Reigning in Data (Part 1 of 3)

(Originally published in Dec 2016 at Aarki.com)

Part 1: The Process of Setting up Creatives

In today’s digital world, ads are everywhere. Using the right creative is crucial for running a successful app marketing campaign. In fact, creatives can make or break your campaign. If they are catchy, relevant and based on the user experience, they will grab the user's attention and drive installs. Otherwise, they will most likely get ignored by the users, together with all the other ads they see every day.

These 3 part blog series by our creative director Noel Perlas will give you a clear understanding how Aarki understands the importance of creatives in mobile app marketing and will walk you through the process of how our creative team operates. In the first part of the blog series, we will describe the process of setting up the creatives.

Learn From Experience

Through a streamlined iterative process, Aarki’s creative team ensures that published ads are always performing at their best. Every new campaign starts out with lessons from both app specific initiatives and industry-wide experience.

So how does it all work?

The app marketers provide us with their best performing creatives and directs us to what has worked for them so far. The insights can be different. For example, which games within their apps are used more often or, for instance, for social casino games 5-reels prove to be better than 3-reel slots, etc. Together with these, we come up with industry-wide strategies.

Consider App Specific Features

While composing the creatives, we consider some features that are app specific. Like ad layout for example, this differs from app to app. Match-3 games have a grid layout that is familiar to their users and resonates well with the users when translated into ad creatives. Social casinos, on the other hand may want to see references to Las Vegas slot machines.

We also consider where your ads will be seen. This help us pinpoint ad formats and strategies that work within that app or publisher. This will differ from each campaign, so it is good to understand the environment and learn from the past.

Identify The Best Performing Creative

Once we receive general information, we start from observing creative performance through multivariate testing. We select 3 creatives for the campaign and iterate based on performance to determine the “champion” creative. In the wake of this, when the champion creative from the 3 variants stands out, we continue iteration on that creative and add a challenger creative in the same format but with slight difference in the components: be it a different background or background color, etc. And lastly, after testing and comparing the performance of these two creatives, we increase media and budget allocation to the best performing (champion) creative.

To learn more about creative optimization solutions, keep an eye out for the second part of this blog series which will focus on the process of testing and tracking the creatives as well as the optimization process.