This piece is brought to you in conjunction with Facebook Gaming.

In the highly-competitive landscape of online advertising, every ad needs to drive value - this helps advertisers to achieve their marketing goals.

As gaming audiences become more diverse, it’s not just about who’s playing, but how and why they play as well. Ads should give players a flavour of what a game is about. But to drive downloads and achieve results, they must be seen by the right audience at the right time, or the message can get lost. Especially as advertisers scale campaigns to reach bigger and broader audiences.

Things can become complex, more time is needed to drive campaigns, audiences can overlap, and potential players might miss out on seeing certain ads entirely. That’s why we created Automated App Ads, to help advertisers achieve more with less when it comes to app ads.

Built on powerful machine learning, Automated App Ads helps gaming developers and publishers of all sizes to optimise app ad campaigns and scale efficiently. Advertisers can set campaign parameters to allow for broad audiences and placements across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, then set an optimization goal for delivery systems to steer toward. Machine learning predicts the most valuable opportunities based on incoming data in real-time, making adjustments to help drive campaign performance.

Achieving the best possible performance for a campaign often requires time to monitor, tweak, and hone multiple campaigns at once. While multiple campaigns can also lead to audience overlap, preventing budgets from being allocated in the most efficient way. This becomes especially tricky at scale, for businesses and marketing teams of any size.

Automated App Ads can optimise in real-time, 24-7. This automation takes the strain off time-consuming tasks like campaign performance and bid management, helping advertisers get more of the customer actions they value most. The simplified campaign structure of one campaign, one ad set, and one ad also helps prevent audience overlap and reduces the number of campaigns required to get results, so budgets are spent effectively.

Automatically test and deliver high-performing creative

Creative is an important part of any campaign; it’s the first hint to potential players that a game is right for them. With Automated App Ads, it’s possible to test up to 50 ad creatives, 5 text, and 5 headline variants, while Dynamic Creative Optimisation automatically tests the best combinations, delivering the top-performing variations to relevant audiences.

Optimise in new ways to achieve advertising goals

If the campaign’s goal is to drive volume of installs and value of downstream events, optimising App Installs with Events balances both in a single campaign. Automated App Ads also brings improved delivery models for app install, app event, and value optimisation.

Reach more people in more places

To get started, simply input the app store to drive people to, country, and optimization goal, and machine learning will help to reach valuable people. With Automatic Placements, the system delivers ads at the lowest cost across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network.

How will advertisers know Automated App Ads is right for them?

We recommend running an A/B split test to see how Automated App Ads performs against a business-as-usual campaign set-up. This means setting up a campaign as normal, and setting up an Automated App Ad campaign with an equivalent country, app store, and optimization goal. After the optimal test length of 10-28 days, advertisers can evaluate whether they’ll achieve the same or better results with Automated App Ads.

While Automated App Ads also doesn’t currently support playable ads, dynamic language optimisation or placement asset customization, we’d still suggest running an A/B test to measure performance against usual app ads using these features.

There will also be times when manual app ads are better for certain goals, or even the type of ads the advertiser wants to run. For example, Automated App Ads doesn’t currently support dynamic ads so likely won’t be a good fit.

Success stories from our gaming partners

Games studios of all sizes have already seen positive positive results by migrating to Automated App Ads, and had really positive feedback to share with us as well.

In early tests, Etermax ran Automated App Ads using the app installs with app events optimization to drive volume of installs and value of lower funnel events for one of their biggest games – Trivia Crack 2. Nahir Garcia, their Head of User Acquisition commented that Automated App Ads helped drive 150K incremental installs, 22 per cent higher return on investment, and 20 per cent higher lifetime value on average.

Ilyon also utilised Automated App Ads to help grow their game Cube Rush Adventure, leading to 150 per cent more installs and 29 cent higher return on ad spend compared to their normal app ad campaigns. User Acquisition Manager Reut Leibel noted that because of the automation of creative testing, they were able to sustain performance throughout the duration of their Automated App Ads campaign.

Start using Automated App Ads

Automated App Ads is currently available for app install objectives, with more features to be announced. Product information, best practices, and step-by-step instructions on setting it up can be found on the Facebook Help Center or by visiting our Facebook Gaming hub page at fb.gg/aaa.