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How User-Generated Content Ads Increase Installs by 30%

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App Masters16:54Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Cheap phone-filmed videos that fit each platform's native style beat traditional ads, which don't fit the platforms. Because they cost almost nothing to make, teams can tailor them to every channel, once tracking is in place.

Key takeaways

  • Anyone who uses the platform can make user-generated ads. 2:37
    • Christian Eckhardt's designers film on the iPhones they already own, with no agency, studio or models.
  • The best content shows real people using the product and its main features. 4:13
    • For the Volkswagen car-sharing app in Berlin, clips show trips to the forest and carrying big shopping loads.
    • A video that answers the most frequent user questions adds a community angle.
  • Each platform needs its own version of the content. 7:14
    • Formats differ, and so does what organic users share on each platform.
    • Production is so cheap that it makes sense to tune every detail per channel.
  • Attribution tracking has to be in place before any campaign runs. 9:34
    • Customlytics sets up a tool like Adjust or AppsFlyer first, then builds campaigns.
    • Without a tool, stick to Google App campaigns on Android and Apple Search Ads on iOS, because Google and Apple own both the system and the ad platform.
  • Advertisers should use TikTok themselves before they advertise there. 15:53
    • The rule is at least an hour a day for two weeks, then create content that fits what you saw.
    • Old brand videos from other channels should not be reused on TikTok.

The big issue with traditional ads is that they don't fit the platforms.

Christian Eckhardt, Customlytics

Chapter summaries

0:00 What user-generated ads are and who can make them

User-generated ads are cheap, platform-style videos that go up against polished agency productions.

  • User-generated ads take on expensive agency videos. 0:21
    • The content is made like a normal user's post, then used as an ad.
    • The comparison is with agency videos that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
    • Agency videos are highly produced, 4K and beautiful.
    • The question is how the cheap clips outperform them.
  • Marketers must use a platform before they can make ads for it. 3:00
    • Nobody runs good ads on a channel they don't use themselves.
    • This applies to the marketing manager and to the designer who builds the ads.
    • Meeting that bar already makes you a user, so you can generate content.
    • Eckhardt calls content creation the easiest part, not the hardest.

4:13 What to film and where it runs

The content starts from the product's strongest features and looks like a normal post on the platform.

  • Film the features most likely to resonate with the target audience. 4:13
    • List the USPs, then film yourself using the product to show them.
    • The choice of features shifts with who the target audience is.
    • The examples come from Customlytics' case study for the electric car-sharing app We Share.
  • Start with new-user acquisition, then branch out. 5:50
    • The first ads, including the FAQ video, targeted new users.
    • There are now many more versions aimed at other sub-audiences.
    • Eckhardt: from there you can go into many different places.
  • The ads look like ordinary social posts and run on TikTok. 6:33
    • They use text overlays, like clips seen on Instagram or TikTok.
    • Often it is just someone holding a phone and talking through the product.
    • All the case-study examples ran on the TikTok channel.

8:27 Tracking comes before TikTok campaigns

Reliable tracking is the base of every paid channel, and new channels come only after the main ones are used up.

  • Tracking-first is a habit learned from untracked paid campaigns. 8:52
    • Eckhardt and his co-founder ran paid for apps in Berlin about ten years ago, before mobile attribution really existed.
    • That spend was very inefficient.
    • The experience shaped the company: its technical setup is closer to its core than the advertising.
    • Apps barely existed back then, so there were no proper tools.
  • TikTok attribution still works the traditional way. 10:00
    • You put a tracking link from the attribution provider behind the campaign.
    • Tracking runs server side.
    • Eckhardt says the whole industry is now moving to SKAdNetwork-style attribution.
    • The host notes that AppsFlyer now has a free plan, so small teams can start without paying.
  • Exhaust the main channels before adding a new one. 12:23
    • A "can we run a new channel?" request is the tip of an iceberg.
    • Below the surface sit tasks like fixing tracking and trying new creatives.
    • Spend grows on Apple and Google anyway, so a paid tool becomes affordable later.
    • The host starts clients on Google, and on iOS sometimes uses Firebase attribution.

