Mobile Video Monthly #6 March 2019: Facebook Ad Library, Amazon video ads and new ASA countries
Mobile Video Monthly
April 2, 2019
We’re back with another Mobile Video Monthly, where we discuss the changes and trends regarding video in the mobile app space. It can be news about ASO, UA or other ways video can be leveraged by developers and publishers
Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss any of our blog posts. Check out the previous editions here:
- Mobile Video Monthly #5 – February 2019 edition
- Mobile Video Monthly #4 – January 2019 edition
- Mobile Video Monthly #3 – December edition
- Mobile Video Monthly #2 – November edition
- Mobile Video Monthly #1 – October edition
Pinterest expands Ads to four more European countries – March 6
You can now run Pinterest Ads in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy, both for standard and video ads.
Pinterest is also looking to roll this out in the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland.
Google Play launches rewarded products (starting with rewarded video ads) to help app developers monetise – March 6
With rewarded products developers can monetize non-paying users by letting them watch a video ad and reward them with virtual goods or in-game currency.
This is nothing you in terms of concept of course, but it is now an option within the Google Play Developer console.
ironSource launches A/B testing tool for mobile app developers – March 12
Still regarding user monetization, ironSource has launched a tool letting you test different ad monetization strategies to figure out which one will maximize your LTV.
You create your A/B test by allocating what percentage of your users should be included in the B test group, and then set up your app’s configuration for that new group.
You then look at performance (revenue, retention and ARPDAU) to make your decisions.
More information here.
Facebook ad metrics updates for more actionable insights – March 12
Facebookis making changes to how they report the relevance of an ad for a specific audience.
Instead of one metric like it is currently the company is going to replace the relevance score with 3 different metrics:
These metrics should help advertisers better understand how changes to the creative assets, targeting or even post-click experience can improve performance.
More information here.
Google Play custom store listings to target specific countries – March 14
With custom store listings, Google Play developers can now target one or several countries and not just a localization.
You can have a different title, icon description and creative assets for each variant. This allows you to show content like screenshots or your promo video that are relevant to users from a specific country.
You can create up to 5 custom store listing pages. More info and examples here.
Google Play pre-registration now available to everyone – March 12
Developers use to need to contact a Google Business Development manager to get started with a pre-registration campaign.
Not anymore. You can now set up a pre-registration campaign in the Google Play Console to start marketing your games before launch. The day of your launch, users who pre-registers receive a notification which can help boost your day on installs.
This is very similar to what Apple made available with app pre-orders, and you can find more about guidelines and requirements here.
Of course during this pre-registration phase your Google Play store creative assets have even more importance, since that’s how visitors can judge your game.
The latest AppsFlyer performance index is out – March 21
If you’re wondering which user acquisition channels are the most relevant for you, check out AppsFlyer latest performance index.
Amazon to launch mobile video ads – March 21
Amazon is out to change the Duopoly and is reported to be launching in-app video ads soon. The company has been beta testing such ads in their iOS shopping app: a brief video spots appear in the search results.
It will be interesting to see how brands (especially eCommerce ones of course) leverage this new channel. It seems that Amazon is requiring a $35k ad budget to run spots.
Apple search ads now available in 46 new countries countries – March 27
Big news regarding Apple Search Ads: 46 new countries have been added (full list here).
This is definitely an interesting opportunity for app developers to get started in new markets while costs are still relatively low, and of course also gain valuable keywords insights for their App Store Optimization strategy.
A new Apple Search Ads feature also added is country bundling to launch campaigns in several countries at the same time.
Facebook makes it even easier to search and view all active ads with Facebook ad library – March 29
Back in October 2017 Facebook announced a “View a Page’s Active Advertisements”, and we then were able to go to any Facebook page to look at their active ads.
Really useful for your ad creatives competitive analysis, yet it still went kinda under the radar. You did have to go to the Facebook page of your competitor, open the “Info and Ads” section and scroll down to look at the ads. Either using the desktop version or in the Facebook mobile app.
Now Facebook just launched the Facebook Ad Library: a “comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running from across Facebook products”.
The focus is on ads related to politics or issues of importance, so a search by topic will only show these.
This means that you still need to search by Facebook page of your competitors, but the user experience is much better now. See below a quick video with “Meditation” and then the “Calm” Facebook page.
You can even get a picture in picture view so you can keep browsing while watching an ad!
There is new information compared to “View page’s advertisement”, like being able to see either Active or Inactive ads but also when each ad started running.
Something else interesting we noticed is that when ads use dynamic creative you’re able to compare the different versions that were advertised.
However unlike with the View Ads feature we could not find any info regarding number of views, which makes it harder to get a sense of how heavily and ad has been used.
Last but not least, Facebook is also expanding researchers’ and developers’ programmatic access to Ad Library API, which was previously in closed beta. So if you have a Facebook developer account and are confirmed you can leverage that data (with limits apparently).
Did we miss any big news related to mobile video for March? If so, let us know in the comments!
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