Geeky House: News and Blog

Improving Performance with TikTok Ads

One of Geeky House’s key titles, Minetap, has already yielded more than $2,000,000 of revenue, and more than 2,500,000 users have already played our game. Like other market players, we tested all popular traffic sources to produce such incredible results. Here, we will focus on TikTok - a platform that surprised us very positively.

How we started: traffic sources, strategies and goals

As is standard in the market, we began with running ads on Facebook: made a soft launch, got clear marketing KPIs and benchmarks, and went global. After that, we decided we were ready to attract new audiences and start our search for other popular traffic platforms. We chose TikTok ads as this platform had been showing rapid growth in users of different ages and interests. TikTok was constantly improving its advertising algorithms and implementing new methods of optimization and targeting. It was and still is the platform of the future - the one that may soon replace Facebook in terms of traffic volume and quality.
We decided to start running ads on TikTok through separate teams: our in-house UA team as well as external agencies. We chose this strategy so as to share our marketing experience and get more insights. The goal was to reach our day 0 and day 7 KPIs on ROAS, and eventually increase ROAS to 130%. After the test, we found that our in-house team showed better results and managed to reach the target KPIs. We have highlighted the key points that led to success.

Creatives - a key point to success

Vitally, our in-house UA team already had experience in running ads on Facebook. This means we could use our best performing creatives on TikTok. By that time, we had already tested more than 300 creatives. We were constantly improving creative quality, generating more effective and engaging ads, which led to higher click-through rates and better overall performance. We tested various mechanics: gameplay, mislead, UGC content with bloggers, etc. We quickly found the 4 top performing creatives that showed the lowest cost per install (CPI), cost per purchase (CPP) and the highest ROAS. We also found that classical gameplay creatives showed the best results.

An example of how we improved our top gameplay creative

We took the first gameplay video as a basis, made the art more appealing, added smooth animations for transitions, added VFX to improve user feedback, and added both the crafting screen and a screen for equipping the hero, which introduced elements of RPG games. We also added a touch of innuendo at the end, leaving the last monster undefeated and changing the call to action on the buttons to “Fight.”


New Optimizations and TikTok’s innovative instruments

We tested three optimization types: App Install, Purchase, and Value Optimization. Value Optimization showed the best results and allowed us to acquire the users that made the highest in value in-app purchases, and had the highest eCPM in our mediation. Apart from that, we tested different geos, placements (TikTok Feed, Pangle), and used new instruments that TikTok implemented such as SPC campaigns (campaigns with automatic optimization), and Auto Generation & Refresh. ‘AGR’ is automatic creative optimization made by TikTok which is generating new variations of top performing creatives: adding music, filters, dynamic elements, etc. We also worked with TikTok Creator Marketplace and launched Spark Ads - a unique TikTok instrument that allows campaigns with videos that an influencer uploaded to their channel. All these steps allowed us to reach 130% of target ROAS, and fast iterations with experiments, defining and excluding campaigns that bring negative ROI, allowed us to spread the budget more effectively.

To sum up, we can say that it is crucial to constantly work on creatives, improving the top performing ones and generating new ones. As well as to experiment with optimization, targeting, and work with data and prediction models. We have to thank the ad networks product team for their updates and improvements that make the lives of advertisers much easier.
UA