State of the Brutally Honest UA by Matej Lancaric

And we have one quote from the the actual survey. These guys are doing 7 million a year across nine channels, but still Facebook and Google doing 80% of the work, which is not really what you want to see. Uh sometimes I see Apploving going anywhere from 60 to 80% of the budget. Again, not ideal scenario, but you should try to diversify and try to have very even budget split. So if one UH channel dies, then you have the replacement. For example, I just had I just had to force Facebook on one one game because on Android it was absolutely terrible.
It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling with Jack.
We're the two and a half gamers. The midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. Mat feeling shaku bringing the insight. We're rocking

those vibes till the early daylight. But hey kua master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Feeling stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jack crafter realms lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Hello. Hello. Welcome to another solo episode. Today I'm going to talk about the state of the brutally honest UA. That's how I named my I would say recent article about uh the UA Iran. um survey on the 20,000 subscribers that I have on my

brutally honest newsletter and I have some interesting findings. Let's let's call it that way. But before we start, this episode is actually brought to you by our dear friends. Vibe, the most intuitive streaming TV ad platform which is designed to maximize ROAS for apps and games of all sizes. It's actually that simple. It's totally self-s served and yes, it actually drives real business results. Join 5,000 brands that already using it. It's maybe it's your your turn. You can check it out uh at vibe.co. It's go there and start your CTV campaigns. Now, let's get back to the episodes. I'm talking about the state of UA and I I actually have a presentation for you. Uh so, yeah, you can see it right

here. Everybody that's uh listening to this on Spotify, go to YouTube or Spotify video. So I call it how to win in 2025. I have numbers from few hundreds UA managers from that survey that I mentioned at the very beginning. It's an interesting stuff. Uh I have this on my Substack as paid article. So you should go there and check all the stats that I have there. This is going to be a teaser. Let's go. How to win this me launcher 11 years in the gaming industry being around I mean we're not getting any younger work with around 52 games soft launched and global launched a lot of stuff small midsize big games doesn't really matter also have a creative team of 10 motion designers people always tell me I should advertise this a little bit more so here we go if you need creatives let me know I do also run playable

ads team as well and have playable maker.com which is the playable ads exporter from video. So you should definitely check that out as well. Okay, let's go to the actual agenda. So I'm going to talk about the CPI ROS benchmarks that I gathered from the previous work channels. What's working, what's not working in the actual creative. We have some benchmarks how how to test different creatives, how to use AI, and what skills you and your UA team should have. So, buckle up. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's also uh created by AI as a lot of different images in this video as well. So, UA actually has changed. No sherlock right in the in the in the survey there's one uh one company that says or

said that one person managing 40 games h I don't think that's possible that much but it definitely changed the whole UA when I joined uh gaming industry 2020 2013 actually we were running hundreds of campaigns on a daily basis these case is way more chilled. I mean it's 80% of this is automated. You don't have to run the microargeting or whatever we called it back in the days. You run few big campaigns on all the channels and that's it. So you have then creative testing and the creative production but it's not again like such a big volume of the campaigns that we had to run in the past. and these 40 games at the same time. Ah, it's quite a lot. So, I hope people just don't tell the truth all the

time. Anyway, so what's actually working right now and for me and I've been saying this for some time the uploavin and we get we got some interesting chatter on LinkedIn about our apploavin episode. I still believe up is the number one channel on iOS. Although Facebook and Tik Tok are really working well, especially on the AM which is aggregated even measurement on Facebook and iOS. Then Tik Tok is also very strong with their own ADC which is advent dedicated campaign. I think I don't really follow all of these acronyms anymore, but it's the same thing as Tik Tok and the Facebook and now Google came up with ICM, which is whatever conversion measurement, but it's all the same thing. It's modeled conversion on iOS and kind of works, especially on

Facebook and Tik Tok. So the these two, but then Applian, it's kind of moving and then pushing everybody from day seven to day 28 optimization, which makes a lot of sense. And if you listen to the episode that we uh we record at Alexis, he also explained why it's a good move and how you can get incremental kind of incrementally better quality users, which again makes sense. more room for data collection and also kind of building higher getting more quality users and also what works now for me besides the all the UI channels and uh it's the AI generated creatives which we talked about million times on the creative trends uh episode and I'm always talking about but besides all of this iOS stuff Google is still the top channel on Android and there is a lot of movement on the rewarded UA challenge as

