Advertiser Case Study: Increase your Games offer’s ROI with Native Advertising in Brazil

Have you tested out ExoClick’s Native ad format yet? Read this Case Study to learn how to increase your Games offer’s ROI with Native Advertising in Brazil! Also, we will tell you how to optimize your advertising campaign in Brazil with Smart Bid. Native is a flexible ad format that matches the look and feel of the website content it is surrounded with, attracting the end user’s eyeballs with editorial content highly targeted to their interests, designed to compel them to click and convert! Offering low bidding prices and big volumes, Native is the ideal format to advertise online Games. This is why the following Advertiser decided to change strategies and use Native advertising to promote his online Games offer in Brazil, achieving an ROI of +132%!

You should also check out our recent blog article How to convert your online offers in Brazil with ExoClick for more great tips!

Advertiser Case Study: +132% ROI using Native to promote a Gaming offer

Offer: Online Games
Ad format: Native
GEO: Brazil
Campaign duration: 1st to 30th September
Conversions: 556
Investment: $845
Total income: $1998
Net profit: $1100
ROI: 132%

This Advertiser wanted to increase the number of end users registering to his Gaming website while getting a positive ROI. His previous strategies hadn’t provided the expected results, so observing the nature of his Gaming offer, his Account Manager suggested trying Native. This is how to increase your Games offer’s ROI with Native Advertising in Brazil:

Creatives and Landing optimization

This Advertiser optimized his ad copy, creatives and Landing Page by using the Native format’s characteristic features:

#1 Dynamic Tokens: By using Dynamic Tokens the Advertiser could automatically replace specific texts with relevant keywords to target the different audiences he was after:

• He used Dynamic Tokens to target his end users by device kinds, operating system and carriers with the tags {operating_system}, {device} and {carrier}.
• He also used the Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tool for GEO targeting, reflecting different locations with tags like {country_name}, {region}, {city}, etc.

#2 Emojis: Native allows Advertisers to make an extra visual impact and attract audiences based on emotional responses with emojis, which add extra dynamism and emotion to the texts. This Advertiser specifically used the ❤️,🔥and 🎮 emojis, which reflected that the product offered was a very trendy online Game that the end users were going to absolutely adore!

#3 Native flow: He created 3 different Landing Pages, all according to the editorial Native flow. This means not going for the hard sell, but rather, offering interesting content that the end users want to see or read: ‘Find out your gamer profile and discover your new favorite game’, ‘expert guide to customize your character’, and ‘Use these 5 killer hacks to SMASH platform games!’. Of course, he made sure that the ads also reflected these topics on the images and the texts, to make the whole experience cohesive and trust-worthy.

#4 Creatives and prelanders: To add extra value and capture the interest of the end users, he also included quizzes to make the offering entertaining and reflected them in the ad creatives and prelanders. With them he made his brand more visible and memorable and encouraged end users to interact with the ads.

Targeting and the test campaign setup

Here are the targeting settings that he used for this Native campaign:

Device: Mobile
Language: Portuguese
Operating Systems: All, including Android, Windows 10, iOS, MacOS, Linux & Unix, ChromeOS, KaiOS, Nokia/Symbian, JavaOS, Tizen, and BlackBerry O.
Browser: All, including Internet Explorer Mobil, Chrome, Mozilla and Safari Mobile
Time Period: 2nd – 6th September (5 days of testing)
Pricing Model: Smart CPM

The Advertiser set the test campaign to last for 5 days and set the pricing model to Smart CPM, targeting Mobile devices. He also made sure to target all browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, which also made the campaign compatible with all operating systems. The campaign was set to run during all day, without Day Parting, targeting all genders and demographics. The Language was set to Portuguese, since the target GEO was Brazil.

Optimization Day: How to optimize your advertising campaign in Brazil with Smart Bid

After 5 days of the test campaign running, it was optimization day. The two significant changes that this Advertiser made was replacing the Smart CPM pricing model with Smart Bid, and starting to use ExoClick’s Landing Page Optimization Tool.

Let’s start learning how to optimize your advertising campaign in Brazil with Smart Bid: He made this change following his Account Manager’s advice, and it allowed him to optimize his bids automatically and efficiently reach high-quality audiences on a larger scale. By setting a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), he was able to find the optimal bid that would yield the best results. In order to achieve the highest number of conversions, he made the strategic decision to use ‘Maximize Volume’ as his bid optimization. This meant that his primary goal was to increase the number of leads or potential users that we were able to reach and engage with. By prioritizing volume, he aimed to cast a wider net and capture as many potential conversions as possible:

Once the Smart Bid model was set on day 7, the campaign got optimized regularly automatically, and was profitable from the first day of using it with 87.78% ROI, which you will see reflected in the metrics on the data dashboard further below.

