This document provides best practices for optimizing mobile game creatives on Google Ads. It discusses identifying the best performing placements like AdMob, display, YouTube, and search. It also discusses targeting the audience by focusing creatives on core gameplay or genre. Creative testing should be done in separate ad groups to see performance in different networks before moving top performers to evergreen ad groups. Frequency of creative uploads and removing low performers after 7-14 days is recommended. Insights from universal app campaigns can also be applied to optimize across different networks.

1. CREATIVE IN MOBILE GAMING - UAC
A practical approach to creative testing & optimisation

2. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
Jussi Naapuri
- Senior performance marketing specialist
- Three years in the mobile Gaming Industry
- Based in Helsinki, Finland - Rovio

3. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
This presentation:
- Best practices we use at Rovio to optimise creatives on Google Ads
- What to keep in mind, and creative learnings we get from Google Ads
- How to approach ad groups and testing creative themes.

4. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
- Identify your best performing placements, where
are you finding the most performance?
- Admob, display, youtube, Google search
- Like any other network, each audience behaves in
a unique way, learn and work towards influencing
performance and spend in each placement
- What role do different creative formats play in
different inventory. Catering creatives
Google’s Networks and Inventory - Where is the value?

5. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
- Who is your audience? Are you specifically
targeting puzzle players or genre enthusiasts?
- Meta vs. Core: Do your creatives fall within the
core gameplay focus, or narrative and picker-style
destruction genre?
- Creative traits: Does your creative portfolio contain
a mix of both animated vs. static creatives?
Audience-focused ad groups - (Ideally) find similar variant and working themes

6. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
- Use orientations and lengths you know perform the
best by game otherwise and be careful about shifting
the subnetwork spend.
- “Adgroup A” usually give us more spend towards
admob but if you put non-theme or format-orientation
related creative, it could shift more spend to youtube
or play inventory.
- If you upload a new Adgroup X and see the inventory
spend, you will have a more controlled environment to
see which video drove spend where exactly
Where do you test? inside or outside your evergreen adgroup?

7. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
How do you test and optimise without absolute visibility?
- If you don’t have post install visibility, at the end of the day, spend is a good indicator of
a good ads. Wait until that (or your preferred) identified metric does not oscillate, look at
the evolution of the metrics throughout the 7-14 days of creative evaluation.
- Once data is matured, remove the lowest performance assets that adgroup. If this is a
testing adgroup, move the best performers to your evergreen adgroup (Probably the one
that has same share of spend towards the subnetworks so you keep the homogeneity)

8. Rovio © 2020 Confidential
Creative volume, performance categories upload frequency, declining performance?
- Google provides a large volume of creatives you can upload to each adgroup, but
more is not neccesarily more - questions you need to ask is does your scale permit
quick enough learnings and conversions per creative to optimise efficiently?
- This will also affect upload frequency: Generally 1-2 weeks
- Performance grouping: Take this with a grain of salt, identify your metrics and
benchmark the same creatives across different networks. Generally we see the same
creatives performing, but this isn’t always the case

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What can we learn from Universal App Campaigns?
- Different creatives perform on different networks, apply learnings to UAC and vice versa,
apply learnings from adwords to other networks.
- Be in close touch with your account manager and support, he/she will guide you through
the issues that may plague campaigns, or explain certain phenomena that occur

10. Thank you! Questions?