The benefits of an automated campaign setup

This article is the first in a series of articles featuring the most up-to-date best practices and recommendations focusing on automation, conversion schema, creative and measurement which will help you to boost the performance of your App Install Campaigns. Keep an eye out for future articles in the coming weeks.

Earlier this year, we announced Meta Advantage — our portfolio of automated ad products designed to optimize for desired outcomes and sustain improved results. These products are our most advanced ad automation technologies and deliver maximum performance at the lowest cost and effort.

Automated ad products not only improve the performance of your ads, but also save you time from campaign setup through bidding and delivery.

We’re sharing what this investment means for mobile gaming advertisers and how they can benefit from it the most.

How does automation benefit mobile gaming advertisers?

Advantage+ App Campaigns (A+AC) is our new name for Automated App Ads, but the commitment to advanced automation and machine learning technology are still the crux of the product.

A+AC offers the potential for better results over time by reaching more people and making deeper connections, all with less time and effort. 

• 9% median lower cost per action than a manual app install campaign setup.
• 6% median lower cost per install than a manual app install campaign setup.

Can the same results be achieved with manual app campaigns and broad targeting?

Advantage+ App Campaigns have backend advantages for achieving greater performance over manual app ad campaigns. Although you can replicate an Advantage+ App Campaign setup in manual app campaigns, these backend advantages can help the delivery and ranking to give your ads more opportunities to perform:

• Creative exploration algorithm explores more delivery to newly added, and existing under-delivered, creatives to help maximize the full potential of creatives, driving overall campaign performance. This aims to reduce creative fatigue and sustain performance over time. 
• Simplified campaign setup gives greater opportunity for ads to compete in the auction to perform. By using fewer inputs, our systems are better set up to help maximize the potential outcomes you want to drive. We’ve observed reduced fragmented performance and greater conversion opportunities for A+AC vs manual setups.
• Machine learning trained for broader reach means A+AC learns from a model designed for greater opportunity exploration. This can result in broader and more adaptive audience delivery beyond core audiences than manual campaigns. We’ve seen optimal, efficient model learnings and greater reach opportunities when comparing A+AC to manual setups with broad targeting.

Would these advantages work with SKAdNetwork campaigns?

We’ve explored how we can use the benefits of A+AC to reduce null rates on SKAN campaigns and simplify account structure to consolidate signals in order to streamline the learning phase.

We analyzed the performance of 35 SKAdNetwork global gaming split-tests that ran October through to December, 2021. We ran 2 tests: 

• First: comparing A+AC to manual setups across 16 gaming advertisers. 
• Second: attempting to move up the funnel to reduce null rates, utilizing App Installs with App Events vs App Events Optimisation or Value Optimisation across 19 gaming advertisers.

The findings can be viewed in more details in this blog post, summarizing here:

• On SKAdNetwork, Advantage+ App Campaigns can outperform manual app ads in both CPA and CPI.
• On SKAdNetwork, Advantage+ App Campaigns using App Installs with App Events Optimization can outperform using App Event or Value Optimization in both CPA and CPI. It’s worth mentioning that adopting App Installs with App Events Optimization helps advertisers bypass the null conversion threshold of 88 daily installs.

What are the latest features added to A+AC and what is planned for this year?

This year we’ve released a few key features to make sure that advertisers’ business crucial setups used on manual app campaigns can be used in A+AC, while continuing performance improvements.

Through the first half of the year we launched:

• Cross-Business sharing for App Settings – apply app settings (minimum age, location, and custom audience exclusion) to campaigns across business managers. 
• Region/State level reporting – get region and state level reporting if using these targeting options in App Settings.
• New Creative Experience – a new creative experience supports Placement Asset Customization (PAC), Dynamic Language optimization (DLO), carousel format, deep linking and creative combination reporting. 
• 7 Day Click-through Attribution & automatically set attribution lets you apply a 7 day click attribution to A+AC campaigns or you can have an attribution set automatically based on historical data.
• 1 Day View through attribution settings supports 1 Day Click + 1 Day View attribution for mobile app install campaigns on Android and non-SKAN iOS campaigns, including select attribution settings.
• Split Testing Tool expansion – enables Split Testing A+AC on creative, targeting and optimization.

COMING SOON:

• Rollout more reporting options to better inform performance decisions
• Support Playables and Instant Experiences
• Continuing to improve performance

We continue to develop and improve our automation offerings to help power growth for mobile gaming advertisers. Be sure to check out our Advantage+ App Campaign hub to learn more and get more guidance on how to get the most out of your campaigns. 

APPENDIX

• Effective optimization helps improve results by learning what works and adjusting settings automatically across audience, creative, and placement settings. Meta’s internal tests showed that Advantage+ App Campaigns saw a median 6% lower cost per install and a median 9% lower cost per action than a manual app install campaign setup.¹
• Scaling and sustaining performance can be achieved by dynamically testing and delivering high-performing creatives and built-in Advantage+ Placements (formerly Automatic Placements) which helps extend the reach of app ads on more platforms and placements
• Save time and effort with less inputs for campaign creation, bulk upload to automatically create ads from up to 50 images or videos at a time, and a simplified campaign structure to maximize the potential to deliver results you care about and help reduce fragmentation between other campaigns.

¹ Source: Statistical Meta Analysis of 16 A/B global studies comparing SKAdNetwork Advantage+ App Campaigns (formerly Automated App Ad campaigns) and manual app ad campaigns in the gaming vertical during September 2021 and December 2021; cost per action is cost per optimized purchase conversions; Confidence of outperformance for CPI and CPA were with 88% and 89% confidence, respectively.