How to build winning ad creatives (and scale them)

Welcome to the fifth article in the series on best practices for growing UA with Unity Ads. This article focuses on creatives and how to build and scale them.

Your creatives are a leading growth lever. They’re the piece of the UA puzzle that captures attention and draws players to your game - so getting them right is important for your entire campaign. Now that you’ve already learned how to find the right campaign type, connect relevant data, develop your creative, bidding and budgeting strategy, and understand the learning phase and ROAS optimization, it’s time to dive deeper into creatives. In this article, we’ll share the best practices that’ll help to drive creative success, so you’re one step closer to achieving your growth goals.

Core creative principles

When it comes to your creative strategy, make sure to keep the following best practices in mind:

• Upload every new creative to Unity Ads before or at the same time as other channels
• Maximize supply with diverse creative types: videos, playables, and video and playable end card
• When applicable, use both orientations (portrait and landscape) to maximize reach
• Test new concepts regularly to find fresh winners
• Reuse top performers to build new creative packs
• Combine best-performing videos with new Interactive end cards (IECs) and vice versa
• Use best playables as IECs, paired with top-performing videos

How to optimize your creative packs

A Creative Pack is a pairing of ad creatives that work together to display an ad. Typically it combines:

• End Card – The interactive screen shown at the end of a video ad
• Video – The main video advertisement that plays

In addition, a standalone playable can also be considered its own creative pack.

Understanding the learning phase for creative campaigns

Once your creative packs are assigned to a live campaign, they enter a learning phase where Unity's system begins analyzing performance data. The duration of this phase is dynamic and varies depending on the volume of impressions received, with 10,000 impressions per creative or creative pack being the key benchmark to aim for.

It’s important to note that the more scale your campaign has, the faster it can reach this benchmark and exit the learning phase.

iOS and Android are treated as completely separate environments, meaning creative learning is conducted independently for each platform. Because user behavior and conversion patterns can differ significantly between the two, a creative pack needs to reach approximately 10,000 impressions on each platform individually before the learning phase is considered complete. To determine if a creative has completed the learning phase, check if it has received at least 10,000 impressions at the entire bundle x platform level.

Even after the learning phase is complete, the optimization process is continuous. Creative packs continue to operate in an exploration mode, where creatives have the opportunity to recover and improve over time with continued exploration.

Using A/B testing to inform your main campaign

To gain deeper insights into how individual creatives perform, We recommend running dedicated Creative Testing campaigns separately alongside your main campaign. These parallel test campaigns are designed to measure key metrics such as Conversion Rate (CVR) and Installs Per Mille (IPM) in a controlled way, without disrupting the performance of your main campaign. The insights gathered from these tests can then be used to make more informed decisions about which creatives to prioritize and scale in your primary campaign.

Analyzing creative performance

It’s important to review your creatives bi-weekly and focus on Share of Impressions as the main KPI. As a general guideline, you should remove creatives with less than 10% impressions Share of Voice (SOV) while ensuring that the total SOV of removed creatives does not exceed 20%. Keep low SOV creatives for at least 10 days after completing the learning phase to allow for potential scaling. If a creative does not scale after this period, we recommend removing it during the next creative rotation. Remember that a low-scale creative does not negatively impact the overall campaign performance and you should remove creatives only to make space for new ones. For ROAS campaigns, make sure you have at least a few closed cohorts before making a decision on creative removal.

Creative content optimization

In order to give your creatives a performance boost, take your leading creative and tweak it by giving it different durations (length of video) or orientations (landscape vs. portrait). You can also make more meaningful changes such as characters, scenery, or other engagement drivers. Changing colors and themes to engage your target audience is another great way to optimize and refresh your creatives.

Create Custom Store Listings and Custom Product Pages

Another way to optimize creatives is by creating custom variations of your app’s product page tailored to specific audiences or campaigns. For Android, these are called Custom Store Listings and for iOS they are called Custom Product Pages. These enable you to highlight different aspects of your app and you can also use them to match specific concepts across both the creative and Custom Store Listing, creating a continuous journey for your users. After confirming your Custom Store Listing performs well, attach it to the matching creatives in all the bundle’s campaigns.

You can optimize performance by testing the following elements on your Custom Store Listing:

• Game elements (characters, objects, etc.)
• Video previews
• Localized store pages in your users’ languages
• Screenshots of your game’s newest content
• In-app events
• Seasonal events

Creative guidelines

Not all campaigns are alike. Here are the best practices you should keep in mind for your specific use cases.

Existing games and new campaigns

For both existing games and new campaigns, you should launch with up to 30 creatives provided the existing creative packs have completed the learning stage. Make sure to add no more than 8 new creatives at a time. You can introduce 4-6 new creatives every three days until you reach 30 and should maintain up to 8 creatives in the ‘“Exploration” phase simultaneously.

Existing campaigns

For existing campaigns, you should upload creatives weekly until reaching 30 in a single campaign. Make sure to use varied creative types such as different video lengths, video + playable, or standalone playables.

