🧠 MVP UA template AXON: How to set up your Applovin for Success by Matej Lancaric

I will show you the actual Axon dashboard. So, let's go in here. So, we have reporting, we have campaign list and whatnot, and media gallery. So, see, I mean, I have here 60-second long video. We can We can check it out here.
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Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensic. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, then listen up. Potensic is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry, game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potensic has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives. Plus, they've partnered with playable maker. Ding ding. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually turn them into playable ads or even

video. Proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative, publishers are getting a higher CPMs. Everyone wins. Head to potentials.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potentials for sponsoring this episode. Hello everybody. It's Mate Loncaric and today we're going to talk about AppLovin aka Axon by AppLovin. I already shared two episodes where I talked about Facebook and Google and how to set up your campaigns and your first campaigns. They're very popular. Today we're going to talk about AppLovin. So, it is one of the best channels out there. So, we definitely need to talk about it. It's It's way different from Facebook or Google or even TikTok. Well, I going to talk about TikTok as well in the future. Let's dive in. So, today we're going to talk about the tracking setup, the campaign structure, bidding, what do

not, the growth curves and multipliers. Some uh talking about creatives as well and I'm also going to show you the actual dashboard with the reporting, the real real numbers and and everything because I run AppLovin for my game as well and it's working really well. It's one of the biggest channels. Well, it is the biggest channel, especially on iOS. Anyway, so again, no micromanaging, no manual optimization, no It's a beast and you know, it really matters like what do you feed into the beast and so we are going to talk about the the events, number of events and then the creatives. It actually works. So, again, first things first. You need the first couple of days, you need to think about different things. Budget, signals, and creatives. So, how much money do you need to spend

from the get-go? Uh I think there are different kind of approaches. Usually, people recommend starting with $1,000 per day. I usually go against all the best practices and try things on my own. I actually started this campaign for my game with 250 per day. Now, I'm on 1,250 per day. Slowly growing. Obviously, it's my own money, so I'm kind of thinking about the cash flow and But, ideal scenario is you start with 500 per day and then you go from there. Both kind of platforms, iOS versus Android. You need to have clear MMP signals. So, if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out. And I I saw this with one of my apps because I was seeing exceptionally high ROAS numbers on AppLovin and in Singular as well. But, instead of sending a real

subscriptions, I was actually sending free trials with revenue, which obviously is wrong. And AppLovin doesn't really have any idea if this is wrong or not, but because you just set it up like that. And especially important for AppLovin, you need playables. Really really playables and kind of using them as a playable end card. Which postbacks to use and what to do? It's not that complicated. Doesn't matter which MMP you have, Singular, Adjust, AppsFlyer. It's optimized on your data. So, you go and do install and purchase and add impression, pretty much. If you if you want to do a tutorial complete, fine. Or if you have a if you have an if you have an app, you do subscription as well. AppLovin is suitable also for apps and it's working really well for one of my apps. Better than Facebook and Google combined. They should uh you should check it out. So, IAP and in-app ads. But,

since you are kind of thinking about ads and doing blended ROAS, it means you have MAX as mediation. So, in here you don't tick both in-app purchases and in-app ads and MMP because you're going to get double count events, like you see here. Cuz this is where it went definitely wrong. And if you see 28 purchases, but only 80 cents in-app revenue, I think this is clearly wrong. So, I'm going to show you how to do it properly in in Singular. Then, you start a campaign and for example, you start a campaign on Facebook, you start a campaign on on Google or any other channel, you and especially I do, as you heard in one of the one of the episodes before, geo buckets pretty much. So, you have one US, you have one tier one, you have US plus tier one, doesn't matter, depends on you. Then, you have rest of the world and whatnot. Here it looks differently. So, you do

