User Acquisition is dead, so what is next for UA managers and social advertisers?
Forget everything you thought you knew about Facebook & Google App Campaign ads. In this video, you will learn about the recent changes and what changes are coming in the near future. In addition, we will discuss the future of UA and the evolving role of UA Managers. Receive actionable insights on how to achieve and sustain high-performing, profitable Facebook & Google social ad spend.
Also, we will announce Google’s App Campaign product innovations coming out in June that are designed to give advertisers control. Find out why creative is king but 95% of new creative fails. Learn the best practices for competitive ad research and why Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) releasing in September will kill all 3rd party ad tech – once and for all!
“User Acquisition Is Dead – Facebook & Google Creative Are King! ” with Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition.
In the past year, Facebook and Google App Campaign optimization algorithms have drastically improved. This created a level playing field for social advertisers of all sizes. Advantages that were once held by third-party SaaS providers have diminished. As a result, media buying and bidding became much easier and faster with these improved native tools. This being said, Facebook and Google’s algorithm improvements may eventually kill third-party adtech.
We have been given some amazing new tools and capabilities in the last few years. But, it has also meant that we have to completely remake how we structure and execute campaigns. And the recent changes are just the beginning. As the ad platforms’ AI algorithms get smarter, like with Google and Facebook, we expect the role of user acquisition managers to evolve rapidly in the next few years.
User Acquisition is Dead. So while this statement might have jarred you, the old way of doing user acquisition really is dead or at least dying.
Finding a winning video ad can be difficult. Often, advertisers have to test many different variables. For every one of those variables and every version of them, the number of videos required to be produced multiplies. That’s why you need a bulk video editor.
Edit Thousands of Videos with Our Bulk Video Editor
In order to test just two versions of a CTA and two versions of an end card, four different videos must be created. You’ll need to make eight videos if you add two different images to that same test. If you wanted to test three images? That would warrant the creation of twelve videos.
And that’s just amateur testing. Our Quantitative Creative Testing method gives you a collection of variations like this to help you find your next 100x ad:
In this post, we’ll discuss how our Creative Studio bulk video editor can get help you edit thousands of videos with just a couple of clicks:
Create Video Variations with Bulk Video Editor
Without the right tool, the work required to make all of those video variations are enormous. To get it all done either your production schedule has to slow down considerably, or you may have to hire help to meet your deadline.
For advertisers who need to make a lot of videos with hundreds of variations, sizes, and concepts, you can bulk upload the videos you want to the Bulk Editor by uploading a CSV file that contains the videos’ required parameters. Our team has created CSV template that simplifies the process, allowing you to edit thousands (yes, thousands) of videos in a few simple steps.
Sizes
Once you’ve found your new 100x video, you need to convert it into a number of different sizes specific to each advertising platform. After that, you need to convert it into even more sizes to be used for different ad placements on each platform. You may also have to adjust the video’s proportions to fit square, portrait, or landscape measurements.
Customization
“Localizations,” or the customization of videos for specific countries and languages, can make a huge difference in performance. All of the videos you’ve created should be recreated to target the localizations specific to your audience.
Our Creative Studio self-service video bulk editor can create videos with the variations, sizes, and customizations you need in just a few steps. In just a few clicks, you can have dozens of versions of your original video.
Edit Existing Videos with Bulk Video Editor
The bulk editor feature also makes it easy to edit existing videos. This allows you to alter any of these elements quickly and effectively:
Intro and end cards
Banners
Footers
Headlines
Emojis
Stickers
CTAs
See how it’s done:
The Creative Studio video editor can also be paired with our new Performance Templates to help reach your advertising goals. These templates are basically blank concept ads that employ the top-performing elements that top-spending advertisers on Facebook and Google App Campaigns are seeing success with right now.
To use Performance Templates, simply add your creative assets into the template that best fits the goals of your ad. Then, you submit a brief to our team and we’ll create the video ads for you.
The options above allow you to have a body of high-potential ads right at the start. This allows your advertising to get up to speed quickly at a cost much less than typical creative development.
Final Thoughts about the Bulk Video Editor
The Creative Studio Bulk Video Editor, Performance Templates, and our designers and developers have helped thousands of advertisers build high-performance creative and scale their advertising. Our case study on Glu’s Mobile’s Design Home app is just one example of Creative Studio’s success – the team increased their ROAS by 70%.
Looking to test our Creative Studio and Bulk Video Editor yourself? Sign up here.
Having an internal marketing team is critical for businesses to reach and sustain the highest possible net profit. In order to maximize revenue, a focus should be placed on building this internal skill set. But, there is strategic value in benchmarking internal marketing teams against external teams. Benchmarking will help management validate the performance of the internal team, and increase team intensity by encouraging healthy competition.
This initiative will allow both the internal and the external team to render new ideas, eliminating tunnel vision and stale marketing. Further, internal teams that work in a silo for months often stop thinking outside the box and get stuck in a rut coming up with very similar ad creative concepts. By benchmarking the internal team against the external team, members from both sides will be encouraged to develop new concepts and media buying strategies and constantly be generating new ideas.
Below, we have outlined best practices for structuring the internal and external marketing teams to work effectively in tandem for success:
How Marketing Teams Can Work Together
Be Transparent
Total transparency and open communication are key to any successful venture. Internal marketing teams and external agencies that are working together should freely and openly share their ideas, strategies, and successful creative with each other. Open communication builds trust and ultimately allows the teams to generate more successes together.
Note: The internal marketing team should own all of these ideas and strategies.
