 creative. Your best bet is to create a balance between still ad images and videos, which will help balance out your ad spend.
Google’s algorithms can optimize the best placements for your ads across multiple channels, such as Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. You can feed your campaigns by maximizing your asset coverage.
Here’s how all those different ad creative formats can be distributed.
Consolidate your creatives into top-performing Ad Group to snap to Google AC best practices
Testing all dimensions (Square, Portrait, Landscape, Vertical)
Re-test Headline/Description copy extensively
And, test creatives using video-only and text-only Ad Groups and scale to top-performing Ad Groups.
Video
The importance of video can’t be overstated. Adding just two videos to the asset mix usually results in a 25% increase in conversions. Don’t skimp on portrait videos, either: when advertisers use portrait rather than landscape videos, we typically see a 60% increase in conversion rates.
If you don’t have videos to add, Google App Campaigns can make a video ad for you using assets from your app store listing. To create your own videos using still images, follow this step-by-step process.
Here are some essential rules and tips for video use.
Videos must be hosted on YouTube.
Orientation can be landscape, portrait, or square.
Make videos that can “flex,” or work regardless of how a user holds their device.
Build creatives that show the app, not people. Many top-performing ads do not show people at all, or only show hands using a phone.
Design videos that highlight the app experience rather than tell a story. Most top-performing ads show a direct experience of the app action itself or a quick demo of the app’s capabilities.
Images
In our experience, we’ve found that certain image characteristics perform better than others (simpler backgrounds, primary colors, authentic/user-generated photos, etc.).
Upload images as .jpg, .gif, or .png with a maximum size of 150KB.
For native ads, landscape is the most valuable format.
For interstitial ads, portrait is the most valuable format.
Other valuable formats include 320×50 pixels, 320×480 pixels, and 300×250 pixels.
Click here to learn how to upload image ads in different sizes.
HTML5
Google recommends using Google Web Designer to create HTML5 assets for campaign use.
Upload HTML5 as .zip (maximum size 1MB) containing no more than 40 files.
To validate your HTML5 assets before uploading, run your .zip file through the HTML5 Validator tool.
HTML5 sizes currently accepted include 480×320 (landscape interstitial, variable size); 320×480 (portrait interstitial, variable size); 300×250 (fixed size); and 320×50 (fixed size).
4. Run Multiple Formats Continually for Maximum Reach
App Campaign Performance
According to Google, there are three ways to kick app campaign performance into high gear: landscape images, landscape video, and portrait video, all run continually for the greatest possible reach. Using this strategy, advertisers can simultaneously achieve creative excellence and maximize app campaign results.
Be sure to focus on the top image dimensions to ensure Google App Campaigns are serving across all networks.
320×480 (portrait interstitial)
480×320 (landscape interstitial)
300×250 (square)
1024×768 (tablet)
768×1024 (tablet)
1200×628 (landscape image)
728×90 (leaderboard)
320×50 (banner)
320×100 (banner)
5. Make User Retention a Priority
User acquisition may be the name of the game, but user retention is often an app’s biggest profit engine. Google App Campaigns’ latest updates make user retention campaigns easier than before. Use automated, cross-channel, tCPA product targeting to encourage users who’ve already downloaded your app to come back and engage again.
The Leading Success Factor: Google App Campaigns World-Class Creative at Scale
Google App Campaigns were good before: easy to use, expansive reach, and the power of AI to manage and optimize campaigns. Its AI’s ability to assemble and reassemble pieces of creative for different placements and platforms has made the user acquisition manager’s job easy.
With new features like value bidding, similar audiences, and AI-driven audience selection and ad placement, we expect advertisers will see even better results with Google App Campaigns—as long as they focus on developing top-quality creative.
To learn about what it takes to produce world-class creative at scale, and how surprisingly affordable it can be, check out our Creative Studio.
If you drill down into which creative elements drove the results from creative testing, it breaks out like this:
60% of videos or images
30% text
10% headlines and calls to action
While videos and images do share first place for their impact on results, videos tend to outperform images. You can see this in almost any study of social media ads or content done in the last few years: Video content almost always outperforms still images. Side note: we have found that Facebook Carousel ads work great for B2B apps and websites.
With ads, the likelihood of a video beating a still image goes even higher. This is why Facebook and Google (and creative partners like ourselves) have gone to such lengths to make adding motion to ads easier. Facebook launched its “Video Creation Kit,” and we’ve spent a lot of time developing our own best practices for how to add motion to still images and AdRules offers a video editor and bulk sheet editingto create thousands of videos for localization, resizing, and quick additions of end cards and start cards all done inside our Creative Studio.
