Neuronation – Old Creatives vs New Adapted Creatives

App

Neuronation is a brain training App that we have been working with hand in hand for the past 3 years.

After a couple of months of testing and iterating our targeting we also looked into creatives and decided to rotate them depending on performance was not enough. We had to come up with completely new ideas and a different creative approach.

Context

In this case study, we are going to show what a big difference it makes if you constantly refresh creatives and how much you can grow the performance of your Google App Campaigns.

Results

The overall results show a dramatic improvement: From October to November, we managed to spend 952% more overall only on video ads and got 1215% more clicks and 3363% more impressions. Think about that: the investment into a great motion designer vs. this extreme growth potential. It’s an easy economic decision.

• +1215% Clicks
• +952% Spend
• +3363% Impressions

But in order to prove the point let us dive deeper into one specific campaign. Below we try to analyze one Android campaign that was targeting French users.

As you can see in the following graphs, campaign costs decrease from October to November, meaning that old creatives were getting fatigued during the time and new creatives gave the performance an incredible boost.

Costs decreased while the campaign was scaled during November 2020. The great performance of the new creatives decreased overall costs for the campaign, CPI (cost per install), CPR (Cost per registration), and CPP (cost per in-app purchase) for example, while spend increased 48%.

So we did not only manage to improve important metrics but also scale the campaign thanks to good performing creatives that we put together as a team. From briefing creatives to knowing how to make the most of the videos, eg. having the right message communicated in the right adgroup.

Another important KPI that we use is Day-7 Net Revenue Confirmed ROAS, which also increased significantly. With this KPI we basically try to understand which install cohort converts from free trial to paying subscribers within 7 days.

Not only did the ROAS increase for this campaign, but it also increased overall, at the account level. It is clear that a constant creative rotation is extremely helpful to give your Google App campaigns a boost. But we wanted to understand what else could have led to this performance increase. Of course, there is not always a scientific explanation possible but we believe that Google boosts video creatives that have a good view rate (many people watch your video ad for a long period of time) or engagement rate (they also interact with it, eg. click on it and convert by downloading your app). The very first signal Google receives is certainly if a user watches your ad – so we developed creatives that could be able to catch the attention of the user at the very first moment – not by making our ads loud or noisy – but by creating interest.

People want to see what happens next in the video, even if they are only 15 seconds long and if the video creatives are engaging and appealing, there will be a higher possibility of your Google App campaign being a total success. In our videos, we made use of a progress bar that marked the percentage of concentration and development of our skills. Our idea was to communicate to users that they would be able to improve their mental skills and develop new ones thanks to the Neuronation Brain Training App.

Our method may be simple, but it is also effective, plus our motion designers come from good backgrounds and know the app very well, so they can adapt creatives to its needs and design. Once we get a good amount of data we assess the creative’s performance and either pause it or create new versions of it variating the video copy, including CTAs, or complete other A/B tests.