Finding Your Next Top Performing UA Creative: 4 Lessons We’ve Learned
4 May 2020
Creative is king when it comes to user acquisition. But developing great creative is easier said than done.
It can take thousands of iterations and multiple rounds of testing to land on the perfect creative for a game. And then the work of adapting that creative for different channels, platforms, ad units, and networks begins.
Gone are the days of “one size fits all” creative. The most successful teams focus on delivering the right message, to the right audience, in the right voice, in the right channel, at the right time. In order to help teams supercharge their UA and hit this bar with great cross-platform creative, the team at Tilting Point wanted to share some best practices for delivering breakthrough creative that performs across channels.
Case study in creative: The Arcana
Every studio’s journey for optimizing their creative is different, but to illustrate how these principles work, let’s take a look at a game published by Tilting Point—The Arcana: A Mystic Romance.
The Arcana is a mid-core fantasy tarot adventure. The game is unique in that it is a romance/mystery story game that never specifies a player gender, allowing playable LGBTQ relationships. The game’s audience is nearly 60 percent female, and between the ages of 18-24. Players also like other romance and dating simulation games including Mystic Messenger, Episodes, and Choices.
The initial creative focused on the tarot card theme, but took elements inspired by Episodes and Choices to broaden its appeal. The ad was tested on Facebook and Snapchat.
The ad initially performed very well on Facebook. It received a good relevancy score, a below-average cost per install (CPI), and a higher than average CTR and CVR. This told us that the blending of Choices-inspired content made it accessible to a wider audience.
But the ad underperformed on Snapchat. The team began to dig deeper to understand why. It started by looking at the creative through the lens of the two platforms’ demographics and implementation.
The team’s iteration began by looking at the demographics for the two platforms. It turns out that Snapchat’s audience was 62 percent female, versus 43 percent female on Facebook. The audience is also significantly younger on Snapchat. The team then began to test a number of variables, including CTA messaging, colors, backgrounds, click versus swipe interactions, length of videos, ad size and orientation.
This allowed the team to make data driven decisions to adapt the ad to Snapchat. The new ad ultimately featured different characters, messaging, video length and was more geared to the platform’s female audience. The result was 15 percent lower CPI, and a 500 percent improvement in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
It can take hundreds or even thousands of creatives to land on the right one for the right platform. The team used Tilting Points automation tools to quickly create and test the creative in about half the time versus manual methods making it easy to produce as many as 1,400 creative assets a month.
Four Key Lessons
The Arcana was able to materially improve the performance of its user acquisition by rethinking how it approached creative. Here are four ways studios of all shapes and sizes can adapt a similar strategy for their game.
Know your game
It sounds like a no-brainer, but great game creative starts with a deep understanding of the game and what makes it unique. Games should have a crisp, well-defined unique selling point (USP), an evocative product description that can serve as a north star when exploring concepts, and a positioning statement that sets it apart from similar games.
It’s also helpful to understand the game’s competitive set, with special attention paid to what performs and what doesn’t in the genre.
Know your audience
In order to produce compelling creative, it’s critical that teams also have a deep understanding of who their customers are, what platforms they use, and what games they like to play. Studios should start with the basic demographic information like percentage male versus female, age range, languages, and geography.
Teams should also learn what mobile platforms their users use, what social media platforms they use, and other games that they play. Are players hardcore, mid-core, casual, hyper-casual? All of these details will help guide the creative.
Know your networks
Finally, it’s important for teams to be knowledgeable about the dozens of networks available to them when looking to acquire users. From Google UAC and Facebook, to Snapchat and Fyber, it’s important to know how each of these platforms can uniquely benefit your UA programs, best practices on each, and the different types of creative you’ll need to create to leverage them.
Test, test, test
Once a team has a clear understanding of its game, its audience, and its networks, it’s time to get to work developing and testing creative.
Finding a partner to help
Getting creative right can be hard work, but it’s worth the effort to help optimize any company’s UA programs. If you’re looking for a publishing partner that can help your team supercharge your UA that performs across multiple channels, get in touch: hello@tiltingpoint.com or https://www.tiltingpoint.com/contact/
We’d love to hear from you!
As VP of Creative at Tilting Point, William has more than 15 years of experience working in advertising and games for companies such as PopCap, EA, Big Fish, and Social Point. He has worked on big mobile titles such as, Plants vs Zombies, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Monsters Legend, Gummy Drop, Big Fish Casino and many more. He is an expert in creative direction, strategic planning, brand development, and design with a focus on data-driven results.