The image is from https://www.consumeracquisition.com/guide-to-creating-facebook-video-ads-using-still-images/
So if creative testing delivers the most improvements for user acquisition campaigns… and video delivers the bulk of those creative testing improvements… if you could only do one thing to improve your advertising, it would be to create better videos.
That’s exactly what we’re going to cover in this post.
Quantitative Creative Testing
Quantitative creative testing for user acquisition campaigns is essential now, of course. And we’ve written about it in several posts. So let’s approach video advertising best practices by breaking video ads down into their essential parts. Those would include:
Ad copy
Buttons
End/start cards
Calls to action
Messaging
Offers
Use of animation/motion
Colors
Backgrounds
Text placement
Video ratio/ length
Here’s how to optimize each of those elements:
Ad copy
We strongly recommend checking your competitors’ ads to see which ad copy they’re using over and over again. A simple twist on what’s been working for them could help your ads a lot.
But while your competitors’ ads can be helpful, there’s one golden rule to follow: Use emotion.
Use emotion as often and as strongly as you can. Emotion rules over rationality, especially for game and lifestyle apps.
This is basically a new spin on that old ad copy rule of “sell benefits, not features.” The most fundamental (and powerful) benefit ever is how a product or service makes people feel. So always focus on emotions. They’re the ultimate product experience.
Here’s how Gardenscapes leverages emotion and empathy to urge users to come back to play their game.
Image is from @Gardenscapes ads in the Facebook Ads Library
Buttons
Speaking of old-school advertising tricks – if you had to distill any ad down to two things, they would be the headline and the call to action. The ad copy in a video ad serves as the headline. Buttons are the call to action.
Once again, checking your competitors’ ads can be helpful, but don’t stop there. There are plenty of ways to test buttons. Try using “my” on your buttons instead of “you” – this is yet another old direct response trick that still works in 2019.
Whatever you do, make the copy on your buttons clear. Confused people don’t take action. And you’re pitching to people who are scrolling through a river of information; even the slightest whiff of confusion is enough to suppress conversion rates.
Start and end cards
Not using these as part of your video advertising? We think you’re missing out.
Here’s why start and end cards work so well:
Tell the story of the ad.
Create a powerful first frame visual.
Start Cards
Start cards are simple. They usually include just the name of the app. Try that, but also try going a step further. Adding a call to action can help a lot.
Some apps use calls to action or phrases that introduce gameplay or explain to the user what they should do, almost like a mini-tutorial. For example, Gardenscapes will use a CTA like “Save Your Garden!” or “Make a Choice to Save Them!”
Some apps try to draw in the consumer’s attention by using phrases such as “The Best Matching Game” or “It’s Harder Than It Looks!” on their start cards. These kinds of phrases draw the consumer to watch the video instead of scrolling past it.
While start cards are not as important as end cards, they serve an important purpose: They can stop people from scrolling past your ad when it shows up on their timeline or social media feed. And if people never see past the start card, they’ll never see any other part of your ad.
The image is from @socialpeta
End Cards
End cards are used to pique interest in the game based on the call to action and the brand slogan.
They work in part thanks to a psychology principle called “the recency effect.” When consumers are looking for new apps, they are more likely to remember apps whose ads use end cards.
Most end cards have the app’s name and a call to action like “Accept the Challenge!” or “Try it Yourself!” Some include a button, too, with copy like “Download Now!” or “Play Now!”
The image is from @homescapes on the @socialpeta siteThe image is from a Gardenscapes ad
Many advertisers also include prompts to download their app on the app store/Google Play, but we don’t recommend that. Including the platform logos frequently drop the conversion rate by 10-15%.
You can try blurring out the gameplay in the background of the end card. We’ve seen it work well, and lots of gaming apps use that tactic.
Text placement, fonts, colors, and emojis
How text looks and where it’s placed can have a big effect on conversion rates. Again, you can get some ideas from your competitors’ ads in the Facebook Ads Library and other tools, but we like to position text towards the top and bottom of the screen and to use bright, pure colors for optimal response rates.
These aspects of an ad are important in another way, too. They’re good examples of elements best chosen by Creative teams. User acquisition managers or teams may want to manage these aspects of ads:
Call to actions
Messaging
Buttons
Headers and Footers
But Creative Teams should be given authority to pick the text attributes we’ve just mentioned, plus background images, button colors, and fonts, and video ad aspect ratios and ad lengths.
