CREATIVE OPTIMIZATION
IN A POST-CTR WORLD
TOP MOBILE MARKETERS SHARE TACTICS AND TRENDS
FROM THE FRONT LINES OF CREATIVE AD OPTIMIZATION
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
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INTRODUCTION
Creative Optimization In A Post CTR-World
Ad channels and marketers are collecting more data than ever before on the performance
of ad creatives. Ad channels now optimize creatives not only for clicks and installs but
also for down-funnel engagement in their customers’ apps. Meanwhile, marketers are
becoming smarter about extracting data from ad channels and leveraging advanced
analytics tools to expose full-funnel performance data down to the creative level.
Included in this guide are best practices on:
Video
Interactive & Playable ads
Dynamic Creatives
Design Trends
Audience Targeting
& More!
As Shawn Wilhelm, a user acquisition manager at Hothead Games
noted, “we know that things like explosions and montages are
great for CTRs, but at the end of the day we’re more interested in
discovering the true value of our creatives. The ideal method of
measurement for us is understanding the down-funnel metrics such
as LTV of users converted by a particular creative.”
The symbiotic relationship between ad channels and marketers,
fueled by growing data needs on both sides, has led to new findings
and trends from the front-lines of creative optimization.
Based on interviews with Singular partners and customers, who
are the top ad channels and digital marketing teams in the world,
Singular’s Guide to Creative Optimization includes creative tips from
user acquisition experts at Google, Twitter, NextGames, Match &
Waze.
Singular is releasing this guide along with information about Singular
Creative Reporting, the industry’s first tool that gives marketers selfservice access to all their creative performance data in one flexible
view. Skip to the end to learn how top marketers use Singular to
seamlessly optimize their image and video creatives for revenue and
down-funnel engagement in their apps.
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
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CREATIVE TIPS
From the Most Data-Driven Ad Channels
Interactive Formats
“New, compelling and novel ad formats drive performance,”
says Si Crowhurst, General Manager at Vungle Creative Labs.
“In digital advertising, new just works, but you also need to
track results.” Crowhurst recommends testing any and all new
ad experiences that partners dream up. For example, Vungle’s
new 360 ad experience was the best performing creative across
all campaigns for three of the company’s largest advertisers
who received beta access.
Yet there are still nuances to creating a successful playable
ad. For instance, when initially rolling out playable ads on
Chartboost, play rates were low and users were not engaging.
“Revisiting the design we tested two new variations against our
original, each one reducing visual clutter and adding new call
to actions to play. The results were extreme: an increase of by
344% and 700% on play rate, and an increase of 79% and 140%
on eCPM.”
Playable ads are among the newest formats to deliver strong
performance for marketers. “While the industry is moving
toward much more engaging formats like rewarded video,
it’s still a passive experience,” says Prashant Pisipati, senior
Product Manager at Chartboost. “With interactive formats
like playable ads, you can combat the passive view to reach
players with genuine interaction. In testing global campaigns,
advertisers are seeing an average of 123% increase in
conversion over static interstitial, with 26.4% increase in D7
retention. When testing publisher-side retention for players
served playable ads, publishers saw no decrease of retention.
Interactive ads are win-win for everyone.”
“The main takeaway,” Chartboost says, “is to optimize playable
ads for play by reducing unnecessary visual elements and
making a clear call to action to engage.”
TEST A
+344% +79%
PLAY RATE
eCPM
Revisiting the design of a playable ad, Chartboost increased
play rate and eCPM by reducing visual elements.
VERSION 1
TEST B
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
+700% +140%
PLAY RATE
eCPM
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Design Trends
The worlds of data and creative design are converging as
marketers and designers are increasingly using data not
only to make optimizations, but also to infuse creatives with
contextual user experiences.
Case in point: Google and InMobi have seen success in running
units that connect to advertiser or third-party APIs to deliver a
highly contextual experience with dynamically-generated ads.
“For a leading secondhand marketplace app, we pulled a feed
of locally-advertised products to serve product-based ads
available within 10 miles of the user’s location,” says Tejaswi
Gautam, Head of Performance Delivery at InMobi. “For a top
ride-sharing app, we built a city-specific map theme with wait
times within a creative that provided the user with a real-feel
app experience. With this strategy, we saw up to 40 percent
higher click-through and conversion rates.”
Waze, the traffic and navigation app, worked in-house with
Google on a similar creative featuring real-time local traffic
updates. The campaign began with 10 simple ads (one for
each city) and through dynamic updates served more than 16
million variations over a three-month test period. The creative
increased app installs 865% over static creative, and had 51%
lower costs per install.
“One surprising trend from our tests: Hyper-local ads that told
of a specific traffic incident like, ‘Standstill Traffic on Portola
Drive,’ outperformed ads that were more city-wide, such as
‘717 Live Traffic Reports in San Francisco,’” says Aman Govil,
Creative Partnerships Lead at Google. “Hyper-local ads better
showcased the kind of specific, granular information Waze
could offer on a city, thus highlighting the app’s unique value.”
