Brian Bowman, Author at Consumer Acquisition by Brainlabs

How to Launch a Mobile App Campaign with Facebook Ads & Google App Campaigns

Posted on March 5, 2019April 8, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Launching a new free-to-play mobile app campaign can be difficult if you’re starting completely from scratch. That’s because most resources about how to do user acquisition on mobile app campaign with Facebook and Google App Campaigns assume two things:

That you already have an account history that you can leverage
That you have a customer list that you can use to create lookalike audiences

So, what should you do if don’t have this in place? What if your user lists and advertising accounts are brand new? This article will go into detail about where you would begin this process, and how it can help your new mobile app campaign become successful.

How to Launch a Mobile App Campaign

Do a Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses are quite simple on Facebook. If you head over to the Facebook page of any of your competitors, you can click “Info and Ads” at the bottom of the left column. This will lead you to a list of all the ads they’ve run.

When looking at these ads, it is important to take note of any trends:

Color Schemes: Bold colors? Muted colors? The same colors?
Text Placement: We’ve found that text in the top third of the image or video works best.
Images of People: Kids? Women? Men? Do they have a character or a celebrity in their ads?
Video Ads: Are they using this kind of ad and if they are, what type of video ads? Brand in motion? Benefit in motion? What is the length of the ads?
Call-to-Actions: Which CTAs do they use most often?

If you answer these questions across a grouping of selected advertisers, you’ll likely begin to see a few similarities, which should be documented and monitored over time. This shouldn’t be the final word on how your ads will look, but it will give you an idea of what’s working for your competitors and what could potentially work for your ads.

There are also a number of tools that can provide you with a robust database of current and past ads running on Facebook, Google and display networks:

These tools can help you identify high-performing ads; reducing the risk of your ads’ failure rate and minimizing non-converting spend that might be created by testing unproven concepts.

Utilize Facebook Best Practices

Before 2018, we were running hundreds of campaigns with super-tight audience targeting. Now, because of the changes to customer acquisition on Facebook and Google, advertisers spending less than $1 million per month tend to run fewer campaigns (50 or so) with broad audience targeting, which gives the algorithms free rein to find the best potential consumers.

We also used to make dozens of changes to bids, budgets, and pause rules daily. But after February 2018, when Facebook switched over to its new “Best Practices” rules, that had to change. All of a sudden, campaigns performed better if we took a step back from intensive ad set management; allowing the algorithm to do its magic.

Choose the Right Campaign Goals

Now, Facebook and Google App Campaigns allow algorithms to manage more aspects of advertisers’ campaigns. This being said, for the algorithms to properly do their job, you still need to give them the right targets: The right campaign goals.

For free-to-play apps, you’ll want to start with Mobile App Install (MAI) ads, transition to App Events, and ultimately make the switch to Value bidding.

Mobile App Install Ads

As an advertiser of a new free-to-play app, or any new product for that matter, we recommended using Mobile App Installs as your campaigns’ first goal because the ad format allows individuals to install a new app in just a few clicks. This can get you quality installs; helping you to build a user base as well as accrue data on your most valuable users.

App Events Ads

Once you have tested Mobile App Installs for a week or two and have gained at least 5,000-10,000 installs, you can begin the transition to a new campaign optimization goal: App Events (AEO). This will help to target in-app purchases.

Value Bidding Ads

After your campaign has accrued enough AEO optimization data (usually between 750 to 1,000 purchases) you’ll finally be able to do value bidding (VO). Value bidding lets you target the “whales” of your user base—the people who spend, for example, $19.99, instead of the people who just spend $0.99.

If you pair this value bidding with how Facebook lets you define custom audiences with lifetime value data, you can really dial into exactly who your highest value users are—and then let the algorithm go find them.

Algorithms, Campaign Goals & ROI

It will take some time for the algorithm to figure out where your ideal users are. This being said, it’s possible to receive a 10% ROI in seven days from a mobile app campaign—but you have to be patient for those seven days. If you change too much about the campaign by pausing it or changing the budget by 30% or more, you’ll trigger a “substantial edit”, which will shift your campaign back into learning mode. This usually increases CPMs by as much as 30%.

As you progress through these different goals, you should anticipate paying more. Value Bidding conversions typically cost two to three times more than App Events, and App Events tend to cost two to three times as much as App Installs. It’s important to not focus on the additional costs, and instead focus on the return you are getting. Here’s why:

Say your value of average download is about 75 cents—which includes your entire paid user base; even the users who never make in-app purchases.

If your average value of in-app purchases is $3.00, you can easily afford to spend two or three times more for an App Event; targeting that average purchase price. 75 cents times two is $1.50; 75 cents times three is $2.25—these are still very much below the $3.00 value of an average in-app purchase. You are essentially paying $1.50 to $2.25 for a $3.00 value.

That’s why Value Bidding is so powerful, and why you shouldn’t worry about paying more for higher-quality, higher-value conversions.

Minimize Audience Saturation & Creative Fatigue

By the time you’ve gotten to Value Bidding, your campaigns will have been running for a few weeks, and you’ll probably be profitable. So, you’ll want to scale your spending. The problem is, this is typically where the complications of creative fatigue and audience saturation begin. As you start increasing your budget, you’ll start burning through audiences faster. As more people see your ads more frequently, they will start ignoring your older ads. These ads will start to fade and become an ambient element in comparison to all the others on the page.

High-budget campaigns regularly wear out creative within four to five days. This, unfortunately, is a consequence of spending more. Sadly, this is a bit of a problem for social advertisers, because creative is expensive—and successful creative (the type of creative you need to beat competitors and keep your KPIs looking good) is even more expensive.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of ads we have created and tested, only 5% of new creative passes the success of the old control. This is why it is crucial to create and test twenty or more pieces of ad creative—to find the one ad that outperforms the others.

Winning Facebook creative is so valuable. Now that algorithms manage many aspects of campaigns, creative is the best differentiator that social advertisers have. This is why it is so important to maximize the lifespan of creative assets.

The Importance of Creating Large Enough Seed Audiences

The key to maximizing the lifespan of ad creative is to extract every possible new user out of every possible audience. To do this, you need to generate at least 3,000 new users, although 7,500 is more preferable. 7,500 new users are enough to create quality lookalike audiences; any less than that, and the customer acquisition strategy will not be as impactful.

Having a good-sized seed audience, as well as knowledge of how to split and divide your audiences carefully and systematically enough really helps to extend the life of a piece of ad creative. This exercise is so profitable that we have built a tool to do it—called Audience Builder. It makes creating dozens (or even hundreds) of targeted audiences super simple.

Final Thoughts About Your Mobile App Campaign

Launching a new free-to-play mobile app takes a bit of patience and a significant amount of money. This being said, Facebook ads shouldn’t be leaking money.

If you utilize data from a competitive analysis to launch with strong creative and shift through different campaign goals—from mobile app installs to app events and then to value bidding—you can minimize how quickly you are burning through your budget. Once your campaigns are running, you can get more value from your creative by creating lookalike audiences. This still allows the algorithms to find new users, but it will segment different populations in a way that leaves no cracks unsealed.

Maximizing these audiences is crucial to profitability because it can take 20 or more new pieces of creative to find the one ad that will outperform your control. This amount of ad creative tends to be very expensive; so when you find that high-performing ad, it’s essential to squeeze every possible conversion out of it.

By utilizing all these methodologies, it’s absolutely possible to be profitable with a brand-new mobile app.

Learn more about how to build successful ad creative campaigns.

