IronSource adds creative insights to its user acquisition platform

User acquisition for mobile apps and games is an increasingly automated process, and so mobile marketing companies like IronSource are trying harder to make themselves stand out. And today, IronSource is adding creative insights to its user acquisition platform so that advertisers can examine how each creative asset in an advertisement performs when trying to attract a user’s attention. This is useful in particular for mobile games, which are among the most heavily advertised apps on mobile platforms.

Rivals such as Consumer Acquisition have been talking about the challenge of modern user acquisition and how to properly test creative assets for a while. In an email to VentureBeat, IronSource said its insights offering is a game-changer for managing UA campaigns for games. With all the competition for mobile game installs, optimizing UA campaigns is the make or break of getting a game successfully off the ground, and key to hitting the top of the charts. At the same time, a lot of UA operations are becoming more automated, so creative remains one of the last critical levers for gaining a competitive edge in a UA campaign.

Despite this, currently the UA platforms that game developers and publishers most commonly use do not offer convenient and granular visibility into the performance of individual creatives, IronSource said. This means that to understand how a particular creative asset is performing in a specific campaign, the publisher must download and analyze data separately and then apply the insights back to the campaign.

The changes to IronSource’s UA platform streamlines this process by making the information on each creative instantly visible, and allowing the creative itself to get added to other campaigns for the same title with one click, improving the efficiency of UA creative-related decisions and ultimately the success of creative campaigns.

This enables mobile advertisers to make data-driven decisions on how to optimize their campaigns’ performance. IronSource is adding the creative insights to its dashboard for its user acquisition platform, making it easier for advertisers to quickly analyze the effectiveness of their creative assets per campaign rather than across a group of campaigns.

The result is better informed, data-driven decisions on which creative is the most relevant for which audience, based on that information, IronSource said.

How it works for games

Currently, creative-related data either isn’t available in the dashboards of UA platforms or has to be downloaded and then analyzed separately. This makes it difficult for advertisers to see how their creatives are performing at the same time or in the same place as where they manage all other aspects of their campaigns, such as budget, bid, geo, and ad unit type, IronSource said.

Additionally, when viewing creatives across all campaigns as a whole, the corresponding data is often averaged out, so an advertiser is unable to see the true impact of each creative, which impedes adapting a creative in order to improve the IPM (installs per mille, or the number of app installs per thousand ad impressions) for a specific campaign. By making data on creative performance visible and accessible right inside the platform, IronSource said it empowers UA managers to understand their creative performance faster and more accurately, and then act on it correctly.

Additionally, the platform saves advertisers valuable time by allowing them to easily reuse a winning design for another campaign within the same title, in one simple click, IronSource said.

When an advertiser is dealing with hundreds, if not thousands, of campaigns on a daily basis, making accurate, data-driven decisions about what to cut, what to promote, or what to adjust becomes mission-critical, Erez Fruchtman, vice president of product at IronSource,said in a statement. He said the new additions are the first of many in the roadmap to give partners actionable data.