Optimizing your ad creative is essential for driving user acquisition, engagement, and revenue growth. With the abundance of audience intelligence tools and solutions available, it can be challenging to determine which ones will provide the most valuable audience insights and help you create impactful ad campaigns.
Previously, we went into detail on why creative optimization is such an important marketing strategy for improving key metrics like ROAS and CPI. Then, we walked through all of the steps necessary to make more resonant and engaging ad creative.
In this article, we will explore the best audience intelligence tools and platforms, including Solsten, GWI, Replai, Sensor Tower, and AppsFlyer, as well as the role agencies play in the creative optimization process. We’ll dig into the different approaches that each takes to creative optimization, and explore the advantages and disadvantages that each solution presents.
Solsten: Unrivaled Psychological Insights for Creative Optimization
Solsten provides the world’s most expansive and actionable audience insights and resonance platform, representing 3.4 billion people globally, and the largest psychological database in the world*.* This database gives marketing teams access to hundreds of science-backed personality traits, measured across every type of gamer. This allows you to predict and effectively target your audience with the most relevant creative content.
Solsten generates unique audience segments for live games and game concepts, providing deep insights into the psychological profiles, values, motivations, and personality traits of the most valuable player. By understanding the intrinsic motivations of your target audience, you can craft ad creative that speaks directly to players’ desires, improving ROAS and CPIs.
Solsten’s audience intelligence platform helps marketing teams optimize their marketing efficiency and spend in a few key ways:
Identify Your Target Audience’s Psychological Traits
Solsten creates completely unique audience segments for live games and game concepts that help you understand your audience like never before. They provide deep insights into the values, motivations, and personality traits of the most valuable player personas for a given game.
For live games, these audiences update in real time, giving you deep insights into the evolving nature of your exact audience. By understanding the intrinsic motivations and desires of your target audience, you can make ad creative that resonates with players on a psychological level. This data gives you confidence that the creatives you are betting on will convert your ideal players and drive ROAS.
Align Ad Creative With Audience Motivations
Solsten helps you understand the potential impact of your creatives through predictive precision and clarity. With the psychological and motivational insights that Solsten identifies, marketing teams can develop ad creative that directly appeals to the specific motivations of their target audience.
For example, if the audience data reveals that a significant portion of the target players are motivated by a sense of achievement and mastery, the ad creative could highlight the game’s progression systems, skill-based challenges, and rewards for accomplishment.
By aligning the ad creative with the audience’s core motivations, marketing teams can increase the effectiveness of their campaigns and drive higher engagement and conversion rates. This is distinct from other audience intelligence platforms, which index on affinity data. Solsten collects audience affinity data as well, and is the only platform that combines those insights with psychological insights.
Differentiate Ad Creative From Competitors
Solsten’s competitor benchmarking capabilities let marketing teams analyze the ad creative and strategies of competing games in the market. By understanding how competitors are positioning their games and appealing to player motivations, marketing teams can identify opportunities to differentiate their own ad creative.
They can focus on highlighting the unique value propositions and motivational hooks of their game that are not being effectively addressed by competitors, helping their ads stand out and attract valuable players.
Test and Iterate on Motivation-Based Creative
Solsten’s platform takes iterative ad creative development and optimization to the next level. Marketing teams can use the psychological insights provided by Solsten to develop multiple versions of ad creative, each tailored to specific player motivations. By running A/B tests and analyzing performance data, you can identify the most effective motivation-based creative elements and continually refine ads to drive better results.
Ready to see why studios like Tilting Point, Mobilityware, and Mythical use Solsten to optimize creative and drive high-conversion marketing campaigns? Reach out and schedule a demo today!
GWI: Survey-Backed Affinity and Demographic Data
GWI boasts survey data representing the views of 2.7 billion people around the world. The company collects this data through a quarterly survey. This data gives marketing teams the ability to create custom audiences based on granular demographic and affinity data. GWI also gathers data on attitudes and extrinsic motivations. This all adds up to 250,000 different attributes that an audience can be sliced and diced by.
This data has potential for understanding the preferences of untapped audiences. However, it comes with some significant limitations for marketing teams that need to predictably create high-performing creative assets that resonate best with a target audience. If you have a live game, there is no ability to gain insights into your current audience. Likewise, if you have a game concept, you have no way of knowing whether the audience you’ve created has any interest in your game. GWI also lacks the potent psychological data that is at the core of creative optimization.
