How to Use Multiple Iterative Interactive Ads to Achieve Advertising Success
Stella Zhu, the Head of Mintegral’s creative studio Mindworks, shared insights at GMIC’s webinar about optimizing playable mobile ads to achieve consistent revenue in advertising campaigns.
Interactive Creatives: The Key to Effective Game Advertising
While banners and video ads remain prevalent in game advertising, their overuse can lead to player fatigue. Relying on these ad formats is no longer sufficient for maintaining user engagement and achieving ideal conversions. Incorporating interactive ads can be a new solution to engage users, and here are the reasons why:
1. Higher Conversion Rate
On the Mintegral platform, 82% of campaigns featuring interactive ads exhibit higher IVR compared to standard video ads throughout the entire promotional cycle. Some developers have achieved IVR improvements from 400% to 500% by utilizing playable mobile ads.
2. Increased User Acquisition Scale
Number of interactive ad impressions * Higher conversion efficiency = Larger scale user growth
Thanks to their superior conversion efficiency, interactive ads enable advertisers to acquire users at a larger scale than ever before. These engaging ads allow advertisers to grow users across various stages of their campaigns, especially during the mid-to-late stages.
In the last quarter of the game advertising cycle, interactive ads accounted for 77% of total user acquisition numbers. This indicates the importance of optimizing and investing in these ad formats to maximize their impact on scaling user acquisition during critical phases of the campaign.
3. Acquire Quality Users with Higher Retention Rates
The "try-before-you-download" mechanism of playable mobile ads filters out users with low interest while appealing to those who are genuinely interested in the game. These ads give users a hands-on experience, allowing them to have a taste of what the app offers before deciding to download. The result is users who are more likely to continue engaging with the app, providing long-term value for developers.
Element-level Optimization: A More Detailed and Efficient Ad Creative Iteration Method
The diversity and freshness of an ad creative significantly impact campaign effectiveness. To scale user acquisition, advertisers should constantly optimize and iterate their interactive ad creatives throughout the campaign, focusing on element-level adjustments to achieve their optimization goals from the following angles:
1. Boosting Efficiency while Reducing Costs
It is not necessary to change the entire ad creative to improve campaign effectiveness. You can break them down into core components and iterate on specific elements, which is more efficient in terms of both effort and cost.
As interactive ads are developed using the H5 standard, advertisers can adjust and optimize each creative element independently using the Playturbo automatic optimization platform. With just a few clicks, advertisers can create multiple versions of playable mobile ads and use them across multiple channels.
In the case of Color Bump 3D, Mindworks optimized two versions of creatives.
The first version replaced the entire playable creative; the iteration cycle took seven days and the IVR was increased by 125%.
The second version only iterated a single element, which is the game skin, from an existing creative. This iteration cycle took only one day, and saw an increase of 80% in IVR.
According to Mindworks data, 60% of campaigns have seen positive results after launching new creatives. However, to manage costs, 40% of campaigns chose to optimize their existing creatives to reach their target audience, which has proven effective in delivering strong campaign ROI.
2. Using Personalized Customization to Reach Target Audiences and Solve Localization Problems
When advertising to global audiences, it is essential to tailor ad creatives based on region and user preferences to maximize their user acquisition efforts.
When adjusting ad creatives, things like gameplay difficulty, UI styles, and ad creative components all have a significant impact on campaign effectiveness. In addition, advertisers should keep testing and optimizing their playable mobile ad creatives to meet the constantly shifting user preferences to improve conversion rates.
Drawing on our expertise, the Playturbo team is here to provide actionable insights into the ad creatives for each genre and user preferences in various regional markets:
Optimization Tips for Playable Ad Creatives By Game Genre
IO and Parkour Games
For IO and parkour games, game difficulty and visual feedback are two of the most important features. Therefore, it’s necessary for advertisers to create a thrilling vibe in the playable mobile ad creatives and provide users with instant feedback to keep them playing, and finally drive them to download the game. Including clear user guides and competitive elements encourages engagement and helps players quickly grasp the gameplay.
When designing creatives for Run Race 3D, Mindworks added multiple AI players to the original single-player version. In addition, Mindworks improved the user guide to help players quickly learn and master the gameplay in just three seconds, resulting in an IVR increase of 116%.
Puzzle Games
Puzzle games cater to diverse audiences. For these games, interactive ads should focus on visual effects and gameplay elements like difficulty, duration, and level combinations, rather than emphasize heavily on selling points.
Racing Games
Since racing games have a narrower audience group, advertisers should optimize their playable mobile ads around game duration, visuals, and gameplay difficulty to appeal to racing enthusiasts.
In the case of Smash Cars, Mintegral added AI racers and positive feedback elements based on the original game, improving user experience and achieving positive optimization results.
Simulation Games and Adventure Games
These genres typically follow a relatively fixed gameplay structure, and players are usually not sensitive to the games’ duration or difficulty levels. Therefore, when optimizing these creatives, advertisers should consider using storylines that highlight the central narrative to provide a deeper context to engage potential players.
Ad Creative Preferences and Optimization Strategies by Region
Advertisers targeting different regions must adapt their playable mobile ads to align with the preferences of their audience.
Take the ad creatives for Idle Hero as an example. The Playturbo team created three versions of playable ads for this game:
- • Version 1: Mainly shows the game’s original gameplay;
- • Version 2: Added panoramic gameplay technology, which allows users to find the enemy they need to attack by rotating their phone or dragging the screen, resulting in an IVR increase of 122%;
- • Version 3: Reduced the playable ad’s difficulty levels and added an effect to highlight the power of special attacks (a classic gameplay element for those familiar with The Legend of Mir), resulting in a 215% IVR increase.
- • User preferences in the European and American markets focus more on the overall interactivity, gameplay experience, and difficulty level of playable mobile ads; they are not so sensitive to visual elements, graphic styles, or special effects.
- • In Japan and South Korea, players tend to be more responsive to elements such as character art styles and skins based on famous IPs, rather than gameplay, duration, or difficulty level.
To optimize interactive ad creatives, the Mindworks team has three suggestions:
- 1. Pay more attention to language localization. Prioritize localization to tailor playable mobile ads for regional languages and cultural nuances. As long as advertisers prepare the translation copy for each corresponding region, Mindworks can optimize the ad creative packages into different language versions, resulting in better campaign outcomes at a lower cost.
- 2. Try to combine multiple selling points with various creatives. Although the core gameplay will remain relatively fixed, advertisers should identify different preferences across users in different regions and adjust their ad creatives accordingly, in order to maximize their revenues through global campaigns.
- 3. Fine-tune campaign parameters. For advertisers who partnered with Mintegral, Mindworks keeps tracking the changes to ad creatives throughout the entire campaign and identifies opportunities for improvement using interactive campaign data.
Beyond these suggestions, advertisers using interactive ads need to pay more attention to user behavior data. By creating multiple creative sets with different parameters, advertisers can find the most effective strategies for reaching specific gamer groups across different markets.