Facebook & Google App Campaign AdTech Changes: What Does This Mean for Advertising in 2020?

Posted on February 26, 2019April 8, 2021 by Brian Bowman

In the past year, Facebook and Google App Campaign optimization algorithms have drastically improved, creating a level playing field for social advertisers of all sizes. Advantages that were once held by third-party SaaS providers have diminished, with media buying and bidding becoming much easier and faster with these improved native tools. This being said, Facebook and Google’s algorithm improvements may eventually kill third-party adtech. How can advertisers take advantage of these adtech changes moving forward in 2019?

Facebook & Google App Campaign Adtech Changes

Ready for an algorithm to do your job? Ready or not, it’s already begun.

At the end of 2017, Google moved the all-new app install campaigns to Google App Campaigns. About a month after that, they turned off any Search, Display, and YouTube app promo campaigns that were running. All mobile app install campaigns on Google must now be run through Google App Campaigns, which allows Google’s algorithm to manage most of the functions in your campaigns.

Here’s how Google describes the new AC:

“As an app advertiser, you want to get your app into the hands of more paying users. So, how do you connect with those people? Google App campaigns streamline the process for you, making it easy to promote your apps across Google’s largest properties including Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. Just add a few lines of text, a bid, some assets, and the rest is optimized to help your users find you.”

Facebook followed suit quickly after. At the beginning of 2018, they rolled out an update, which included new best practices. While Facebook’s changes weren’t as forced as Google’s, they still influenced results.

Then, on February 19, 2018, Facebook’s algorithm significantly changed how mobile app installs and lead generation campaigns are managed. Advertisers handed over quite a bit of social advertising control to these algorithms. This gives us, advertisers, the freedom to focus on things like ad creative and audience expansion.

The Advantages of Algorithm Control

Luckily, giving algorithms this much control has a couple of upsides.

1. Since many responsibilities of the user acquisition manager have moved over to algorithms, this creates an opportunity for less-experienced advertisers to get results comparable to their more advanced peers. This means more advertisers, with a wide range of experience, can still profitably use the platforms.

2. Advertising platform algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated, so many third-party advertising tools are no longer needed, hence the adtech changes. In the past, adtech tools were a significant competitive advantage. Now, both Facebook and Google App Campaigns offer almost comparable tools for free.

How to Manage Campaigns with Facebook & Google App Campaign Best Practices

Before February 2018, Facebook advertisers could run a lot of ads. These ads could have audiences that overlapped, and there were no penalties for making frequent bid changes; even if there were multiple bid changes every couple of hours. Advertisers could pause ads, and budgets could be modified all the time. Facebook allowed adtech providers (similar to our AdRules tool) to edit bids, budgets, and pause rules with the utmost precision and speed. Optimizations were done through many actions—most of which were controlled by the advertiser or by a third-party adtech tool.

Adtech Changes

The above-mentioned changed dramatically on February 19th. The adtech changes began to penalize advertisers, and soon enough, it was understood that Facebook would reward social advertisers for running and optimizing their campaigns according to the best practices—which were outlined in Facebook’s “Blueprint Certification.”

Fewer Campaigns with Minimal Audience Overlap

It is better to rely more heavily on the Facebook algorithm, which will help sift through audiences and settings to help you acquire the right customers. Broad targeting with no overlapping audiences, combined with Facebook’s Value Optimization (VO) and App Event Optimization (AEO) works very well to create a successful campaign.

Managing for the Concept of “Significant Edits”

If an advertiser does any of the following things, it can result in the campaign being moved from an optimized mode back into what’s called the “learning” phase:

Pause one of their campaigns
Change a campaign’s budget by more than 40%
Alter an ad’s bid by more than 30%

All ads start out in “learning” mode, then graduate to an optimized phase. Completing said learning phase usually requires 50 conversions per ad set per week. Once that is completed, the campaign will shift into optimization mode, where the CPMs usually drop by about 30%. Clearly, that’s far more efficient, so there are real motivations to avoid substantial edits and keep campaigns in optimized mode.

Google Campaigns: “Set It & Forget It”

Google’s version of this phased mode is even more striking than Facebook’s. Google App Campaigns are almost to the point of “set it and forget it”. It takes some money and patience for Google’s algorithm to get good results, but it can happen within a couple of days.

Shifting Away from MAI

When this algorithm change occurred, there was also a shift from Mobile App Installs (MAI) to Value Optimization (VO) and App Event Optimization (AEO). In the past, we had used campaign goals such as Mobile App Installs (MAI). Afterward—and even still today—we utilize Value Optimization (VO) and App Event Optimization (AEO) as campaign goals.

Here’s the reason why VO is more effective, according to Facebook:

“When marketers advertise with Facebook, they want to build campaigns that ultimately drive efficient return on their ad spend. Yet managing and optimizing their campaigns previously required using proxy metrics such as clicks, impressions, and installs to gauge whether or not a campaign had driven meaningful business impact. Today we’re introducing value optimization so that marketers can focus their campaigns on anticipated purchase value.

Value optimization works by using the purchase values sent from the Facebook pixel to estimate how much a person may spend with your business over a seven-day period. The ad’s bid is then automatically adjusted based on this estimation, allowing campaigns to deliver ads to people likely to spend more with your business at a low cost.”

This makes sense—we do not necessarily solely want app installs, but revenue. It is a huge advantage to advertisers that the algorithm can crunch this data to show us not just who is most likely to install an app, but who is most likely to purchase from it as well.

Using Value-Based Lookalike Audiences

Advertisers often use another Facebook tool called value-based Lookalike Audiences. It lets the algorithm not just find people who are likely to purchase, but people who are likely to make a big purchase.

One thing to note, however, is that you’re going to pay more to find these types of high-value users. We have found that Events (AEO) tend to cost two to three times as much as mobile installs do and that Value buyers tend to cost two to three times more than Event conversions. If you were paying $1 per app install, expect to pay $2-3 per app event and $4-9 per value optimized event.

This new algorithm-driven customer targeting allows us to greatly expand our audiences. Since the algorithm is smart enough to handpick people, there is no need for narrowly defined audiences. Facebook and Google can find the right people for you. As long as you cast the net wide and give them plenty of people to choose from.

Our Best Practices: What’s Working Right Now

Many things have changed over the last year, including best practices. Here are some of the things that we expect to see become big opportunities in 2019:

Value Bidding: When beginning this process, you will need to start with Events. When your account accrues enough data, make the shift over to VO. It can take about 500 to 1,000 conversions before Facebook allows you to use Value Bidding. Then, when you can use Value Bidding, run Events at the same time. This allows you to nurture new prospects for less ad spend, eventually converting them more affordable.
Minimum Value ROAS: This is a feature with a lot of potentials to become the next big thing. In terms of Facebook, you can say to them: “I want a 10% return on ad spend by day 7”, and they’ll basically fulfill the goal. This eliminates many of the ups and downs of performance and lets you essentially hand over all the work.
Test Lots of Ads for Existing Ad Sets: Start off with smaller budgets to test new ads, then set rules that let those new ads burn through a small budget, such as $50. From here, move up to a $500 budget and then move to a $5,000 budget. This allows you to maximize spend; focusing on the potential buyers early and minimizing the amount of audience you burn through.
Manual Bidding: It is possible to still reduce bids by less than 30% and keep your campaigns in the “optimize” mode. It will let you see if you can decrease bids without decreasing volume. This strategy is a good way to squeeze every last bit out of your budget.