The image is from @luckyday on the @socialpeta site
Video ad ratio
Landscape, square, or horizontal? But this aspect of your ads can have a huge effect on performance.
We recommend every advertiser use at least these three aspect ratios in their campaigns:
Image is from Mobile Apps Unlocked Consumer Acquisition – FINAL powerpoint deck
Of course, creating videos for every ratio and placement size is a lot of work. This is why only your highest-performing video ads should be made into every possible size and aspect ratio. Otherwise, you’ll just waste a lot of time and budget creating endless versions of low-performing videos.
That said, because Facebook and Google’s media buying is mostly automated now, any video you run may be seen across a huge array of properties. This is part of why we recommend using videos so much – we’ve found that 45% of total impressions on iOS are from video ads.
Also consider creating more than one video, even if you can’t afford robust video ad creative testing. We’ve found that adding just two videos to almost any campaign will increase conversions by 25%. The more you spend, the more videos you need, too. Advertisers spending even $50,000-$75,000 per month should create at least four new high-performing videos per month.
Google has one other interesting recommendation: Make videos that flex in length. So even if you stick with one video aspect ratio, create three versions of that same video ad. One 10 seconds long, another that 15 seconds long, and one that’s 30 seconds long. Then let the algorithm figure out where to show the different ads.
Video Ad Creative Conclusion
If you haven’t been using many – or any – video ads for your user acquisition campaigns, that needs to change right now. Videos convert. They’re more than worth the extra investment.
Or maybe you’re a step ahead of that. But if you’ve only been creating one or two videos at a time, it’s time to upgrade your advertising to develop more video assets, stat. You need to be testing multiple ads, and then when you find a winner, make multiple versions of that winning ad in different aspect ratios and in different video ad lengths.
Giving Facebook and Google good, flexible creative like that lets the algorithms do their work far more effectively. It will get your user acquisition campaigns a considerably better return on ad spend, too.
In 2019, the success or failure of user acquisition advertising campaigns comes down to creative testing.
Facebook and Google’s shifts toward automation have removed most of the advantages of third-party adtech tools used to deliver. Those platforms’ automation of bid and budget management and audience selection has leveled the playing field even more.
But creative is still an opportunity. The algorithms can test different creative elements of ads, but they cannot create those elements. Creative is still best done by human beings.
Trouble is the vast majority of creative fails. 95% of new creative will not beat the current control. And if an ad can’t beat the control, there’s no point in running it. It’ll only cost you money.
So the real competitive advantage lies not just in creative, but in testing creative – to identify creative winners as quickly as possible, and for the lowest amount of spend per variation.
Creative Testing
We’ve created and tested tens of thousands of ads in the last two years. We’ve profitably managed over $1 billion in ad spend. Here’s where our biggest wins have come from:
60% creative testing
30% audience expansion
10% of everything else
Creative is the differentiator. Creative is where the bulk of the big wins are. And from those creative wins, here’s which elements tend to win the most:
60% of videos
30% text
10% headlines and calls to action
That gives you an idea of where to start your tests. But it’s not all you need to know. Take Facebook user acquisition advertising, for example. It has several hidden challenges, including:
Multiple strategies for testing ads – It’s nice to have choices, but they can complicate things. You can test creative on Facebook with their split-test feature, or by setting up one ad per ad set, or by setting up many ads within an ad set. Which one you pick will affect your testing results.
Data integrity – The data for each of your tests won’t come in evenly. Some ads will get more impressions than others. The CPM for different ads and ad sets will vary. This makes for noise in the data, which makes it harder to determine the winning ad.
Cost – Testing has an extremely high ROI, but it can also have a very high investment cost. If you don’t set up your creative testing right, it can be prohibitively expensive.
Bias – Facebook’s algorithm prefers winning ads. And because you’ll be running your control against each new ad, the system will favor the winning ad. This skews the data even more and makes it harder to establish which ad won.
Running tests in Google Ads has many similar challenges, but it is about to get easier soon when Google App Campaigns launches “asset reporting” (expected towards the end of this July).
Perfect Versus Cost-Effective Creative Testing
Let’s take a closer look at the cost aspect of creative testing – and how to overcome it.
In classic testing, you need a 95% confidence rate to declare a winner. That’s nice to have, but getting a 95% confidence rate for in-app purchases will end up costing you $20,000 per variation.
