Run Engaging Ads
That Drive Conversions

There’s no better way of connecting with your users than through a relevant and engaging ad creative.

As the seasons change, so do app users’ behavior and purchasing power—sometimes dramatically. Knowing how to take advantage of seasonal trends and tailor your marketing campaigns to different festive and seasonal periods is key if you want to grow your app. 

The land of the rising sun continues to fascinate people from around the world. Japan is a nation known as a frontrunner in technology, from pocket calculators to robots. The country has adapted as industries have shifted, and right now there’s a big move towards programmatic advertising. 

Technological innovations have made information easier than ever to access. News now spreads around the world in seconds via various channels. One of those channels is mobile apps. Research on app usage and habits found that 88% of smartphone users have at least one news and weather app on their mobile phone, and smartphone users spend 41% of their total digital time on news apps.
 
As the app market continues to grow, mobile marketers need to know how to stand out to mobile users. One approach is to catch their attention with a distinctive creative strategy. A mobile marketer who knows the behavior, perceptions, and demographics of their users will have the upper hand on the creative strategy of their campaign, allowing them to design an ad that is specific to their target audience.

Mobile advertising has come a long way since simple banner ads on mobile screens. With the latest creative strategies that aim to enhance the user experience, mobile ads have become more relevant to the audience's expectations. 

There have been many recent advancements in targeting capabilities, opening marketers to a new set of creative possibilities. Gone are the days when knowing only the demographics of your target audiences was enough to show them relevant creative ads. Users have become more demanding and ad creatives need granular-level personalization to be successful.

The possibilities for creative concepts are endless. With so many techiques to focus on, including audience segmentation, real-world events, app updates, current news, and trends, ad fatigue is certainly avoidable. Strategic and imaginative ads are the key to winning audiences’ attention. One creative concept that can benefit your campaigns is meta ads.

Emotions form connections. In advertising, emotions can help humanize an ad’s message, which leads to more chances of resonating with viewers. Ads that appeal to emotions focus more on feelings of characters and strong imagery rather than providing a logical reason to believe the ad’s claim.

Bigger does not necessarily mean better. An ad format that takes up a big portion of the mobile screen may be easier to notice but may be viewed as simply intrusive. A banner ad, which is the cheapest mobile ad format with the lowest cost per mille (CPM), may yield better conversions and overall campaign performance when well-executed, despite its small size. Read on to learn how to creatively work your way around banner ads.

In any business, one of the most basic dilemmas is the trade-off between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. And so it is in mobile advertising. Mobile marketers are often torn between trying different ad creative approaches to explore the best ways to achieve their campaign goals, or sticking with accustomed tactics.

Display ads have the potential to increase brand awareness and return on investment (ROI) by serving users relevant ads, engaging with them, and making them realize the app’s value. For these things to happen, it is important to note that having a user-centered approach to the conceptualization of the ad is a must. Read on to find out what makes a display ad perform successfully and how you can ensure that your display ads help you hit your key performance indicators (KPIs) the best way possible.

With limited mobile storage space and millions of apps that users can choose from, the challenge of making your app stand out is ever present. It is one thing to get a user to download an app, and another to keep them engaged. So how can you face the challenge and keep your users engaged? The answer is having the right creative and retargeting strategy.

Calculating the top performing ad—the “champion”—is easier if the best ad elements are determined. In order to show the impact of a single element on the campaign’s performance, we analyzed a programmatic advertising campaign for a casual game app over a period of two months. The objective of the case study was to find out which variant for a specific ad element would outperform the others.

An important part of running a successful app marketing campaign is knowing when to refresh your ad creative. If you show the same ad in a high frequency, your message may get lost and, as a result, users will abandon the app sooner than expected. One of the most effective strategies marketers leverage for fighting ad fatigue is ad creative refresh.

Marketers are used to the fact that audience preferences are constantly changing. As users are swamped with more digital content, their expectations rapidly rise when selecting brands to engage with. The days of “one size fits all” or, in this case, “one ad fits all,” have ended. This challenges the mobile advertising industry to adapt methods, like multivariate testing, to target users with ads that align with their interests.

The role of the ad creative in running mobile advertising campaigns cannot be overlooked. With the mission to keep creativity at the core of advertising, Aarki is sharing its knowledge and experiences to show how the right ad with the right creative can bring you high LTV users. Here are some of the processes that Aarki’s creative team undertakes for campaigns:

User experience, one of the most important factors of a successful mobile advertising campaign, should never be underestimated by app marketers. We’re all tired of the static banner ads that pop up in the middle of the game and say nothing interesting and relevant. But mobile technology does not stand still and with the rapid development of app marketing strategies, new and more appealing ad formats are evolving. The choice between various formats depends on the target users and the campaign’s objective.