In order to maintain transparency and cooperation, these two teams should be speaking on a weekly basis. This weekly meeting presents an opportunity to share information about work that has been recently completed and objectives for the coming week. More importantly, this meeting allows the external agency to talk to the internal team about upcoming objectives and marketing initiatives. This ensures that they both have the most up-to-date information and that they stay on track.
Use Project Management Tools
Email inboxes are messy, cluttered, and hard to keep up with. Team chat tools like Slack, Google Hangouts, Hive, and Fuze have become a popularized way to execute intraday communications across teams. These tools allow user acquisition and design teams to ensure that information is staying out of crowded email inboxes and stored efficiently within specialized communication channels.
For creative reviews and approvals, project management systems with simple UI, like Trello, are helpful. These platforms make it easy to share ad designs and provide teams with a streamlined place to gather and centralize feedback. And again, these deliverables stay out of email inboxes.
This way, both the internal and external teams are able to operate efficiently in regard to creative reviews and approvals. This is especially helpful to intellectual property holders as they often have a multitude of external sources that are contributing feedback.
Benefits of Supplemental External Marketing Teams
The job of an external agency is not to replace the internal marketing team. However, marketers are often apprehensive about partnering with an external team due to the fear of the agency outperforming them. This is certainly not the objective of an external agency and is rarely the outcome.
External teams are put in place to help ensure that internal teams are operating at peak efficiency. As a result, this offers a number of benefits to both the creative team and the media buying team.
Benefits for the Creative Team
External agencies are often leveraged on the creative side to assist in the brainstorming process and help deliver new concepts. When they find a high-performing deliverable, they share it with internal teams so that they can create variations. The creative testing strategies for finding high-performing ads are also recorded and shared between them.
This also benefits internal teams. It allows them to efficiently share the lessons of what has worked and what has failed. Consequently, this prevents them from making the same mistakes and wasting money. Both teams work closely in tandem to form a cohesive whole.
Benefits for the Media Buying Team
The two user acquisition teams are able to benchmark each other. When one account goes into a test bucket at Facebook causing something to stop performing as efficiently, it’s a good idea to have one or two more accounts running. It’s also more efficient to have one account that spends less because it does not reach as far, as it allows for more efficient running.
Giving media buying power to an external agency allows the internal team to separate their budget and run it efficiently in a split format. This is the concept of shifting budgets.
Final Thoughts About Marketing Teams
Both internal teams and external teams can work in tandem to learn, push, and drive better marketing results. To accelerate the growth of internal marketing skills and knowledge, consider partnering with an external agency. This will give your team the means to push further.
Learn more about our managed services, and how we help internal marketing teams innovate and optimize advertising strategies.
In September 2018, Facebook launched Stories Ads to global advertisers. This ad format offers marketers a new way to engage users and increase conversion rates on the web’s largest social networking platform. This presents marketers with a great opportunity to reach targeted users, as over 300 million people use Facebook Stories every day.
Facebook Stories allows users to share, discover, interact and engage with content on a vertical screen. Their ads are full-screen, vertical advertisements that appear between user stories on the Facebook platform. Video Stories ads can run anywhere from 1 to 15 seconds, while image ads in this format can appear for up to 6 seconds, and swipe up calls-to-action allow marketers to prompt users to visit their target landing page. These ads look similar to Instagram and Snapchat Stories, creating an immersive full-screen visual experience.
Facebook Stories employ full-screen visuals. So, if you opt to display an ad in this format, it means you can’t compromise on flat visuals. Due to the fact that users are able to swipe off a story, ad creative must be compelling and engaging and motivate the user to click on the call-to-action. Facebook suggests using minimal text at no more than 20% per piece of creative content.
2. Create Time-Sensitive Content
Users engage on Facebook to stay up-to-date with new trends and happenings. The stories are only visible for a maximum of 24 hours, and one of the main reasons that these stories are so compelling is due to the fact that they are so short-lived. Creating time-sensitive, urgent content makes it more likely that users will take action quickly. Use Facebook Stories Ads to announce important updates or offers that will be available for a limited time only, host competitions and sweepstakes, or reward engaged users with sales codes or discounts.
3. Make it Short and Sweet
Top-performing Stories ads tend to be shorter and contain branding elements earlier than lower-performing ads do. Facebook’s research revealed that, in video Stories ads that have multiple scenes, top-performing ads have shorter scenes and last for a duration shorter than 10 seconds.
4. Use a Straight-Forward Call-to-Action
Using a clear CTA in your ad simply and directly encourages a user to take action. The Facebook Stories advertising platform provides advertisers with a variety of different options for creating good CTAs. Remember to use the call-to-action option that relates most directly to your overall campaign goal. For example, mobile game or app advertisers should employ the “download now” option. This will help drive users to download your offering in the app stores.
5. Don’t Forget Mobile Optimization
Users consume content at a faster rate on mobile, so it’s important to deliver your brand message quickly (in the first few seconds of your ad) to boost engagement and CTR. Use vertical dimension ratios to ensure your ad is optimized for full-screen viewing.
Tip: Many mobile users opt for silent viewing, so don’t rely on sound to deliver your message – optimized visual creative is key.
Facebook Stories Ads provide businesses and marketers with yet another tool for gaining user attention. This placement offers a great opportunity for advertisers hoping to boost leads, conversions, traffic, or brand awareness. These types of ads also give marketers the ability to repurpose creatives for both Instagram and Facebook platforms. Thus, saving them time and money on creating extra content, and enabling A|B testing over both platforms.