worldwide campaign and then you split by the attribution window and then platform. That's it. Oh, well, okay, okay, okay. And then then it's either blended ROAS, ad ROAS, or IAP ROAS. So, you have uh different options. But, the important part is since you are targeting pretty much the whole world, you need to have at least a little bit of a control. You can do geo Well, you can do budget by geo, which is pretty interesting because the minimum is $10 and then if you do the whole world, you suddenly have 2,300 per day as per number of campaigns uh number of you can you can target. But anyway, the important part here is geo level budget doesn't work here, but you do campaign level budget and an important part here, you do targets by geo. So, let's say day 28 target is 120%

on your end overall, but you want more traffic from US, Korea, or Germany, or UK, or whatever, you decrease the the target by 10-20%. In order to get more traffic in these countries. If you want to get just eliminate India, Brazil, whatever whatever you want to do, put higher targets there. Well, you either get better quality or you will not get almost any traffic. In regards to actual ROAS campaigns and kind of warm-up period that we had before because some different channels and in the past, pretty much here as well, you had to do day 7 ROAS campaign or even CPA campaign way, way before. It's not needed anymore. You got so you go straight to day 7 or day 28 ROAS. I did day 28 way because I see different and better results on day 28

campaigns and attribution window. And I'm doing blended ROAS. Some of the some of the companies I work with do day 28 ad ROAS campaigns works like a charm. If you don't have ads, well, IAP ROAS it is for you. And when setting up the the actual target for your campaigns, don't go straight into what the real target is, but again, it's a little bit below that. We have this in on every channel, obviously, here as well. Just be a little bit more competitive. Don't go straight to 120% or even the best mistakes or biggest mistakes I've seen I want to see 300% rows on day seven. Good luck with that, obviously. So, be realistic and be slightly below the actual target to give a little bit of room and space to algo to get you some players. Then we have the two biggest questions between

day seven rows or day 28 rows. Well, the thing is like day 28 rows should bring you higher quality users and it's optimizing for day 28, obviously. So, you have more room or more data to come in and eventually the long-term cohorts are getting better with with But, I mean, this doesn't take into consideration, let's say, your cash flow situation or whatnot. Day seven is usually better in terms of the in terms of the short-term rows numbers, but then you kind of based on these different days, you can calculate the multiples or multipliers between day zero, day three, day seven until day 60 or 90. It depends on your actual goals. If you are long-term If you have Let's let's call it that. If your payback period is longer than

30, 60, 90 days, it makes sense for you to to optimize for day 28 up attribution window and day 28 campaign. If you actually have let's say 30 days payback period and you are aiming to get 100% on day 30, the most probably better option here would be the day seven. Cuz you get shorter cycle and more data in short period of time. The two most discussed things recently in our Slack channel and even even elsewhere because this option wasn't there before or well, it was before but it was a little bit different. So, you had CPI billing and that was only thing how to kind of influence the level of spend per day. This changed and now you have two options. CPM billing which kind of spends evenly the budget throughout the

day, which is exactly what you want. Then there is CPI billing which spends the budget as quickly as possible. So, then what happened in the past was like, hey, your campaign is capped because we spent your budget in two two hours pretty much. This doesn't happen anymore with CPM billing. So, I think it's very it's better for start. Then then you go for CPI billing eventually when you have all the all the best creatives in tested on Apple. I mean and then you just go there for for you just go there with only the best performing with videos and create and playables and the combinations between these so you can leverage the the CPI billing and scale with this aggressively. So, this is what I mentioned with goal by country because here you go you have one one kind of campaign and instead of multiple campaigns everything is in here. So, you control this

with the goal by country and targets by country. So, that was kind of like the actual setup but the setup again is pretty simple. Nothing really complicated. You just go, click. I can show you how it's done. And that's it but the most important part is now where we are going to the creative plan. You can't compete without playables. I mean, ideally world-class playable strategy but again playables are very very important. Where to start? Because people are usually like, we don't have creatives for play for AppLovin. Well, doesn't matter. Just get all your videos from Facebook, TikTok, Google, whatever. Put all of them, not only top ones. And even, I mean, even if you do the cinematic trailers, just put everything that you have in here. But connect it to the playables. Which means like 80 to 90% of spend goes to playables, and it's obviously converting better. Definitely then

