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Do This Before You Advertise Your Mobile App

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App Masters11:24Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Study what top advertisers already run, including their ads, text and audiences, before you spend a dollar on your own app ads. Their data is public, so it lets you skip costly A/B tests and lower your cost per install.

Key takeaways

  • Ad networks earn the most money while app makers pay for blind tests. 0:24
    • Facebook and Google collect the revenue while creators A/B test ads on small budgets to see what works.
  • Competitors' live ads can be studied for free in the Facebook Ad Library. 1:09
    • You can filter by country, impressions, platform and date range, up to 90 days back.
    • Calm leans on social proof and question hooks. Voodoo repeats a "pro versus noob" format across its games.
  • A paid tool like SocialPeta shows the same ads across many more networks. 4:06
    • It covers AdMob, AppLovin and Pinterest, and shows creative sizes, ad types and each ad's headline and copy.
    • Gaming ads in it range from HTML playables to videos, so you see what each network favors.
  • Audience reports show who engages with a competitor's ads. 7:02
    • A Chrome extension builds a PDF from the public likes and comments on an ad.
    • For Calm, ages 24 to 34 engage most, about 60% are female, and most are in the United States. This may only reflect where Calm advertises.
  • Tighter targeting is what lowers your cost per install. 10:44
    • From his experience, the more granular the targeting, the lower the CPI.

I don't ever like to start with a blank slate. I want to see what people are saying, what kind of language they're using.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Study competitors' live ads in the Facebook Ad Library

Checking what rivals already run on Facebook shows you which ads and words to plan before you pay for any test.

  • Look at competitors' ads before you start any paid campaign. 1:09
    • The library is free, and you search any advertiser by name.
    • Calm is the example because it earns a lot in the app space.
    • The ad types, videos or banners, tell you which creative assets your launch plan needs.
    • Each ad is a ready example of a format that a big advertiser keeps paying for.
  • Ad text is a source of ideas, so save the best ads in one document. 2:16
    • One Calm ad shows a line of text first, then the video plays.
    • Voodoo is a publisher, so one search shows ads for many of its games.
    • Calm copy: Most apps are designed to steal your attention. The Calm app was designed to give it back.
    • Voodoo often uses one of its games to advertise another.
    • He also sorts by most impressions and by active versus inactive ads.

4:06 SocialPeta shows the same ads across many networks

A paid tool widens the view from Facebook and Instagram to every major ad network.

  • SocialPeta ranks the biggest spenders and lets you filter by network and country. 4:06
    • Its top charts list the gaming apps that spend the most, and non-gaming apps too.
    • Pinterest is a network many people ignore, and he finds it strong for health and wellness.
    • He got a trial to try it. The name is pronounced like "peta".
    • The Facebook library only covers Facebook and Instagram, because Meta owns both.
    • He found a few apps himself through Pinterest.

5:42 Reading competitor copy across networks

Competitor ad text shows which words work on each network, so you never start from a blank page.

  • The text view shows the exact words competitors use. 6:12
    • One Calm ad reads hate waking up exhausted, this sleep app is what you've been missing, the same social proof seen on Facebook.
    • Each ad lists its headline, ad text, copy type and where it runs.
    • Each network behaves differently, so compare AdMob with Facebook.

7:02 Turning audience data into a target

Audience data tells you who to target, and the competitor's ads tell you what to show them.

  • Pair a proven ad with the audience that engages with it. 8:01
    • You could target women aged 25 to 34 with an ad Calm already runs a lot.
    • The data comes from public likes and comments, so it shows only people who reacted.
    • It also shows markets Calm is starting to enter, such as Colombia, Brazil and Australia.

8:50 Running the same research on a game

The same steps work for games, starting from a direct competitor.

  • Pick the closest competitor and analyze its ads the same way. 8:55
    • You can also pick a game from the gaming top charts.
    • You can filter by ad type (image, video, carousel, HTML playable) and sort by impressions.
    • Game copy on AdMob includes the most addictive game, the best casual game and the best arcade game, in several languages.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, app marketing agency. Competitor ad research with the free Facebook Ad Library and the paid SocialPeta tool lets app marketers copy proven creatives, copy and audiences before spending on their own tests. The payoff is lower cost per install without paying ad networks to run blind A/B tests.

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript349 lines
0:00

what is up app nation it is steve p young founder of appmasters.com the place you go when you want action-packed content in the app business we helped over 3000 app developers really grow their downloads and increase their revenue and in this video i want to share a few of my favorite tools to make sure that you do not waste any money on your mobile advertising let's face it the real people that are making the big bucks in the mobile advertising space is the ad networks such as facebook and google because we as app creators are spending money a b testing running a test little budget to see what's going to really work for our app and so they're the ones making a lot of money in the app space but with the tools i'm about to share with you you're going to be able to discover the ad creatives that are working for the top advertisers figure out what kind of budget you need to crush your next milestone and finally save you

1:00

a fortune on all your tests so that you don't actually have to spend money on a b testing all right without further ado let's get into the screen share so the first tool i'm going to share with you guys is the facebook ad library like it's a completely free tool you can put in any advertiser and here before i start any type of paid acquisition campaign and a lot of it's going to happen on facebook i always look at what my competitors are doing so here i'm going to pick out calm just because they're one of my favorite apps and why not they're making a lot of money in the app space and so here you can see what types of ads calm is running on facebook you can filter by country you can filter by impressions by most recent last days seven days so forth up to 90 days you can be filtered by the platform so is it instagram audience network messenger what are they doing and then lastly you can sort by