well. Right. So, who is the new kid on the block? Yes, you guessed it right. Is the rewarded UA kind of all the channels. We were talking about this few years ago and we were talking to Misplay because Misplay are friends of the podcast as well. They were the only player. Now it's like millions of them and you wake up. It's either new mod new model on the AI field or a new rewarded UI network which is fine but eventually it's going to get a little bit different on the on the river UA play where it's going to get consolidated obviously. Anyway, but let's cut back to to the actual UA channels. So it is working but there's always a bot. It's kind of limited scale depends on what kind of channels you are working with. This was

the case where uh you kind of had to combine a lot of smaller rewarded UA channels to kind of reach certain scale. These days you have kind of aldia, you have tier ads, you have misplay obviously uh and adjo and all the some others which are kind of getting bigger and bigger. So the scale becomes less of a problem but there is fraud which is a huge problem and we're actually talking about the fraud problem with with Zeno from tier ads. So if you haven't checked that episode, you should definitely go there and uh and check out like what you need to do in order to kind of limit the fraud. It's few very easy well not easy well for me everything is easy which is uh I'm the UA person but it's like server to server integration and a lot of other stuff that Zeno mentioned that you should definitely check out. Also iOS was quite

a big problem. Now it's changing, thank God. So we can run a lot of iOS UA on the rewarded channels as well. But then the biggest problem was players get rewards and they churn immediately, which then up your LTV predictions. And I've seen a lot of companies struggling with this because of all the prediction models and seeing how much they can earn on first seven days and roas is such a great as you can see such a great number on the roas side for all these UA channels and campaigns on the rewarded UA but then it flattens out. So I've yeah I've seen this in some of the companies I worked with before the when I joined and tried to do the the UA review I saw

a lot of money wasted on this because then the LTV plateaued after day 30 let's say and then the BTV prediction didn't really work easy solution are targets for reverted channels but then also coming back to the episode with Zeno uh he mentioned one interesting thing which is the long-term player progression and which basically says and comes back to the point that I mentioned before rewarded UA channel needs to have capabilities to keep the player engaged even after day seven ideally after day 30 ideally after 60 90 days. Benjamin as as a U channel is actually doing quite an interesting job. So you should definitely check it out because then you can also have multiple different offers. So you start with play time or few step offers then you get time limited offers

and then you try to still kind of work with the player within the campaign. So this is the kind of way to go and the future of the all the rewarded UA channels we're going to see in the next couple of weeks, months this year, definitely rewarded UA is not going anywhere. So in terms of the UA budget and the mix, these are the survey data that they gathered. So obviously what I mentioned it's very similar to what others are doing. So on the Android Google ads app login and rewarded UA. Interestingly apploin for me doesn't really work that well on Android. If I need to compare it with let's say Tik Tok which always sucked on Android with the smart plus campaigns going really well. Anyway iOS app login as I mentioned Facebook, Tik

Tok and Apple search ads. I mean good luck with Apple search ads. Uh but again we have one quote from the the actual survey. These guys are doing 7 million a year across nine channels but still Facebook and Google doing 80% of the work which is not really what you want to see. Sometimes I see applo going anywhere from 60 to 80% of the budget. Again, not ideal scenario, but you should try to diversify and try to have very even budget split. So, if one U channel dies, then you have the replacement. For example, I just have I just had to force Facebook on one one game because on Android it was absolutely terrible and I see that AC across different games at the moment. But since I ran Appin, Tik Tok, Moco and some rewarded U channels, it was fine

because I distributed redistributed the budget to other other channels and zero problems. Okay, so some benchmarks. These are some game some M3 mobile gaming benchmarks that I've seen before. You can you can check it out. Uh I'm not going to talk about all of these, but we have strategy as well. which are some interesting numbers and midcore gaming UA benchmarks. All of these are based on the real data that I was able to gather. But also we have a PVX lambda which is pvxpartners.com/lambda. So if you want to get real benchmarks and real kind of insights, you plug yourself in with an MMP and you can get some benchmarks and some data points easily. And I mean these are our dear friends from PBX. We've seen the numbers we recorded episode DJ and Ros

benchmarks one of the most popular videos. So you go there, check out the benchmarks or you plug yourself in to PVX and get the benchmarks by yourself. Quite a lot of games and numbers they have. So definitely useful creative trends and we are talking about the creative trends on monthly basis. So I've kind of gathered the interesting stuff that is working and you might you might have seen it anyway on on a monthly basis. But we have content uh creator generated content humor. We've seen the hyper casual gates almost on the on in every game which is kind of going for forex playables working quite well when you're trying to uh diversify outside of the Facebook and Google. AI videos all over the place with altered gameplay and misleading ads obviously still kind of dominating few categories