Here’s why: To reach a 95% confidence level, you’ll need about 100 purchases. With a 1% purchase rate (which is typical for gaming apps), and a $200 cost per purchase, you’ll end up spending $20,000 for each variation in order to accrue enough data for that 95% confidence rate.
And that’s actually the best-case scenario. Because of the way the statistics works, you’d also have to find a variation that beats the control by 25% or more for it to cost “only” $20,000. A variation that beat the control by 5% or 10% would have to run even longer to achieve a 95% confidence level.
That’s a deal killer for a lot of businesses. Few advertisers can afford to spend $20,000 per variation, especially if 95% of new creative fails to beat the control.
So what do you do?
You move the conversion event you’re targeting up a little in the sales funnel. Instead of optimizing for purchases, for mobile apps, you optimize for impression to install rate (IPM). For websites, you optimize for impression to top-funnel conversion rate.
Why impression to action rate?
The obvious concern here is that ads with high CTRs and high conversion rates for top-funnel events may not be true winners for down-funnel conversions and ROI / ROAS. But while there is a risk of identifying false positives with this method, we’d rather take this risk than the risk and expense of optimizing for bottom-funnel metrics.
If you decided to test for bottom-funnel performance anyway:
You would be substantially increasing the spend per variation and you’d introduce substantial risk into your portfolio’s metrics.
Or you’d need to rely on fewer conversions to make decisions, which runs the risk of identifying false positives.
Here’s one other benefit: When we’re optimizing for IPM (installs per thousand impressions), we’re effectively optimizing for relevance score.
As you know, a higher relevance score (Quality Rank, Engagement Rank or Conversion Rank) comes with lower CPMs and access to higher-quality impressions. Ads with higher relevance scores and lower revenue per conversion will often outperform ads with lower relevance scores and higher revenue per conversion because Facebook’s algorithm is biased towards ads with higher relevance scores.
So optimizing for installs works better than optimizing for purchases on several levels. Most importantly, it means you can run tests for $200 per variation because it only costs $2 to get an install. For many advertisers, that alone can make more testing possible. There just aren’t a lot of companies that can afford to test if it’s going to cost $20,000 per variation.
Here are a few other best practices to make the whole creative testing system work:
Facebook’s split-testing feature – We mentioned earlier that there are several different ways to test ads, even within Facebook. Skip the other options and just use their split-testing feature.
Always test against a top-performing control – If you don’t test every variation against your control, you’ll never know if the new ad will actually beat your control. You’ll only know how the new ad performed compared to the other new ads you tested, which doesn’t actually help.
Only test on Facebook’s news feed – There are 14 different placements available in Facebook’s ad inventory. Testing all of them at once creates a lot of noise in the test data as each placement has different CPMs, conversion rates, and CTRs. So don’t do that. Keep the data clean and just test for the news feed.
Optimize for app installs – This is a major lever in getting your costs down. It may not be a perfect solution, but it works well enough.
Aim for 100 installs minimum – You need at least 100 installs to reach statistical significance. We can bend the rules of statistics a bit to find winning ads faster and cheaper, but we cannot break the rules entirely.
Use the right audience – Use an audience that’s considered high quality so it’s representative of performance at scale, but also one that isn’t being used elsewhere in your account. This minimizes the chance that audiences used in test cells could be exposed to other ads that are running concurrently in other ad sets.
Consistent data drives higher confidence in results – Never judge a test by its first day of results. Look at aggregate performance for variations and for stability across day-to-day results. If test data is consistent and winners and losers are no longer changing day-over-day, your test results will be far more reliable than if cumulative variation performance is still changing day by day.
The data below shows the winner changing on the last day, which is an indicator that additional data would increase our confidence in the data. The winner “orange line” had a poor day 1, but a strong day 2 and day 3. This is an indicator that the results were still changing at the time of test completion.
How to Test “Predicted Winners”
If you follow all those best practices, you may have a few new ads that have performed well (and reliably) against the control. You’ll have what we call “predicted winners.”
We know these newly-tested predicted winners performed well against the control in a limited test. What we don’t know is what will happen if we really increase their exposure and test them against purchases and for ROAS. Will they continue to perform?
To find that out, each winning variation should be launched into existing ad sets. These variations should be allowed to compete for impressions versus other top ads. This will allow us to verify whether these new predicted winners are holding up at scale.
Run through this process enough, and you’ll finally have found that precious thing… an ad that beats your control.