13:54 Best practices for TikTok beginners

New TikTok advertisers need data on the whole funnel and content made for the platform.

  • Track events further down the funnel, not just installs. 14:32
    • Without install tracking, optimizing campaigns is very hard.
    • The same holds for later events.
    • Eckhardt repeats it on purpose: tracking and data is key.
  • Recycled brand videos waste the budget. 15:08
    • A funny brand video made ten years ago may seem fine to upload.
    • His verdict: you might as well give the money to charity, a better investment.
    • The two-week habit of using TikTok yourself, even if you hate it, is what lets you make content that fits.

In the growth library

Christian Eckhardt, CEO and Co-Founder of Customlytics, a mobile technology and marketing consultancy in Europe. Shows how to make low-cost user-generated style video ads for TikTok, set up attribution first, and prepare before spending on a new channel. The case behind it is a Volkswagen car sharing app (WeShare) where user-generated ads lifted CTR 25%, impression-to-install conversion 282% and installs 30%.

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

Transcript489 lines
0:00

what is up that nation it is your boy steve p young founder of appmasters.com the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and more importantly those revenues i want to thank you for joining me week in and week out every friday morning at 9am and today we're gonna talk about a couple of different things i'm super excited to learn alongside with you it's ugc content so all that means is user generated content and using that content as ads and then i want to talk about how that's performing as opposed to hiring a big agency and paying tens of thousands of dollars for them to create a highly produced one 4k beautiful videos and all that stuff how are they perform outperforming those highly produced ones secondly i want to talk about take talk ads and lastly talk about push notifications i think it's a great way to bring users back and then my guest has some great case

0:51

studies on how they've been able to help clients with some cool features with push notifications that i actually didn't know about that's why i love doing the show i get to learn alongside with you and joining me today is christian eckhart he is the ceo and founder of custom lytics there he is let me bring both of us ah i'm screwing up everything there he is he is the ceo and co-founder of custom lytics the leading full stack mobile technology and marketing consultancy in europe christian welcome to the show how you doing my friend welcome hey how are you here's your beautiful website here too thank you yeah thanks so much for having me steve i'm really i'm really excited for the show um let's see if i can uh if i can cope with your if your dad jokes um and yeah we'd love to uh love to describe all things mobile because this is what we well i mean this is what we've been doing for our entire

1:47

professional lives at least so uh yeah really looking forward to that same here you know i think we can talk a lot of shop we both have local app marketing agencies so there's a lot that we can share together all right i want to say hi to a few people in the comments we've got yash we've got rassi how's it going man fam friday's with that masters description just so you don't you know all the acronyms out there and ram you launched a new app in two weeks that's awesome man sup grow cool notice that you just did an update so congrats to that all right so christian let's start off with this i mean we talked about this but ugc user generated content like i guess let's before we get into the case study how do we even get started with user generated content because i feel like the hardest part is getting the actual users or maybe it's somebody on your team to create this content yeah that's actually the good part i

2:39

would i would uh actually a good point which is not very controversial i would say the exact opposite it's actually the easiest part to get started on user-generated content so what we so i mean if you want to do successful marketing on literally any of the modern uh digital uh social channels you have to be a user anyways to understand it this you know you will never be good at doing you know running ads there running marketing there if you're not using the platform yourself as the marketing manager or as the designer who designs the ads for it um and if you know that criteria is met then you're a user and that also means you will be able to generate content um and that's exactly what it's all about um so actually that's the that's the beauty or at least that's how we always see that's the beauty of user generated content is that anybody can do them you don't need an agency you don't need your

3:35

crazy nice expensive studio to shoot it you don't need you know models and all those kind of things um for us it's literally it's our designers um starting starting to use the um you know the smartphones that they have anyways um we film you know the stuff on on iphones which is i mean as we all know quite decent cameras anyways um so yeah it's actually quite easy no i like it is there a template that you guys have in terms of hey here's the flow here's the storyboard or it's just literally like what are the top two three features what's the template that you guys tend to follow yeah it's along the lines of what you already said um we think about what would be you know our like like you said what are the usps what are the features that we think will resonate the most with the audience of course also and always slightly uh depending on who's actually your target audience um and then you go