At this time, Facebook Stories Ads drive lower competition and therefore present lower CPM rates. Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, expects Stories to be shared more often than news feed content in the future. In addition, platform Creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that one of Facebook’s goals is to ensure that these ads perform as well as they do in the news feed.
Our creative studio can help your team develop high-performing Facebook creative at scale.
Facebook launched Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) a year ago to give social marketers the option for machine learning to control their budget at the campaign level. When CBO is activated, Facebook can automatically move the budget to the most effective ad set in a campaign and distribute budgets in real-time to increase efficiency.
This allows marketers to run multiple ads within a single ad set. Once CBO is turned on, Facebook will optimize to find the best ads and ad sets based on performance across a campaign. Then, it will distribute the budget to automatically maximize financial results. Campaign Budget Optimization is a powerful optimization tool offered by Facebook to simplify account management and reduce daily tasks for social advertisers.
In this post, we’re discussing what marketers need to know about CBO:
Campaign Budget Optimization
Changes to Facebook Media Buying
It’s no secret that Facebook is evolving, and two key changes will have a significant impact on media buying:
Facebook is simplifying its optimization algorithm.
Facebook announced that CBO will become mandatory starting in September 2019.
This means that budgets will no longer be controlled at the ad set level, regardless of if you are using Facebook power editor or a 3rd party bidding tool that has its own rules or algorithm for budget distribution. Marketers will have to adjust how they manage and build Facebook campaigns. Starting in September, Facebook will be the one to decide how to distribute the campaign budget across ad sets. In short, marketers will no longer be able to make intraday changes, which will fundamentally change the way marketers buy media on Facebook.
With this move, Facebook is signaling a move to automated media buying and automated management of budget and ad set optimization, much like their biggest competitor – Google’s Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Sometimes, Facebook will “pre-announce” big changes and new features, like hiding device IDs from custom audiences, which allows time for the market to provide feedback and for Facebook to validate their approach and determine if it needs modification. Other times, such as with the “significant edits” roll-out in February of 2018, Facebook will just release the big change and the market is required to adapt to stay current with best practices.
Why Mandatory, and Why Now?
In making CBO mandatory, Facebook is reducing the complexity of media buying. This will further level the playing field between large and small advertisers. In addition, this appears to be a crucial step towards the simplification of their overall algorithm. Ultimately, moving towards offering a more Google UAC-like product.
With other optimization improvements, Facebook has made it easier than ever to buy media on their network. As they continue to roll out new features, they gain more control over the media buying process and will continue to automate processes; decreasing complexity and increasing efficiency for all advertisers.
Be Ready for the Change to Mandatory CBO
On the bright side, marketers will have time to experiment with this feature in preparation. Come September, all campaigns will automatically migrate to CBO, and this will impact how all existing and new campaigns run. So, it is vital to test CBO now to be prepared for this transition.
Of course, there’s always a way around rules. For a short while after the September rollout, you could “game” Facebook’s CBO requirement by restructuring accounts into thousands of campaigns with only one ad set—grabbing back granular control over budget allocation. There are, however, a few challenges with this approach:
You will be fighting Facebook’s best practices. As we’ve seen time and time again, their best practices do work overtime.
You will take a large number of significant edits across your entire account.
Facebook could potentially cap the number of campaigns that you are allowed to have in an account. Then, you have to rebuild again and take the significant edits.
Final Thoughts About Campaign Budget Optimization
Our key takeaway on this transition is to take advantage of the months between now and September. This will help you to gain a full understanding of how to use CBO efficiently across your accounts. Test and re-test structuring campaigns so you are not penalized with the mandatory migration in September.
There is still a huge potential advantage to CBO. If marketers embrace CBO, it will be easier to maintain accounts. This means they may be able to hire lower-cost staff to manage Facebook campaigns. This ultimately redirects capital back into top-of-funnel marketing.
Scaling Social Advertising: A Guide for Game Publishers…
Developing and publishing a game has many challenges, and the go-to-market launch plan is typically reserved for the last several months. We’ve noticed that most gaming companies produce creative assets for social advertising campaigns after the game has been designed and is ready to launch. Reusing game elements in social advertising is a crucial issue for game publishers, and it poses a threat to profitable advertising.
Many game publishers do not pre-plan social advertising asset allocation. This creates an enormous challenge when promoting their game in the highly competitive Facebook and Google social advertising markets. Not only will gaming companies need a large number of assets, characters, and environments for the initial launch – they’ll also need an increasing volume of assets to achieve and sustain profitable advertising spend.
We recommend developing a social advertising asset plan that is tied to the game development schedule to avoid any issues. Here’s how:
1. Develop Brand Identity Guidelines to Social Advertising
Whether you’re working with an external agency or in-house designers, it’s important to establish your brand guidelines before moving into creative asset production. This provides consistency, ensures quality, and reduces time spent in creative reviews and approvals for branding changes. Your brand guidelines are a manual signifying how your brand should be presented to target audiences. This can be across many elements, including fonts, characters, color palette, logo size and placement, iconography, and brand voice.
2. Establish a Social Advertising Creative Approval Process
When running a social advertising campaign on a platform like Facebook, social advertisers should have hundreds of ads in rotation at one time in order to surface winning ads that convert effectively. Additionally, creative ad fatigue can set in quickly, so it’s critical that you continue developing and testing a high volume of creatives throughout your acquisition campaign.
To keep the creative development engine running, you need to develop an efficient creative approval process. Consider the following questions when establishing your advertising and approval process:
What is the process for sending changes and feedback to designers?
Who are the individuals approving creative?
What is the SLA (service level agreement) on turning around feedback or approvals?
To what extent is brand compliance necessary?