Pro Tips for Mobile User Acquisition Testing
Get back to testing – Your new winners will soon fatigue and performance will deteriorate. The best way to offset performance fatigue is to replace old creative with new creative winners
Do more competitive creative analysis – If you’re a new media buyer (or even an experienced one), spend every bit of free time you have doing competitive creative analysis. It’s a high-return activity that will help you generate better ads to run your tests with.
Don’t trash the near winners – Sometimes in tests, we’ll have ads that were within 10% of the control’s performance but didn’t quite beat it. We don’t just kill those “near winners.” We’ll send them back to the creative team so they can tweak those ads just a bit to improve performance.
Conclusion for Creative Testing
Quantitative creative testing has one of the highest ROIs of any business activity. No matter who you are, or how much creative testing you’re doing, do more of it. It’s the single best way to improve the ROAS for your accounts.
Facebook and Google are better at creative advertising than you are.
Don’t take it personally. It’s just that you can’t crunch 10,000 data points in a minute. And you can’t keep recalculating those 10,000 data points over and over – hour after hour – for weeks, much fewer years on end.
That doesn’t mean you’re obsolete. It doesn’t mean you’re out of a job (yet). It just means it’s time to let the machines do what they do best, while we humans do what we do best.
Fortunately for us, AI and machine learning algorithms still can’t make good creative assets. They aren’t that great at strategically testing creative. And they can’t do a competitive creative analysis yet, either. Or develop a creative strategy.
So that’s what we recommend user acquisition managers focus on now: Creative. Creative analysis, creative testing, all fueling a data-driven creative strategy. Let the machines handle the quantitative aspects of user acquisition while we focus on what only humans can do.
How We Got Here
Over the last few years, the machine learning algorithms at Facebook and Google have grown very efficient at buying media and managing bids and placements and audiences. As a result, the levers that user acquisition managers had used for campaign optimization are increasingly being taken away. The campaign optimization work that humans have been doing for years can increasingly be automated.
But one major area is still well within human control: Creative.
Facebook and Google’s machine learning algorithms can’t develop creative. That may change in the future, but for now, humans are still the undisputed champions at creative development, strategy, and creative testing.
A Brief History Of How User Acquisition Advertising Became Automated
Google
Google App Campaigns launched in 2015 (as “Google Universal App Campaigns” at the time). From the start, it was something of a black box. All the app advertising campaigns on the platform were automatically switched over the new campaign type, and Google Ads’ machine learning algorithm took over the controls of placement, bids, and audience selection.
If you were okay having your campaigns become automated, this was all good news. As Google put it at the time, “All you need to do is provide some text, a starting bid, and budget, and let us know the languages and locations for your ads. Our systems will test different combinations and show ads that are performing the best more often, with no extra work needed from you.”
Facebook
Facebook took a different approach. Instead of doing everything in one sweep, they have incrementally taken away certain levers from advertisers, and they’ve usually made those changes optional (with the notable exception of Campaign Budget Optimization, which will become mandatory for most advertisers as of September 1, 2019).
But Facebook has been moving toward algorithm-controlled campaigns for a while. AEO (App Event Optimization), VO (Value optimization) and LTV (lifetime value targeting) were one of the first steps. Advertisers could specify those types of goals and then let the algorithm figure out how to best get new users for a price set by the advertisers. But even with that level of automation, it was (and is) still a human picking which type of optimization strategy they want to use. When Campaign Budget Optimization goes into effect in September, humans may no longer be picking the bidding strategy.
With those new goal types, Facebook’s algorithm was controlling ad placements, audience, and when and which device ads showed on. Facebook also made it possible for advertisers to let the algorithm create new lookalike audiences for them once the advertiser had defined a “seed” audience.
There was some creative testing involved in all this, too. Facebook, like Google, also developed a way to test creative elements via Dynamic Creative. This was complemented by Dynamic Language Optimization, where the algorithm picked which languages to run ads based on performance.
Facebook’s Simplified Campaign Structure
So user acquisition has been being slowly taken over by algorithms for quite a while. Facebook new recommended simplified campaign structure, which came out barely a month ago, is yet another example of how rapidly user acquisition is becoming automated.
The net of all this is that while Google is getting more complex, with Ad groups, Value Bidding, Similar Audiences, and media library and asset reporting due to come out soon, Facebook is getting easier.
We expect these two platforms will basically meet in the middle between total automation and human-control campaign control around Q1 2020 when Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization and Dynamic Creative Optimization really kick in. So for the next nine to twelve months or so, humans will still be managing a fair amount. But after that, the machines will take over.
