Profit Paradox: Ad Age Matters More Than You Think

Folks, drop your performance marketing KPI slowly. We need to talk about one and only KPI that matters:

The average age of your top performing creative.

By age, I mean the first air day of your top-performing ad.

I will explain why mobile marketing is broken (big responsibility here).

And I hope you will join me in saving our fragile and beautiful business.

Let me start by explaining our problem in a nutshell:

Profits from user acquisition are thin. And mobile apps run very, very old ads.

In one of my previous LinkedIn posts, I shared this:

And it’s true. We can’t trust anyone’s success in this business; we can’t trust new top-grossing games because we don’t know their profit margin. Even for old games, this holds true (unless public data is available).

But…

There is a way to increase our profit margins.

And here is the solution:

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Btw, if you are new here, hi 👋, this is Growth Therapist speaking. I grow apps as a freelancer. Connect with me or hit subscribe for user acquisition and data-driven creative tips.

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Produce top-performing ads and do that constantly. And forget about the rest of your KPIs.

“Samet, Why do you say we should forget the rest?”

Because your good creatives will help you in every country, every operation system, and every channel you are running your ads in. It is scalable—more than you can imagine.

So forget about panic running on new channels, countries, and operating systems to keep your job or boss happy.

“Samet, you seem so obsessed with creative optimization.”

I am, and here is a fact for you:

Candy Crush was running the same ad for more than TWO years as their top ad (in the last 90 days, in the US)*.

* Numbers are taken from AppMagic, and for the apps that I work with, I can tell that it is pretty accurate, but still, don’t shoot the messenger.

I’ll give you another point:

Looking at the top 20 ads among match-3 apps (in the US, in the last 90 days): As of today (28.6.23), those top ads on Android have an average age of 10 months, and on iOS, they have an average age of 6 months. The oldest top 20 ad running on Android was a whopping 26 months, and on iOS, it was 28, both by Candy Crush.

But hey, I am not writing this article to shame Candy Crush, Gardenscapes, Royalmatch, or Fishdom. In fact, shame is never a good tool for change (putting my growth therapist hat here).

Instead, I am sharing what I recognize in the mobile/app marketing industry because I am good at seeing patterns, and happy to share them with you so that we all look at our operations to fix this problem.

To put all these thoughts in another way:

Creative optimization is our best bet for maximizing profits.

If you still have doubts and ask me:

“Samet, what is the big deal about optimizing creatives?”

Here are two charts for you:

This shows that the longer you run your ad, the more average performance you get (put it in another way: you have thin profits).

In the best case, you keep producing new ads so that your average performance (a.k.a. profits) stay elevated.

Shout out: Eric Seufert‘s charts in this article resonate well with me.

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“Samet, we don’t know the benchmarks for producing new ads. So I am not sure if this will help our business.”

I hope by now you understand that if you don’t do creative optimization, you let your ad saturate the market and plateau its performance. Who says this is a good idea?

If you want to try it for yourself and see the magic, have your north star KPI as

Have a maximum of 3 months-old of top creatives currently running in top 3 markets.

Yes, the measurement of this is very painful. Yes, the performance changes based on time, channel, placement of that channel, and countries… But, what’s the alternative?

Running the old ads in another country? Running your first ten ad ideas to judge if your new game makes enough money? Running the old ads in your best market? Obsessing about having OKRs of “try five more countries and channels?”

Or worse, you complain about SKAN.

But hey, instead, I am offering a fundamental shift in our busy business days, and it is easy to say it. It takes work to walk the talk. I know. I know.

For this mind shift, you might consider the following and test for yourself:

Solution 1 – Hire a full-time performance creative marketer whose ONLY work is to advocate for more and better creatives. No other task. NO OTHER TASK. If you can’t hire someone because it is too expensive or risky, go for the next solution.

Solution 2 – Hire a fractional performance creative marketing manager (like I am) and ensure you get fresh creatives much more frequently. The benefit of having fractional performance marketing managers is that they spend their careers having the skills to create the best ads possible. This differs from the usual user acquisition manager skillset we are discussing.

Solution 3 – Take a step back (take 20 steps, maybe) and watch how you operate creative production and testing in general. Hire a consultant (like I am – no shameless plug here, I am great at it). Get a good perspective of the new world. Get inspired by any company that builds kick-ass creative engines.

If you enjoyed the article – hit like, apparently, it helps. 🥳

Until next time. 👋 🤩