2021 Global Advertising Creative Analysis Insights Report

In 2021, the launch and growth teams of overseas companies encountered many challenges, especially when faced with iOS's suddenly tightened privacy policy and the disappearance of user-level data, they seemed overwhelmed.

We all know that the disappearance of IDFA is just the beginning. All major platforms will further tighten their privacy policies in 2022. When user data is no longer the core of the online marketing field, who can take its place and become the tool for advertisers to attribution and optimization?

The answer is "creative material".

By optimizing your advertising campaigns around “creativity”, you no longer have to worry about changes in privacy policies. You only need to focus on the metrics that are relevant and visible to your business at the moment and present them on the basis of effective integration.

In other words, suppose you are connecting the optimization of ad delivery to a part of the advertising ecosystem that is still controllable, such as bidding? Unfortunately, this part has been automated. Audience targeting? Either it has been automated or it is locked by the privacy policy.

The only variable that remains within your power to shape and deploy is “ad creative,” and it has no chance of disappearing.

So, why are we so sure that these important ads can be optimized and that these optimizations are meaningful? It's data, lots of data. We see hundreds of thousands of (advertising) materials every day, a large number of pictures, videos and interactive ads, and each of them consumes at least $5 in advertising budget and is associated with at least one App download. The analysis of these materials provides us with a good conclusion: there is still a lot of room for optimization of advertising materials .

Before we start the analysis, we need to state in advance that, unless otherwise stated, IPM is the primary indicator we choose. IPM stands for Installs Per 1,000 Impressions and is quickly becoming the most important metric for creative analytics because it is deeper in the conversion funnel and is not subject to privacy policies and obfuscation.

KPI 1: Advertising performance across multiple campaigns

Figure 1: 45% of creatives that consistently outperform expectations will be prematurely removed from production

Figure 2: 55% of ads that consistently perform poorly will be kept in service for 4 months instead of being taken offline

You don’t have to overhaul your entire creative production system to improve your success rate, because simply and directly analyzing your advertising campaigns with creativity at the core can improve your delivery conversion efficiency. Bidalgo is one of the industry leaders in creative-centric tools, but even on our platform, we see 45.2% of high-performing assets being dropped by advertisers, despite the positive impact they had on marketing performance.

While IPM may not always be the most important metric, it is always critical because it illustrates the creative’s ability to attract users who will be persuaded to try the product. Good creative will attract the right users to click, while discouraging those who won’t convert.

KPI 2: Material Efficiency

To illustrate the severity of the problem of “non-essential creative production”, we looked at creatives that contributed little to the overall campaign, spending less than 0.1% of the overall budget. They contributed little to the ad spend, but advertisers invested time and money to produce them. How many such advertising assets are there? Too many.

Please see the following figure:

Caption: On average, 28% of ad creatives are allocated a negligible amount of budget; overall, these creatives account for less than 3% of total spending.

Caption: In the above picture, more than a quarter of the creatives are only allocated single-digit advertising spend! Moreover, the larger the budget an advertiser invests, the more serious the budget dispersion will be. Although top advertisers are less sensitive to the production costs of creatives and require more diversity to succeed, the final figure of [39%] is too high.

Let’s look at the ratio between advertising costs and materials from another perspective. In the picture below, we can see the following ratio: “how much material consumes more than 80% of the budget”.

For example: In advertising campaigns with monthly spending less than $10,000, 26% of the creatives consume 80% of the budget; in advertising campaigns with monthly spending greater than $1 million, 14% of the creatives consume 80% of the budget. This fully reflects the concentration problem of advertising budgets. Think about the risks brought by this concentration and reliance on a small amount of creatives. Creative fatigue is inevitable, and the concentration of spend on these assets makes each of them a potential threat to the efficiency of your campaigns. The bigger the budget, the greater the risk.

KPI3: Performance of advertising creatives

Let’s dive deeper into the IPM (installs per thousand impressions) metric to see how the data can help you gauge the overall health of your creative asset library and its utilization. Let us now look at a set of current situation data observed by Bidalgo.

1. 36% of creative advertising does not meet advertisers’ expectations

2. 46% of creative ads performed at an average level

3. 18% of creative advertising performance exceeded expectations and received a good response in the market

In theory, under ideal assumptions, all creative assets are of similar quality, reflecting the best and greatest efforts of the relevant personnel (production, delivery, optimization, etc. teams). In this case, the IPMs for most assets should be relatively similar. (There will be a certain percentage of flops or breakthrough material, but not a lot).

But what Bidalgo observed was actually very different: We framed three very broad groups of IPM values ​​to see how much ad assets corresponded to each group. According to this predefined definition, poor performance means that the IPM brought by the material does not reach 50% of the industry average (calculated comprehensively for multiple products, channels and asset types); the IPM is between 50% and 150%, and we consider it to have passed at this level; and the so-called "explosive creative" refers to those creative materials whose IPM is above 150% of the industry average.

Next, let’s look at the performance of different industries and different types of advertising creatives around the world.

Table 1: Advertising creative performance in different industries

(Data source: Bidalgo 2021 Advertising Creative Insights Report (The above averages are calculated based on different combinations of advertising asset types, channel combinations, and operating systems.)

Table 2: Advertising effects of various creative types across the entire network

There’s no easy way to overhaul creative processes and make them more efficient. Because this process usually involves multiple teams, these teams have different KPIs, work priorities, and even data access permissions.

Creative performance data can be combined with metadata to extract valuable, actionable insights. For example, you should break down and group your assets by basic attributes to understand which universal attributes apply to a certain target audience. The “attributes” mentioned here can be size, format, resolution, or even designer, which is not surprising, because some people are naturally better than others at knowing which ideas are more popular and which people prefer which styles.

In order to give you more effective advice, we would like to share some industry-wide data and insights here, which you may be able to use to guide your future creative asset optimization efforts.

Data 1: The 10 most popular video ad durations on the Internet

Data 2: The 10 most popular durations of game video ads

Data 3: The 10 most popular video ad durations in lifestyle videos

Data 4: Top 5 resolutions that audiences prefer

Data 5: The audience's favorite 4 screen ratios

Data 6: The proportion of materials on iOS and Android platforms

Final Thoughts

The insights and opinions that Bidalgo can provide are just the conclusions we draw from our daily observations and analysis. Compared with the creative material data that already exists on the Internet, it is definitely a drop in the ocean.

Hopefully, the tools and services we build can provide some direction for you and enable marketing teams to reach their goals faster. While industry-wide insights can get you further on your performance and optimization journey, you still need to use your own data and optimize according to your own goals, and we’re happy to be your partner on that journey.

Author: Bidalgo

Source: Bidalgo