Given the fact that 95% of new creative fails to outperform the best running ad, we recommend developing a company-wide policy that embraces prototype ads, which can be designed quickly and efficiently. The most effective and profitable companies blast out ads that are about 60% brand compliant to quickly test and remove the low performers. If a winning ad is found, new variations are enhanced to be more brand-compliant—and then are retested. This process helps to maximize creative testing, minimize rejections of out of the box concepts and minimizes the financial loss associated with non-converting spend.
3. Prepare Clean Structures & Naming Conventions
Another important process to develop before creative assets are in production is the organization of how files and layers will be shared across internal design teams and with external companies. If you’re working with in-house and external designers to develop a continuous stream of creatives, you will really want to establish the directory structure and naming conventions for asset sharing and layers, as it will save time across resources. You will want to think about how to organize your native files versus those being edited. As well as, how to manage assets in review versus approved files.
4. Design with Layered Files
In image editing, layers are used to separate different elements of an image. For example, separating characters and environment elements from the background. If you’re working with an external creative company, you can save a tremendous amount of time and provide creative flexibility with layered, well-organized, and named files.
This enables any designer to quickly identify which file and layers they should use to develop countless iterations of ads with different elements from a photoshop file. Provided your brand guidelines with these layered files to ensure that the countless iterations, colors, and fonts will adhere to guidelines.
5. Create a Variety of Characters & Sprites
Advertisers should integrate characters or personalities from game titles into creative. By testing 100K Facebook ads, we’ve found integrating characters can result in stronger ad performance. Showcase a wide variety of characters or sprites from your game. Provide ample images to choose from when creating ad units. This makes it much easier for the designer. Also, make sure to save out all character animations, background elements, and environments with transparent backgrounds into well-organized folders, so they can be reused easily.
6. Share Sound and Music Files
Creative including theme music from the game or sound effects typically draw a stronger response from users. So make sure to create a set of ad units that include licensed audio. For editors, provide full songs or clips from the audio track being used in the game. This allows them to easily access and select segments for ad units that reinforce gameplay and brand experience.
7. Leverage 3D Game Environments
By using a game engine (like Unity) or a modeling and animation software (like Maya), you can build and leverage detailed 3D environments from your game. This creative can then be used for your acquisition and social advertising campaigns. There is no better way to showcase your game to prospective players than with the same characters and immersive environments that you have designed in-game. Utilize these assets can help to create higher quality visuals as well as capture user attention.
Developing a Social Advertising Strategy
It’s crucial to think about your social advertising strategy. Especially, early in the game development cycle and ongoing as you’re making an update or adding a new level. Whenever there are assets in production for your game, you should be organizing them for future social advertising campaigns.
Your creative asset development plan should start with thinking about what you want to achieve. For example, you may be looking to build awareness for your upcoming game (perhaps to create pre-registrations or pre-orders). Or you may be looking to drive clicks, conversions, and sales (driving interested consumers directly to the store to buy). Depending on these goals, you will need to create different types of creatives to achieve them.
Identify all of the social platforms that you plan to use to advertise your game, as a next step. Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Instagram, and YouTube each have standard IAB. They also have custom ad units that you’ll need to plan for in advance. Consider platforms where video ads may perform better and plan on developing video creatives according to the platforms’ guidelines.
Think about what key takeaways or feelings you want audiences to experience by seeing your ads. It is important to think about how you want your advertising to impact your target audience. Regardless, of the goals of your ads (i.e. registrations or downloads). Do you want them to think your game is action-packed and intense? Or do you want them to think it’s a casual, easy-to-pick-up and play, kind of game?
Final Thoughts for Scaling Social Advertising
Construct a plan on when, where, and how your ads will appear to consumers. As a result, you will be prepared to develop your assets and launch campaigns more quickly. Your design teams will be more effective and time-efficient in creating the creative assets you need to win your audiences. Then, ultimately, grow your player base.
Learn more about our Creative Studio and how it can help you build and develop the ad creative you need to win over your audiences.
The AdBuilder tool helps Facebook advertisers create campaigns with a drag and drop system, while also empowering them to edit creatives and split tests quickly. Recently, Consumer Acquisition launched AdBuilder Express, a new addition that can be accessed from the Advanced Reporting dashboard.
AdBuilder Express allows users to make changes to existing campaigns and ad sets at scale. This means that you will no longer have to edit Facebook ads one by one. Instead, you will be able to choose unlimited amounts of creatives and ad sets to combine in a single session.
Follow along as we cover some of the main benefits you’ll gain by using AdBuilder Express, and how to navigate it.
AdBuilder Express Features and Benefits
The Build Cart Function
When you access AdBuilder Express from Advanced Reporting, you can add elements that you’d like to apply to a shopping cart-like feature called the build cart. This combines all of the elements, campaigns, and ad sets into a build, which applies all of the changes at once. These builds also double as templates you can use later.
The first step is to click the build cart icon and choose “Start New Build.” Using the filtering system, advertisers can locate specific ads with options such as:
Ad Options
Click-through rate
Impressions
Cost per mobile app purchase
Number of clicks received
Selecting the “Action” and “Build” buttons enables you to then add these to the build cart. Similarly, users can click the various columns like “Ad Set ID” or “Ad Set Name” to sort through ad sets.
Returning back to the “Action” dropdown, advertisers can select the creative they’d like to add to the cart, such as copy, video, calls to action, and dozens of others, including:
Ad Creative
Descriptions
Headlines
Media
The destination URL of the ad
Carousel options
AdBuilder Express isn’t just able to replace videos on ad sets, but rather any creative element and audience you can see from the dropdown menu on the Advanced Reporting dashboard.