In the last few years, the rapid development of more advanced targeting capabilities for mobile programmatic media buying has paved the way to creating a new set of creative possibilities. Thanks to location data, mobile devices now allow marketers to target users on an even more granular level.

By Kass Yboa, Associate Creative Director 

Proper advertising is crucial for the success of any app marketing campaign. A wrong ad creative can drive potential high lifetime value (LTV) users away. Moreover, ad creatives also help app marketers grab users’ attention and drive them to take action, whether it’s installing an app, registering for an account, or making a purchase.

By Michael De Dios, Client Services Associate

The smartphone was once only science fiction. Today, it’s become a medium for content and information to develop. While the smartphone industry continues to grow, so do the amount of ads being launched online that it caught itself in a state of a perfect advertising chaos. We could argue that mobile advertising is dead, and it has become a wasteland of interstitials, banners, animations, and videos. However, there are still a lot of mobile ads that work and serve their purpose on a very rewarding level –– and they benefit from a good creative.

We continue the blog series by our creative director, Noel Perlas that we believe will give you a clear understanding on how Aarki understands the importance of creatives in mobile app marketing. In the previous part of this blog series we drilled deep into the process of building and optimising the creatives. The last, third part of the blog series, will zoom out the best techniques that work across all strategies.

We continue the blog series by our creative director Noel Perlas that we believe will give you a clear understanding on how Aarki understands the importance of creatives in mobile app marketing. In Part 1 of the blog series we discussed broadly how our process works in optimization of creatives. In Part 2, we will dive into the details of how our creative team tests and optimizes creatives.

Source: AppsFlyer

If you haven’t heard about the latest acronym drawing increased attention in the mobile advertising space, now would be a good time to surface it. I’m talking about DCO, or Dynamic Creative Optimization, and its role in the mobile programmatic marketplace. DCO has been around for quite a while on desktop, but mush less so on mobile. With improved HTML5 rich media and multivariate testing capabilities, this reality is changing.

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.  

The mobile advertising industry continues to grow and innovate at a fast pace. One of the newest mobile ad formats to emerge in the recent year is playable ad. Since its emergent, playable ad has quickly become a popular ad format amongst mobile app marketers.

Mobile app advertising can make or break your app. Too many mobile ads, or even the wrong kinds of mobile ads, can drive potential high lifetime value (LTV) users away. Proper advertising is crucial for the success of any app marketing campaign. 

Mobile device usage has skyrocketed during the past decade. Likewise, mobile devices themselves have taken big steps in evolving. From the birth of the first generation of iPhone in 2007 and first Android smartphone in 2008 to the recent debut of iPhone 7 and other Android models, we’ve seen several different screens sizes and upgrades.

As ad technology evolves, so do mobile users and their interests. In order to drive user acquisition campaign performance, app marketers should align their strategies with the interests of target users. Ad creative can helps app marketers pique users’ interest and drive them to take action, whether it is installing an app, registering for an account, or making a purchase.

Creative often lives in the shadow of media in mobile programmatic advertising as many app marketers put the majority of their focus on media placement. However, media is only one aspect of an app marketing campaign. Creative can have an equally, if not more, powerful impact on the ad performance. Even if the ad has been placed in the optimal location, the target audience most likely will not give it a second glance or engage with it if what they see isn’t up to par. Often times, audiences click and engage with an ad because of how it looks. Therefore, to take the performances of mobile ads to the next level, creative should also be focused on alongside media placement.

An important part of running a successful app marketing campaign is knowing when to refresh your ad creative. Doing so will not only help you acquire more users, but it will also help you get the most return from your investment.

Every mobile app is unique. It is designed to satisfy its user’s needs in a way that is better than all other apps. And yet, some apps boast of a healthy ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users while others can barely get off the ground. What makes one app achieve user glory while another app falters?

Creative for mobile ads is becoming more complex and video continues to prove effective. From an engineering perspective, what is one of the biggest challenges faced with this brand of engaging creative?

Mobile advertisers spend days building out plans and creative, but all of that is for naught if the ad doesn’t perform. Mobile advertisements should consistently provide the end-user with a smooth and engaging experience through faster ad loading speeds and quick, seamless rendering. Faster loading speeds and rendering translate to higher engagement and conversion rates. If the creative doesn’t load or render fast enough, watch the mobile advertising campaign get sucked into a black hole, where the end-user will never find it and ad performance tanks. There is a reason campaigns still end up in this black hole, faster ad loading and rendering comes with a few hurdles to clear. 

