Matej Lancaric

When you see a decline in KPIs for three consecutive days, it’s a signal that the creative is starting to die. This means it’s time to think about optimizations you can do and/or replace the creatives.

Define the different kinds of player motivations with your team, then ask chatGPT for concepts and copy to get some ideas.

TikTok’s Spark Ads work really well. It’s the same concept of “screening” the organic content that shows good engagement on social and re-using it for UA, except it’s much easier to set up: you select it and can run it right away.

Take all the social media content with high engagement that games have, and run it as UA creatives. It’s a sort of creative testing since you can already see the engagement with the content created

The best KPI to decide on a creative winner is ROAS. You can have a 5.5 IPM; nobody cares if it doesn’t make money. Even D1 ROAS is a great indicator to use vs. your benchmarks (e.g., if you have limited data, on iOS for example).

Different creatives have different retention profiles. Example: fake ads with low CPI but also low retention rates.

You need to have at least one new concept a week if you don’t want to see performance drop.

You need to understand very well how the CPI vs. LTV equation works. This is more important than caring about how the creative looks like.

If you use seasonal creatives, be sure to have seasonal creatives throughout the whole funnel: ad, icon, screenshots, feature graphic, ideally even an event within the game. Also make sure to take them all out once the season is over!

It’s sexy to talk about creatives based on personas, but personas have been here since the beginning of marketing and are not that easy to use. The best performing creatives are the ones taken from the casual game genre.

To brainstorm creative concepts you can look at competitors’ creatives, but if you’ve been running UA for a long time you should also make an assessment of your past creatives that worked well and didn’t work well.

When it comes to creative fatigue you need to take a look at the combination of the creative and the targeting to make assumptions from that combination. A creative that showed fatigue might work well with a different audience.

Using outsourcing companies can bring a lot of value right away through new ideas, a new pairs of eyes and different processes. So it's worth it even if you have a big in-house team.

One thing that's important to measure the KPIs of the creative is the naming convention so you can clearly see what's inside the creative and if it's portrait, square, etc.

Facebook Canvas Ads allow you to create an instant "store" experience. It's like a short mobile landing page that allows you to describe the game, for example using your store assets. They use this a lot and it tends to perform well.

You can only send one event, either from Facebook or your MMP. If you send events from both, you’ll see a double counting of the tracked events (e.g., purchases, revenue).

Meta is suggesting that if an MMP doesn’t support AEM, you can start using the Facebook SDK for measurement instead. However, remember that Meta uses modeled conversions, i.e., made-up conversions.

AEM uses the Facebook SDK to measure iOS 14+ campaigns, almost similar to how you use Firebase for Google UAC campaigns.

AEM is currently not available in all accounts, and you need to be eligible. One criterion is that you must have the Facebook SDK supporting iOS 14+ campaigns (16.0.0).

Diversify not only UA channels, but also campaign optimizations:

• You need at least 2 or 3 UA channels in the mix. Facebook is not the biggest share of impressions anymore.
• Depending on your game’s monetization strategy: have purchase-optimization campaigns, app-event optimized campaigns, value-optimized campaign, AdROAS campaigns

Some devices have better performance than others, particularly on Android. Since Android OS 12 now runs only on 6GB of RAM, you can exclude everyone else and improve your campaign performance with just one toggle.

Create D1/D3/D7 ROAS benchmarks for each platform and UA channels, an keep track of when 100% ROAS is reached. Then, measure and evaluate performance against these benchmarks. Keep in mind you need to recalculate them based on seasonality, company cashflow, scaling, features, and LiveOps.

If you increase the budget, you target a broader audience and your payback period increases. For gaming, you typically want to increase the budget by about 20-30% on a monthly basis until your payback period hits the D90 “ceiling”.

D7 ROAS is the most common KPI gaming companies optimize against, because these cohorts are usually mature enough. In most cases, D1 and D3 is too early to assess performance. But you need to keep in mind different channels have different LTV curves. Example: FB D7 ROAS might 20% and reaching 100% D60 while Unity has D7 ROAS 5% reaching 100% in D30.

Setting goals and defining a UA budget requires knowing:

• Product KPIs, so you can understand down-funnel performance

• Product roadmap, so you can plan more budget after some features are out (assuming performance will get better)

You can’t compare CPIs from mobile app install campaigns with purchase campaigns and value-optimized campaigns. This is why CPI benchmarks from different tools are usually off.

When calculating your payback period, you need to look at the net figures (e.g., after taking out the App Store and Google Play Store fees), not the gross figures.

Consolidate your campaigns. Fewer campaigns mean higher budgets to leave the learning phase quicker. Group your campaigns into buckets and tiers, and put some money behind it. Make your tiers based on your LTV and ROAS numbers for the last 90 days. Example: US as a standalone, then “rest of the world”.

Your favorite data tools’ estimates can be very wrong. Example: Matej had found ad revenue estimates on Legend of Slime that he realized were way off after talking to their team.

Marketing trends typically flow from e-commerce to apps to games, with a 3-year lag. App marketers should look to e-commerce for emerging trends, while gaming can learn from both sectors.