Our system will also notify you if you’re missing any crucial components as you add to the cart. This prevents advertisers from producing incomplete builds.
The cart acts as a fast and convenient method to combine creatives and campaigns, without the need to perform these actions repeatedly. In the past with AdBuilder, you would have to manually visit Advanced Reporting, copy and paste headlines or copy, and repeat this process for every ad set.
We’ve removed this process with AdBuilder Express, effectively speeding up how fast you make mass changes to campaigns. Check out our other AdBuilder Express introduction to view summarized step-by-step instructions on using the software.
Thorough Review Process
After you’ve added the specified ad sets and creatives to the build cart, you will be taken to the creative review stage. Here you will be able to edit any element of the creative, from the text, link, headline, to the call to action or video.
You can browse which Facebook page should be connected to the ad by selecting the “Browse” dropdown menu. Additional pages can be added via the connections settings in Advanced Reporting.
A window on the right shows a live preview of any changes you make to see it in real-time. Under the preview, advertisers can choose between Facebook, Instagram, and carousel options to view how the ad will appear in different formats.
Furthermore, additional creatives of the same format can be made by clicking the red text beside the plus button. These will be added to an entirely new ad within your campaign.
On the final review page, advertisers can review the name, tag, ad sets, and other aspects of the build. Under “Launch Options,” users will be able to choose whether or not the ad will be active upon publishing, select all ads or copies of ads, and save a report.
This can then be published to take effect on the chosen campaigns by clicking the “Publish” button on the top right of the dashboard.
Track and Reuse Your Builds
The builds you make in AdBuilder Express can be saved and named to be used later. Saving them also enables advertisers to track how their builds are performing. Optimizations can then be made to further improve performance. And, good builds can be applied to other creatives or ad sets.
Previous builds can be used by choosing “Load Existing Build” after clicking the build cart icon. This will display all of the preceding builds that were saved to be chosen from.
Quickly Launch and Find Winning Combinations
With AdBuilder Express, you will have the power to identify which audiences, creatives, and ads perform the best together. Furthermore, advertisers can quickly launch campaigns with new audiences and fresh videos to make winning ads.
Being able to edit hundreds to thousands of video ads at once also opens the opportunity for improved testing. Apply a new video to existing ads and track every metric through Advanced Reporting to observe the changes. Similarly, users can test different audiences for the same video to analyze how they respond.
Final Thoughts About Adbuilder Express
AdBuilder Express is made to assist advertisers in editing creatives within hundreds or thousands of campaigns and ad sets. You can access it through our Advanced Reporting product.
Advertisers must first ensure that they’ve created campaigns, ad sets, and uploaded creatives through the standard AdBuilder platform to begin. They will also need to complete the pricing, budget, audience, and placement steps.
The AdBuilder Express process begins by choosing ad sets and creative elements you created prior to combining via the build cart. These are merged together to save you time from performing these changes manually, along with being able to quickly edit and test videos for different ads.
First, edit the chosen creatives during the publishing process. Then, complete them to apply the changes to as many Facebook ads as needed. Builds are also tracked to measure performance, so you’re always aware of how certain creatives and ads work together.
Get AdBuilder Express today by visiting ourAdvanced Reporting page.
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For too long, smaller developers have been left out in the cold—a huge loss for the industry and for consumers. The next visionary app should have a fair chance to succeed. Its odds determined not by budget size but by the caliber and capabilities of its marketing partner. If you are an “appreneur”, mobile app marketing might be your greatest challenge. The cost of running a high-powered social ad campaign has given established developers an advantage. Most social ad agencies aren’t built, much less inclined, to serve the little guy with limited media spend.
There are only a few good options in the market. So, small and even midsize developers have to settle for bare-bones service, generic design templates, and figuring it out on their own.
The good news is, you won’t have to settle any longer. Let’s take a look at four ways social advertisers can conquer mobile app marketing on a budget:
How to Conquer Mobile App Marketing on a Budget
1. Use Optimization Algorithms to Their Advantage
Facebook and Google UAC have improved their optimization algorithms so much in recent months that advertisers of all sizes can access sophisticated optimization algorithms without becoming social advertising experts. Both new and established companies can automate the most repetitive aspects of campaign management and achieve comparable financial results.
This means social advertisers are now free to focus on what really counts: creative development, creative testing, and audience selection.
But in each of these areas, there’s still a big service gap for startups and SMBs. It’s difficult to find agencies offering experienced, affordable, robust creative, and rigorous testing in-house—the exact capabilities you need to ensure efficient advertising spend.
To help close the service gap and allow startups and SMBs to compete more effectively, we recently began offering three tiers of managed user acquisition and creative services for Facebook, Instagram, and Google UAC. All mobile app developers and lead generators, regardless of budget size, now have the means to get profitable and scale their user acquisition on Facebook and Google App Campaign.
For social advertisers, this results in a more level playing field:
“Apart from the fact that you are a small fish in a really huge pond, startups have a great challenge when it comes to pushing their app in the market. Competition is very high and tough, considering that there are other app developers with a bigger budget and market experience.
For your app to get downloads, your efforts need to be something like 10% on development and the majority 90% on marketing.”
With tiered managed services, startups and SMBs can take advantage of the same concierge-style offerings as larger developers: creative development and optimization, ad placement, and ongoing campaign management. Creative and user acquisition experts can enhance everything social advertisers need, from start to finish.