Multivariate optimization in mobile advertising is set to take the world by storm. As digital advertising continues its journey toward consumer-first creative, an executive’s final world may as well be silence. In the future, creative teams will have one audience to convince – the target consumer. Even though we are in the early stages of evolving the ad ecosystem for this mindset, consumers are already building expectations for ads that “get” them.

Media SaaS platforms are springing up everywhere, crowding the space. From start-ups to established players, sellers evangelize the centralization all of media planning, buying, reporting and first party data management, across premium, programmatic and native buys. Whether it’s mobile, tablet, desktop, programmatic TV, display, video or search, each platform touts a secret sauce to better media targeting and performance.

In my last article, “Designing Joyful Experiences,” I talked about the “Do” and how you should take care in crafting your interfaces on mobile. In this article, I focus on the framework that helps us design these interactions.

There is a strong link between performance and creative. The ways in which the two interplay is constantly evolving, creative teams and analyst teams are brought closer and closer together for real-time optimization. Aarki Analytics Manager Casey McKnight and Software Engineer Igor Raush walk us through their latest project to link creative closer to performance.

If 2014 was the year of mobile, than 2015 is the year to set yourself apart and transform your mobile content into joyful creative. Our Creative Director, Noel Perlas, comes to Aarki with years of digital marketing and interactive design experience. Below he shares ways in which your brand or agency can keep your creative fresh for mobile.

It is essential that mobile ads include a clear objective for users, and a clear way to complete the objective – a clear call to action (CTA). CTAs come in all shapes and sizes: drive traffic to a site, generate leads, sign up for a newsletter, redeem a coupon, locate the nearest store or download an app.

In anticipation of the Digital Publishers Summit next week, I wanted to reflect back on top trends in 2014 and make some predictions on where publishers will be shifting their focus in the new year.

This weekend, the U.S. will kick-off the holiday shopping season with Black Friday. Too many hours of planning, approvals and mocks have preceded this very important weekend for numerous creative teams. Smart marketers understand there is still much more work to be done, the best digital campaigns bank as much on real-time optimization as they do on pre-work. Here are five proven ideas that can help you (or your marketing team) optimize your holiday ads and connect online advertising to offline sales.

Happy Halloween everyone! We hope your office is decorated as wonderfully as ours and your stomach as full of sweets. Today we reflect on the lessons Hallow’s Eve can teach advertisers, besides watching out for haunted agencies and amazing agency-themed costumes.

Our in-house creative guru Justin Kim shares his top five tips for executing a flawless creative process. Designers, working in shops of all shapes and sizes, should find these tips useful as they design their next advertising masterpiece.

Video advertisements outperform all other digital ad formats. Mobile video is the fastest growing digital ad format. Videos drive higher engagement, which results in heightened brand awareness and higher click-through rates. Make sure your creative suite contains tools that maximize video engagement by optimizing the creative for completion rate.

Building interactive cross-screen ads can prove daunting for even the most experienced creative team. Dependent on the level of complexity, the process of storyboarding, attaining client assets and finalizing an ad unit can take between one day and four weeks. Through the use of cloning and templates you can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on each ad unit without compromising performance. In this article, we outline three ways you can use cloning and templates to scale ad creation and optimize performance.

Advertising Week has come and gone. And while there is consensus mobile is the “next big thing” in the advertising industry, chronic problems persist. Last week in New York, we heard Google’s Jason Bigler speak to a few solutions to these problems: rich media, cross-screen ads, and reusability. Other Ad Week speakers, such as PepsiCo’s Frank Cooper, believe Bigler’s solutions are resolving the chronic problems and predict 2015 as the year interesting mobile creative is unlocked. Now the pressure is on you as the creative director to deliver against these elevated expectations.

From the creative suite to the analytics dashboard – Aarki Studio – our interactive advertising platform is built for ease of use. Publishers, brands, advertisers, developers and ad networks look to us to simplify ad creation and measurement.

The epidemic of killed pitches is rampant, as detailed last week in Ad Week’s “Creative Review Shortlists Are No Longer All That Short." Tasked with concepting, creative types are finding themselves falling asleep with a computer in their lap and post happy hour quality time with Photoshop. To put a spring back in your step, a sparkle in your eye and a light in your light bulb, here are five amazing non-rich media ads to inspire your creativity for your next multiscreen, multichannel advertising pitch.

Aarki Study Reveals that Interactive, Multiscreen Mini-Game Ads Provide Highest Engagement and Performance

When faced with the creation of rich media ads, many companies find themselves stuck with few options and the daunting task of creating an ad that performs.