4:30

out and essentially you film you know yourself using the product showing the features that's what it's all about um so in the in the case study that we will maybe a later look at with one of our clients we share it's an electric car sharing uh app from volkswagen here in berlin and um exactly this one and there the content is essentially all about what you can do with the cars so you know going out to the green um all the nice forests here in berlin uh you know shopping big stuff that would be super annoying to carry in public transport um yeah and then of course this is the starting point and then you can do so much more with it what you can see in the middle here is the uh the infamous faq so you can even you know combine it with some community work even and you in this case we started to collect the the most frequent questions um and then you know we answer them in a nice video so yeah

5:27

endless possibilities i want to talk about this middle one because i think this is the one as i was reading through this case i recommend you guys go in there so all you got to do is go to custom lytics and then go to learn and then you can go to case studies and find it same there but was this targeted to new users that haven't heard about we share too like how are you using this particular ad and for we share yeah in this case it was um however there were also then other um variants of it where we you know there was by that by that time uh so but by this time by now we do have many more uh versions of it that also have different other you know sub targets or some audiences that we try to um that we try to get with it in the beginning we started with the obvious one which was more the user acquisition uh new users kind of uh thing but um yeah so this was the starting point then you know from there you can you can go

6:24

into many different places all right now that you have this user generated content looks really cool right it's the same things that we might be seeing on instagram on ticktalk with some of the texts up here right here and honestly it is literally like that we for certain clients too it's literally like somebody taking the phone and be like hey guys and talking through it and be like hey this is how we do this and that but talk to me about where you run these ads then what's been the most best performing network yeah so um the particular examples here are all from tiktok so we are running them on on the tick tock channel which i think yeah i don't have to explain so much about i guess people in the audience will know about it or have heard about it um what i want to say here though now that you're asking for it is that it's very important that we so the approach is not to take the exact same content and even if it is user

7:23

generated and put it on all the different platforms it's really about us you know thinking thinking about the specialties of every platform sometimes it's the format sometimes it's just because the stuff that your friends and other uh organic users of the platform are sharing might be different across patrons and then we would we would go there and try to make it as fitting as possible with the platform because that is that's what it's all about i think we've arrived at a point where we're using all these new um social networks and the big issue with traditional ads is that they don't fit the platforms um so if we you know if we if we accept this and start working on on on content that is actually fitting the platform then why not go all in and really think twice or maybe three times about what is the even the the nitty-gritty detail stuff that's different across the platforms and then have it produced in the

8:19

in in the perfect way because like we said production costs for these are insanely low so yeah yeah just get get out and do it all right so with tick tock what about the attribution how do we make sure that tick tock is a high performing channel are you doing anything from attribution standpoint yeah so um although we kind of uh we didn't uh start with this topic but actually the technical infrastructure is even i would say more our dna or the core of our company than the the pure advertising is this is where we're coming from uh the the backstory to that is that by um my co-founder and i um we were working at the level hero before starting the company um here in berlin already together and we started in a time when mobile attribution didn't exist really because apps barely existed by the time and we were doing paid for the apps there and we've realized that it was super inefficient because we didn't have

9:16

any proper tracking and that was like i don't know 10 years ago now um and this point at this realization has kind of you know influenced us so much that we then even later on started the company with this we're very focused on all you know every client that comes in we would first look at the tracking and we will first make sure that everything's set up there that they have an mmp distribution tracking tool like adjuster apps flyer in place and then redo any campaigns not the other way around um and that also of course holds true for ticktock um so tick tock right now is um still using attribution on that's done on the attribution provider side although it's server side but yeah so you do have tracking links with server-side tracking though but um it's kind of almost a traditional setup i have to say these days um because everybody's now moving to save attributing and nana but for now it's still the traditional