but but as we've talked about ugly ads and we talked about this in the bending spoon episodes episode that works crazy well because people don't really know they're watching ad but they are so very native driven creatives work well near that experience and the save me, save the king with freezing families. All of these we are checking on a monthly basis with different games and surprise surprise there always these concepts that are performing well and they're not going anywhere. But then I mean talking about this since January I think I maybe even at the end of 2024 and the volume of creatives is very very very important and we have some data from AppSlare. The higher the spend more creatives you need and some of the game

some of the companies are spending millions of 7 millions per quarter which is quite a lot of money. they are producing more than 2,000 creatives which is also like resizes localization but still you need a lot of creatives and you need to do it on a weekly basis and quite a lot of them even if you do this I've seen all of the problems or not all of the problems one big problem all the time and I've been having conversations with so many companies and it's always the same question. Okay. So, how do we beat the top performing creative? We have one creative which is performing well. I mean it was the creative inner and still is. We can't beat this creative at all. So, even the upsell data kind of showed that 2% of the creatives still generate like more than 50% of spend which sucks

sucks suck balls really. The only how you can actually combat this is with the loads of creatives. The more creatives you have, more shoots on goal, higher chance of succeeding, which means refreshing refreshing refreshing the creatives every week, multiple times a week. It's it's easier said than done, I know, but with the AI, with the with the so many vendors out there and your own creative team, you suddenly so many different creative concepts that you can you can go and upload them into a creative into your campaigns. And it doesn't really need to be only a new concept. You can and you should iterate and you can iterate easily, right? You can refresh hooks. You can you can iterate on the length, you can iterate on the speed, you pace of the creative and just, you know, test new angles, right? So, when you're talking

about the hooks and I'm pretty sure you know what I'm going what I'm going to show you now, our good friends from Century Games, which are the kings of the hooks on the one left side, Frozen City. And I've seen and we've seen this creative million times also with white out survival also also with the kingshot. How cool is this hook? It's really cool. And it's the the best thing is it's actually made by AI I would say. Yep. And it really goes directly into the game play right away and it suits so well. They again as I said like they are the the masters of the of the of hooks for sure but we have we have more. So we I I was kind of doing some of the research uh for for different hooks and

there was this slingshot hook that suddenly I saw so many different games actually using this. So Angry Birds Evony Royal Match and it's not only Survivor even Survival maybe but not White House Royale but so many other games they're still using this and you can see it's across social casino X match free doesn't matter and we're going to see this more often. So if you find a good hook, just try to think about how you can actually transform this and uh translate to your game. It doesn't really it's not rocket science. I would say it should should be quite easy. But and then if you think about the iteration of your creative hook, that's the first step, right? Then you can you can use the the real kind of live scene or sequence from from

whatever videos you can find or you can build it with AI these days right and it's working so well even the real life footage as I said AI tools you can use AI UGC kind of stuff you can use UGC so you can slap a person on top of the video that you have you can go and create a selfie AI video. With the Google V3 free, you can kind of use the same concept and start with a street interview. You have different elements, sounds, captions, music from the Tik Tok and use obviously the the video on Tik Tok or you you kind of you have one video, you cut it into pieces or you have three different videos, you stitch it together and suddenly you have a 90-cond video. Doesn't matter. The long form videos work really well on Facebook, work really well on Google, work really well on Apple. I mean, well, it's kind of 60 seconds or 59 seconds,

but still suddenly from one for two videos, you can have one long video. Easy as that. I know app quantum for example, they test or use the one minute long video and it's kind of compounds from two 30 secondond videos. The second 30 second video, it's the meat of the the creative which is the best performing video and the first 30 seconds is kind of like a hook. So they're kind of testing that and suddenly you have a combination and then you can have so many different variations with this best performing video and with first 30 seconds as as a different video. So just think about it how you can easily iterate just have multiple combinations from different videos. For example, I have this kind of two videos. Yes. 30 sec 35 second video

with one uh one sound and one Oops. one uh interesting music, slightly different voice over and just the same scenes from AI surprise I think the first one day seven was 37% the second one which is basically the same video just different pieces and slightly different voice over and music 58% day seven RO quite a big difference. So with an easy iteration, you can get so much so much better numbers. Then what I mentioned earlier, the save me and saving whoever character from the game, it kind of always ends with a fail. And uh I'm pretty sure you've seen this this video which I even we are kind