Final Thoughts About Adtech Changes

With Facebook and Google App Campaign algorithms improved significantly, we now find a level playing field for social advertisers of all sizes. Because of these algorithmic changes and improved native changes, Facebook and Google App Campaigns may eventually kill third-party adtech.

How to Produce Data-Driven Ads and Adhere to Brand Guidelines

Posted on February 15, 2019February 9, 2021 by Brian Bowman

There are two types of marketers: brand marketers and data-driven marketers. Brand marketers spend their time thinking about visibility and reputation, while data-driven marketers care about just one thing: measurable results.

Generally, both of these marketers agree that it’s good to have brand guidelines. The company should have a consistent look, and that look should be clearly defined so that everyone in the company can understand and replicate it.

You can see the importance of brand marketing exhibited across large, multinational companies. For example, Coca-Cola has a look that differs slightly between Spain and the U.S., but their products have to be instantly recognizable in both countries.

Data-driven marketers deserve a lot of respect, too. They’re focused on measurable and testable results. Thanks to the rise of digital marketing, this group has come a long way from 50 years ago, when it took six to eight weeks to get split test results.

While both types of marketers are necessary, sometimes disputes arise from seemingly small things.

Take, for example, Facebook ad testing.

Facebook Ad Testing: Brand vs. Data-Driven Marketers

A company with a strong brand identity needs to bring in new users on a regular basis. This company started Facebook advertising efforts a couple of years ago. In the beginning, there was low competition and success seemed to be easy. Fast forward to a few years later, and Facebook advertising had become progressively more competitive and costly, though it was still worth investing in. So, the company continued to run ads on the platform, with a monthly spend of $1 million or more. Facebook ads became a critical stream of new customers for them.

The company began to rely on that continuous stream of new users, and their advertising evolved. They figured out everything: all the optimal settings and technical tricks. Their ads were running more efficiently than ever.

Unfortunately, their competitors figured it out too, and the company needed to find a new edge. So, they decided to invest in ad tech.

Investing in Ad Tech

Ad tech showered them with new insights and capabilities. They saw improved advertising at scale and discovered what they could do with the result of that advertising (converting clicks into paid purchases, attracting repeat customers).

All was good for a while until eventually, the company’s competitors began to use the same ad tech products. The company again lost its competitive edge and began to notice its results plateauing.

Luckily, the majority of their user acquisition team were data-driven marketers. The team went back to the drawing board. They analyzed their data and Facebook advertising reports and discovered the big issue was the ads themselves.

Ads containing breakout creative had been responsible for the majority of the company’s success. Those fresh ads drove most of their conversions.

The user acquisition team now starts to refocus on creative, while still utilizing ad tech. They determined that their competitive edge lies in the development of breakout creative, and they had to use that to their advantage.

Staying Ahead of Creative Fatigue

To create more breakout creative and to stay ahead of creative fatigue, the company had to build an ad creation and testing machine that could deliver a successful, breakout ad weekly. They ramp up their creative development capabilities by hiring more creative personnel or by finding a creative studio.

They establish a way to produce a high volume of quality creative so that even if 95 percent of what they generate fails (and it does), they are still able to produce new breakout creative every week.

Certainly, they must also be testing this creative. So, the team creates a testing system to assess the new creative and deliver a breakout, control-defeating ad every week.

This time, they’ve got their competitive edge back.

Imagine a digital assembly line: the creative machine churns out fresh ads, and the testing engine evaluates the ads. It’s perfect. They can now consistently generate a breakout ad every week. They exceed their KPI goals.

Then a VP notices that one of the ads they’re running is not brand-compliant.

The system comes to a dead halt.

Within the cycle of creative development and testing processes, this situation has been seen many times.

After long hours of our own trial and error, we’ve found that prototype ads resolve this situation the best.

The Reason Data-Driven Prototype Ads Work

Simply put, prototype ads are concept ads. These ads are often broken into two categories: concepts and variations. Concepts are the big picture ideas that are fresh and different from the ads you’ve run in the past. Concepts take a lot of brainstorming and refining, but because they are so distinctive, they are often the source of breakout ads. Variations are required for testing individual elements in the creative. Prototype ads are generally successful because they allow your team to make data-driven decisions while still largely adhering to brand-driven rules.

Why Prototype Ads Should Meet 60% of Brand Guidelines

Prototype ads require some input from brand marketers. These out-of-the-box ideas are a bit uncomfortable for people who have memorized their brand guidelines to digest. However, we’ve found that ads that are at least 60 percent compliant with brand guidelines will not damage the brand image. With heightened freedom of ad creation, the creative team is able to develop ads more quickly, which is essential given the volume of creative required to scale success.

If ads are even 10 percent more guideline compliant—meaning they meet 70 percent of brand requirements—the creation of new ads becomes a lot more difficult. It slows down ad creation and makes it a much more expensive process.

If a prototype ad survives round one of testing, it can be reworked to better adhere to brand guidelines. We’ve found that it’s easier and more efficient to tweak a winning ad and make it more brand-compliant than it is to take a brand-compliant ad that is underperforming and incrementally test it until it performs well (if it ever does).

Prototype Ads: The “Fail Fast” Testing Method

Round one of prototype ad testing is merciless. Each ad gets only about 10,000 impressions to prove itself.

There are three key benefits to this method:

You can test a large number of ads rapidly. Since 95 percent of tested ads will fail to beat the control, it is crucial to be able to test quickly and dig through all of the underperforming ads to uncover the breakout gem.
If by chance an ad is not abiding by brand guidelines, this method limits how many times the ad will be seen. Ten thousand impressions is not enough to do damage to your brand, especially if the ad is at least 60 percent guideline-complaint.
Wasted ad spend is minimized. Prototype ads only get ten thousand impressions to prove themselves, which translates to just $15 to $20 in ad spend. Say goodbye to the days of spending $500 on each underperforming ads.

Understanding Statistical Significance

You may be thinking, “10,000 impressions is not enough to achieve statistical significance.” And, you might be right – if we were doing a typical A/B split test.

But we’re not doing an A/B test. We’re not looking for small 5 to 10 percent advancements. We’re on the hunt for one breakout ad that will outperform 95 percent of other ads.

Here’s an example:

The graphic below shows a dynamic view of the Visual Website Optimizer A/B Test Statistical Significance Calculator.

In the first view, the variation only gets 15 conversions. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough for the test to be statistically significant. However, if the test variation does well and gets 20 conversions from those same 1,000 visitors, it then achieves statistical significance.

20 conversions is an “earthquake”—the type of performance breakout ads can produce. The first test falls short with just 15 conversions and does not perform well enough to be considered a breakout ad.

For this reason, results from prototype ad tests can be trusted after very few variations. Prototype ad tests are fundamentally different than A/B split-testing. The test is not looking for incremental improvements – it’s looking for winners in the form of breakout results. And though it’s necessary to test many ads to find the breakout winners, remember that we have an ad testing machine built to manage that process.

Final Thoughts about Data-Driven Ads

Data-driven Facebook advertisers can fulfill their need for high-performing ads but also comply with brand-driven guidelines utilizing these tips.

Though prototype ads may not always adhere perfectly to brand guidelines, they can be made to fit very closely. The added performance delivered by prototype ads is a good trade for bending branding rules, even if only just a little.

Want to learn more? Discover our definitive guide for Facebook advertising best practices.