Vungle works with its customers to match creatives to data
collected from a user’s device. “Information like device
type, connection speed, sound, location and language can
be collected to ensure the best ad experience is delivered,”
Crowhurst notes. “For example, if a consumer has a poor
connection, it is better to deliver a shorter ad that requires less
bandwidth. If a consumer has their phone set to Japanese, it
is best to deliver a creative in that language. Or, if a user has a
muted phone, an ad with subtitles will perform best. The list
goes on.”
AdColony urges its customers to design platform-specific end
cards for their video campaigns. “We’ve found that it is better
when app install campaigns have dynamic end cards that
mimic key aesthetics of the app stores they are driving users
to,” says Doug Manson, AdColony’s VP of Creative. “This instills
trust in the ad, increasing CTR and CVR in the process.”
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
Waze’s dynamic hyper-local ads (left) outperformed ads that featured
city-wide messaging.
AdColony’s Manson has also observed a shift towards more
immersive creatives and a shift away from “device-framed
footage in favor of full screen in-app footage in creatives. Copy
is then applied over the full-screen footage, maximizing visual
impact while still enabling rich storytelling for users whose
devices are muted.”
Video
Short, interactive, vertical-oriented and feature-focused. That’s
how ad channel executives describe the most successful video
creatives in 2017.
Dave Egan, Global Sales Lead for App Promotion at Twitter,
advises marketers to include a card at the beginning and end of
videos showing the app and play store logos as well as a visual
CTA to download the app. He recommends using strong visual
cues in videos, rather than relying on audio, and showing the
interface of your app so a user knows what to expect. In terms
of video length, the “sweet spot” for performance on Twitter,
Egan adds, is around the 15-second mark.
InMobi has similarly seen 15-second video ads consistently
outperform 30-second versions, according to Paul Duenas,
InMobi’s Interactive Art Director. Duenas encourages marketers
to place an interactive end card at the completion of a video ad
that can be static branded content or a rich media experience.
InMobi has seen Splash Ads perform tremendously well in
China, a market that is expected to overtake the U.S. in mobile
video ad spend. “An advertiser can show an animation or GIF
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around the brand/product in the first few seconds leading up
to an end-card with a call to action,” says Gautam. “In China,
animated characters drive higher CTRs whereas Western
markets prefer portraits or sketches of artists, celebrities and
sportspersons.”
In sum, when it comes to orientation, either create videos
designed for vertical orientation or ensure that your ad
networks dynamically optimize horizontal videos for vertical
orientation.
In terms of video creative design, “today users increasingly
prefer to consume mobile content in a vertical, portrait
orientation,” says Chartboost’s Prisipanti. “Because it’s often
not feasible to re-design all your creative assets for vertical
orientation, it becomes important to optimize serving
horizontal creatives in a vertical orientation.”
From leveraging the untapped screen area to making the call
to action button more ergonomic to one-handed mobile users,
Chartboost’s orientation optimization tests increased CTR by
17% and rewarded video eCPM increased by up to 40%.
Google’s Auto-Flip feature uses machine learning to generate
vertical versions of horizontal video creatives.
Campaigns & KPIs
While creative design is an art, the optimization of creatives
is more of an evolving science, with different levers to pull to
tweak spending, campaign duration, refreshes and creative
tagging.
Chartboost optimizes horizontal video creatives for display in
vertical orientation.
According to Google, more than 80% of video ad views in
mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices
held vertically. Google’s new “Auto-Flip” feature auto-generates
vertical versions of horizontal video creatives, using machine
learning to identify important objects in horizontal videos
and produce a vertical version that highlights those elements.
Tests show click-through rates are about 20% higher on these
dynamically-generated vertical videos than on horizontal video
ads watched vertically.
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
Vungle recommends advertisers tag their creatives with
attributes such as video length or creative theme. “Creative
meta-tagging allows for an ever-changing list of attributes
to be correlated with the creative composition of interactive
video ads,” says Crowhurst. “Analytics can then be applied
to determine best practices, along with engagement and
conversion drivers based on the tagged attributes.”
Twitter recommends cycling new creatives every 2-3 weeks and
running 3 different creatives per campaign. Marketers can use
ad groups to assign equal spend to different creatives within a
single campaign and determine performance of each creative
against an almost equal number of measured impressions.
AppLovin suggests running ads for approximately 1 week when
testing and refreshing creatives every 2-3 weeks. “It’s important
to look at the data to understand what is resonating with users
and what isn’t,” says Alice Liu Guillaume, Manager of Strategic
Business Operations. “We measure this based off clickthrough and conversion rates, and in some cases down-funnel
performance metrics provided by the customer.”