of uh talking about it on each of the trends uh that the saving the king with the royal match. I mean they have I guess like 10 10,000 different iterations and again this is one minute long video and they are using one minute long video for a long time and again then it goes to the best performing video here. It's almost the same kind of practices that quantum guys are doing. I think a royal mage is doing as well. So again, can you do it better? Of course you can. Of course you can. And it kind of uh goes to to the next kind of point what is working well which is the the near death experience. It's always the snake or something which is very very much trying to kill you. and you need to defend yourself. And the anxiety and like the near death

experience is something that that evokes really strong emotions and it works so well with all the kind of target audience. And can tried this on all the different games and it really it really works because all the save the king now almost all the metry games are using save someone from drowning from snake from lava from whatever danger. So save saving someone or near the experience you should definitely try that out your game especially if you have a casual puzzle game. Um and I mentioned also the creator generated content. I'm trying to stay away from user generated content because it's slightly different time now when and I mentioned this and I will mention this million times. It's not about oh my god this is the best game ever you should download it.

You need to still catch the attention, have hook and be different. Try to really grab the attention and talk about the game and uh be very straightforward. Sometimes even like this lady over here even then kind of showcase the game play. And here you still have the first, I don't know, like 10, 15 seconds where you see, oh, it's a, you know, it's brand new game, no ads. Okay, interesting. Whatever. Oh, no Wi-Fi needed. But she's doing in a very interesting way. And uh it definitely grabbed the attention of everybody. That was one of the best performing videos. And who is this? It's me, of course, because I'm always trying to experiment obviously with a lot of different things and I try to

understand how it works when I'm talking about the creator generated content and obviously I want to try and I'm also trying to do ugly ads. also trying to do different things because when I understand how it works, it always makes things better. Also here with uh recording a video with my friend, dear friend John Wright, and it was performing decently well on all the social media channels and even in in some ads that I ran as an experiment for the for the playable trends that I I posted on my substack. So when I talk about the creator generated content again, yes, it still kind of has the same requirements as the best kind of like the anatomy of the best performing ad, great hook, great kind of meat, which is the the middle of the creative, and then the call to action. And then I was

talking about ugly ass that are native and look really not like an ad. And this is something that shot at home. You need to see you need to hear the all the all the music playing with all the toy the the toy soldiers and then kind of seeing all the gameplay from this. It was performing super well because people are not really they didn't really understand it's actually an ad and it was and this also was shot by by my dear friend Lori from uh from Longleaf Valley as a UA manager. Firstly, it was run on Tik Tok as an kind of organic post. It was getting so good feedback in terms of the comments, likes, and the views. Then I kind of I thought, oh, okay, let's let's run it as

a as a UA video. Immediately the best performing video on on Facebook for for months because it doesn't really look like an ad, right? And it's very native and it's very believable as well. So it's this is something that you should be you should start doing and e-commerce are already right there. Some apps are doing it as well. So good all the trends obviously there's so so much more trends that are kind of changing on a monthly basis. So check out all the trends on our YouTube channel. Yeah, but then we come back to the actual creative testing and the benchmarks and how how different people test creative and how much money they they kind of allocate to creative testing. It's interesting that people are doing like 10% of the UA budget on creative testing almost like all like 75% which is something that I usually do depends on the the level of budget but

still 10% is a good amount. What is shocking is that people are producing less than two videos a week. That's not enough. And only f 18% produce five and more videos a week, which is a great start. You should start there. And uh also as soon as you branch out of the Facebook and Google, go for playables obviously. So go for at least three to five videos a week. I delete 5 plus and you can use AI to to produce more you know just think about the iterations that I was talking about but then you you launch the creatives into the campaigns you immediately see if it's performing well or if it's not performing well I mean you haveing the campaigns on a daily basis you see it you have the gut feeling you have the numbers and after 10 dollars spent you see if the creative is going to work or not you are in the campaigns. You know

what I'm talking about. So, how can you actually test different creatives? Million million different frameworks. It's all like different things on Facebook, Google, other kind of kind of kind of uh channels. For me right now, as I talking about the volume, I don't really have a creative testing campaign if I don't need really need to. If I need to, it means I have 20 40 creatives a week. So, I need to kind of test them in a separate campaign. But what I I do now is just launch or add new creatives into the business as usual campaign twice a week. I don't really care. It's not really uh restarting the the or yeah, restarting the learning phase anymore. So, that's fine. So, I just launch new creatives into the campaign twice a week. There you go. If you don't want to do that, here's the the option which is still one geos 150 per day and or 500 or 1,000 per day. Depends obviously on the scale of the of your UA operations, but just add new