better than the static end card, which is now a little bit automated, but it's interactive end card with one click. But the important part is you need to still refresh the creatives and then produce new playables. Because new playables per month for top-grossing games more than 60. It's insane. But not impossible. Again, there are different tools that you can that can help with these uh production. The important part on the video side is also try to optimize for long-form videos, pretty much anything between 30 to 60 seconds. Even best practices from AppLovin said 45, 47, 51 until 59 kind of uh second or the the length is ideal. And I'm trying to get definitely longer videos there. If you have a hook or not, doesn't matter too much here. Should be kind of important you know, on the other

channels, but here is not as important since the the user or the player needs to watch the video for at least 30 seconds. Be sure that you are kind of optimizing the playables for 10 plus clicks, ideally more, because the the duration correlates with the success. Or the kind of let's call it the the ratio to finish the the playable as well, but still again multiple clicks in here. Well, there is media tab which I'm going to show you where you just upload all all the stuff and then mix and match pretty much. The best practices say 10 videos, 10 playables and 10 it's end cards per kind of set and let algorithm find the winners. It's hard to say if this is the correct approach. What I do usually it's kind of bundle these by theme or iterations. So let's say I will show you how how it's done. You have one video with five iterations and then you kind of connect a playable concept and it can be also

with iterations. So with 10 can you have you can have five videos and five five playables, but it's still one concept and one concept. Which is very important. Then as soon as you see something's working push it. Push it, don't hold back. Increasing budgets like 30 50% but also decreasing budgets by 30 50% if it doesn't work. Again, needs a little bit of learning period, but still it's not like on Facebook or Google you do always 20% increase once or twice a day a week. Here if something works, go [snorts] for it. Go for it and let's see. Then you monitor for a couple of days and you see. If you see the campaign is not performing well, don't just pause it. It just slightly increase the ROAS targets instead of pausing because then naturally the the algorithm will bid and adjust the bid accordingly. So

there are few things that even I see on myself that I'm I want wanted to do when I saw the campaign wasn't working really well or was working a little bit worse than I was expecting. Don't touch it too often even in the The few days just set it and come back in 3 days. It might look okay, as in my case, or it might look really bad, as I've seen in different cases. Please, don't touch the campaign too often. Repurpose all your best-performing videos, and even the ones that fatigue, from other channels. Have multiple different creative sets for the start. Start with five, ideally 10, and even more when when you get the chance. Don't scale like a coward. I mean, come on. If you see it, just push it. Let's go. Set the realistic target, because if you do set a greedy target on day one, the campaign is never going to

get out of the learning phase. Call and use the playablemaker.com to play to create playables from templates. I'm running a combination of templates creative templates playables, and um playable from actual game that we built internally. And don't micromanage the geos. Let's bundle them. So, what to actually do day by day? Nah, I think I touched first week with don't touch it too often. After the CPI stabilizes, I think um that's like day four or five. If everything looks good, just sit tight and enjoy the ride. So, don't touch it if everything Yeah, everything looks good. But then, I would say after week, I would start adding adding new creatives and the creative combinations. With pausing, it's always the hit or miss, or the there like two schools of thought. I paused few creatives because they were just getting a lot of budget

and shitty traffic, or well, shitty traffic, not exactly great ROAS. Then, the other thing is people, and especially Apple I mean uh reps, they tell you not to pause anything. even if you click pause, there is a big no-no button or very scarce screens, like don't pause this, it can influence the algorithm. Again, might be true, so be be careful. I'm usually pausing the the creatives at least like a couple times a month. Then, evaluate and scale based on the obviously the the level of spend you have after 2 weeks. If it's working well and you are hitting the goals, go for it. Go for it. So, 2026 AppLovin, it's all about feeding the beast. Go straight to the ROAS campaigns, pick day 7 or day day 28 based on the LTV or kind of based on your casual situation. Start with CPM bidding. Repurpose all the creatives you have from Facebook, Google, TikTok, wherever. And scale if the ROAS targets are met or

