Creative Optimization. Part 2: Organize, Iterate, and Challenge

We continue our blog series that aims to give you a clear understanding of how we at Aarki approach ad creatives in mobile app marketing. In Part 1 of the blog series, we discussed broadly our process for the optimization of creatives. In Part 2, we dive into the details of how our creative team tests and optimizes creatives to achieve maximum ROI. 

There is a fine line between effective advertising and irritating advertising. Too many impressions of annoying creative can drive away potential high lifetime value (LTV) users. Showing the right creative in the right placement is the key to success. This is what Aarki’s creative team strives to achieve. And we do this through a methodical process which we unpack in the infographic below:

Ad creative is the backbone of mobile advertising. Make sure you are using the full potential your ad creative to maximize reach and most importantly, relevancy. If you haven’t checked our whitepapers yet, do it now to get more information on creative insights and best practices that have proved most successful in user acquisition and re-engagement campaigns. 

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STEP 1: Research

A successful campaign always begins with proper planning and research. Start with understanding the audience and the app itself. After diving deep into the essence of the app, compose an inventory of all the assets, including previous campaigns.

STEP 2: Strategize

The next step is deciding the creative strategy, i.e. understanding the best ways to communicate the intention of the app. Answer questions such as:

What is your way in?
How do you get your point across quickly?
How do you easily attract users?

For eCommerce apps, for example, this may be to incorporate current discounts or deals into your ad creatives to attract more users to your app. For puzzle games, showing boosters can pave the way to successful user acquisition.

STEP 3: Organize

Now that you have a plan and a strategy, it’s time to get organized. Create a list of all the elements you will need to test, like CTA color, CTA copy - “free install”, or “download now”. With multivariate testing, you can test multiple elements at the same time to determine the most effective combination. No element is less important than the others. You will later test them all. 

STEP 4: Build

You are finally ready to build your creatives, according to your plan, adding your own creative flair to make it standout. Depending on the scale of the campaign, you may need more than 10 creatives running simultaneously. With a multivariate approach, it is possible to expand that number even more and test every permutation of creative elements. However, our experience shows that launching with 3 to 4 creatives is enough to get sufficient data to inform your next step.

STEP 5: Analyze

Data should inform the creative. You need to monitor every creative as if they were your children, measuring performance across a range of metrics. Measure and track cost per install (CPI), click-through rate (CTR), and return on investment (ROI). CTR alone is not helpful, as users might click but not install. CPI should be your primary metric to assess your creative.  

STEP 6: Optimize

After doing multiple cycles of build and analyze you should be able to determine a clear winning creative formula. This is when your analytics team should optimize the campaign placements to help you make the overall performance even better.

STEP 7: Iterate

Iteration is the next step of optimization. There will always be a creative that performs better than the rest. We at Aarki, call this the “champion” creative. This champion creative tells us what direction to take for the next iteration. This set of new creatives we call “challengers”. We roll out these creatives and then monitor to see if the challenger creative will outperform the champion creative.