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Recommended Ad Channels for Creative Optimization
Singular has selected 24 ad channels as the most optimized ad channels for data-rich creative testing on mobile. These
channels provide mobile marketers with superior visibility into the performance of their creatives, equipping them with the
granular data they need to tailor creatives to their users’ tastes.
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CREATIVE TIPS
From Top Marketers
Three Seconds is All You’ve Got
SAARA BERGSTRÖM
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
“In mobile advertising, I would say that
we’ve been fairly surprised with the success
of shorter cinemagraph style videos and
gifs. They are much stronger in particular
compared against more cinematic
productions. I think the fact that a video gets
straight into the action helps with audience
interaction and capturing attention within the
first 3 seconds.
For season 7 of The Walking Dead, we
integrated the game and the show very closely
with new content based on TV show episodes
released every week. I believe this is the most
real-time integration seen in the mobile space
in between a TV show and a mobile game.”
Swing for the Fences
WARREN WOODWARD
HEAD OF USER ACQUISITION
“Understand the ecosystem and what works
for you, but don’t just settle into the same
tendencies. Swing for the fences. Try whacky,
unique, out of the box techniques. They may
just work and give you a really powerful
creative. I’ve done unique things like trying
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
live action videos with sock puppets for prior
titles at previous companies. Don’t just relying
on creative teams or ‘big budget’ creatives.
Contact art students to come up with unique
iterations to see if they work.”
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Nail the Name
SAIKALA SULTANOVA
HEAD OF USER ACQUISITION
“In most ad platforms, you can name your
creatives yet many marketers fail to add
strategic snippets of code within their names.
We encode things like the video length and
creative theme (e.g., cinematic vs. gameplay)
as metadata within our creative names.
Using Singular, we track down-funnel metrics
per creative all the way down to projected LTV
in 12 months. We can then see which video
lengths or themes drive the highest LTV per
channel.
Just GIF It
SALAH MUSTAFA
DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL MARKETING (MENA)
“One interesting test we’ve tried on Facebook
was animating a specific section of a static
banner ad in which the end result looked
like a gif. The animated section was an
in-app screenshot highlighting some of the
partners that we compare prices from. It was
interesting to see engagement rate increase
by circa 54% compared to the static version.”
We’ve found that longer videos perform better
on video-focused networks such as Vungle,
Unity and AdColony. On Facebook, we’ve
found that 20-second videos work best for
some games, while 7-second videos work
better for other games.
Since videos are often viewed in mute
mode, we tell our designers to include large,
attention-grabbing captions. In addition, it’s
important that the opening static image is
somewhat catchy in case the video doesn’t
load at all.”
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When Unattractive Attracts
VERA ZLYGOSTEVA
HEAD OF MOBILE PERFORMANCE
“It is common that less attractive creatives
work better in Russia. For example, in the
creative to the right—which performed well—
note that the red circle and the portions with
black text in the middle were actually part of
the creative. The creative says ‘search flight
tickets’ in the black box, the green text says
‘Goa, Maldives and Thailand’ where Goa is
circled in red. It was only used in Russia.”
Leverage the Networks
SHAWN WILHELM
USER ACQUISITION MANAGER
“We’re always leveraging our networks to
maximize our results. Not only do they have
the most relevant knowledge of what will
work, but we’re also able to leverage their
tools to split test creatives against each other.
Ideally this can be done programmatically,
but it’s so important for us that we’ll conduct
these tests manually if it’s not supported. In
addition, a majority of our creative is done in
house, but as we launch more titles we see
ourselves relying more heavily on network
creative teams to provide assets.”
| Creative Optimization In A Post-CTR World
A Woman’s Touch
KARA JONES
SENIOR ONLINE MARKETING MANAGER
“Specifically for dating ads, women will
respond to images of other women, but men
will not respond to images of other men. So
when gender is not known, it is safest to use
only ads with images of women. In addition,
images and videos that appear to be usergenerated will usually outperform images
that look like stock images.”
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SMARTER, FASTER CREATIVE OPTIMIZATIONS
Singular Creative Reporting
For more information, [email protected]
Measure with a unified view
of your creative data
Get easy access to deep performance metrics on
all your creatives, across each of your ad channels,
within one flexible view.
SINGULAR TIP
Compare creatives based on your marketing strategy,
such as brand vs. non-brand or incentivized vs. nonincentivized and break out by Country, Channel and
OS.
Give better direction
to design teams
Leverage Singular’s image recognition technology
to group similar visuals and quickly determine
performance.
SINGULAR TIP
With hundreds of assets of slight variations, group
images into clusters and breakout by source to
narrow down which creative type is performing best
for each ad network.
Stay organized and identify
by themes
Tag your creatives with relevant keywords then run
reports on these tags to compare how “TV-themed”
images perform against “gaming-themed” images.
SINGULAR TIP
Run your report to group assets with creative
clustering, then tag all similar images to categorize
into themes such as copy location, character focus, or
call to action.
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