Meta's Dynamic Creatives/Flexible ad formats

Terminology

Advantage+ Campaigns - Advantage+ automates many aspects of campaign setup, including audience targeting, placements, and budget allocation. Advertisers provide basic inputs (e.g., business objectives, creative assets), and Meta optimizes the campaign for performance.

Dynamic Creatives - This is an optimization tool, into which Advertisers provide multiple versions of ad assets (e.g., up to 10 images or videos, 5 headlines, 5 ad copy texts, and 5 CTAs). Meta then generates dynamic combinations and shows them to your target audience.

Flexible Ad Formats - According to Meta, Dynamic Creatives will be sunset and Flexible Ad formats will replace them to optimize the layout and presentation of an ad based on its placement and user behavior, ensuring the ad looks and performs its best across different placements (e.g., Feed, Stories, Reels).

Creative Structure

When using Advantage+ Campaigns, you upload your ad creatives (images, videos, assets) and Meta uses them to generate different variations of the Ads. However, if you use Manual Campaigns you can decide which creative assets will be shown in each Ad.

Limitations

1. When utilizing Advantage+ Campaigns or Flexible Ad Formats (as opposed to manually creating individual ads), Meta reports performance at the asset level. This means that you won't always know the exact combination of assets served together at any given time.

2. There are cases where text and images/videos are reported together.

3. Meta has limitations on what dimensions can be queried together across all their data (not just in creative reporting), Singular's default breakdown is Country. However, you can upgrade to use our multiple breakdowns if you want more than one breakdown.

Singular Best Practices and Things to Take Note of

• If flexible ad formats were used, Singular's Creative Format will be reported as automatic_format. In these cases, the video/ image and the relevant text can appear in a single row. When it's not Flexible Ad Format the assets will not appear together.

• Within its reporting, Singular offers network events (conversion events) to help measure lower funnel data. These events are available for both Creative and Asset level! This is particularly advantageous when running iOS campaigns.

• You can take advantage of Singular’s video metrics to help you measure how your videos perform (additional metrics such as 2/3 sec video views can be added via conversion events.)
  
• You can leverage Singular's technical ad specs dimensions to cluster your data and identify which variation of your creative(s) works better (such as aspect ratio, orientation, video duration, height/width, etc).
  

Google Ads AIC (App Promotion) Campaigns

Terminology

AIC campaigns are Google's app promotion campaigns. This was built to streamline the process of creating ads, making it easy to promote apps across Google’s largest properties including Search, Google Play, YouTube, Discover on Google Search, and the Google Display Network

Creative Structure

• • In AIC campaigns, you upload a collection of assets which Google then uses to generate different ads in different variations. The “Ad” will represent the entire collection and not a specific variation. That is why there is only 1 ad per Ad Group.
  • The collection of assets is sourced from visual and text content provided by the advertiser or automatically retrieved from the Play Store, App Store, or their website.
  • Assets can be videos, images, html5 and text (headlines and descriptions). Google recommends building out different AdGroups for different creative themes.
  • Google Ads mixes and matches these separate assets to build variations of the Ad for the app, and optimizes these variations based on the campaign settings.
  • These ads can appear across all Google properties: Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and within other apps on the Display Network.

Limitations

• Only network data is available at asset level (there is no tracker data)
• Because all of the ads in an App campaign are generated by Google Ads, you won't be able to see how each individual ad is performing, but Google does provide asset-level metrics.
• Asset level metrics are correct, However, when aggregating them and comparing to different levels they may be under or over reported:
  • Undercounting can happen because the metrics do not include store assets and other system-generated assets.
  • Overcounting happens when the same ad is shown multiple times, but each part of the ad (like a headline or image) is counted separately. Think of it this way: if your ad has a video, a headline, and a description, each of those gets its own impression count. So, if the ad is shown once, the video, headline, and description all get one impression. This means the system counts three impressions even though the ad was only shown once. When you add up all the impressions for each part of the ad, it looks like the ad was shown many more times than it actually was, leading to overcounting.

Best Practices and Things to Take Note of

• AIC campaigns will be reported as "APP_AD" under Creative Format, in these campaigns each Sub Campaign will only contain one creative ID which represents the entire collection of assets. In other campaign types a sub campaign will have creative ID for each individual Google ad.
• As only network data is available, we recommend using "Network Installs" and not "Installs" metrics.
• Utilize Google's performance label for each asset, which is detailed under the "Asset Performance" dimensions. This label provides insights into which assets outperformed others within the same sub-campaign.

  

• To gain a better understanding of how your assets were utilized across Google's properties, we recommend using the following dimensions:

  • Sub Ad Network: This dimension represents Google's various properties, such as YouTube, Display, Search, etc.
    
  • Google Ads Asset Type: This dimension indicates the role of the asset in the ad (e.g., description, headline, YouTube video, logo, call to action).
    
    
• Leverage Singular's technical ad specs dimensions to cluster your data and identify which variation of your creatives works better (such as aspect ratio, orientation, video duration, height/width, etc)
• You can use asset-level conversion events to measure lower funnel performance. Google supports only one event called: biddable_app_post_install_conversions - Number of in-app actions. Currently, this is the only post-install event available, there is no revenue provided.