By elevating the quality and making execution easy, these services are designed to fuel growth and help a smaller advertiser learn how to effectively advertise on Facebook and Google UAC. If an advertiser hits a home run, that advertiser already has the built-in resources and support it needs to rapidly scale.
The automation features we recently added to AdRules, a self-service platform that works in conjunction with Facebook and Google algorithms, simplifies workflows and reporting. In addition, social advertisers can use advanced reporting to test and tweak their creative, launch and test hundreds of ads in short order and build thousands of custom and lookalike audiences in minutes.
3. Focus on Creative Development
Creative is your most effective lever to improve performance. Especially now that Facebook and Google have effectively taken over intraday bidding and budgeting. We also simplified media buying with improved machine learning algorithms. As a result, advertisers need superior creative to achieve breakthroughs, and experienced Facebook and Google partners can provide it.
The problem for startups and SMBs, until now, has been the expense of creating a sufficient number of high-quality ads to produce runaway successes (i.e., the 5% of ads capable of beating previous high performers) and manage creative fatigue.
A 5% success rate means 19 out of 20 ads will fail along the way. That’s a lot of creative. Without human talent driving the process, social advertisers stand to lose a lot of money in their efforts to strike gold.
4. Develop Human-Intensive Creative
Developers of all sizes need human-intensive creative at scale. This ensures efficient ad spend and maximizes the odds of market success. In our experience producing more than 300,000 videos and managing over $1 billion in social advertising, we’ve found a way to feed the beast with fresh creative concepts. All while benchmarking and partnering with in-house creative service teams.
It’s all in the way we’re built. Our Creative Studio is a team of veteran Hollywood CGI/Visual Effects directors, artists, and storytellers. This gives us the bandwidth and talent we need to service companies at every level. All the way up to high-budget firms spending seven figures per month.
As Facebook and Google continue to evolve, and our industry evolves, we’re excited about the creative possibilities. At-scale creative services that only major players used to find affordable—from ideation to production and optimization—are now available to companies of all sizes looking to break through and disrupt the marketplace. It’s a heartening development that’s long past due.
It’s Time for Startups and SMBs to Get in the Game
In many industries, disruptive startups can gain a foothold with relative ease. Not so in the app ecosystem. Because high-end mobile app marketing services are all but closed off to appreneurs with startup-sized budgets.
We’re determined to change that. We want you competing on a whole new level. With managed services you can afford, the next breakout success could be yours.
We aren’t here to replace internal marketing teams—we’re here to support them.
Instead, we are here to augment your work. We work with companies in building or running internal marketing teams. Our goal is to help teams run at peak efficiency. Consumer Acquisition’s core value is to benchmark these internal teams by:
Validating performance
Increasing intensity
Expanding creative testing abilities
Gathering new ideas
Sharing best practices
Why Internal Marketing Teams are Important
We believe internal marketing teams should be a core competency for all companies. This team is crucial to maintaining the highest possible net profit. This being said, we have also seen the tremendous strategic value in benchmarking internal teams:
Management can verify that they have a great team; they don’t have to lose focus wondering if they could do better.
Competition increases within internal teams, but in a way that builds better performance and encourages the sharing of best practices.
The internal team (and the external team) can develop new ideas quickly and build on each other’s work. Both for media buying as well as a creative strategy. This reduces tunnel vision, keeps ad creative fresh, and also keeps the ad performance up.
Who Consumer Acquisition Serves
We have managed over $3 billion of social advertising on Facebook and Google App Campaign for the world’s largest mobile games and apps, helping them maximize profitability from mobile app installs and lead generation.
As direct response marketers, our clients are typically interested in metrics. Such as return on ad spend, average revenue per user/unit, net profit, cost per subscriber, and similar KPIs.
You can get support with both video and image ad strategy and production via our Creative Studio. Also, we can create high volumes of creative for Facebook, Instagram, Google App Campaign, Snapchat, Pinterest, and IAB ad formats. Even if you need 100 new video ads a month, we can help.
On average, there’s a 95% failure rate for new creative. This means only 1 out of 20 videos will become a winner. This results in a lot of non-performing spend on media testing. So, focusing on a data-driven, quantitative creative testing process is most effective and productive. Data enables us to understand what’s working and what’s not, and use that data to guide our creative process. This will ultimately save you media dollars and time.
Pricing Options
There are two options to our pricing models: month-to-month or a three-month agreement. In both cases, there is no fee for the tool, just a per-unit cost for the creative.
The flat-rate minimum per month is $5,000 (you get four videos per month), as well as discounts for three-month agreements or high-volume video creation. We also offer a $99 Video Ad promotion for your first video, so that you can test us out before jumping in.
All of these videos and image concepts that we design are made for you. This means that you have the right to use this ad creative however you want, whenever you want. Additionally, we can provide resizing services for ad creative.
Managed Services for Social Advertisers of All Sizes
Our managed services bundle together media buying, creative development and testing, reporting, and ultimately, campaign execution. These services are meant for companies that are looking to scale their direct response advertising on Facebook and Google UAC.
Self-Service SaaS Tool for Media Buying
Our self-service ad buying and creative automation tool for Google UAC, Facebook and Instagram focus on three things:
Workflow automation
Ad building and reporting
Creative analytics
The fee for this service is 0.7% of spend, with a maximum of $15,000 per month. If you spend less than $50,000 per month on Facebook or Google UAC across accounts, it’s free.
Fully-Managed Services: Social advertiser spending is less than $100,000 per month with many creative demands. The fees for this are 15% of spend or $15,000/month, whichever amount is greater. In addition, the term is 90 days for unlimited video and image production. We also offer discounts if spend exceeds $100,000 a month.
