David Vargas

📢SKAN can work better than AEM for some apps Yes, you read that right.AEM is not a silver bullet.It can fail when, for some reason, Meta is not able to fingerprint their users 😬(because yes, they obviously do fingerprinting😂)Today, I’m sharing a real case where this happened.We started a Trial Start campaign in early February using AEM to feed the algorithm with real-time signals which indeed helps the campaigns to optimize better.The campaign started to show more signals on AEM than SKAN during the first weeks but with the time, SKAN started capturing more CTA conversions daily (as shown in the graph), making a HUGE difference on the CPT for each attribution methodology.In my case:👉Cost per trial (last 14d) according to AEM: $71👉Cost per trial (last 14d) according to SKAN: $49🤯Difference: SKAN is 30% cheaper, making my campaigns profitable—unlike AEM.Despite […]

If you are targeting older audience segments (+35yo) --> This is what you are looking for 🎯 Today I am sharing a real data case with one of my clients.In this case, our core audience was men over 35. After setting up the initial campaigns in Meta, I started experimenting with the creatives as I usually do.We had all kind of angles and concepts (UGC, static banners and motion videos) within the same ad group because we had not more budget to create separate testing ad groups. However, by analyzing the engagement metrics of our videos, we identified the key elements that resonated with our core audience. I primarily rely on the following metrics to evaluate the performance of creatives::-CPA-CPI-Outbound CTR-Hook Rate-Hold Rate-Install Rate-IPM-CVR from Install to Target ActionWith these metrics, you can easily determine which creatives perform best and […]

📢If you run iOS campaigns on Google Ads and Meta using their modeling technologies simultaneously, you need to know this: 👉Google ALWAYS tends to overestimate conversions👉Meta ALWAYS tends to underestimate conversionsAnd to prove it, I will share a recent case I had with one new client which I recently audited and had NOT SKAN schema in place (they just had cv=0 for installs and that's it)First, let's analyze Google Ads numbers: They were running one AEO campaigns for "start_trial" in the US. Since they didn't set up any event in SKAN schema, these trials were purely modeled by Google.➡Google modeled installs: 537➡SKAN installs: 427➡ASC App Referrer: 419 installs With ASC and SKAN being so close, it’s hard to trust Google’s numbers. (I know ASC & SKAN are not attributed in the same way, and they're even different conversions)➡Google modeled trials: 139 […]

🚨Be careful when you upload one unique size in Meta! I am seeing some accounts (not all the ones I have access to so I guess they're rolling this out gradually as well) where they enable flexible media by default on the second step after uploading one video.Besides that, they've also put a new option to disable it in case you want.My take on this is pretty clear: Another step towards fully automated campaigns where we just lose the control over everything😅😅

This is why I love working with Meta Ads✨ Because of the speed to detect winning concepts!!Just look at that beautiful screenshot👇Purple line shows the top performing creative in one of my BAU campaigns on Meta. It held the #1 spot for nearly 30 days, even though I rotated over 10 creatives every week.We couldn’t find anything that outperformed it until February 19th, when we tested a simple, almost ridiculous 15-second video.From that day on, algorithm slashed the spend and reach of my top creative by 90%, reallocating ALL the budget and into these "stupid" videos 😂 And I love this! I love how fast the algorithm tells you that you found the needle in the haystack. In just one day you can detect this and create +50 iterations of the same concept by changing hook, music, transitions and all […]

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 […]