Localized creatives

All campaigns are shown to users based on targeting. Therefore, you need to create separate campaigns for specific geo/language targeting to match the language with the right audience. Even if you’re using another primary language, you should always include English creatives as well. One English version per campaign is usually enough.

Choosing top performing creatives

Keep creatives that get a significant number of impressions. At the same time, you should also review quality metrics like ROAS and retention to make sure your creatives are meeting your long-term goals. In general, you should keep creatives when they show an upwards trend in impressions. You should remove a creative pack when it shows a downward trend for impressions, have consistently low impressions, and the CVR is declining.

How to scale new creatives

The right way to scale new creatives depends entirely on the type of campaign you’re running. Usually, this is most relevant either when you’re going live with a new pack on one of your main business campaigns or when you’re launching a Creative testing campaign (a campaign which helps you test and evaluate creative prototypes).

Existing campaigns

For existing campaigns, you should aim for a maximum of 8 creatives in learning at once. Since optimization is on the campaign level, upload your new creative in your highest scale campaign. We also recommend using videos in both orientations. In regards to your budget, check to make sure you’re not near capping in the current stage as creative packs might boost your scale.

Creative testing campaigns

In Creative testing campaigns, creative packs are run on an equal opportunity basis. Advertisers can accurately compare performance based on whatever metrics are most important to them. Test your creatives to make informed decisions on which creative packs to use and in which markets they work best.

Here’s how:

With control creative pack

Compare new creatives with the best performing creative from the main campaign. Get started by creating a creative test campaign that has the same targeting as your main campaign. Add your new creatives and also assign it the best creative from your main campaign. This way, the new creative is tested on a similar audience that the best creative in the main campaign was attracting.

Use a control creative pack with history to accelerate new creatives in testing. It’s important to note that conversion rate data on the control pack can help boost impressions for new creatives and comparing conversion rates identifies the most effective creative pack.

Without control creative pack

Test new concepts by comparing new creatives and selecting a winning concept among them. Get started by creating a Creative testing campaign and adding several new creative packs that are variants of the new creative concept. Because there is no control creative pack, this will be an entirely new learning cycle for all creative packs in the campaign.

Creative testing best practices

When running Creative testing campaigns, make sure to use a sufficient budget. For T1 geos, use $100 per creative pack and in T2 and T3 geos, use $50-$100. Select the bid equal to or above the bid set for a chosen country in your main campaign. If the country is new, run automatic bidding. Make sure to contact the test targeting user groups that most closely resemble the groups in the actual campaign. Run your campaign for at least one week and aim to accumulate at least 10,000 starts or 100 installs per creative pack. The creative pack with the highest conversion rate is your winner.

Creative lifecycle

Moderation stage

When you launch a creative pack, it will move to the moderation queue automatically. You should enable the “Creative moderation alert” in your User Acquisition dashboard to receive email notifications on creative moderation status changes.

Creative pack status

After a creative has gone through moderation and been accepted, you will see a status cue next to it. This reflects the current performance of the creative pack and will change as the performance changes.

Iterations

Perform iterations based on your top performing creative packs. Take the following example in the illustration below:

In this case Video 1 + IEC 1 is leading

• Iteration 1: Choose video 1 with a new IEC (2)
• Iteration 2: Choose a new video (2) with IEC 1
• Iteration 3: Change the video 1 length with IEC 1
• Iteration 4: Choose video 1 and change the IEC number of taps or task

No matter what iteration test you are conducting, remember to perform only one iteration to properly monitor the action that brought the uplift so you can replicate it.

Playable best practices

Playables are ads that enable the user to get a taste of your game by playing it inside the ad. These ads can be highly effective for attracting high-quality players since the players who convert have already experienced and are interested in your game.

But creating playables that convert isn’t necessarily straightforward. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Only send users to the store after achieving a sense of success like a goal or win.
• Leave enough space around the main element of your creative to adapt its orientation.
• Keep interactions simple and intuitive by incorporating visual indicators like hand gestures or arrows.
• Try giving players a choice to personalize their playable experience, like choosing an avatar or game environment.
• Add visuals, sounds, and haptic effects for a bigger “wow” factor.
• Forge an emotional connection with a strong narrative and interactive storylines.
• Test different iterations and monitor KPIs like engagement rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.
• End with a clear call-to-action that encourages immediate action such as “Download Now” or “Start Playing”.

How playables can help your app

Because this format is interactive and engaging, playables are a great solution for a diverse mix of apps. Here’s how they can help:

Captivate users with stand-out creatives

Building winning ad creatives is an ongoing cycle of testing, learning, and refining, not a one-time effort. By launching diverse creative packs, respecting the learning phase, running structured A/B tests, and reviewing performance, you give your campaigns a strong foundation for growth.

Want more insights for powering your Unity Ads campaigns?

Ready to see your campaign in action? Get started with Unity Ads.