As User Acquisition Becomes Automated, What Are The Roles For Machines, and for Humans?
Machines are very good at quantification – crunching the numbers. As they become able to take over more and more of campaign optimization work, will it push human user acquisition managers out of a job?
We don’t think so. If you’re able to learn new skills and you can pivot effectively, you’ll probably be okay. And honestly, most good UA managers already have those two skills down anyway.
So here’s the deal: We expect that human UA managers probably have about nine to twelve months to enhance their skills so they can be ready for when the machines really do take over the bulk of user acquisition advertising.
Quantitative Creative Testing
In the next few months, UA managers should focus on math-based creative testing (which we call quantitative creative testing), establish a thorough competitive ad research methodology, and develop a robust a/b testing strategy and system so they can test ads as efficiently and as affordable as possible.
Creative teams also need to learn how to do robust creative audits and how to develop effective creative strategies. They have to become data-driven, rather than brand-driven.
The old dichotomy between creative, right-brained people and quantitative, left-brained people needs to be bridged, and maybe even merged. These two groups need to learn how to speak each other’s language. People who can speak both “left-brain” and “right-brain” will become even more valuable to high-performance advertising teams. If you can bridge those two skill sets and ways of thinking, you don’t have to worry about losing your job. You might even get a raise.
Third-party Adtech Tools Obsolete
But that’s only one aspect of this shift to automation. The evolution of Google and Facebook’s ad platforms have had one other massive consequence: they’ve made third-party adtech tools basically obsolete… or at the very least, crushed their value. Now that anyone can have access to world-class advertising AI platforms via Google or Facebook advertising, having a fancy adtech tool is no longer as much of an advantage.
Optimizing these platforms has one other major consequence: Because Facebook and Google’s ad platforms are increasingly automated, they’ve made it possible for almost anyone to advertise profitably. So increasingly you don’t need to be an advertising whiz to get good ROAS.
This means businesses can hire less skilled people. It also means that exponentially more advertisers can get success with advertising on these platforms. Automation may end up being the best move Google and Facebook have ever made to grow their advertising user base.
So now that we’ve covered what’s happened with Google and Facebook, and how advertising automation will affect advertisers, user acquisition managers, adtech tools, and the platforms themselves let’s shift into today.
Here’s what you need to be doing right now if you want to run a competitive advertising program in Q3 2019.
Creative Testing Best Practices for Q3 2019
User acquisition advertising is evolving rapidly. Every few months for the last few years, either Facebook or Google has made significant changes to their platforms that have made it more and more possible to automate user acquisition advertising. And because these changes are available to everyone, competition has increased. Any competitive advantage third-party adtech tools had given is gone.
This has leveled the playing field. The last thing the machines have not automated or started to automate – creative – ends up being a UA manager’s last competitive advantage.
This makes every aspect of creative vital to success.
Most Ads Fail
Creative excellence isn’t easy. High-performance, control-beating creative is a rare thing. In our experience, after spending over 3 billion dollars in user acquisition advertising, usually only one out of twenty ads can beat the current “control” (the top-performing ad).
The reality is, most ads fail. The chart below shows the results of about 600 different ads. Spend was distributed based on performance. As you can see, out of those 600 ads, only a handful was responsible for the lion’s share of results.
The extremely high failure rate of most creative shapes advertising budgets and advertising testing. Because 95% of creative fails, if you can’t test ads quickly and affordably, your campaign performance is going to be crippled.
But testing alone isn’t enough. You also have to generate enough creative to fuel that testing machine. Because 19 out of 20 ads fail don’t just need one new piece of creative; you need 20.
And because creative fatigues so quickly, you don’t need 20 new creatives every year or so. You need 20 new creative concepts every month, or possibly even every week.
How to Test UA Creative in Q3 2019 Quickly and Affordably
So 95% of new ads will fail to out-perform the “control” (the current top-performing ad) in an advertiser’s account. This is true regardless of the platform, the industry, or anything else. It’s true for your competitors, too.
And so if most ads fail, the best way to find a breakout, a control-beating ad is to test a lot of creative.
The secret is to do that testing affordably and quickly. Because there are a lot of ways to test creative. There are dozens of variables in any given ad to test. If you don’t have a disciplined, methodic practice for testing, it’s easy to blow way too much time and way too much money on testing creative and still not have a winner.
