Improve campaign performance#

The following recommended best practices can help you to improve your campaign performance.

Follow Insights cards#

An Insights card is a notification section (card) at the top of your campaign details. These notifications provide insights into issues and opportunities that arise during your campaign.

For example, if your campaign pauses because it has already reached its daily budget, the insights card will notify you. The card also suggests how to get your campaign running again. Follow the guidance in insights cards to both resolve issues quickly and take advantage of optimization opportunities.

Create a strong trailer#

A trailer that resonates with your target audience is the biggest factor for boosting your conversion rate. This is especially important because conversion rate is one of the most important measures Unity’s algorithm uses to determine your ad ranking, and thus your visibility and performance in the network.

General characteristics of a strong video trailer include:

• Meaningful, action-packed gameplay footage
• Strong calls-to-action
• References to game dynamics that make your game unique
• Localization in geo-specific languages (where applicable)
• High production value
• Voiceovers, speaking characters, and sound effects

See also best practices for video ads.

Rotate trailers#

Users eventually experience ad fatigue when exposed to the same video trailer over and over again. This contributes to a decline in conversion rate, and thus a decline in overall volume. Combat this effect by rotating in a new trailer with fresh content approximately once every quarter, if resources permit.

Fine-tune campaign targeting#

Segmenting your campaigns is a great way to add precision to your user acquisition efforts. Some factors to consider include:

• Choose your geo targets carefully. You might already know what countries perform best for you, and you can assign each a different bid accordingly. If you are just starting out with user acquisition and have not gathered enough data to ascertain what performs best, try launching first in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. As you gather data and want to explore more opportunities, you might consider expanding to other English-speaking countries, countries in Western Europe, and the Nordic countries. Conduct periodic reviews of per-country performance, and adjust bids from time to time.
• Break out your iOS campaigns to target different bids for iPad and iPhone. iPad users generally tend to be higher value users than iPhone users, so bid accordingly.
• If you target non-English speaking countries, run localized versions of your trailers and end cards.

Remove underperforming publishers#

Use Report Builder to track which publishers are delivering you the best and worst quality installs, and target accordingly. By adding a parameter to your tracking URL, Unity passes you an identifier called a source_app_ID.

Once this parameter is in place, wait until you’ve collected a statistically significant amount of internal data regarding publisher performance. Then, analyze the user quality data per publisher according to your key metrics, and use the app targeting feature to blocklist poor performers.

Give changes time before expecting results#

When modifying campaigns or creatives, give them time before reacting to those changes. For example, install postbacks from a SKAdNetwork integration typically have a one- to three-day delay. Algorithms that predict conversion rates generally need three days or more, and Audience Pinpointer D7 Return on Ad Spend or Retention algorithms need nine days or more to digest data and optimize effectively. This allows accurate comparisons between a campaign’s effective cost per install (eCPI) and target cost per install (tCPI).

The same cold start challenges that existed for former cost per install (CPI) campaigns also apply to target cost per install (tCPI) campaigns. A few days of patience helps give campaigns their best chance at success.