Now, let’s look at his decision to start using ExoClick’s Landing Page Optimization Tool in order to automate the traffic sent to his 3 Landing Page variations. He tested out all of the three algorithms to continue to test out which of his 3 Landing Pages was the best performing as the campaign continued running:

#1 Even: Spreads the traffic evenly between the LPs
#2 Fixed: Enables you to define the exact percentage of traffic each LP will receive
#3 Automatic Optimisation: Send the majority of traffic to the best performing LP

End of campaign results: Increase your Games offer’s ROI with Native Advertising in Brazil

Using the Native format and its creative and targeting features offered this Advertiser the opportunity to efficiently target his end users and engage them by giving them content that they really wanted to see, thus guaranteeing high volumes and clicks. By changing the bidding model to Smart Bid he guaranteed that his campaign would be always profitable. He then also decided to test out different Landing Page Optimization algorithms to further optimize the campaign, and continued to make small tweaks and optimizations after optimization day: For instance, he made sure to pause underperforming creatives and experimenting with new ones in order to keep the campaign fresh and engaging. Thanks to all of that, a period of stability was followed by a consistent increase in ROI towards the 132% ROI result.

Expert tips to create the perfect Native flow for your online Games offer

Continuing on we will give you some tips to create the perfect Native flow for your online Games offer. As you now know, the Native flow is ideal for online Games because it gives you the opportunity as an Advertiser to play with psychology, offering non-sales oriented content, designed to simply catch the end user’s eye and make them interested in your offering – We are talking about tips, influencer reaction videos, insights about the game, feature highlights, etc. Here is how a successful Native flow works and how to increase your Games campaign’s ROI with Native advertising:

Tip! How to work the image: Your ad’s image is your first opportunity to capture the viewer’s interest. You don’t need a graphic designer, you can pick a simple and compelling image that fits into the website that you are targeting. Avoid Stock photos and instead use images that look like user generated content and that could have been taken with a smartphone. Appeal to the end user’s curiosity looking for an emotional response. In this case, we are talking about an audience interested in Games, so this could be an image of a young gamer who is loudly celebrating that they have beaten the game! Here are more tips to create high converting Native ad images texts.

Tip! Write great copy for Native: Title and Description are the other 50% of the spell to make end users click. Remember that there is a word limit, so you need to get your point across fairly quickly to make your text be the most powerful CTA – You could make it a question, use facts or statistics, or offer a lifehack, for instance, and of course, use emojis! Keep it coherent with your ad image and make sure that it shows what your audience can expect to find once they click. To continue with our previous example, if you are showing the image of the young gamer winning. Let’s try this Advertiser’s copy as an example: ‘Use these 5 killer hacks to SMASH platform games!’.

Tip! How to craft the Landing Page: When the user clicks the Native ad, it is best to follow the Native flow from beginning to end: Once again, we are talking about editorial style, which means that your Landing Page should look like a blog article, or contain content designed to be useful to the end user. This could be tips for the game, info about the profiles of the characters in the game, a highlight of the game’s best features… Then place your CTA at the end of the Landing Page. The secret to converting Native ads is not to go for the hard sell, but to educate and capture the interest of the end user with your Landing Page. So, because you have advertised 5 hacks to help your end users win, your Landing Page would work best as an article with 5 (and maybe some more!) tips and hacks.

And here are some ExoClick tools that you can use to target, track and optimize your Native campaign:

Tip! Dynamic KW Insertion: This feature lets you dynamically change texts within your Native ad campaigns. It is a really useful feature, particularly for GEO targeting and can really help you increase conversions. It’s all down to Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tokens, which automatically replace specific texts with keywords relevant to the end user. Read our tutorial here.

Tip! Keyword Insertion Language Distribution: ExoClick allows you to automatically translate the Keyword Insertion token in the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. The Dynamic Tokens will display in the language that you set for the campaign. The language is set in the top right of the Variations list. Choose the language for the Tokens from the Ad Text Language drop-down. The default language is English.

Tip! Variations Optimization Tool: Try uploading several different images and use ExoClick’s Automatic Variations Optimisation Tool. This tool is super useful for Native campaigns because it enables you to automatically optimize your creatives depending on your goal: CTR is good if you want to drive as much traffic as possible to your landing page. Or choose Automatic on Conversion Rate to generate conversions ASAP, and in order to help get your ROI.

Tip! Use ExoCick’s Conversion Tracking: Conversion tracking is an essential part of advertising. By doing conversion tracking, you will be able to see how many sales, leads or installs you are getting from these campaigns and get an accurate picture of how profitable the traffic is. This tool is specifically useful when used along with the Smart Bid model.

Do you want more tips on how to increase your Games offer’s ROI with Native Advertising in Brazil or have any more questions about this format, how to optimize your advertising campaign in Brazil with Smart Bid, or want to learn about any other ExoClick’s excellent platform features for Advertisers? Get in touch with you Account Manager or contact our Customer Success team now!