David Vargas

Meta is this for real????? 😳 😨 I mean, this looks like a clear intention to me. I honestly expect that they will get rid of manual campaigns at some point and this is scary. This is forcing advertisers to feed their crappy inventories!!!Man, this industry really kills me more times than I deserve.I CAN'T EVEN FIND AN OPTION TO DISABLE THIS SH****!!!!!!

🚨 Be Careful with TikTok’s Attribution Settings! 🚨 Today I am sharing a case study that I recently saw with one of my clients on TikTok.We started this channel to see if we could outperform Meta with the new creatives that we produced so we simply copied the setup that was working well on Meta:👉One campaign based on signup (upper funnel event) --> Campaign 1 - Event 1 if you look at the screenshot👉One campaign based on an activation event (lower funnel event) --> Campaign 2 - Event 2 if you look at the screenshotAfter running both campaigns for a couple of weeks, we analyzed attribution types to compare them with Meta and Google. We do this because we have a strong organic presence in the country that we are targeting so we wanted to avoid as much as we […]

🚨Be Careful with the new adROAS campaigns in Meta🚨 As I recently shared on LinkedIn (I’ll leave the link in the comments), Meta has rolled out a new Value Optimization (VO) campaign specifically for mobile games that monetize mainly through ads rather than in-app purchases. For now, this is only available on Android..I started testing this with one of my clients, and the initial results were impressive. We were reaching profitability in a much shorter period compared to other main channels like AppLovin and Google. Naturally, we began scaling gradually, as you can see in the graph.But then... things took a turn. Once we reached $1k/day in ad spend, we saw a drastic drop in efficiency, which is clearly reflected in the declining ROAS.The main reason seems to be the steady decline in retention rate (see screenshot 2), which is […]

🚨𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐝𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜🚨 At least for a while.Today, I’m sharing another real case study with a client I recently partnered with.Our goal is to accelerate the growth in one of their key markets (mostly dominated by Android) so, in early January, we launched paid campaigns on Google Ads.When we started the campaign, we were so surprised because the CPA (in this case cost per signup) was ridiculously lower compared to previous tests on Meta or TikTok so we started to monitor the organic traffic to see if Google was just targeting users who searched our brand because we were seeing a huge spend in Serch (screenshot 2)Was Google just targeting users already searching for our brand?Quite obvious right? Since we started the campaign, our organic started a very declining trend as you can see […]

𝐃𝐎𝐍’𝐓 𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐀𝐃𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐆𝐋𝐄 𝐀𝐃𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄! ❌❌❌ According to Google's documentation:"Seasonality adjustments are an advanced tool that can be used to inform Smart Bidding of expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales"On paper, this sounds like a great solution to test when you’re struggling to increase spend (as was my case).But in practice?Using seasonality adjustments essentially tells the algorithm: "Hey Google, my conversion rate is gonna be higher so send me the WORST quality users ever because my creatives will convert them anyway!"As mentioned above, we wanted to scale the spend during Christmas and here’s what happened when we aggressively adjusted conversion rates (claiming our Christmas creatives would convert 100% better):✅We could scale (+41% spend)❌But CPA was the worst of the year (+62% compared to the previous period)❌The worst CPI of […]

Should you trust the Advanced Dedicated Campaigns (ADC) feature for iOS campaigns on TikTok?🤔 The answer is simple: 1000% yes!Today, I’m sharing a quick case study that demonstrates how using ADC can feed your iOS campaigns with more signals, leading to better performance.In this case, the experiment was done with 2 MAI (Mobile App Install) campaigns with same audience creatives. The only difference? One used ADC while the other didn't.This client recently started with TikTok Ads so the account was new, so ADC was not available initially. Therefore, I had to start without ADC in my first campaign whose results are here:👉Spend: $6k👉CPM: $5.71👉CTR: 0.36%👉CPI: $3.52👉Install Rate: 45.41%After running this campaign for a week, I finally enabled ADC so I just duplicated the old campaign but activating ADC to compare performance. Here's what happened:👉Spend: $4.5k👉CPM: $3.96👉CTR: 0.31%👉CPI: $2.89👉Install Rate: 44.67% […]

First of all, Happy New Year everyone!✨ I'm back from a much-needed vacation and I’d like to kick off the year with a very quick and easy-to-understand case study about 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐢𝐱𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚.One of my clients wanted to target older audiences but was using a single ad group that included both videos and static banners. When I took over the account, the first step was quite straightforward and logical:👉Separating static banners into their own ad group was going to give us a major delivery between older segmentsAnd below, you just need to see the results:1️⃣The banner ad group allocated 51% of its total spend to the two oldest age ranges, compared to 30% in the video ad group.2️⃣ The banner ad group spent 77% of its budget on Feed placements, while the video ad group only spent […]

Last post of the year!🎄✨ Today I am bringing a real-data case about the 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐚𝐝𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐒 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚 for all those games that primarily monetize through ads!The case is quite straightforward:I unlocked this new optimization goal one week ago and here’s what I’ve observed so far:👉LTV D1 is 378% higher in adROAS campaign👉Retention D1 is 15% higher in adROAS campaign👉Retention D3 is 12.8% higher in adROAS campaign👉ROAS predictions over one year are positive in a shorter period and at higher percentages.So the conclusion is clear:  START TESTING THIS ASAP! 🚀How to enable this optimization goal:1️⃣Connect your AdRev partner with Adjust to start receiving AdImpression Revenue data in Adjust.2️⃣Enable AdImpression Mapping in Adjust under Meta’s Data Sharing options. (Note: This feature is only available if you have the Adjust Growth Solution.)3️⃣Ensure you’ve sent at least 15 […]

New week, new case study! 🤓 Today I’m sharing a success story with one of my oldest clients: We have been working together for 13 months and what we have achieved together is simply amazing.When I started with this game, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐩𝐩 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 €𝟏𝟎𝟎𝐊 𝐌𝐑𝐑 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 €𝟑𝟓–𝟒𝟎𝐊/𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡..The game had strong metrics and significant organic presence in one market (which was responsible of 99% of the revenue) and it was generating solid revenue. However, the campaigns (managed by a well-known agency) were an absolute mess as they were optimizing for non-valuable events.I didn’t use any magic tricks or do anything that good UA professionals wouldn’t know. I simply applied logic:📢If a game monetizes through in-app purchases, you need to "teach" the algorithms to find users who actually make those purchases. Otherwise you are wasting time, money and resources.I […]

Wanna launch an A/B test in iOS but don't want to wait 4 weeks for getting some significance? Here’s a faster way: Use paid UA to speed up your testing and decision-making process.Follow these steps:1️⃣ Create two CPPs: One should replicate your default page, the other should be the variant you want to test2️⃣ Create one CPI campaign in Meta, targeting the country you want to test (ideally the one that brings most of the revenue)3️⃣ Create 2 ad groups within the same campaign and put on each one your best creative (one of those that you know that will easily produce installs)IMPORTANT! the creatives MUST BE the same in both ad groups. Otherwise the A/B testing wouldn't make sense as more variables would affect the final conversion rate4️⃣ Spend $100/day in each ad group and wait 3-4 days.5️⃣ Enjoy […]