Consumer Acquisition Launches Performance Templates and Automated Video Production for Social Advertising

Posted on February 12, 2019April 8, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Facebook and Google App Campaign (formerly Google UAC) social advertisers can save time and money using customizable performance video templates and self-service video bulk editor integrated into the AdRules Creative Studio platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – February 12, 2019

ConsumerAcquisition.com today announced the launch of a video automation platform with new performance templates and self-service video bulk editor integrated into the Creative Studio platform for Facebook and Google UAC advertisers.

eMarketer forecasts that US spending on social video ads will reach $11.69 billion in 2020, more than double 2017. Instagram Stories has over 500 million daily active users, up from 400 million in June 2018 [Statista January 2019]. Ad creative is now the clear driver of performance. Especially now that viewers are consuming video content like never before. Also, because media buying was simplified by Facebook and Google UAC. So, It is imperative for advertisers to quickly and efficiently develop and manage video creative at scale.

Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said: “Producing fresh video ads is more important than ever. While we’ve assembled an elite creative team that provides managed creative optimization, advertisers wanted a self-service tool to quickly identify high-performing videos, bulk edit thousands of ads, resize creatives, add headlines, localize languages or change end cards, and more. Our Creative Studio editor allows you to bulk edit videos yourself or provides a guided experience with hand-selected performance video templates based on creative concepts that are working broadly right now for top-spending advertisers on Facebook and Google UAC.”

Consumer Acquisition has managed over $1 billion in social advertising budgets, including over $200 million on Facebook in 2018, and knows what creative is working best for mobile games and apps. The company’s new performance video templates have been selected based on high-converting video concepts from top advertisers. They have a simplified creative brief process that guides the advertisers to provide a basic set of their own assets. This quickly produces high-performing videos. Consumer Acquisition will update these performance video templates frequently based on new video trends and high-performing concepts.

Performance Video Templates

In addition to performance video templates, Consumer Acquisition’s self-service video bulk editor platform provides a way to easily edit existing videos with start and end cards, banners, footers, headlines, emojis, stickers, and call to action. Advertisers can also convert videos into additional sizes, including square, portrait, and landscape. The Bulk sheet Editor saves considerable time by editing thousands of videos in just a few steps. It’s ideal for localizations, ad copy tests, and converting multiple square videos into portrait and landscape.

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A Guide to Creating Facebook Video Ads Using Still Images

Posted on February 8, 2019April 8, 2021 by Brian Bowman

If you want to run more video ads on Facebook, but lack video footage, try creating the ads with still images. All it takes is a little motion.

Facebook recently added a new feature called “Create to Convert.” This production framework is designed to help advertisers create short videos from still images.

With Create to Convert, you can make four different types of videos. The following definitions have been pulled from Facebook’s page about Create to Convert.

Creating Facebook Video Ads Using Still Images

Basics in Motion: Animate your still image by adding only one or two elements of motion in a few seconds and include a call-to-action (CTA) card at the end to drive your desired business outcome.

Brand In Motion: Bring the elements of your brand or logo to life in a few seconds to promote brand recognition and then add a CTA card at the end to drive action.

Benefit in Motion: Bring the key benefit or message of your ad to life through animation in a few seconds. This could be a product benefit, a special offer or discount, a testimonial, or product variety. Highlighting the benefit will illuminate the value to your audience and adding a CTA at the end will enable them to take the next step toward conversion.

This ad for Glu Mobile’s Design Home app is a good example of benefits in motion:

Demo In Motion: Focus motion on demonstrating how your app, website, service, product or feature work. Show people how to navigate your offerings and include a CTA at the end to take action right from your ad seamlessly.

You may be wondering, do these in-motion ads really work? They do! According to Facebook testing, 69% of ads developed with Create to Convert saw improvements. In one case, conversion rates rose a whopping 500% with these video ads.

10 Steps to Create Video Ads Using Still Images

So, how does one use this feature? Until recently, companies would have to hire a team from Facebook Creative or work with a creative agency to develop these videos. In mid-2018, Facebook unveiled this functionality to all advertisers. Yes, it’s already available to you in your account.

1. Create a new campaign and then select the “App installs” objective. Currently, the ability to create videos from still images is only available when using the app installs objective.

Should you need to use this feature for a different type of objective, you can contact Facebook’s Creative Shop team, or reach out to a Creative Partner to develop an ad on your behalf.

2. Next, select the blue “Learn more” link in the Turn Images Into Videos box shown above. From there, you’ll see this pop-up:

3. Select the blue “Get Started” button. You’ll then be directed to the Format section of the ad creation process. Click on “App Installs.”

4. In the Format section, choose “Single Video.” Then, on that same page, click “Use Templates.”

This will show you all the possible templates that you can use to turn still images and text into video. You can choose from:

-Square or Vertical Templates, or

-Holiday or Standard Themes

Below, you see all of the templates available for square videos with the Standard theme:

5. After choosing a template, you’ll see a new pop-up screen. Here, you will define your video’s first scene:

First, you need to select the background color for your first image.

6. Next, you’ll be tasked with adding a logo or a small image. In this example, I added an image to the bottom left corner:

7. From here, select the “Scene 2” icon. This allows you to define the background and add text:

In this case, I left the background image blank and added text in the top third of the video frame:

The on/off buttons in the upper right-hand section of each option allow you opt-in or out of using certain elements.

8. Repeat these steps for Scene 3. You’ll be given the same options as you were in Scene 1 and Scene 2.

9. Finally, define the Effects in your video. You can add a frame, some new colors, or use a Sticker (shown below).

You are able to specify the size and position of the sticker, just like you can with the text and image elements.

10. To save your work, select “Use Video.” The next screen will bring you back to the customization page.

Final Thoughts About Creating Facebook Video Ads Using Still Images

As you can see, creating great Facebook video ads from still images isn’t too difficult. If you use some of the best practices we’ve found for creating mobile video ads, you can easily turn images into videos for some of your best ads yet.

Our latest release, the Bulksheet Editor for Creative Studio, allows you to bulk edit videos yourself. It also provides a guided experience with high-performance video templates based on creative concepts that are working for top-spending advertisers on Facebook and Google App Campaign. The platform allows you to easily edit existing videos with cards, banners, footers, headlines, emojis, stickers and call to actions. This editor helps advertisers save considerable time by editing thousands of videos in just a few steps.

Learn more about Bulksheet Editor and our Creative Studio.

How to Create 100x Ads with Quantitative Creative Testing

Posted on February 1, 2019April 8, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Facebook advertising gets more competitive every year. The social platform now offers a variety of advertising tools (like value bidding) so anybody with decent advertising know-how can compete with big brands. Gain a competitive advantage when you create 100x ads with quantitative creative testing.

This means two things:

More advertisers can use Facebook profitably
The playing field becomes increasingly level

The improvement of Facebook’s native ad tools has taken away many advertisers’ key competitive advantage: better ad tech. So, advertisers must find a new way to stay ahead of the pack.

The answer lies in their creative.

Using Ad Creative as a Competitive Advantage

You won’t find high-performing results in just 10x ads, but when you create 100x ads; the kind of breakout creative that delivers outsized results. This being said, the majority of new ad creative will fail, which is why we need a systematic approach for finding these breakout, 100x ads.

Recognizing this type of super creative isn’t as simple as just looking at it. It isn’t an issue of “I think this ad will perform better.” Opinions don’t matter, but performance does.

Oftentimes, this breakout creative doesn’t even look like anything special until it’s tested in a live campaign. Then, when you look at the reports, that one humble little ad starts to emerge from the rest.

This is why creative is truly such a competitive edge—but only if you know how to find those high-performing ads.