Managed SMB: Designed for social advertisers who spend less than $50,000 per month, this helps those seeking guidance with user acquisition and creative production. Our fees are 15% of spend or $15,000/month, whichever is greater, but we also offer discounts if spend exceeds $100,000 per month. The term is 90 days and we bundle unlimited video and image production which is necessary to achieve and sustain scale. Any additional creative is available for an incremental fee.
Managed Startup: This tier is designed for true startups who need to get their ads working on Facebook and are spending up to $25,000 per month. If you are looking for a quick 30-day test to experiment with Facebook ads, this is the plan for you. We use your creative and then cut our usual rates for creative by 50% for the first ten videos.
How We Work
Based on how involved the creative team would like to be in the process, we create a customized strategy for each client. A typical engagement would include the following:
Creative Strategy Development
We begin by auditing your existing primary account(s). Based on your creative history, we put together a strategy. This takes into account the number of videos requested and the available budget for testing.
Transparency in All Communication
We believe in 100% transparency in all communications. This means that we share all our ideas, all our strategies and the ideas that shape them, all our tests, and all performance reports with the client to create the best possible plan of action.
Your “Creative History” and “Media Buying History” Documents
We document all creative testing and then share the results with clients so they have a roadmap of everything that’s worked or not worked. We create documents like this for all creative development and testing, as well as for all our media buys and audience targeting. Clients own this document and are free to keep it with them.
Daily and Weekly Communications
We also make sure to conduct calls on a weekly or biweekly basis. This is where we share what we’ve done in the past week. We also discuss strategy and tactics for the coming week. These calls help clients to stay on track. But they also help us gain insights into clients’ priorities. In addition to any strategy changes or other shifts that may affect the performance of their ads. For intraday communications, we use Slack channels so clients can reach us instantly.
Creative Reviews and Approvals at Consumer Acquisition
Our Creative Studio includes a Trello-like interface, where the client can review creative throughout the course of its development. This makes it simple to see what’s being done and allows for easy reviews of creative.
At Consumer Acquisition, we know how critical it is to make creative reviews as simple as possible. We work with several companies that have intellectual property holders, like television shows, feature films, celebrities, or athletes. So, there are often many outside sources who need to access creative and give feedback and approval. Our system is designed to gather comments and feedback. This way, reviews are centralized and approvals are as efficient as possible.
Of course, having all this in one interface also keeps it out of email. Every evolution of creative and piece of feedback is easy to see, track, and archive as development moves forward.
Fully-Managed “Bake-Offs”
It’s really easy to get stuck in a rut with direct response creative. One of the things we do to minimize this is with agency “bake-offs”. These are head-to-head competitions where we benchmark your internal team’s performance or complement their work with new ideas. The idea is to help improve performance for both media buying and creative concepts and variations.
We have conducted 59 competitions like this—and haven’t lost one yet.
So why a bake-off?
Creative Sharing: Consumer Acquisition documents and shares the best creative and UA practices. We share everything we learn with you.
Fresh Concepts & Strategies: Generate fresh creative concepts and new media buying strategies. If your ad creative begins to go a bit stale, but you have to preserve ad performance, a bake-off is a way to gather these fresh creative concepts and new variations.
Variation Creation: New variations can be created based on winning concepts and high-performing competitors reduce non-converting spend.
Here’s how we conduct our bake-offs:
The length of each bake-off is 30 calendar days.
Each partner (us and your internal team) gets $50,000 to $100,000 of budget.
Each team needs to spend two-thirds of its budget on iOS and one third on Android or they automatically lose.
Mobile app engagement ads are not allowed during a bake-off.
Each team begins with a fresh account at exactly the same time—presenting no account history bias.
Audiences are split 50/50 between teams—which Facebook can set up.
Each team starts with the same seed creative as well as the same audiences.
Once the first day has passed, teams do not share creative, audiences or account access.
Metrics are shared every Tuesday and Friday.
Performance is measured by net profit—with our fees included in that calculation.
The winner is ultimately determined by the account with the highest net profit.
The Creative Benefits of Working with Consumer Acquisition
As mentioned above, all of our best creative practices are always shared and documented. Many companies utilize us for the development of new creative concepts. In order to eliminate the team’s tunnel vision, we help to generate endless fresh creative concepts.
Once we have a winner, that creative is sent directly to clients. Then they can use it as soon as possible. This being said, when social advertisers get a winner, they also reciprocate and send it over to us as well. This helps to harbor a collaborative environment—where both teams can build off each other’s’ work. This leads to better results than ad creative developed independently. As a result, you can reduce non-converting spend even further. Just have your internal teams easily create new variations.
With internal and external teams working together to test new creative, it’s possible to rapidly iterate new ad creative. The foundation of this work is Creative History we put together for every client. That way, clients can bring on new employees or new partners without having them “reinvent the wheel”. Instead, they can build from what we’ve already done.
Media Buying Benefits at Consumer Acquisition
Our media buying at Consumer Acquisition works like our creative services in many ways:
Benchmark the performance of your internal team.
Document and share any user acquisition best practices.
Generate a media buying document that contains all wins and failures from media testing. This allows you to bring on new employees and partners. Thus, share learnings so that mistakes are not repeated.
Consumer Acquisition works as an external team, which means your advertising is now done through two accounts. This does have advantages. If a certain campaign gets wonky or moved into the learning phase, then the other account can take on more traffic.
