As users spend time in apps they're exposed to a huge volume of creatives, each designed to capture their attention and drive downloads, especially from gaming apps. With so many creatives from competitors vying for users’ attention and time, it’s vital to make your creatives as impactful as possible.
The Unity Ad Design Studio is a team of creative experts who analyze and design creatives to drive installs for Unity customers. In this e-book you’ll discover some of their best practices, designed to help you cut through the noise and drive your game's growth.
Video creatives perform best when they show what it looks like to accomplish an attainable in-game goal, rather than an idle on-screen moment. That’s because users want to overcome a challenge in the games they download, not just look at a screensaver.
Demonstrate to users that your game has goals they need to accomplish by leveraging assets that show progress, or by showing goals being completed. This creates anticipation for that great feeling of beating a challenge, as well as demonstrating that your game has structure and progress - two things users want.
Some examples of this include defeating a boss, a progress bar being filled, or a level being failed.
In your creatives, you only have a small window of time to convey your message to users. To make the most of this window, balance the elements of your creative’s visual hierarchy to help guide the user’s attention. Visual hierarchy refers to the order in which a user will read the information on screen.
You can predict and influence focus by using letter case, background color, animation speed, and button position in the creative’s composition. Use visual hierarchy to direct users’ attention and tell a story that leads them to installing your game.
Juice is the added visual, sound, and haptic effects that make the player's in-game experience more exciting. For example, showing a user how many gems they've earned after completing a level is essential, but the confetti and phone vibration that come with the level complete screen are extra - they’re the juice.
In the same way juice enhances your game, we recommend using juice in your playables for a bigger “wow” factor. A quick hack to add juice is to include micro-animations.
In your playable, you're inviting users to step into your game’s world. Micro-animations help to make that world more inviting and real.
Some general best practices when adding micro-animations include:
When refreshing creatives in an existing campaign, tailor new creatives to the source apps that generate the most installs.
For example, if most of your users are coming to you from the puzzle genre, make sure your next creative set features problem-solving gameplay. Another example might be that if your top source apps are in landscape orientation, your creatives should be too.
Getting it right means staying up to date with what’s performing well in your top source apps, in terms of creatives and game elements, and leveraging the trends driving installs for those apps in your own creatives.
It’s hard to enjoy a game in only a few seconds. Give users a pathway to fun by making your playables long and solvable enough so they can get a taste of your game. This way, users are redirected to the app store with a sense of success.
In your playables you should be thinking about the player experience just like you would in your game. That means having a clear UI, a balanced difficulty level, and boosters to give users extra help if they need it. A quick hack to help users to enjoy your playable is using extra lives or a hint to make sure they leave the playable feeling like a winner.
Make creatives that feature holiday-themed and seasonal game elements to drive performance during the holidays and season changes. For example, in a hidden object game, instead of collecting wood or crystals to build their base, the user can gather Christmas-themed resources - like a wreath and gifts - with the goal of assembling a festive tree display.
Another way to bring the festivity of the holiday season into your creatives is through themes of community. Holidays typically are associated with community and time spent with friends and family. Tap into users’ cozy feeling of connection with your own gathering of in-game characters enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner, opening gifts under a tree, or heading to the beach on Summer vacation.
Don’t just translate, transport. Localization done well doesn't just mean translating your creative from one language to another for a new audience. It means also getting the cultural references right to give it the best chance of having an impact for a particular region.
For example, just because you have a Christmas themed creative winner that’s working well for US audiences, using elements like snow, doesn’t mean it will necessarily work well in other regions - like Australia.
While some might assume that you don’t need to localize the creative for an Australian audience, since both the US and Australia are English speaking. But, the two regions have very different climates. The winter elements that make a creative seasonal and relevant for US audiences, won’t have the same impact for an Australian one.
Don’t skimp on creative types and formats. Different formats work better for different sources and the same is true for creative lengths. So producing and testing multiple creative formats and lengths will keep your creative campaigns relevant and flexible. This also has the benefit of ensuring you have a ready roster of different creative formats and lengths to renew your campaigns.
Over time ad efficacy declines, creative fatigue sets in, and trends become dated, so even your best performing creatives will need to be updated eventually. By investing in multiple ad types and lengths during testing, you'll stay ahead of the trends and keep your creatives relevant.
The Unity Ad Design Studio has helped studios increase their installs by +10X. Contact your account manager to learn how the Unity Ad Design Studio can help you grow your game - from analyzing your ad design process to end-to-end creative production.