How to Create 100x Ads

To find and create 100x ads, you will need to develop a lot of ads and test them every step of the way. The challenge is, 95% of this new creative will fail to overcome current best-performing ads.

This means you don’t just need one new ad—you need twenty—in order to find something that is going to outperform your current winner. Finding the 5% can be difficult, so you need to create twenty ads to find that one gem.

Another element to consider is ad fatigue. As you know, ads don’t last forever on Facebook. The bigger your budget, the faster these ads will fade. For advertisers who spend $1 million or more each month, ads can fade in as quickly as four to seven days. Taking this into account, you’ll need at least twenty new ads each week.

This may seem impossible, but it’s not. It just requires the ability to scale up creative development and test these ads extensively. We call this process “Quantitative Creative Testing”.

What is Quantitative Creative Testing?

Quantitative Creative Testing isn’t quite a/b split-testing and isn’t multivariate testing. It’s specifically designed for creative production of Facebook ads and Google’s Universal App Campaigns (UAC). There are two types of ad creative tests: Concepts and Variations. Here are the key differences:

Concepts: Large Changes & Large Impacts

5emConcepts are brand new, completely different ads. They’re big “outside-of-the-box” approaches that can result in large improvements to revenue (or in some cases, large losses). Concepts are the key drivers for creative success but must be used in a limited way. When they fail, they tend to fail badly.

Variations: Small Changes & Small impacts

Variations leverage pieces of past, high-performing concepts. So, you reposition existing elements to create something similar but new. Variations don’t have big differences like concepts, but because they’re based on high-performing ads, variations typically generate smaller, more incremental wins and/or losses.

The general idea is to follow the 80/20 rule—spend about 80% of the time optimizing the best ads and creating new variations. This limits the amount of non-converting ad spend and allows us to prototype and iterate new ads quickly. The remaining 20% of the time should be spent toying with new concept ideation; big, grand ideas that often fail but sometimes generate a 100x ad.

5 Creative Testing Phases

The Quantitative Creative Testing framework is broken into five phases:

Phase 1: Competitive Analysis

Before new ads are created, it’s important to see which ads competitors are running, and which of these ads seem to be successful.

Set aside an hour or so and identify your top ten Facebook ad competitors. From here, you can conduct a creative audit of their Facebook page by looking under the “Info and Ads” tab. This won’t tell you how the ads are performing, but it shows which ads the company is running. Paid competitive tools can help to provide you with deeper performance analytics.

Take notes and screenshots of what you find during this competitive analysis, and look for ideas to use in your own ads.

Doing this background work is critical. It allows you to optimize your ad spend, since you’re creating ads similar to other companies’ best-performing ones. It also gives you a strong creative framework based on what companies like yours are doing.

Phase 2: Simple Variation Testing

Simple variation testing is where we start to break down ads that are already working and determine which elements of those ads are driving results. This reduces the financial risk in creative testing and gives us advertising best practices to apply to new concepts down the line.

Here are some of the elements we like to test:

Calls to Actions / Buttons
Video Length: 6, 10, 15 seconds
Text Headers: Text placement, text length (4-6 words seem to perform best), text color, font, and more
Image Format: Square, horizontal, vertical, or in story form

Once you know which ad elements are the primary performance drivers, you have some very valuable information. This can be used moving forward for ad variations and for new ad concepts.

This variation testing basically gives you a “best practices” template to use for future ad creation.

Phase 3: Advanced Variation Testing

Advanced Variation Testing takes everything we’ve learned so far from competitive research and ad element testing. We’ll use this information to start building and testing new ads.

There are a lot of elements to test, but here are some of our favorites:

Start and End Cards: There are plenty of things to test with cards, aka calls to action. You can try placing them at the beginning, or the end of videos. Test different calls to action and CTA colors.
Colors: We’ve found that primary colors work best—the bolder the better.
Ad Copy: You can test different ad copy, the placement of the ad copy, copy color and font, or no ad copy at all.
Mobile Device: Showing a mobile device in the ad versus not showing one.
Background Image: Busy, or plain? One color, or a pattern? Note simpler backgrounds tend to perform better.
Image Layout: Split screen? If so, split it vertically or horizontally? Try a grid of images. Horizontal? Vertical?
Image Testing: As you know, images matter a lot, so they must get tested a lot. Oftentimes, we test images based on whether they are user-generated or stock photos. User-generated content, or photos that look like they are user-generated, outperform “magazine-like” photos.
Product Amounts: Testing one product versus multiple products.
Logos: Include or exclude the App Store logo and/or Google Play Badges. Removing the logo tends to lift performance by about 15%.
Logos and Brand Placement: Top, bottom, left, or right? You can also test no logo—ads often perform better without branding elements.

This may seem like a lot until you look at real ads and see all the different combinations that are possible:

Create 100x Ads

Phase 4: Benefit & Demo in Motion

These tactics leverage Facebook’s “Create to Convert” feature, which allows advertisers to take still images and convert them into videos.

“Create to Convert” offers multiple ways to create videos ads from still images:

Basic Motion: Adds one or two moving elements on top of a still image.
Brand in Motion: Your branding or logo element/s moves in front of a still image or stock video footage.
Benefit in Motion: The benefit of your ad or its primary message is the moving aspect of the video.
Demo in Motion: This uses video footage of how your app, website, service, product, or feature works, and shows it over a static image, so it looks like the ad is showing someone using your app (or website).

Phase 5: Best Practices for Concept Ideation

Concept ideation is where we attempt to produce a breakout, 100x ads. About 95% of ads will fail to outperform existing ads, with some failing hard. To minimize losses, about only 20% of creative work is focused on new concepts.

To develop these new concepts, you’ll need to:

Leverage your competitive analysis research.
Use your storytelling skills to frame, present, and create new concepts. This means you need someone on your team who can explain what your app does or offers in a concise and compelling way.
Leverage character animation and assets in new ways. If you have a celebrity or a very well-known brand, try to make them the center of the ad. If you don’t, test using characters to see if they help or hurt performance.
Create variations of these concepts using insights from your simple variation testing. Integrate the ad elements and combinations that work best.

Create 100x Ads Conclusion

The full process of Quantitative Creative Testing is quite a lot of work. Not every advertiser has the time and ability to develop this much creative, while also managing so many tests. However, it can be done – and will help you to regain a competitive advantage through Facebook ads.

Want to learn more? We’ve tested 100K Facebook ads to figure out what drives successful creative.

Google App Campaign & Tiered Managed Services Offered by Consumer Acquisition With Enhanced Workflow and Automation Features

Posted on January 22, 2019May 24, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Leading social ad creative studio and user acquisition platform expands services and SaaS platform for mobile advertisers, reveals over $1 billion in social advertising spent on Facebook and Google App Campaign (formerly Google UAC) for some of the world’s largest mobile games and apps.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – January 22, 2019

ConsumerAcquisition.com today announced they’re offering social advertisers fully-managed user acquisition and creative services for Google Universal App Campaigns (UAC) in addition to Facebook and Instagram. For a limited time, new clients receive a 50% reduction in fees for managed spend on the Google App Campaign. In addition, creative is all-inclusive in this offer.

Optimization algorithms for Facebook and Google UAC dramatically improved over 2018, This leveled the playing field between advertisers both large and small. To be successful, social advertisers must focus on creative optimization and workflow automation. As such, Consumer Acquisition launched new workflow automation features in its AdRules self-service platform, which makes it far easier to build ads quickly. AdRules works in parallel with Facebook’s and Google’s optimization algorithms to simplify repetitive tasks, giving users the ability to generate thousands of audiences, quickly launch ads, and source new creatives through the Creative Studio.

Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said: “We’re excited to announce that we now offer managed service support for Google UAC and we’ve expanded our AdRules platform to offer enhanced workflow automation. This makes it even easier for advertisers to launch campaigns quickly and keep them continuously fresh with creative concepts from the elite team we’ve assembled in our Creative Studio. We’ve listened to the market and we’re the first company to offer tiered managed services designed to support startups, SMB, and high spending social advertisers.”

Eric White, Vice President, Mobile Marketing at Ebates, said: “AdRules saves us a ton of time with its simple workflow for creating and cloning many ads. It eliminates repetitive tasks so our team can spend more time focused on strategy. Their advanced reporting uncovers high ROI creative and audiences that help us scale faster.”

Google App Campaign and Tiered Managed Services

New Tiered Managed Services For Advertisers Of All Budget Sizes

The app ecosystem is growing with companies in all stages (startup, mid-sized, and enterprise). At the same time, Consumer Acquisition launched a new tiered model of managed services to address the wide range of needs across all sized companies. Managed services offer media buying, campaign optimization, and access to an elite in-house creative team with vast experience in storytelling, animation, visual effects, and customer acquisition strategy. Service tiers include:

Fully Managed Services

Social advertisers spending more than $100,000 per month with significant creative demands.

Managed SMB

Social advertisers spending less than $50,000 per month seeking guidance with customer acquisition and creative production.

Managed Start-Up

Startups spending up to $25,000 per month, seeking an inexpensive, guided solution to social advertising.

Tiered Pricing Model for Every Level

Fully Managed Services: greater of $15,000 or 15% of monthly media spend, 90-day agreement.

Managed SMB: greater of $5,000 or 20% of monthly media spend, 60-day agreement.

Managed Start-Up: greater of $2,500 or 20% of monthly media spend, 30-day agreement.

AdRules New Workflow Automation Features the most efficient way to a simplified workflow and advanced creative reporting:

Advanced Reporting

Designed for social advertisers to test creative and iterate new designs based on performance; see reports with rolled-up data, receive automatic recommendations to optimize poor-performing creatives and audiences.

Creative Reviews and Approvals

Simplify creative approvals through an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop UI that gathers and centralizes creative feedback, tasks, and action items.

AdBuilder Express

Quickly launch and test hundreds of ads. Also, easily identify winning ads and audiences in just a few clicks. Then, swap in fresh videos, and build new audiences and ad copy into new combinations.

Audience Builder Express

Build thousands of Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences on Facebook faster than ever before! In less than one minute, create hundreds of custom audiences by choosing App Events and Lookback windows. Also, generate thousands of Lookalikes in just a few clicks by choosing Lookalike Ranges and Countries. Then, AdRules will do the rest.

Pricing

New customers receive a 60-day free trial, and then it’s only 0.7% of spend afterward. Advanced Reporting is only $99/month.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

Google® is a registered trademark of Google LLC.

How to Improve Mobile App User Acquisition in Q1 2019

Posted on December 21, 2018April 9, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Facebook has over 2.27 billion global monthly active users according to a recent report by Statista. With so many users, it’s no surprise that Facebook is also the world’s largest advertising platform and a great place to find prospective customers for your business. However, social advertising certainly has its nuances, and your team needs to take this into account to fully capitalize on the full potential of Facebook to drive mobile app user acquisition efforts.

The details matter. The effectiveness of the ads you place, audiences you target, bidding structure of your campaigns, and the creative you deploy all affect the success of your campaigns. Let’s take a look at a few best practices you can use to accelerate your user acquisition efforts in Q1 of 2019.

Mobile App User Acquisition

Understand Your Objective

The Facebook platform has three different advertising objectives that can be used for mobile application ads: App installs, traffic, and conversions. For customer acquisition purposes, consider mobile app install ads, which immediately direct users to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store to download and install your app. You can also deliver ads to consumers who are most likely to take action after installing your app with Facebook’s App Event Optimization feature. This way, you can track both installs and conversions using one objective.

Pro tip: When using the mobile app installs objective, make sure to implement Facebook SDK and mobile app events within your application. By implementing these features, you’ll be able to track installs, re-engage existing users, and drive conversions.

Build on the Right Campaign Structure

Choosing the right campaign structure can make or break a Facebook advertising campaign. A platform best practice is to have the smallest number of campaigns in the account as possible with limited or no overlapping audience targets. In accomplishing this, it is also best to create campaigns that are tied to a particular geography, buying type, and bidding type to minimize overlap and competition between ads.

When choosing a buying type, you have two options:

Auction
Reach & frequency

With the mobile app installs objective, it is best to use “auction” as your buying type, as it will give you more control over the target audience and duration of your ad, as well as ad budgeting.

Make sure to choose the right audience and avoid audience overlap between ad sets to minimize ad competition. With acquisitions, we want to target potential new users who are likely to be interested in your content. A great way to do this is to create Lookalike Audiences. This allows you to reach potential new users that are similar to your high-value customers and thus likely to be interested in your content. You can target audiences geographically to ensure languages are optimized as well.

Our user acquisition experts have determined that the best way to maximize Facebook ROAS is to optimize creative and test. It is a best practice to create many ad sets that target specific audiences (that do not overlap), have different campaign objectives, and employ different bid types. This will allow you to efficiently release user-specific ads, drive minimum auction competition, and scale ads at volume.

Use Automation to Manage Ads

The Facebook algorithm allows for auto-bidding, auto-placement, and auto-budget. This allows you to let automation work in your favor, limiting the need for daily interactions and changes.

Auto-bidding lets advertisers train Facebook on which users are most valuable. The algorithm then performs real-time bid changes for you so less time is spent on intraday bid changes.
Auto-placement allows Facebook’s optimization system to spend your ad set’s budget based on performance across placements. This puts the right ad, in front of the right audience, at the right time, and on the right device.
Auto-budget allows Facebook to increase and decrease your budget. This is based on ad performance metrics and rules for increased performance in real-time.

Automation makes advertising easier for marketers, allowing you to focus on what matters most: creative.

Employ Optimized Creative

Facebooks’ advertising and automation features have leveled the playing field for advertisers. This leaves creative (and testing creative) as the primary competitive advantage on the platform. Our research found that 95% of direct response creative fails to outperform a portfolio’s best ad – the control. This means that you have to continually test a large quantity of high-quality creative to find the 5% of winning creative that will help you achieve your business goals, without reaching creative fatigue. For every 20 new video concepts you create, only 1 will be successful.

There are two Facebook features that you can deploy to help you determine your best creative. They are dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and split testing.

DCO allows you to test multiple ad components like the headline, ad copy, calls-to-action, and image at the same time. Facebook then will determine the winning combination of elements to drive your best ad. This feature allows you to drive continuous testing and optimization to make sure your campaigns are functioning at their best.
Split Testing allows you to run A|B tests between creative to avoid showing the same creative to the same people. While also simplifying the creative testing process and helping uncover winning creative elements.

Leveraging a creative studio to develop ads at scale will allow you to have quality creative at your fingertips.

This team will develop fresh creative concepts and variations of successful content to run across different social networks. They will also be able to optimize future creative to help you achieve business goals more efficiently.

Final Thoughts About Mobile App User Acquisition

According to Statista, there are 2.1 million apps on the Google Play store and 2 million apps available on the Apple App Store.