10:17

uh scenario you create an adjust or abstract tracking link and um put it behind the campaigns and then yeah hey you know my audience sometimes they may not be able to afford the i know i have flyers got a free plan now so for those who are just like starting out absolutely can you get started for free i believe just that's why i love the audience they told me about it i was like i didn't know that but for those have you ever tried the ios especially on ios side of things like there's a campaign tracking i think even google has their utm the underscore campaign have you done anything with that being like all right if you don't have any attribution here's how we're gonna do it yes we have um however our conclusion after trying many different things and i guess also things that google facebook didn't really like to see our conclusion is that if you for whatever reason if you don't have a an attribution tracking tool or you

11:14

cannot afford one then you should stick to the channels that are tracked automatically because um the owner of the advertising channel is also the operator of the operating system as in its apple or google so without tracking our recommendation would be google app campaigns on android works without any additional tracking of course because they own both the you know the operating system and the advertising platform and the network search as its search apps uh on ios i mean it searches um so this is what we would stick to if you um if you cannot afford or don't want to go down the route of an attribution tracking tool and then also realistically you can do a lot on these channels and by that time you will also naturally already spend quite a bit and then it's like you know then you will be able to afford it so yeah i love what you said that christian okay that's what i love doing what i do

12:12

because i've been recommending that to most of my clients i'm like hey you know google for google and sometimes we're starting to do google for ios using firebase attribution so that's going okay yeah so that's the way and round but like what we've been saying is start with apple search ads start with google ads kind of just what you said and then move on to the other thing because everybody wants to do so many things at once because they hear the nice the latest buzzword like what about this what about that and it's like dude you know have you exhausted these primary channels is it do you have that approach to or yeah what would you say yeah no it's the same okay it's always this the update i don't know where i saw this i have to look it up um it was a my linkedin feed i forgot who who posted this um actually nice new meme you know this tip of the iceberg internet meme where there's something on top of the

12:59

the tip of the iceberg and everything below the water and the meme was that um the tip of the iceberg was the client says uh can we run a new channel and below the ice and below the water it was like 100 things like oh fix the tracking try new creatives so yeah this is pretty much our approach as well um pretty much i like it i'm trying to find the i'm trying to go through your linkedin see if you've you've liked it or something i wouldn't i wouldn't i would find it i i i wouldn't think i think i know i know who posted it so maybe i can okay i found it i will send you the link cool hey i think it's we are live okay cool luke says has it started yet i've gotten the title screen still you might try to refresh it luke i think it's working so you guys let us know in the comments if it's working but i i see it live and recording hey christian one thing i want to mention is with tick-tock ads anything

13:58

like best practice wise for newbie new beginner out there like i'm completely new on this i've i've heard a lot of different people saying tick tock tick tock is working really well especially with facebook having its issues with idfa and all that stuff any best practices that we should know with tick-tock ads uh there are several things to keep in mind i'm thinking about what we can talk about that's not too uh boring well i mean the first and obvious one which we already kind of discussed is yeah um get an attribution tracking in place of whatever uh shape or form and make sure that your campaigns are tracked um if you don't um if you don't track even you know basic stuff like the installed and uh yeah obviously you will have a very hard time optimizing your campaigns uh the same holds true for um events that are further down the funnel um but this is a camera i keep repeating myself i say this all the time but the

14:57

tracking is tracking and data is key so that's of course a very important one um the second top tip may be also obvious at this point but i will i will happily talk about it again is don't go to tick tock with the apps that you're using in other channels like don't yes i know you can upload whatever funny brand video that you have flying around that was produced 10 years ago and this you think is still okay um but no then you can also um i don't know give the money to some like uh charity that's a better investment then so uh yeah don't do that um which i guess leads us to the third point um which is try to when you start with tick tock try to really get into it you use it like i would i would say golden rule before you do any ads on tick tock even if it's painful for yourself because you hate it use the product for two weeks in a row every day at least an hour if you can get through this then

16:09

you and you still want to do tick-tock ads but um then you will have a decent understanding of the content that you will see there and then after two weeks try to come up with content that you think fits in there and then i think you'll be doing quite all right all right guys we had some technical problems with this live stream so that was part one of the live stream and use the link up top or down below to see part two where we're gonna break down best practices for tick-tock targeting push notifications how to properly respond to app store reviews and the impact it makes on your app engagement so definitely join us for part two all right i'll see you on the next video