Prototype Ads
We use “prototype” ads to get around those pitfalls. Prototype ads are run for short periods of time (bursts, really) to determine if they will perform or not. These ads may bend or even break brand guidelines, but this doesn’t matter too much because they’ll typically get only 25,000-50,000 impressions or less.
We overcome most of the limitations of statistical relevance with prototype ads, too, because we aren’t looking for minor performance differences – we’re looking for 10x, even 100x results. Breakout ads. So we don’t need to have as many conversion events accrue as we would if we were looking for minor differences in performance. Discerning a winner that performs 25% or better than the control takes much less time than discerning a winner that performs only 2-5% better.
Of course, most of the prototype ads we test will fail. But when a prototype ad does perform, we’ll clean it up a bit to make it more brand complaint, and then test it again to a larger audience.
Prototype ads work because they let us test dozens of new concepts at a time, hopefully with very few creative restrictions.
That is one key requirement for prototype ads: Creative freedom. Advertisers need to give both internal and external creative teams enough freedom to develop the kind of bold new concepts that become breakout ads.
Prototype ads don’t just work for brand new concepts. They can also be used for variations. When we test variations we take a winning ad and use it basically as a template. Then we test dozens of slight variations to the ad to see if we can’t squeeze better results from it, or at least get it to last a little longer before ad fatigue sets in.
80% of what we test is a variation. This minimizes the losses that happen when you test big, bold new concepts, but it still leaves room to test enough of those new concepts to keep ads fresh and to keep creative teams from getting stuck in a rut.
Creative Testing Best Practices
We’ve tested hundreds of thousands of ads. Based on that experience, we’ve developed a creative testing methodology that allows us to find winners faster and more affordable than is traditionally possible.
Our core methodology right now (it is always evolving) is as follows, in this order:
Creative Audit
Competitive Audit
Creative Strategy
Creative History of Winners and Losers
Concept Refresh
Winner Variation Testing
Asset Folders For Winning Ads
Here are the details for each of these best practices:
Creative Audit
We hate repeating work, and we hate repeating mistakes even more. So before we create new ads or develop a new strategy, we’ll dig deep into the prior performance of a user acquisition advertising account, with a particular focus on the creative assets.
Doing an audit like this will help us avoid repeating the same tests and mistakes an advertiser has made before. It will also give us valuable information about what has worked, and what might work going forward.
The end result of a creative audit is to analyze, document, and share what has worked and failed in the past six months. We focus on videos and images, ad copy, and which concepts and variations have performed best and worst.
The goal is to identify key winning concepts and to fuel ideas for which approaches we want to test with the creative strategy. Then we’ll create a living document where winners and losers are visually documented so both creative teams and UA managers (internal or external) can learn from each other.
Competitive Audit
Competitors’ ads are a bank vault of creative insights – if you know what to look for. The good news is that there’s a nearly endless supply of tested concepts. The bad news is 95% of your competitors’ ads fail, too.
Facebook’s new Ads Library is a great way to see which ads your competitors have been running. But it lacks conversion data, impressions, and interaction data – all metrics essential to evaluating ads. So we also use tools like Social Ad Scout, Connect Explore, SocialPeta, AdSpy and other resources to get that information.
Effectively evaluating competitors’ creative is a valuable skill. But it’s usually not ideal to have either a true creative or a true quant do it. Ideally, you want someone with a balance of both right and left brain thinking. Someone with a psychology background and good math skills might fit the profile. They need to be able to interpret the metrics on competitors’ ads but also be able to see the psychology behind why certain ads are working.
A good creative evaluator will be able to see trends in both creative and data. They’ll come up with a hypothesis about why winning ads work, and then incorporate that hypothesis into a client’s creative strategy and testing protocol.
Doing competitive audits like this can make a huge difference in long-term performance. This is a high-value activity UA managers would do well to put more time into.
A good competitive audit will include:
1. An analysis of competitors’ ad concepts based on spend, conversions, engagements, and any other meaningful metrics you’re especially interested in.
2. Documentation of how competitors have used the following elements:
Ad copy
Buttons
End/start cards
Calls to action
Messaging
Offers
Use of animation/motion
Colors
Backgrounds
Text placement
Characters
Logos and/or stickers
New elements
Old elements used in a new way
3. The final competitive analysis document will include screenshots of all these elements. It’s usually best to organize them into a spreadsheet so you can sort the data by:
Competitor
The ads they’re running
What you’ve noticed about those ads
What test ideas you’ve gotten by reviewing their ads
If you’re in need of a few truly “out of the box” ideas for new ads, look to other industries or niches. Find breakaway, 100x ads and then analyze them like you would a competitor’s ads. This is especially effective if you can find an industry or niche your highest value audience has a particular affinity for.
