The Anatomy of a High-Performing UGC Ad

ugc is user generated content that's basically an ad you can make with your iPhone the main traits with ugc is it doesn't look like a not even though it is let's break down the the key ingredients of a top performing app with my experience there will be like four main ones the first one is the hook first three seconds that's where you catch the attention second one elements are you using a green screen what kind of footage are you using are you using C options subtitles anything circled little sound effects third one psychological resonance what kind of emotions the ad generates when you watch it and that one is very very important especially when you want to compare like a normal performing ad to a top performing ad obviously you cannot always have high emotions with every ad sometimes just some psychological arguments can be enough to generate strong intention the last one they're called to action if Hook is the most

important part have you seen where it's just the footage is all the same but the first three seconds you just change it up and it made a key difference absolutely whenever you create ads especially ugc ads UC see user generated content ads that's easy to do you want to try different hooks so when you create your ad you have the way I shape things is you have the the hook the intro development and call to action I like to have different hooks but these hooks can use the same development and same call to action sometimes people can use different call to actions as well if they want to but the hooks for sure good idea to test it what type of hooks work the best question and solution kind of hook so for example does your inbox look like this so you show full inbox well then listen to my free act question solution works all the time the second one let's say we're using iOS something like iPhone hack part one or iPhone hack

they don't want you to know about then it has a little bit more of curiosity this one would be good for an app that helps you save on battery and stuff like that then you can say hey this app Apple doesn't want you to know about it take a take a peek listen to that and then people boom you catch your attention third one you show right away how to solve your problem and this is how you solve this problem for example hey this is how you organize your couple's life another one how to that's easy fifth one POV P this one is still very trendy it's like point of view I'm doing this or POV for example you're having problem managing your uh calendar with your girlfriend and then boom you go on with explaining things so POV Works organically as well as with ads this one is really good too these are the sign that you might need to get a nap for meditation because you're too stressed out so this thing is really powerful and

people always look out for do I have these symptoms seven one if you are X then listen up so if you are tired of not sleeping well then Len up I've got a free act for you this is really good last one I've seen it working with ads four reasons why four reason why I love this app and then you go on with explaining the kind of benefits and so on you want to talk about the versus this is trendy two the screen is split on two so on top you have the couple arguing and on the bottom they're having a good time same people just different situation and then you're like okay these people are not using KLA these people are using C KLA and then for the rest of the ad you can go on and explain why it makes their life easier do you want me to pull up any of the examples shpd is a package tracking app how it works oh I think we I cannot hear the um yeah sorry I'm not sure if the listeners can listen but the beautiful thing is we

having subtitles here yep the thing I like about it is you're leading with something that people are used to seeing and then leading with like hey here's the app the reason why I I like this one is it doesn't feel like an ad the reason why this video is working so well to my opinion is because we're using the the angle of the Porsche Pirates the Porsche Pirates are like people who are stealing Amazon packages and stuff like that is very trendy nowadays when we go with the hook this footage marked the last time when we're hit by a Porsche P every words there are important this footage when people when someone sees this footage that looks like something more intimate more like hey what's going on plus the video that accompass that it is a footage is it it is it's actually like a camera 80% of Americans are doing online sh shopping so obviously it's something that is bothering everyone so because of these little elements little

little things it catches the attention I changed my mom's name on iPhone and she was like my mean my neighbor for a little bit we staged the whole thing but it does look like a a genuine tip in then so as for elements we have here we have the captions we have the subtitles we have screen records we have content transform via AI That's those are the elements as as well as package tracking I love that you're searching for best package tracking and then Boom showing the screenshot of shiity brilliant move I took a stock photo from someone who was robbing a bank I think that was a photo was showing and I took like a screen record a screenshot of a video where you can see some Amazon packages I have no skills in editing it's just all because of AI that I can do these magical things and when we talk about these kind of like elements as well I it works with all these shippers everything Amazon Walmart Etc so I made sure that

we had the call to action I don't know if we have seen it yet but check this out it's coming soon okay because now I know works for me hope it helps it's not downloaded it's like hey it works for me I hope it helps I'm just being genuine here I just want to give you a nice tip and boom which platform would you pick Tik Tok Instagram or YouTube to start off with for video ads I would say maybe meta because meta regroups Facebook ads and Instagram ads still like the platform that's most used and that's where you get the complete tools as well compared to Tik Tok or Google could work too but a prefer app install campaign on Google th% because it's such a blackbox ugc when you're doing ugc and UAC Universal app campaigns on Google I've seen vertical videos perform pretty well so throw your reels throw your Tik Tok videos onto Google ad platform typically we've seen the the textle ads you know