With so many applications available for download, app companies must employ user acquisition best practices to drive downloads and usage. When tested and executed correctly, Facebook advertising can drive business profitability and lead to the achievement of financial objectives. Don’t risk falling behind other developers. Use these tips to accelerate mobile app installs, increase conversions, and reach your business goals in Q1.

Facebook and Google Third Party AdTech is Dead

Posted on December 5, 2018April 14, 2021 by Brian Bowman

As seen on Venture Beat. Consumer Acquisition said it believes Facebook and Google third-party adtech is dead. Or perhaps the way to say it is, “Adtech is dead. Long live adtech.”

Adtech is Dead

During 2018, the optimization algorithms for Facebook and Google Universal App Campaigns (UAC) have dramatically improved, leveling the playing field between advertisers both large and small.

The duopoly’s native adtech has improved such that advantages once held by third-party software-as-a-service adtech providers have significantly diminished. Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition, said in an interview with VentureBeat that his company saw the writing on the wall and decided to change.

Consumer Acquisition is a Facebook and Instagram marketing partner, and it works with Google UAC, Snapchat, Pinterest, and IAC. So it kind of sounds like the company is saying that its own business is dead. But it’s not quite that.

“To be successful, social advertising technology companies must focus on cross-platform campaign management, advanced creative reporting, and workflow automation”, Bowman said. In other words, the bar is higher for being useful as a third-part adtech company.

In direct response to this year’s optimization algorithm improvements from Facebook and Google UAC, Consumer Acquisition has reduced the cost of its platform to 0.7% of media spend with a maximum monthly cap of $15,000.

“It takes a mental leap of faith that this is in your best interest, but their algorithms are more efficient,” Bowman said.

AdRules Self-Service Platform and Google App Campaign

In addition, the company’s AdRules self-service platform now supports Google UAC reporting, which offers mobile app advertisers and lead generators a self-service media buying solution and advanced reporting platform.

Back in February, Bowman said that the company found that the Facebook optimization algorithm
was better and that the native tools for both Facebook and Google UAC had gotten much easier to use.

“People refer to Facebook and Google UAC as the duopoly, but I think what they are trying to do is lower the skills required for successful advertising, and, in doing so, level the playing field between very larger advertisers and very small advertisers,” Bowman said.

The companies simplified how advertisers managed media buying and bidding, he said. And so Consumer Acquisition shifted to focus on the creative marketplace and software that helps advertisers identify and resolve creative fatigue and audience saturation, he said.

“We’re so confident in our approach and the direction that the industry is headed that we’ve radically dropped the fee we’re charging for our self-service software,” Bowman said.

Adtech Market

Consumer Acquisition isn’t the only company cutting prices for social campaign management software in the adtech market. Marin Software, a public company offering digital marketing software for performance-driven advertisers and agencies, also recently announced shifting their model to a flat platform fee, rather than using traditional pricing as a percentage of digital ad spend.

“I wouldn’t go so far to say adtech is dead,” said Jessica Hasenplaugh, head of user acquisition at Berlin-based mobile game publisher Wooga (which was just acquired by Playtika), in an interview with VentureBeat.

Wooga is a customer of Consumer Acquisition, but Hasenplaugh acknowledged things are changing.

“I would definitely say we are saying a lot of automation within the work we have historically done within the two biggest ad networks, Google and Facebook,” she said. “We are focusing on things that can be done, like focusing on creative. Creative is one of the things that can’t be automated by big ad networks. There are other things that we do like leveraging our data, which is getting better, and better understanding our user base. We find where we are wasting and eliminate that, and we deal with ad fraud. We focus on other networks where we can benefit if we put some time and effort in.”

She acknowledged that you won’t have to make so many campaigns for a single game and change those campaigns on the fly as much as in the past.

Bowman believes that any adtech company that simply tries to keep up with Facebook and Google native tools capabilities, or those that have built proprietary optimization or AI algorithms, will see the value of their solutions rapidly drop to near zero.

“Before February, our old strategy was running a high number of ads, and we were doing may five to 10 changes per ad per day,” Bowman said. “That technique no longer worked. It was both good and bad, as it radically simplified the way we were running on Facebook.”

Making frequent changes using third-party tools was no longer efficient.

“Before February, it was about how smart your quantitative folks were at changing things,” Bowman said. “Now it’s easier to run the ads. So that means creative is the most important part of advertising. You can control that. In the past, most adtech partners were not creative platform partners. They were not good at it. Now there’s less value in the adtech stacks. So the creative has to step up.”

One byproduct of that is Consumer Acquisition is hiring more talent that is good at creative advertising. Rather than simply focus on AI to improve creative materials.

“This is going to be a human-driven business for five to 10 years,” he said. “We brought in 50 editors and trained them. For the foreseeable future, humans will do the work in creative analytics. The opportunity is to become good at creativity. The question is how you evolve your creative thinking.”

Hasenplaugh added, “You might try to automate things, but that will just open up questions. And the people who work on this will try to find answers to the questions. I don’t see AI eliminating our jobs.”

AdRules

Consumer Acquisition’s AdRules software optimizes the social advertising processes with workflow automation, bulk ad creation, bulk audience creation, and creative development at scale.

Advertisers can reduce time spent on competitive tasks. Such as building ads and adjusting bids and managing budgets due to AdRules’ automated capabilities.

AdRules also offers a creative analytics solution with reporting views not available on Facebook or Google’s native tools. Advertisers can see images, videos, and graphs with rolled-up data, cohort reporting, and advanced tagging. They can also view key performance indicators (KPIs) from multiple sources in one dashboard. Including APIs, measurement partners, and proprietary business intelligence data.

Additionally, to maintaining financial performance, the platform can deliver fresh videos and images sourced through its Creative Marketplace.

Consumer Acquisition

Consumer Acquisition was founded in 2013. Its customers have used its tools to create more than 300,000 videos and acquire more than 150 million app installs. Its customers include Glu Mobile, Wooga, Ember Entertainment, Ford, Checkout51, Autogravity, and more.

Facebook App Advertising: 8 Tips for Great Campaigns

Posted on December 2, 2018February 4, 2021 by Brian Bowman

Want to blow some advertising budget? Facebook is a good place to do it. If you aren’t following the most recent Facebook app advertising best practices, you can easily burn through hundreds – even thousands – of dollars in just a few minutes. (This article was covered by Chief Marketer.)

At first, your Facebook ads might look like they’re doing okay. You may get a lot of clicks. You might even get some app installs. Unfortunately, your final outcome might end up not being worth the cost, because you’ve wasted most of your ad spend reaching the wrong people, or because you’ve spent $20 to get a customer who won’t ever spend more than 99 cents within the app.

Facebook app advertising doesn’t have to include some much-wasted ad spend. It can be a massive, reliable source of new users—and that’s especially true after the improvements Facebook has made to their automation and campaign management tools over the last year.

To meet your social advertising goals and get the users you need, you just have to follow a few of Facebook’s advertising best practices. Each one of these tactics can reduce wasted ad spend and maximize your user acquisition budget.

1. Choose the Right Type of Facebook App Advertising

If you’re starting a campaign from scratch, try Mobile App Install (MAI) ads. These ads let people download and start using your app with just a few clicks.

Minimizing clicks is good, but the real benefits happen if you’ve set up the Facebook SDK. With that tracking set up, you’ll start gathering information about how people are using your app and who’s using your app. That data can be used to optimize other campaigns later on.

