How I managed to improve the click-through rate by 60%

• Four web games
• US$5000 daily budget
• 60% CTR increase
• 15% Return on Investment
  

The challenge

37 Interactive Entertainment is a leading game publisher,  developer and advocator of Chinese culture. In order to build a globally-leading entertainment company, they are expanding their business to other areas such as film and music production, artist agency, animation, VR content, cultural and healthcare content and online education.

37 Interactive Entertainment is nominated as the top 25 global public game company (No.3 in China). 37 mobile now has more than 300,00,000 monthly active users. What's more, over 70 billion users have registered to its platform. As the game published continued to grow, 37 Interactive Entertainment has published thousands of games to over 200 countries, its monthly revenue reached to US $28,290,944.

37 Interactive Entertainment has its reputation on "military&agency" grade of advertising training.  That is why I decided to join its Facebook Marketing Team to learn from its innovative campaign management and combine with my skill sets. During the course of Facebook marketing practice, the Facebook campaign reached 1.6% in click-through rate, 15% in ROI and 2% in conversion rate. The average monthly revenue has grown from USD 12,000 to more than USD 60, 000. See the story below!

Key Problems 

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New games that have no historical data

Not enough in-app purchases

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Want to broaden the reach and grow the app installation

Looking for targeting the right Facebook users that are most likely engaging more in the game

My Approach

To build a sustainable and profitable game environment, I need to craft a campaign strategy that navigates to the right prospects and convinces them to download the app. Specifically, I leveraged data-driven insights to quickly iterate and methodically improve results day on day, week on week, and month on month. What's more, I utilised keywords management, detail targeting setting, graphic design, copywriting and locations management to create a sustainable Facebook campaign with targeted budget control.

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Highly-customised Facebook campaigns, segregated and optimised to Facebook Pay-per-click and Facebook video ads.

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Leveraging the custom-audience lists at hand, utilised the audience lists and the remarketing campaign.

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Specifics of account management and optimisation were applied: campaign structure, ad set bidding, ad copywriting, landing page and other core metrics required to maximise results, drive volume and hit targets.

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Monitoring and driving key metrics, including but not limited to Daily/Weekly/Monthly Revenue and CoS% targets.

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Frequently refreshed ad creative/graphic, ensured the optimum engaging visual.

Breaking down a winning digital strategy

01 Working with the in-house design team on the banner and ad creatives Ensure the constant optimisation of creatives to agreed CTR and Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Immediate attention-grabbing creatives are the key tactic to attract clicks. The typical forms of ad graphic can be categorised in 6 types (refer to the samples below).  What's more, carefully selected the elements included in the graphic/video without violating the Facebook Ads policy is essential for a smooth targeting. 

I started to have regular stand-up twice a week, formulating data report to analyse every creative performance. Click-through rate is my first-hand of evaluation in terms of ad graphic performance. With that in mind, I have concluded several appealing ad creatives that attract clicks:

1. Before-after character growth show
2. Exposure of female characters
3. 3D-rendered promotional trailers
4. 3D-rendered fight scenes
5. In-game incentives 

After months of analysis and observation, I was able to find the creative patterns for target audiences' taste and improve my CTR and daily active user rate. These include 1.6% CTR with a base of 80,000,000+ impressions and 10.54% active user rate.

Frequently assembling custom audience lists  

02 Testing targeting combinations between locations, keywords, lookalike and placements

Creating an effective campaign is all about targeting the right customer at the right time. The way a customer experiences the connection of an ad will forever colour the lens through which he engages and reviews the product of all kinds.  With that in mind, pivoting the detail targeting setting and focusing on continual optimisation were my core strategies in campaign set-up.

I like to categorise custom audiences and tag them with keywords. In the meantime, I created look-a-like(LAL) audiences based on the seed audiences in order to fulfil my board-match objective. There are specific ways of creating LAL audiences:

• 1%
• 1%-2%
• 2%-3%
• 3%-5%
• 5%-10%

The tiers of the LAL audience group ensured the potential market scale when needed. On the Ad reach frequency level, it involved frequency control in a range from 1.5 - 2.  

Meanwhile, customer shopping behaviour varies from the development of their home countries. Applying the following budget optimisation strategies helped me maintain a stable Cost Per Action(CPA) and a sustainable in-game eco-system:

• Tier 1: players from developed countries have no concerns about purchasing. Examples include Australia, American, Canada and Singapore. These countries reflect higher CPM and CPA, but with high ROI. 
• Tier 2: Players from developing countries are careful with their financial well-being. Examples include Malaysia, Filipina, Turkey and Bazil. The infusion came with low CPA and simulated high-end players to top up.
  

The ultimate take away

37 Games challenged my mentality in critical and analytical ways, which helps me broaden my horizon in paid media.  Pay-per-click requires on-going optimisation and data-driving insights. It offered me a scientific approach explaining the market trend and assisted me further in my career development.

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