campaign optimization

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Title: Optimizing Campaigns
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When launching a user acquisition campaign, you want to be sure that you are utilizing all possible levers at your disposal in order to get the most performance out of your campaigns. Of course, raising your bids to competitive levels is the most obvious and one of the most effective ways of increasing volume. However, there are several other ways to optimize without touching your campaign spend. Here we will go over some of the best practices you can implement in order to achieve such results.

Create a Strong Trailer

Having a trailer that resonates with your target audience is the key factor in boosting your conversion rate. This is especially important because conversion rate is one of the most important measures utilized by our algorithm to determine your ad ranking, and thus your visibility and performance on our network. 

General characteristics of a strong video trailer include:

• Meaningful, action-packed gameplay footage
• Strong calls-to-action
• References to game dynamics that make your game unique 
• Localized in geo-specific languages (where applicable)
• High production value
• Voiceovers/speaking characters/sound effects

Rotate Your Trailers

Users eventually experience ad fatigue when exposed to the same video trailer over and over again. This contributes to a decline in conversion rate and thus a decline in overall volume.  Combat this effect by rotating in a new trailer with fresh content approximately once a quarter, if resources permit.

Fine-Tune Your Campaign Targeting

Segmenting your campaigns is a great way to add precision to your user acquisition efforts. Some factors to consider include:

• Choose your geo targets carefully. You might already know what countries perform best for you, and you can assign each a different bid accordingly. If you are just starting out with user acquisition and have not gathered enough data to ascertain what performs best, we recommend first launching in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. As you gather data and want to explore more opportunities, you might consider expanding to other English-speaking countries, countries in Western Europe, and the Nordic countries. Conduct periodic reviews of per-country performance and adjust bids from time to time.
• Break out your iOS campaigns to target different bids for iPad and iPhone. iPad users generally tend to be higher quality users than iPhone, so we recommend a higher bid there.
• If you are targeting non-English speaking countries, it is best to run localized versions of your trailer and static thumbnails/endcards.

Remove Underperforming Publishers

You have the ability to track which publishers are delivering you the best and worst quality installs, and target accordingly. By adding a parameter to your tracking URL, we will pass you a 5-digit publisher ID. The macro for this parameter is “{source_game_id}”. Please consult your tracking service for the corresponding parameter name. 

Once this parameter is in place, wait until you have collected a statistically significant amount of internal data regarding publisher performance. Then, analyze the user quality data per publisher according to your key metrics (LTV, ARPU, etc). Send Client Services a list of the low quality publishers, and we can block these for you.