After you’ve done some testing with mobile app install ads, shift into app events (AEO) and value (VO) bidding.

One caveat: If you’ve just started app advertising on Facebook, you may have to wait before you get access to value bidding. Your account needs to accrue enough app event data for value bidding to work.

The two bid types are similar, but they have key differences:

App Event (AEO) bidding	Value (VO) bidding
needs slightly higher quality audiences than VO	needs broad audiences
might be more efficient for you as the VO audience pool becomes oversaturated	VO is a more finite audience than AEO and will reach audience saturation more quickly.
	should be more efficient for new audiences and new creative
2-3 times the cost of a mobile app install	2-3 times the cost of app event bidding

So how can you manage these differences? Create two Facebook ad campaigns: one for each bidding type. Then watch the campaigns carefully, and move the budget to whichever one performs best.

2. Test Multiple Bidding Structures

The bidding structure you pick can make a big difference in results. But the only way to know what will work for you is with testing.

So here are your options: Automatic or manual bidding.

Automatic bids are designed to meet your campaign goals for the lowest cost, while manual bidding lets you have more control over your cost per acquisition on Facebook.

Here’s where the settings are during campaign setup:

Unfortunately, you can’t always get an apples-to-apples comparison of how the two types of bidding compare. Value bidding currently uses automatic bidding only, though we expect that to change soon, as manual bidding is in beta. In the meantime, try using manual bidding for app events. We’ve found it tends to work better than when we use it with automatic bidding.

Also, test bid types with and without auto-bidding. Just be aware that manual bidding will require manual bid adjustments to maintain scale, and those bid adjustments will trigger “significant edits” (thus affecting your campaign performance) if you change bids by more than 30%.

Here’s a recap of the different types of Facebook app advertising bidding structures:

Mobile App Install Ads: Auto and manual bidding are available.
App Event Bidding: Auto and manual bidding are available.
Value Bidding: Auto-bid is the only option right now, but manual bidding is in beta and should be available soon.

3. Nudge Your Bid Amounts Up Slowly Until You Find the Sweet Spot

Bidding higher doesn’t just mean your ads will reach more people—it also means you’ll have access to higher-quality inventory. Think CNN versus “Uncle Archie’s Fishing Tips and Movie Reviews”. If your audience targeting is done right, those higher-quality sites could more than pay for themselves.

Bidding higher can be particularly effective if you want to aim for quality over quantity; for instance, if you go after people more likely to pay for a $20 app than a freebie. So, try bidding high to capture paying users via app event bidding.

This being said, increase your bids slowly; try a 10% increase to your bids. If that doesn’t trigger any significant edits, try a 20% change. If you slowly increase your bid like this, you’ll eventually find the tipping point—a sweet spot where you can get just enough exposure to the right audiences to make your target acquisition costs work.

You may also want to test these types of bid changes on small and big-budget campaigns separately. Campaigns with smaller budgets can handle a larger change in bid values without triggering what Facebook deems a “significant edit”.

About “Significant Edits” in Facebook App Advertising

A “significant edit” is any change to a campaign, ad set, or ad that’s enough to cause the Facebook ad algorithm to shift your ads back into the learning phase. If this happens, it can muddle test results. Even pausing your campaigns, ad sets or ads is enough to trigger a significant edit. It’s a problem because your ads won’t perform as well in the learning phase as when they’re in the optimized phase.

The learning phase isn’t exactly like a penalty box, but it can function a bit like one. If you keep doing “significant edits” and repeatedly cause the algorithm to move your ads back to the learning phase, that alone can waste a lot of ad budget.

4. Target Your Audience and Ad Placements

If you’re running an app event or value bidding campaign, use auto bidding and set it so all placements have broad targeting. This will let the Facebook ad system dynamically adjust bids and find the best audience for your app.

Audience testing is essential. If you’re not doing it, you’re almost certainly wasting a lot of advertising spend. So, test several different audience types along with different bid types. This will maximize your ads’ reach but still let you find new users affordably.

Here are some of the audience types and ad placements we’ve found work best:

Mobile app installs work well with lookalike audiences.
App events pair well with targeted interests plus full-range age targeting 18-64+.
Use value bidding with broad audiences and wide-open age targeting (18-64+) to maximize reach.

5. Use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)

This one’s simple: Turn on Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). It will manage your daily ad spend without you having to go in and temporarily pause a campaign (which would be considered a “significant edit” and put the campaign back in the “learning” mode).

Of course, you can launch app install ads without campaign budget optimization turned on, but it usually only works if you have some historical performance data to manage the ads by. That performance data will show you which ads have performed or not, so you can do the budget optimization manually.

6. Be Frugal With Your Budget At First, But More Generous Later.

Working with a brand-new account with no historical data whatsoever? Then you need to use a multi-ad structure.

This is easy to do. Just set up at least two to three ads within a single ad set. Use a budget of about $100-$200 for the set. Let that run (with tracking installed, of course) and accrue performance data before you expand the campaign.

Your Facebook app advertising strategy should change if you’ve got an existing account that has enough historical data. In that case, use a multi-ad structure with higher budgets (like $200 or more per ad set).

7. Be Careful How You Scale Up Campaigns

Campaigns with campaign budget optimization do tend to be more profitable, but that comes with an added complexity: CBO campaigns usually hit a spending threshold where the return on advertising spend (ROAS) will start to fall off.

There are two ways to fix this:

Launch new audiences under new ad sets within the same campaign
Launch new ads within the existing ad sets

8. Minimize “Significant Edits” But Don’t Avoid Them Entirely

We’ve mentioned how campaigns tend to perform less optimally if they’re running in Facebook’s “learning” mode. But there are times when learning mode is a good thing and could reduce wasted ad spend later on.

For example, if you make significant edits while you’re launching a new ad, having the campaign re-set into the learning phase to maximize the ad’s performance makes sense. It could have a positive effect.

Deleting a bad ad is another opportunity for the learning mode to help you out. You don’t want that ad’s bad performance to affect your campaign’s history, so re-setting the campaign in that instance could help, too.

Pausing campaigns, ad sets, and ads also have their place. As mentioned before, pausing any of those three things is a “significant edit” – it will trigger the campaigns being brought back into learning mode. But if an ad (or ad set, or a campaign) had been performing well, but then stopped performing, it makes sense to pause it. If you can’t find some way to fix it, it has to stop running. You can’t just let it continue to waste ad budget.

Final Thoughts About Facebook App Advertising

If you’re in a competitive industry (and who isn’t?) these eight Facebook app advertising best practices are a good starting place for creating an ad campaign for your new app. But really, they’re just table stakes. You and all of your competitors have access to the same settings. Getting the basics right is a good start, but it’s not really a competitive advantage. On the other hand, generating high performing ad creative is. So, after you’ve fixed the issues mentioned here, refocus on developing better creative.

This means you’ll need to get really good at creating new creative, of course. But it also means you’ll have to commit to ongoing, rigorous testing of copy, video, and images. Quantitative creative testing never ends, thanks to ad fatigue and other factors.

We’re not talking about creating one new ad or two a week, either. 95% of your new creative will fail. Only 5% – one in twenty new ads – will outperform your current best-performing ad. To maintain a competitive edge, you and your team need to become a creative-generating machine. And even when you have a new winner, it’s only going to be a winner for so long.

But if you optimize your account with all the best practices, and build a creative and testing machine, it is possible to get the return on ad spend you need.

Learn more about our Creative Studio and how it can help your mobile app gain a true competitive advantage.