Replai: AI-Driven Recommendations for Dynamic Creative Optimization
Replai offers AI-driven recommendations for optimizing video ad creatives based on historical performance data. Marketing teams can use Replai to assess the effectiveness of individual creative elements within their video ads, and implement AI-driven recommendations to improve existing creatives. These recommendations could include specific actions such as removing certain characters or adding specific emotions within the first few seconds of the ad.
Replai also allows marketing teams to experiment with new creative combinations by selecting and combining deconstructed video elements (via tags) and analyzing how different combinations impact performance metrics. This experimentation process can lead to the discovery of novel and impactful creative combinations that drive better ad performance.
While Replai provides valuable insights for creative optimization, it lacks a deep psychological understanding of target audiences. Other solutions go beyond historical performance data to provide insights into the intrinsic motivations and desires of player personas, enabling the creation of truly resonant ad creative.
Sensor Tower: Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking
Sensor Tower‘s Ad Intelligence platform lets marketing teams track and analyze the mobile advertising activities of their competitors. By examining the ad creatives used by competing games, teams can gain insights into effective themes, visuals, and messaging that resonate with their target audience. This information can be used to inform the direction of their own ad creatives and identify opportunities to differentiate their campaigns.
Ad Intelligence also provides access to ad creatives from different regions, helping teams to identify localization trends and preferences. By analyzing how competitors adapt their ad creatives for specific markets, teams can gain insights into cultural nuances, language preferences, and regional design trends. This information can be used to create more targeted and culturally relevant ad creatives.
What Seonsor Towers lacks is any understanding of “why” behind their competitive benchmarking. While the Ad Intelligence platform is a valuable tool for competitive analysis, it contains no deep insights into “why” ads are working and others aren’t.
AppsFlyer: Performance Analysis and Collaboration
AppsFlyer‘s Creative Optimization solution offers a holistic view of creative performance across all media sources. This includes key metrics like cost, installs, clicks, retention, and lifetime value. This gives teams a complete understanding of how their ad creatives are performing throughout the entire user funnel. By analyzing this data, they can identify the most effective creatives and allocate their ad spend accordingly to maximize ROI.
AppsFlyer’s AI-powered insights provide granular data on creative performance, helping teams confidently identify the specific elements within their ad creatives that drive the best results. By seeing which components resonate with their target audience, teams can optimize their creative strategy to focus on the most impactful elements. This leads to more effective ad campaigns and improved conversion rates. However, without understanding “why” these creative elements are resonating, it can be difficult to replicate the success of a high-performing ad.
While AppsFlyer is a robust tool for performance analysis and optimization, it is similar to many other dynamic creative optimization solutions on the market, and lacks deep psychological insights. Other solutions offer a more in-depth understanding of target audiences’ intrinsic motivations and desires, which is essential for creating ad creative that truly resonates on an emotional level.
Agencies: Strategic Planning and Creative Execution
Agencies come in many shapes, sizes, and forms, but broadly offer strategic planning, concept development, and creative execution. By partnering with an agency, marketing teams can leverage them to create high-quality, data-driven ad creatives.
Agencies collaborate with game studios to develop comprehensive creative strategies aligned with business objectives, target audiences, and unique selling propositions. They generate multiple ad concepts designed to engage the target audience and communicate the game’s value proposition effectively. Once ad concepts are approved, agencies make the creative assets. This ensures that the final creatives are of high quality, visually compelling, and optimized for the intended media channels.
Agencies help with creative optimization, but they usually use old-fashioned market research and standard practices. In contrast, Solsten offers unparalleled insights into the psychological profiles and motivations of target audiences. This opens the door to ad creative that resonates on a deeper, more personal level.
Conclusion
While GWI, Replai, Sensor Tower, AppsFlyer, and agencies offer valuable features services, Solsten emerges as the clear choice for marketing teams looking to create truly resonant ad creative.
Solsten offers unrivaled psychological insights into target audiences. With Solsten’s audience intelligence platform, you can align your ad creative with player motivations, differentiate your campaigns from competitors, and continuously refine your strategies based on data-driven recommendations.
With Solsten, you can create ad creative that speaks directly to the intrinsic desires and motivations of your most valuable player personas, driving higher engagement, conversion rates, long-term player loyalty, and ultimately better customer experiences.
In a world where capturing players’ attention and emotions is harder than ever, Solsten’s psychological data is the key to unlocking the full potential of your ad creative. By tapping into the motivations and desires of your most valuable audiences, you can create campaigns that truly resonate, setting your studio apart from the competition and achieving sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive market.
Ready to see how Solsten can optimize your marketing efficiency and spend? Schedule a demo today to learn more about the only tool that reliably predicts your future success of your creative and campaigns.