the text Bas ad the headlines and descriptions get the most Impressions but the times where video and images beat it is when you have a vertical video like this too one thing that's really cool with Google ad campaign and that's only strictly for app installs you can see where your placements because you can see oh okay on display and on YouTube my cost requisition is quite good on my creative so that means something's going do you think testing the ad as a normal video like organic on Tik Tok and monitoring the reaction is a good way of testing whether the ad will perform well what works in organically doesn't necessarily means it's going to work for ads because it depends always of the objective right but if your post is about your your app itself and not sells it go ahead and and do that Daniel says how big of a budget should I have available as a newbie before jumping into ads at least 20 $30 a day for a

start is enough for you to get result but if your app is in B2B for example you might not get a lot of traffic but the one traffic you will get might make a big difference but if you're like normal app I would say and you it's about it's about volume and so on 20 $30 a day would yeah repa says how is it possible to be profitable with ads if you charge $30 a year at 3% conversion rate and you get installs for less than 90 cents and I never see installs for less than a dollar there's two things you can do try to get that conversion rate higher the other thing you can do is think about mixed model marketing George says should I post a ugc video on my app account or their creator account mentioning the app I don't think there's a big difference between the two I've tested both because you can do something with Tik Tok ads and also with Instagram ads nowadays called like the partnership ads or spark ads whatever platform

you're using instead of using your page or your app is going to use a Content creators page so it it looks less like an ad Marcel says when you are testing various ad creatives at the metrics level are you focused on Impressions cpcs installs whenever you start a a campaign the first metric I look at the CTR and the cosper click or aka the cosper tap once you see some numbers it moves but not that much so if you see that your cost per tab for example is 90 cents and you need to have for example just like our previous example a cper install for one daughter you might have to do something with the creative because it's going to be hard to get there so if you have a high CTR that means people are engaged with your ad you're getting there if you have a low cost per click that also means people are engaged with your app then look at it downloads and give it a shot at first if you have a okay cost per download but

you see that it keeps on decreasing you're good to go so start with that and then look at or subscription if you event the event you choose in your ad campaign is subscription look at that too let's say you're getting a CTR for $2 what percentage of those clicks lead to an install do you have a rough number in your head when you want to have a good CTR on your on your campaign that will stay between like one and 4% most of the time uh sometimes if you have an app that's more Niche and that's just like Target specific people yeah maybe your cper TAP might stay in the $1 area but try to stay under the the $1 I want to get into the best campaign structure to start testing these new ad creatives I'm a big fan of app install campaign at first of let's say you start from scratch you're on meta ads and the algorithm has no data at all I would start with app install campaign because the way it works with advertising

platforms they need events if they don't have events the algorithm cannot aim anywhere so if you don't know how many subscriptions you might likely get or so on the more closer to the final conversion the the less events you get so if you start from scratch you want to give the algorithm as much as possible data so I would start with app install campaigns maybe and then move up to subscription based campaign and you can test both in the same times as well when it comes to objective campaign now in your app install campaign what I suggest you to test at first right away very simple it's audiences and creatives you create one campaign Advantage Plus on meta with automated targeting and then you upload two different creatives and then you use the two same different creatives for a different audience maybe a broaden audience with no targeting tools at all H targeting details at all that could be something the best

structure for sure and when it comes to budget again there's no right answer for that but I would say if you don't have at least $500 to test in a few weeks it might not be enough for you to get thata and know what's up for sure but one thing if you're like hey my hat is $2 per tap and I'm going to let it run at the end until the end of $500 maybe it's Gonna Change that's not probably not going to change so you want to act quick but also you don't want to jump to conclusion too early it's like the sweet spot of things $500 when you're testing out these different audiences they're two different ad groups in the same campaign or different campaigns if it's an Advantage Plus audience for example because of the technicalities of things you cannot have one campaign it has to be like two campaigns but normally I would suggest to keep it under one campaign if possible but if you if you run IOS and Android you have no choice

anyway to have like two different campaigns at first how often should you be testing out new creatives we try to do once a week but do you have a Cadence that you like depends of the budget but once a week once every two weeks Lucas says Hey both is it necessary to set up Facebook SDK to report ads results back to meta or can you simply run it without it yeah you do Lucas if you want Facebook to be intelligent if you want Facebook to look for more people that are likely to install your app you definitely need the Facebook SDK how do you determine top performers on Tik toac ad Library you can see a little filter where you can choose app install campaigns and you know for sure you're watching ads about people looking for either app installs or subscriptions the other thing you could do is go see your competitors's ads on Facebook ads library and Google ads Library as well the thing that people don't know is I keep only the ads

that are active and I go scroll down and I see which one is the oldest so let's say you have an ad that's been running for eight months I know for a fact that this is a top performer