For our best relationships, we do a weekly review of both teams—both internal and external. If we outperformed the internal team in terms of net profits, we’ll be given a bit more budget. However, if they’ve outperformed us, we will give some budget back. This keeps some mild pressure on for competitiveness and performance. But, it also helps to smooth out any hiccups in either account.
Initially, to streamline the process for advertisers, Google created Google App Campaigns; allowing these advertisers to promote their apps across different platforms while using one system. When creating ads in Google App Campaign, it is inherent that the advertiser uploads their creative assets—because Google’s system utilizes the creative assets from the Google Play Store to design ads that are formatted for different specifications.
It’s important to provide a variety of text, image, and video assets—all of which align with the goals of the campaign. Google App Campaign can develop relevant ads for every moment, in every possible format, and for almost every channel. Their systems try out different combinations and show which ads will perform the best over time. This allows advertisers to extend their reach across many different channels such as the Play Store, through other apps, in Google search, or on YouTube.
Wondering how to make the most out of Google App Campaign capabilities and features to optimize campaigns? Here are some tips and tricks:
Google App Campaign Best Practices
1. Increase Bid to Budget Ratios
Target CPA (tCPA) is a smart bidding strategy. It sets bids that allow you to maintain your set cost-per-acquisition while getting as many conversions as possible. Because of the advanced machine learning behind this, your bids can be automatically optimized, and auction-time bidding is also offered, which allows you to tailor your bids.
Setting Up Bid to Budget Ratios
In terms of tCPA bidding campaigns, 10X is the minimum that you will want to set so that you can ramp up your campaigns quickly. This being said, for these bid-to-budget ratios, using 20X will often show stronger performance.
When it’s not possible to increase the daily budget, you can cluster your budgets together into one single campaign. To get the best out of this campaign, you’ll want to make sure your tCPA campaign bids start around 20-30% higher than your ultimate goal.
On the other hand, when running CPI (cost-per-install) campaigns, budget caps should be 50X the target to your CPI, with bids starting around $4-$5. This should be the case even when CPI goals are lower.
General Best Practices for Bid-to-Budget Ratios
Make sure your daily budget caps at least 50X target CPI or 10X target CPA.
Don’t change target CPI/CPA bids > 20% in 24 hours until the campaign is generating 20-30 targeted in-app events per day.
Target CPI campaigns’ bid starts at least $4-5, even if CPI goal is lower.
Target CPA campaigns’ bid starts at least 20-30% higher than the goal.
Additional Consideration: Geo Expansions
If you’re running your campaigns in a limited set of geos and are looking to expand (but are constrained by budget), focus your efforts on a limited set of geos instead. Although it may seem like you’re missing an opportunity by not expanding, you need to prove success in Tier 1 markets before uncapping your budgets. When you increase your bid-to-budget ratio over time—and get closer to 20X, this is where you can begin to consider expanding to different geos.
2. Market Clustering and Bidding Strategy
Market Clustering for Small Budgets: Markets, tiers, languages, and other factors should all be aspects of your campaign structuring strategy. This being said, it will be helpful to combine ad campaigns if they are in one language and have low bids. This will give you a higher bid-to-budget ratio, as well as more events firing every day. This also allows you to control the delivery a little better—it is best to consolidate until there are larger budgets where you can separate campaigns by market.
Make Small Bid Changes: Another important thing to note is that when you have a smaller budget, you will want to also make small CPA/CPI bid changes. It is recommended to change by less than 20% per day until you are consistently getting about 40-50 targeted in-app events every day.
Set Bids Early in the Day: It is best to set bids during the beginning of the day—it allows you to be competitive. With that being said, you can then begin tapering the bid down once you begin generating enough event volume each day.
3. Creative Best Practices: Adding Images to Every Campaign
Having great ad creative is imperative. In order 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. Also, video assets tend to perform well, though they are more expensive. The best thing to do is to create a balance between still ad images and videos, as it will help to balance out your ad spend.
Google’s algorithms can optimize the best placements for your ads across multiple channels, such as search, display, YouTube and Google Play. You can feed your campaigns by maximizing your asset coverage. For instance, provide all sizes for videos:
Landscape
Portrait
Square Video
Similarly, provide all size options for still images:
Landscape
Portrait
300×50
320×50
HTML5 assets
Once your ad creative assets have been running for around 10-14 days, it is easy to identify the highest performing assets. You can then have your team start building new iterations of high-performing assets and ultimately delete the low-performing ones.
4. Maximize Google App Campaign Performance
According to Google, there are three ways to really improve app campaign performance. When advertisers follow these golden rules, it’s possible to achieve creative excellence and maximize app campaign results. The three rules are to continually run multiple formats of each creative for the greatest reach: Landscape Image, Landscape Video, and Portrait Video.
Pro Tip: Focus on the top image dimensions to ensure Goolge App Campaign is serving across all networks. Dimensions are as follows:
320×480 (Portrait Interstitial)
320×50 (Banner)
480×320 (Landscape Interstitial)
1200×628 (Landscape Image)
300×250 (Square)
728×90 (Leaderboard)
1024×768 (Tablet)
300×50 (Banner)
768×1024 (Tablet)
320×100 (Banner)
Google App Campaign Conclusion
Google has made significant algorithm improvements that help advertisers identify and target audiences with Google App Campaigns. Because of this, your focus should shift to bidding strategy, market strategy, and creative testing.
Constantly testing creative is crucial to achieve and sustain the return on advertising spend (ROAS). The fact of the matter is, creative rapidly fatigues with increased spend and audience reach. In addition, 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. This year, advertisers need to rapidly develop new creatives and leverage best practices to drive positive outcomes with Google App Campaigns.