if your goals are met, go for it. With winning auction with playables, especially the playables that are longer than the interactive end cards, which is which are couple of clicks. In here, 30 to 60 seconds playables. Okay. That's it, my dear friends and listeners, but I will show you the actual Axon dashboard. So, let's go in here. So, we have reporting, we have campaign list and whatnot and media gallery. So, see, I mean, I have here 60-second long video. We can can check it out here. Thank you very much. Obviously, only feed and then then we have gameplay. So, these are all the videos. So, we have 45 seconds, 59, 48, 45, whatnot and then other different concepts with some other apps as well, but they have 40-second videos, etc. Then, we go to the actual HTML.

Let's say [snorts] we want this only, Robot Breaker, so I can show you. We have puzzle playable, which is obviously a template. We have chat with me, again, a template. Also, carousel, which is, again, a template. Thank you very much. You can just do this. Nobody cares. The puzzle playable works really well. But then, we also have a new playables, which are pretty much game related. This is only yesterday. Let's say it's the last 7 days. So, we have a long one, which is this one, and it's really long, so I'm not going to play this. But again, showcases the the actual game. Okay. And multiple levels. And then we have a short one, which is pretty much the same, just uh just only one fraction or like part of the the long one. It's only the first map. Oh. And you see, this one is in eight

creative sets, seven, eight. This is the one is in 14, even. So, there is a lot of different combinations. So, let's say let's go here, so we see. These are all the creatives that I have, pretty much. So, I have a fixed plane, which is a combination of still out. Again, I told you like I'm trying to do theme kind of creative sets by theme. So, this is a fixed gameplay, a fixed plane video, and here we have a lot of gameplay playable. If we go, for example, into this combination, uh we have all kind of the video iterations from this hanging on the cliff video, and then free playables. So, again, it can be one video concept with different iterations, and then all the playables. But it can also be, uh let's say, this one, which is again, the only feed concept with four videos, and then four playables. But the

playable is still the game playable that I I showed you. Again, so we're matching these diff- these two things by theme. So, that's it. And then it's all billing. Let's see if we do have the package name. This one. We run this and kind of customize the columns. So, we have unique purchase because that's very important. That's the That's the the num- That's the event which is important for the algorithm because you should kind of aim like a 10 unique per day, Let's do day zero. Oh, wait. This is IAP only, but we have total total revenue. This again can be whatever. So, this last week. Let's say last 30 days. So, pretty much see I mean it is working quite well. I mean it's starting spending with 250. It's pretty much after 30 days. It's all almost all across positive. Very small

spend then it starts scaling little bit scaling well scaling growing. 700 per day. Now we're on 1,000 per day and now going to to 1,000 1,200. So, again it is working super super well. Some of these days less than 10, but more more like these great days where we are getting more than or where I'm getting more than 10 15 per day. This is exactly what we want to see. So, pretty much this is it, guys. This is it. Works super well. It kind of requires a lot of kind of love and attention, obviously. I've seen this go wrong multiple times, but it needs kind of time to get somewhere and and the it requires time to kind of learn. And then there were a few questions about kind of how like how how to refresh creatives. Well, I upload

creatives like at least like once or twice a week pretty much all doesn't need to be in a single day. But usually I see a fluctuation when I add new creatives. It takes a day takes a day until it stabilizes. So, be careful. So, that's why I would say if you are adding creatives, let's do it in one or two days all them together because then just going to up the the whole week which you don't want. And then it stabilizes afterwards. That's it. I would add maybe five at the time depends on the budget even five for me for this budget would be quite a lot. So, I I'm kind of adding like three different ad set creative sets and then wait until I have more data. But if you have any questions, if you want any answers as well or how to set up AppLovin campaign, it's there is a MVP UA template pretty much the setup guide in the show notes that I wrote for AppLovin and for everybody. Thank you very much for listening and

see you next time. Bye-bye.