Most mobile game studios are struggling with user acquisition costs. Despite following every creative best practice in ad design — high production values, compelling calls to action (CTAs), and benefit-driven messaging — the average Cost Per Install (CPI) for casual games on iOS reached $4.83 between March 2023 and March 2024.
As everyone in mobile gaming knows, iOS privacy changes have transformed traditional targeting capabilities across all major ad platforms, making it harder than ever to reach the right players efficiently. In this environment, understanding surface-level ad creation isn’t enough. Studios relying solely on creative best practices are seeing significant declines in their return on ad spend.
The real differentiator? A deep, data-driven understanding of your target audience’s psychological makeup — the intrinsic traits and motivations that drive not just clicks, but long-term engagement. While there are many approaches to ads creativity and video ads, successful advertising campaigns require deep psychological understanding of your audience.
The Challenge: Creating Ads That Actually Convert
Marketing creatives face unprecedented challenges in 2024 when designing great ads:
- Data privacy restrictions limiting targeting across ad formats
- Market saturation driving up acquisition costs
- Increasing difficulty capturing audience attention
- Need for more innovative ad campaigns to stand out
Different versions of your ad must play a role in testing what resonates. High-quality images and motivation-driven ad copy need to work together to drive engagement. This is why we’ve developed a psychology-based approach to creating ad creatives that perform.
Case Study: Improving Ad Creatives for a Mobile Golf Game
Let’s explore how to make a great ad using Solsten’s approach through the lens of a fictional mobile golf game, Legends Tour. This PGA-licensed game exemplifies what makes a good advert when psychology meets ad creative.
Step 1: Access Your Audience Intelligence Dashboard
With our consumer insights platform, Navigator, game teams can generate player audiences crafted from a wide variety of criteria. Interested broadly in RPG players? No problem. How about players who like Call of Duty, Nike, Breaking Bad, and volleyball? We got you.
After you input your criteria, Navigator rapidly identifies the global population who match this criteria. This audience is segmented into custom personas that reveal psychosocial traits, favorite games, movies, tv shows, apps, gaming preferences, demographic data, and much more. You won’t find a more complete picture of gamers anywhere else.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience For This Creative
Using Solsten’s Market Potential data, Navigator can help you analyze which audience to target for this creative. It lets you compare the total population size, average monthly spend on gaming, and lifetime value of each persona.
Personas can also be weighted using Solsten’s proprietary Player Centered Score (PCS). The PCS is a scientifically valid, accurate indicator of how “valuable” this player group is to your game concept. Connect with a Solsten expert to learn more.
Step 3: Creating Ads That Connect — The Psychology Difference
What makes a good advertisement? While many focus on creative ad campaigns and artistic ads, Solsten measures over 275 psychological traits across 12 categories. Here’s how this transforms your approach to creating an ad:
The Starting Point: Traditional Creative Approach
The initial creative approach relied on standard industry best practices and creative intuition:
- Dynamic camera angle following the ball’s trajectory
- Tournament atmosphere in the background
- Blend of casual and professional art style
- Subtle multiplayer tournament hints
While this creative follows established gaming ad conventions, it leaves key questions unanswered:
- Why would this specific scene resonate with our target players?
- How does it tap into their core motivations?
- What psychological triggers drive conversion?
The Psychological Approach: Data-Driven Creative Decisions
Using Solsten’s Navigator platform, we analyzed the psychological profile of golf gaming enthusiasts. This revealed three core traits that directly informed our creative decisions:
1. Difficulty Seekers (High Challenge Motivation)
- Original: Generic golf course scene
- Revised: Featured a challenging hole with lots of pressure from the observing audience
- Why: Data showed our audience scores 82% higher than average in seeking difficult tasks
2. Competition Driven
- Original: Subtle tournament hints in the background
- Revised: Immersive stadium atmosphere with thousands of spectators
- Why: Audience indexes 75% higher in status-seeking and competitive drive
3. Values Courage & Perseverance
- Original: Standard gameplay-focused copy
- Revised: Copy emphasizing “Face the pressure. Make history.” highlighting the mental challenge
- Why: Target audience shows 68% higher scores in courage-related traits
The Results: Psychology-Based Creative Changes
Each creative element was deliberately chosen to resonate with the identified psychological traits:
Setting Selection
- Moved from generic course to iconic #16 hole
- Added pressure-cooker stadium atmosphere
- Incorporated real crowd reactions
Visual Focus
- Shifted from ball trajectory to player perspective
- Enhanced crowd presence and reactions
- Added status symbols (leaderboards, tournament signage)
Copy Evolution
- Changed from gameplay description to emotional challenge
- Added persistence-focused messaging
- Incorporated high-stakes tournament context
By grounding creative decisions in psychological data rather than intuition alone, we created an ad that resonates more deeply with ther target audience’s core motivations and values.
Proven Results: Why Leading Studios Choose Solsten to Make Better Ads
Leading studios like Mobilityware, Tilting Point, and Zynga are seeing what makes a successful ad campaign through Solsten’s capabilities:
1. Comprehensive Audience Understanding
Easily and quickly understand high-value players by segmenting player populations from the most expansive and actionable psychographic database in the world. Solsten’s platform represents 3.4B people globally. It includes insights around intrinsic psychological traits, gaming preferences, current interests, and much more. We deliver the most comprehensive and actionable consumer insights to companies like EA, Sony, and Supercell.
2. Psychology-Based Creative Development
Our platform helps creative teams make informed decisions by providing deep psychological insights about their audience:
- Understanding which psychological traits define your most valuable players
- Identifying core motivations that can guide messaging and creative direction
- Revealing player values that inform visual and thematic choices
- Uncovering preferences that can shape creative strategy
- Optimized calls to action based on audience motivations
Each creative decision can be informed by data from over 275 psychological traits, ensuring your advertising resonates with your audience’s core motivations and values.
3. Advanced Psychographic Segmentation
Protecting the economic viability of current games is a major priority in 2024. We’re seeing more studios prioritizing long-term retention, allocating marketing budgets to live ops efforts and re-engagement campaigns. Using our API, studios can quickly segment their player base to understand the psychological differences that exist and augment their creative accordingly. Solsten can help you understand why your creative performs the way it does across your entire portfolio.
Improve Your Ad Performance Today
Ready to learn how to make great advertisements that drive real results? Leading studios are already using Solsten to:
- Reduce CPIs by up to 50% (as seen with Mythical Games’ NFL Rivals)
- Boost ROAS through psychology-driven ad creation
- Create advertising campaigns that consistently outperform
Book a demo today to discover how our psychology-based approach can transform your ad creative development and optimization process.