Creative Strategy
This is a plan based on the creative audit and the competitive audit. Its goal is to reduce failure across the team (for both UA managers and creatives). It should be an evolving map of how to do testing and messaging.
A creative strategy lays out what the team/s plan to do, the timeframe they intend to do it in, and the ideas they’re going to test. It usually includes:
a rough budget of ad spend and testing investments
a rough calendar of when tests and creative will launch
specifics about what the creative strategy’s key goals are
A good creative strategy is a living document, in that it will probably change over time, but it provides everyone (on both internal and external teams) a blueprint to work from.
Creative History of Winners and Losers
This is a document of everything we’ve tested, why we tested it, and the results of each test. It’s updated weekly, and every new version is shared with our client, our creative team, and any other interested parties.
The purpose of this document is to minimize repeated tests and mistakes and to build on what’s worked, regardless of which team is doing the testing or creative development. It’s a way to share the results of our work product and how we developed that product.
Winner Variation Testing
We’ve mentioned how 80% of what we test are variations of winning ads, and how 20% are completely new concepts.
Here’s one other way to use that framework. Once we have a winning ad, we’ll test every element it’s made of. This allows us to figure out which elements or combinations of elements are making the ad work.
It takes quite a lot of tests and a fair amount of money to break up and test an ad like this, which is why we don’t do it for every ad – only 100x, breakout winning ads get analyzed like this. The information we learn from the analysis is vital to developing break-out ads going forward. It’s also fantastic for something called a “concept refresh.”
Concept Refresh
This is a new practice we’ve been getting excellent results with. Concept refreshes allow us to keep an ad alive for almost forever – if we know which elements to keep the same and which to vary. But after we’ve done the winner variation testing mentioned above, we know which elements matter most. And so we can keep the anchor elements that are driving results, and refresh everything else in the ad.
Asset Folders For Winning Ads
Whenever you get a winner, all the files – the videos, the Sketch files, the Illustrator files, the Photoshop files, the music files, all of it – get dumped into a folder. When you create variations, use the elements from the winning ads folder. Not the files from other variation tests.
This may seem like a small thing, but tiny differences can have big effects.
Don’t get sloppy with file naming conventions, either. Pick a naming convention and stick with it. That allows both internal and external teams to easily access the files they need quickly, without having to waste time looking for the right file.
Creative Testing Best Practices Conclusion
Creative development, testing, and strategy are still best done by human beings. The algorithms at Google and Facebook may be able to test creative elements, but they still can’t create those elements. They can’t do competitive analysis, either. And they can’t plan out a coherent creative strategy.
If you’re an acquisition manager, we recommend you focus on expanding your skills in those areas. You don’t necessarily have to become creative, but you do need to show creatives how to become data-driven, and you need to be able to distill and interpret data for them so they can deliver better creative.
But also keep your eye out for new opportunities. Machine learning is a powerful tool, but it flunks if you ask it to solve for problems it hasn’t encountered before, or if you ask it to interpret data in ways it hasn’t been programmed to do.
So if, say, a machine learning algorithm was asked to optimize an ad for augmented reality, or if it was asked to optimize voice-enabled ads, it wouldn’t perform well.
A human, however – a smart, agile user acquisition manager – might be able to take what they’ve learned and applied that knowledge to the new situation.
Humans have always been good at this. We’re great at adapting. And it’s a skill we’re going to need going forward.
In an effort to showcase our creative more frequently, we are producing highlight reels to show our best work. Our first half, 2019 July Highlight Reel showcases some of our favorite ads we have produced for clients. This includes clients across gaming, e-commerce, entertainment, financial services, and automotive verticals. Check it out!
Creative Drives Performance!
July Highlight Reel
Facebook and Google’s new algorithms have simplified media buying, making ad creative the primary driver of performance. Our in-house Creative Studio has managed over$3 billion in ad spend and produced over 300,000 videos for the world’s largest mobile games and apps. As a result, we deliver ad creative at scale for these channels in our 2019 July Highlight Reel:
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. In addition, 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 also supports Facebook and Google App Campaign.
In January 2019, we announced that we’re now offering Google App Campaign for managed services. We also 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. It also meets Google ad spend requirements and delivers company agency and client revenue growth. Thus, sustained and grown its client base”. Premier Partners are held to an even higher standard. They 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 are 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.