1:53

high to low so let's take a look at that so this self-care app is changing lives they put a lot of social proof great i like that so this seems to be the video ad and you can see what kind of ads they're running are they gonna be videos are they going to be banners what type of content do you need as part of your launch plan what kind of creative assets do you need to put into place and i always love getting some inspiration on the text that you're they're using so we're seeing a lot of different social proof ads in here so most apps are designed to steal your attention the calm app was designed to give it back get started today i love that do your thoughts race at night and i love how there's a text here and then the video plays so you can actually even play it try calm so really really cool right i like that and here's where you get the inspiration for the type of ads that you want to create okay so you can keep going

3:00

through and looking through all of this and i've usually put together a document that says here are the best types of ads that i like so check out somebody else that's not in that's a gaming space so you guys can see both voodoo look they're crushing it let's see what they've got because they're a gaming publisher what you can see is a ton of different ads for all their sorts of games so it looks like a this looks like the new game that they're launching and i love how they do this a lot pro versus noob harder than you think is usually a thing that they do a lot of use another game that they have another game so you because they're a publisher and they got multiple games under them you can see all sorts of things and then again you can sort by the most impressions you can pick the country that you want to do active versus inactive ads and then so forth so really really cool do some analysis do some research figure

3:57

out what your competitors are doing so that you can start preparing your assets now let's go into a paid tool now this is a company that i just heard of called social petta it is peta like a dog pet but here's what i'm in their platform and i got to get a trial for this and so here's what i am in i'm in their top charts right now they're ad intelligence and i get to see all the gaming apps that are spending the most money these are the top publishers in there so again you can start filtering off of who you want to target you can go into non-gaming and take a look as well and what i like about them is unlike facebook obviously they only have facebook and instagram because they own both you can see all the different types of ad networks and what i'm really interested in too is pinterest i think it's a great platform that a lot of people are not paying attention to that if you're in the health and wellness space

4:55

it's a great platform to start advertising i found a few apps through pinterest myself so you can filter off any ad network and then the different countries that you want to do as well so let's go into some of the data so we saw what facebook was presenting to us let's see what social peta shows us as well so let's click on column again so i've got the call map right here and again you can see a little bit more data the creative dimensions here so you can see that they're probably running the square video ad type of thing and then you can see the dimensions here here you can see are they running more images video so if you want to see what their images are you can click on that the date again now you can see a ton more platforms you got admob right here you got facebook ads so very similar to the ad that we saw earlier we got lebron right here so you get to see a ton more platforms than just what they're

5:52

doing on facebook so are they using different types of ads on admob versus facebook what are they doing on other platforms and you get to see it through a paid option like social peta and then you can sort here by last scene or impression again so you can do that the cool things that i want to show you guys is also this there is a text version i don't ever like to start with a blank slate i want to see what people are saying what kind of language they're using and here's what we're finding out again this was a social proof stuff that we saw on facebook earlier look at this hate waking up exhausted this sleep app is what you've been missing so you can do a lot more and you can look at each one you can see the headline the ad text the copy type what are they using where are they advertising what are they saying on the different platforms and there's so much more right like i can scroll this is just the first page

6:49

but then you can just continue scrolling and then you can see from a network perspective what are they doing on the different ad networks because each ad network is going to behave differently here's the cool thing that i really like too is this ad audience so you need to install this chrome extension right here but once you do here is the type of report that you're gonna get on the people that calm is actually targeting within their ads so here's the report that i just pulled i wanted to see the ad audience for calm so this is the pdf that i was able to download that social peta presented to me through the actual plugin so you can see the type of ads which we already saw on the platform as well the impressions the comments so one thing to note is the audience that socialpeda is now presenting to us are the people that have either liked or commented on the post so they're able to pull that data of

7:53

anyone that because it's all public they're able to say what types of people are liking it what types of people are commenting on it and then present you with the audience data so then you can start going in hey 24 to 34 might be my target market because they're the most engaged in a calm ad you got 60 female about 40 female male mostly in the united states a few in the united kingdom and that could just be where calm is advertising more but then you can also find that colombia they're starting to advertise brazil is a great country australia so forth really valuable data and this will allow you to lower your cpi's because then you can focus again you have all the data now right you see what calm what type of ads column is running and now you get to say well maybe i could target 25 to 34 females and then present them with an ad that i know calm is actually showing a lot of all right now i want to show you guys what a

8:53

gaming ad is gonna look like with social pedo we're gonna actually pick the game that we want to see again you can see the top charts under gaming and see and pick those out which one's most comparable to your app but i think most people are just gonna pick a competitor and do an analysis on there so here's what the gaming stuff very similar to what we saw on calm here's all the type of ads what they're running on app lovin so you can see it's more on a it looks like an html playable ad for app eleven whereas this admob is a video whereas app eleven it's another video so now you can just get a sense of what kind of ads they're showing in the different languages here you can sort if you really wanted to to see what type of ad type they're running so image video carousel html playable so forth and then sort by most impressions so very similar to what we saw on calm there's not much to this again you can

9:52

do the add audiences here i didn't pull it for that but you get the same type of data that you got on calm and then you can look under the text to see what kind of text they're using so the diff again like the most addictive game the best casual game this is happening on admob different languages the best arcade game so a lot of cool data in here right guys that was it a lot of great information like i said any time before i'm about to start any type of advertising campaign i always want to do some research first i want to see what other people are doing what's performing well for them the data's already exist out there and so let's use a data-driven approach to running better ads that are going to actually lower your cpi's what i loved about social pedo was that you got to see the audience demographics because that's really really powerful what from my experience to really lower your cpi's your cost per installs

10:48

you're gonna need to focus on your targeting the more granular you get the better your cpi's all right let me know in the comments below what you thought of the video what kind of ads are you going to start creating and as always guys if you want to see any type of content from me feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what kind of content you want to see from me so until next time i'll see you on the next chat if you got anything out of this do me a favor like the video so until next time i'll see you on the next video