In January, AppsFlyer launched the ‘Creative Optimization Solution’, a new product that provides marketers unparalleled insights into their creative assets and data-driven guidance on maximising impact.
Coupled with artificial intelligence (AI), ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ identifies patterns, trends, and features that drive optimal audience engagement. This enables marketers to capture the most value from their ad spend while enhancing the effectiveness of their creative content and campaigns.
Adam Smart, Director of Product (Gaming) at AppsFlyer, explains that historically, advertisers and marketers have faced several challenges when effectively visualising and analysing the performance of their creative assets across various advertising networks.
Helping decision-making
Traditionally, data aggregation has been at the campaign or ad set level, making pinpointing individual creatives’ impact cumbersome. This lack of granularity often leads to suboptimal decision-making and missed opportunities for optimisation.
Moreover, manually tagging and tracking creatives across multiple networks introduces the risk of human error, further complicating the process.
While data aggregation at the campaign or ad set level is standard, isolating the performance of individual creatives has been difficult. Manual tagging and tracking processes are prone to human error.
Recognising these pain points, Smart’s team set out to simplify the process by providing a solution that offers comprehensive visualisation and analysis of creative performance.
The idea for the ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ originated from recognising the increasing importance of creatives in the face of evolving privacy regulations and advertising landscapes.
By collaborating closely with design partners and early adopters, the team refined the solution to meet the needs of marketers, user acquisition teams, and creative professionals. Through iterative testing and feedback, they validated the solution’s effectiveness in providing actionable insights into creative performance.
For companies of all sizes
Overall, the evolution of the solution reflects a commitment to addressing the evolving needs of advertisers and marketers in an increasingly complex and competitive advertising landscape.
“The purpose of the ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ is twofold: firstly, to address the inherent complexities associated with tracking and analysing creative performance across diverse advertising networks, and secondly, to empower marketers and advertisers with actionable insights to optimise their campaigns effectively. By leveraging AppsFlyer’s attribution capabilities, the solution aims to provide users with a holistic view of their advertising efforts, allowing them to attribute installs and engagements back to specific ads and creatives,” explained Smart.
This level of visibility enables users to identify top-performing creatives, optimise budget allocation, and make data-driven decisions to maximise ROI.
The use of AI
Additionally, the solution employs AI-powered automation to streamline the tagging process and analyse the elements within creatives, such as scenes and visual components. It saves time and resources and ensures accuracy and consistency in tracking and analysing creative performance.
The ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ was designed to cater to the evolving needs of marketers and advertisers in a competitive and intricate advertising landscape.
AppsFlyer aims to empower companies of all sizes to achieve their advertising goals more efficiently and effectively by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly platform for visualising, analysing, and optimising creative performance.
The solution empowers stakeholders across performance marketing, creative, and business intelligence (BI) teams to collaborate to craft diverse asset variations, test and validate winning variables within advertisements — saving time and resources while elevating performance. Marketing teams now possess the tools to make creative decisions that marry human intuition with the precision, speed, and scalability of the AI capabilities embedded within the product.
The ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ offers functionalities to simplify the complex task of tracking and analysing creative performance across various advertising networks. At its core, the solution provides users with comprehensive visibility into the performance of their creatives within different advertising campaigns.
Smart emphasises that the solution applies to companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, in the mobile gaming industry. Critical prerequisites for successful implementation include focusing on user acquisition, a willingness to analyse and iterate on creative assets, and a data-driven marketing approach.
For evolving advertising strategies
While initially tailored to mobile gaming companies, the solution may also apply to other industries as advertising strategies evolve.
The solution is designed to meet the needs of any company that relies on advertising to drive user acquisition and engagement.
Overall, the ‘Creative Optimization Solution’ offers a flexible and scalable platform for companies of all sizes to maximise the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and drive better results.
By leveraging AppsFlyer’s advanced attribution capabilities, users can track installs, engagements, and other vital metrics back to specific ads and creatives, enabling them to measure the impact of their advertising efforts accurately.
One key benefit of the solution is its ability to empower users with actionable insights to optimise their campaigns effectively. By visualising the performance of individual creatives, users can identify top-performing assets, assess the effectiveness of different messaging and design elements, and make data-driven decisions to maximise ROI.
“For example, users can track metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost, and budget allocation for each creative, allowing them to allocate resources more efficiently and optimise their campaigns for better performance,” said Smart.
Building in the differentiator
This product brings out several technical differentiators of the solution, including AppsFlyer’s expertise in attribution and data aggregation, AI-powered automation for tagging and analysis, and the ability to provide comprehensive insights into individual creative elements. Unlike competing solutions, AppsFlyer integrates attribution data with creative performance metrics, giving users a holistic view of their advertising efforts in a single platform.
The solution’s AI-powered automation capabilities streamline the tagging process and can analyse the elements within creatives, such as scenes and visual components.
This saves time and resources and ensures accuracy and consistency in tracking and analysing creative performance.
Additionally, the solution offers advanced features such as A/B testing and experimentation, allowing users to optimise their creatives based on real-time data and insights.
Understanding the market
AppsFlyer worked with over 100 companies, including fintech company Dave and mobile gaming leader Papaya Gaming, through the development and testing of the product. Companies across gaming, fintech, e-commerce, and entertainment industries employed the product to enhance their marketing efforts to great effect.
Brands utilising the product grew their ad spend by over 300 per cent, seeing vast improvements in key performance indicators. Campaigns resulted in increases in ad click-through rates of up to 50 per cent, decreases in cost-per-install by 30 per cent, and up to 100 per cent growth in customer retention and revenue metrics.“
“Overall, the solution’s technical capabilities set it apart from competitors by offering a comprehensive and user-friendly platform for visualising, analysing, and optimising creative performance across various advertising networks,” said Smart.
He added that resource constraints initially posed challenges during the development process, leading to slower progress than desired.
Additionally, aligning with various advertising networks to standardise data formats and integration methods required significant effort.
Learnings from the market
“However, through perseverance and collaboration with partners, the team successfully overcame these challenges and refined the solution to meet market needs,” said Smart.
One of the key lessons learned during the solution’s development and testing was the importance of collaboration and feedback from design partners and early adopters. By working closely with these stakeholders, the team gained valuable insights into the solution’s usability and effectiveness, allowing them to iterate and improve upon it over time.
“Overall, the development and testing phase of the Creative Optimization Solution presented its share of challenges, but also valuable lessons that helped shape the final product into a robust and effective platform for optimising creative performance,” said Smart.
The future roadmap includes plans to explore AI-driven video creation prompts based on performance insights. While the solution currently focuses on visualising and analysing existing creatives, future iterations may further incorporate generative video creation capabilities to streamline the creative process.
By leveraging AI and automation, the solution aims to provide users with personalised recommendations for creating effective video ads based on their campaign performance and target audience. This approach saves time and resources and ensures that creatives are tailored to maximise engagement and ROI.
Overall, the future development of the creative optimisation solution is centred around empowering marketers and advertisers with AI-driven insights and recommendations to create more effective and engaging advertising campaigns.
As technology evolves, AppsFlyer remains committed to staying at the forefront of innovation in creative optimisation and advertising analytics.