creatives there after 4 days post the post them and the best performing move to business as usual and repeat every time or every week every time you have new creatives. We have some other kind of UA channels. Obviously, Unity has its own creative testing campaign. Google doesn't really have this, but I just add new creatives as as a new ad group into B business usual campaigns. Tik Tok. Oh my god, Tik Tok. It's just creative hungry. 10 videos or eight videos like three times a week as soon as I have so many of them on from the Tik Tok creative challenge. And every time there's a new ad group and a new winner, just promote the winners into the main ad group. Rinse and repeat. The main interesting thing from the AppLin episode was the was the fact that Applo actually allocates like 5% of the campaign budget to the new creatives. So, you don't really need to

have a new creative testing campaign. you just launch again a new c new creatives into the campaign and it will test and if it's if it gets decent results it it's going to get more and more traffic I've seen this recently we produced few creatives for for one game they tested it on Facebook none of them got any type of any traffic like okay interesting but then they launched it on applavin and six out of eight immediately got got traction and two of them became a creative winners afterwards. So not all the creatives are suitable for all the channels and the testing you know creative winner on Facebook it's going to outper almost almost always outperform everything that you get. So AI, let's hear this out.
AI is going to take your job. If not AI, I will. Jokes aside, 68% of respondents

in my survey use AI to assist in the creative framework. Gemini, Chat, GPT, Midjourney, Caput, and Cynthsia are common tools for producing creatives. Clingai, Runway, Sora, and Google V2 are also used. Use cases for AI, UGC scripts, thumbnail optimization, first frame hooks, iteration, audience research, and many more. Yes, if you are not using AI, you're already 2.5 steps behind. Pun intended. Okay, let's get back to the real presentation. This is so meta because this is not me, but it's my AI avatar. Exactly. This is the future. But a jokes aside, it actually it's an integral part of our creative process. Even with my team as soon as they I introduced the AI mid journey cling or even chpt to the I did image generation or anything related to the scripts or whatever 10xed the the whole production I mean

it's inevitable. So start using it yesterday. It's insane. And it also kind of goes into the the UGC AI UGC because it's not always only about the the talking talking head anymore. It's the in position kind of uh UGC stuff because it also evolved, right? We don't really we can't even say who is real and who is not real. I mean, if it's if it's good or bad, I don't I don't really know. But still, it really speeds up the whole production. And this lady in the yoga position, one of the best performing videos from the from the past. So again, if you need an EU UGC and the UGC already works in in the games that you manage, help yourself out with the with the AI UGC. There's so many different tools. Every every week there's a new one. So just go for something which is not really the same as everybody else is

using because nobody wants to see that. And when it comes to AI in general, we have so many games using this and we have I mean we might have the the AI corner that the Yakob is always pushing for uh with the AI because it's becoming more insane and more and more insane. But these are like just some examples from the Forex games that they are using this and I think Dark War started using this in last year in se in November and since then never stopped and it's very very attention grabbing very novel. People want to watch this and it works really well on Facebook for some reason especially on Facebook. I have more Forex kind of examples. These are some of our very favorite ones because it's I mean it's very unique, let's call it that way. And I still want to watch it. So as soon as you you want to watch and

you watch the the video for almost a minute and 15 seconds, that's a very positive signal for for Facebook and I would say also for other channels. But it's not only about uh Forex games. is again an AI oops AI UGC that kind of combi that AI that com combines UGC uh link AI and some some other kind of trends and again like performing super well because it's again it's something that you want to watch until the very end and nothing in this I guess actual real person so everything is is based on AI which drives me to to the the whole kind of skill set in the UA field for 2025 and uh it's not the same as it was

before because I mean even Mikey can just push buttons right but these days your manager really needs to needs to know how to tell a story. it needs to kind of know how to write a good prompt for any type of AI and that's where everything is heading right so you need to go from just clicking the buttons to be very creative oriented and very kind of engineering the prompts that's just to get the best outputs. So if you if you want to ask your your team and push them after this episode, ask them how many creatives are you producing or they producing every week? What's the what's the CPI or draw us by by platform and the campaigns? What's

the spend goal? If you hit the target, what's the payback? and what kind of AI tools they use and if they are kind of testing new channels frequently if they are perfect if they are not well it's uh something they should definitely do so don't use the the good old tactics but kind of use the new stuff and new storytelling testing new creatives producing new creatives testing new channels diversifi diversifying from from the Facebook and Google's to all that networks and testing the reward at UA play because that's where all of us are going at the moment. So guys, thank you very much for listening and to tuning into this episode this week. If you have any comments or any anything you want to share with me on or the crew for Felix and Yakob, please

share it under the video or join the Slack channel or see you somewhere later on. Thank you very much. Cheers. Bye-bye. [Music]