Supercharge your App Campaigns

The world of Apps is evolving and growing in complexity. To stay ahead of the competition, creative and media teams are going to have to work more closely than ever before.

Google App Campaigns have rapidly become a fundamental part of a brand’s app marketing strategy. Within the app arena, user acquisition campaigns have become increasingly automated, with campaign setups becoming a lot less complex, resulting in the space becoming a lot more competitive. But what does this mean for paid media managers? We need to change our tactics, shifting to a forward-thinking and more innovative approach. Enter creative! Creative freshness and utilizing continuous testing have become the most pivotal elements of successful Google App Campaigns.

Historically, creative concepts and iterations were visually focused, causing poor testing environments and lack of direction when it came to a creative strategy. With an industry shift, emphasizing the importance of a data-led creative, practitioners have had to adapt their skillset and become more involved in the creative decision-making, changing a once design-oriented focus to an innovative, data-led directive.

So, how does this work? And why?

Campaigns rely heavily on creative, using dynamic and exciting designs to capture the audience’s attention. Combining a continuous flow of creative with insights into audience breakdown and engagement metrics is fundamental for learnings and continuous development within your creative decision-making.

With automation becoming the central part of all paid media campaigns, Jellyfish and other app experts needed to adapt. We set the goal of producing a solution which, in short, optimizes existing clients’ digital assets into ad formats that are built specifically for platform, placement, audience and objective. ‘Asset optimization’ is based on a test and learn ideology, taking the lead from media planners, ensuring continuous optimization of assets, as well as media buys to enhance campaign performance.

This ideology has helped transform the way Google App Campaigns (GAC) are being run at Jellyfish, and creative diversification is no doubt fueling success. Advertisers who increase their creative freshness yield better returns on installations and conversions, with anywhere between 50-80% of ROI coming from creative, which is why it is so important to pay close attention to what is working and what isn’t. For example, should we be prioritizing video assets over images as they are gaining better exposure and results? In our testing and learning, we found that yes, video is much more powerful than images alone on Google App Campaigns for certain verticals. 

3 different ways to test iterations and concepts…

1. Leverage ad groups: By adding text assets into your ad groups, you create another opportunity to tell Google which audience you want to target. When you are looking to test iterations, it’s better to duplicate the ad group, keeping all assets consistent apart from the ones you are testing.

2. Geo-testing: Geo-testing in the same country provides very little insight for many advertisers due to the lack of correlation between spend and conversions in regions. However, if you are a global advertiser, identify two countries which have similar traits and test iterations between the two.

3. Uploading ads to your current ad group is the simplified way to experiment and the fastest way to get results; this is also considered the fairest testing environment as this experiment happens under business as usual conditions. Top tip: we found this way works best when you are testing concepts and not interactions of creative.

Watch our webinar on how to successfully launch a GAC campaign with Google, and a real-life case study on the results.

Surviving iOS14.5

We’ve been immersed in the new world of privacy with Apple for well over a year now, yet reporting remains challenging, and understanding the impact of creative on your core KPIs is still somewhat murky. With the changes from iOS14.5, focus your testing on quality over quantity. Implementing a large variety of creative into a campaign at one time is going to make it challenging to understand what is working and what’s not.

Start by gathering insights on each interactive creative by testing a small set of ads, then analyzing the in-ad metrics such as click-through rates and engagement rate. From here, you can pick out the best-performing creatives and launch a large-scale campaign. You can use all data insights you have at disposal such as YouTube analytics and GA4.

There are quite a few platforms providing metrics at your disposal – use them. High-quality and optimized creative will support your overall user acquisition and help to mitigate any impact this may have on install rates. With iOS GAC, there are far fewer placements available than on Android, therefore the quality of your creative needs to be strong. A year into the new privacy world, advertisers are becoming more comfortable with privacy changes and as a result, we are seeing advertisers return to GAC iOS, which in turn is inflating the auctions. Thus, putting more emphasis on the quality of creative.

The push for privacy changes will continue, highlighted by the introduction of the privacy sandbox on Android, which is set to be enforced in 2 years’ time. Advertisers will need to get comfortable with modelled data, start creating and implementing measurement models, and conducting incrementality tests to validate results.

Want to talk about how Jellyfish can support you with Google App Campaigns or asset optimization? Reach out to our experts superchargedapp@jellyfish.com