Phaver - TikTok app install ads in the US

Phaver, a share-to-earn social app, partnered with Shook Digital to support their US app launch with performance-driven TikTok ads featuring local creators explaining the value of the new app.

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As Phaver’s team already knows the massive impact that creatives have on ad performance, as well as the focus on creator content that’s needed to succeed on TikTok, they reached out to Shook Digital for help. Shook’s team found 2 creators, who also had a presence on Phaver’s platform, and worked with them to create a series of scripted videos around key themes in the app. 

Variations featured creators of different age groups and backgrounds, focusing on different verticals and value propositions, as well as strategic text overlays for maximal performance.

Shook then ran a series of tests across the variations on iOS and Android, soon noticing one of them overperformed the others by an over 10x margin and shifting more and more of the budgets towards the best performing version.

Campaign structure also followed TikTok’s best practices that suggest reaching at least 50 conversions per ad group in the first week and allowing the algorithm to optimize efficiently. This brought the cost per install down 68% between the first 3 days of the campaign and the last 3 days of the campaign.

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The extensive creative testing and optimized campaign setup brought the winning creatives CPI to 6 euros, which was well below the campaign target. The campaign also reached 320,000 target audience members and drove almost 5000 visitors to Google Play Store and Apple App Store to find out more. Installs and activations were also tracked in detail with the Mobile Measurement Partner Branch as well as a custom invite code used in the ads that allowed more accurate tracking of signups.

The power of creative optimization is evident in this case, since the highest performing creative variant in the end brought over 99% of the installs while spending 58% of the total budget of the campaign and producing a CPI 10x lower than the second best performing one. The results were also verified with the client’s proprietary data so there are no tracking issues behind the staggering difference. 

Furthermore, for impatient campaign optimizers it’s worth noting that the CPI of even the best performing creative variation started high, but by giving it enough budget and not making any major changes during the first week, the CPI dropped by 68% to reach the target levels for the remainder of the campaign period. 

6€ CPI – 10x better performance with creative optimization – 68% improvement in CPI after learning phase

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