💎 Growth Gems #79 - Ad Monetization, Creatives and SEO
Hey,
This week I’m sharing gems on:
These insights come from Kevin Indig, Isabella Zulli, Salah Mustafa, and Felix Braberg.
Enjoy!
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SEO: aggregators vs. integrators, misconceptions
I’ve shared some SEO insights for the last couple of months (cf. Growth Gems #75).
This time, the gems from this podcast episode are entirely focused on SEO: Sean Ellis (Author of Hacking Growth) and Ethan Carr (Growth Trainer & Coach) discussed the topic with Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor) in How Startups Should Think About SEO from Shopify's Former Director.
💎 There are two categories of companies when it comes to SEO
Aggregators - marketplaces (e.g., UberEats, Booking.com): they don’t create the content themselves and need to make sure that the content is easily findable, but have an advantage.
Integrators - content platforms (e.g., Peloton): they have to create all the content themselves to leverage SEO.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 07:05
⛏️ Going Deeper: if you’re an aggregator, you want to think about SEO from day one when you’re building your website or web app because it’s going to compound. Technical SEO (crawling, site speed, internal linking, etc.) will matter even more.
If you’re an integrator, it’s about content marketing and creating “unique” content (non-commoditized) with an amazing experience, building a strong brand, and building backlinks.
💎 Three misconceptions/mistakes about SEO:
It’s a very stable channel. This is not the case anymore: Google has become very smart and constantly tests things. There is always volatility.
Only what happens on the website is important (technical SEO, content). Don’t disregard what happens before you get there: leverage the “SERP features” results (e.g., map integration, image carousel, direct answer, etc.).
Creating a lot of content is enough. You need to think about the competitive advantage you can get.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 18:55
💎 Reverse-engineer what Google tries to achieve by looking at the search results to see the SERP features used. For example: for a search like “tattoos”, you can see that Google shows a lot of visuals, assuming people want inspiration. So for that search term, you want to make sure you show images on your page.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 23:30
💎 Keywords still matter. But you need to update your knowledge and think about users’ intentions and topics.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 25:12
💎 Backlinks still matter. It’s all about references from other sites, even though Google has gotten much better at understanding the context of backlinks.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 26:25
⛏️ Going Deeper: Kevin also shared that if you’re an aggregator, you need to understand the kind of inventory you have and the intentions of users (e.g., comparison, alternative, etc.) or “jobs to be done”. You need a high-level view.
💎 Sitemaps are still essential for SEO, and you can structure them to benefit you. Create both XML sitemaps (uploaded in the search console and structured by categories, page type, time, etc.) and a large HTML sitemap (an actual page on your website with links to the different categories).
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 32:42
💎 SEO is a company-wide job. You can scale SEO by inspiring people to do things with an SEO mindset: run tailored workshops with writers, engineers, designers, product marketing managers, product managers, etc., so they understand how they can make an impact. When they implement what they do, make sure you show them back the results.
Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor)
at 44:35
Creatives: creative testing, naming convention
Phiture has been growing fast, and they work with several clients on acquisition.
Isabella Zulli (Senior Graphic Designer), Sarah Tilley (Copywriter at Phiture), and Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant) shared more about their approach in the Creative testing & how to unlock creative wins webinar.
Interesting to get a sneak peek into how the behind-the-scenes!
💎 The PET model can help you develop your creative concepts. Highlighted in green below is what tends to work best in performance campaigns.
Isabella Zulli (Senior Graphic Designer at Phiture)
at 11:56
💎 Create a Copy Kit for your text assets: construct efficient documentation and keep it updated and organized. This allows you to repurpose lines and CTAs across some channels and creatives to streamline messaging and save time.
Sarah Tilley (Copywriter at Phiture)
at 21:55
💎 Assess if hyper-localization is a good idea by looking at the benefits vs. drawbacks:
Benefits: target lots of groups during one testing cycle, create more personalized assets, identify unique trends/data to inform future tests, and drive stronger value for the customer.
Drawbacks: it is time-consuming for production, has a complex sign-off process, is only relevant for specific channels, and depends on your budget.
Sarah Tilley (Copywriter at Phiture)
at 26:13
💎 Put together a creative testing roadmap focusing on new and unique weekly concepts. Define how many concepts you’re launching initially and how many new concepts you’ll be adding in per week.
Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant at Phiture)
at 28:10
💎 When possible, test and report on creatives in a separate campaign and only include the promising performers in your evergreen, scaled campaigns.
Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant at Phiture)
at 29:50
⛏️ Going Deeper: Salah also recommends trying to neutralize the audience effect on creative testing by testing your new creatives against generic audiences or the typical audience type.
💎 Not having a clear naming convention makes it very hard to analyze the performance of the creatives. Create a template once and use it moving forward. Essential tags to have:
Asset type - static or video
Name of the theme
PET conversion tactic
Main messaging or keywords
Identifiable design elements (app UI, device frame, what the image/video shows, visual style)
Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant at Phiture)
at 31:33
💎 Assess creative performance by different attributes when analyzing commonalities between creative hits. Look at your metrics per different “theme” or “dimension”, not just by individual assets. Example: UGC ads vs. Product UI ads, static ads vs. video ads, short vs. long ads, etc.
Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant at Phiture)
at 41:48
⛏️ Going Deeper: assessing creative performance at the “dimension” level will help you build more accurate assumptions because if you’re only analyzing performance at the asset level, you might draw conclusions on the asset when, in fact, it’s the dimension that is impacting performance the most.
💎 When you’re building your creative report, make sure you:
Add all relevant dimensions (theme, iteration, media type, length)
Include key metrics to evaluate creative performance (don’t overdo it)
Create a view for the marketing team and a view for the creative team
Integrate a visual snapshot of the creative, as it will help draw conclusions and find patterns
Add controls for statistical significance
Add a measure for creative wins/losses
Salah Mustafa (Principal Growth Consultant at Phiture)
at 43:10
💎 It’s important to showcase the app experience front and center. Unique video footage (vs. stock videos) helps increase performance.
Isabella Zulli (Senior Graphic Designer at Phiture)
at 52:32
💎 Although video assets tend to perform best, they also boost campaigns with images. Production time is much faster and you can get great results when pushing them together with video ads.
Isabella Zulli (Senior Graphic Designer at Phiture)
at 52:55
Ad Monetization: DSPs competing, Black Friday tips
If costs rise for acquisition with Black Friday and the end of the year, it means it’s a lucrative season for the “other side”.
I’m now a loyal watcher of two & a half gamers, and I thought it would be timely to share some insights from Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization) on optimizing for the upcoming high season.
You’ll find below a few ad monetization gems from two different episodes.
💎 You always want to have a challenger exchange to AppLovin Exchange (ALX) or ironSource Exchange. DT Exchange (by Digital Turbine, previously Fyber) is the best choice. ALX never competes with ironSource exchange, but they do compete with Digital Turbine, so when you add DT Exchange, you’re getting DSPs to compete with themselves for the lowest third of the inventory.
Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization)
at 20:40 in two & a half gamers session #36 - Google AdROAS campaigns, Admon Exchanges, Survivor.io update
⛏️ Going Deeper: as supportive evidence of this competition, Felix shared his comparison of the last 30 days of DSP inventory:
ALX: Moloco, Liftoff, Twitter, Chartboost, Bigabid
ironSource Exchange: Moloco, Liftoff, Bytedance, Tradedesk, Chartboost
DT Exchange: Moloco, Liftoff, Tradedesk, Opera, Chartboost
💎 App-ads.txt ensures digital ad inventory is sold only through sellers that USA publishers have approved. Ad networks frequently update this file. In the next ten days, update these lists and make sure your entries are up-to-date to maximize your demand pool. If you don’t update these lists, you’re missing out on ad partners, which means less revenue.
Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization)
at 06:57 in two & a half gamers session #38 - Q4 Admon pro tips, Survivor.io clone Heroes vs. Hordes, TikTok SPC
💎 Tighten up your waterfalls if you have placements from the same network being called twice or more in a row or placements with less than 1% fill AND earn less than 1% ad revenue. Run A/B tests before Black Friday, where you set up high placements to fill over the weekend, so you’re in a good spot for Black Friday.
Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization)
at 08:52 in two & a half gamers session #38 - Q4 Admon pro tips, Survivor.io clone Heroes vs. Hordes, TikTok SPC
⛏️ Going Deeper: the a/b tests you run are to remove low fill and low revenue calls. You’re trying to keep the same or higher ad ARPDAU by low fill calls, then once low fill calls are gone you add high eCPM calls of 300-400.
💎 Do theme-rewarded ad icons: change the physical button where you call the rewarded video. Example: ad button in the shape of a turkey or a pilgrim. You can see impression/DAU increase by 5-7%, which reverts to baseline after 4-5 days. This is only worth it if you already make significant money from ad monetization, in which case you can ask your UI designer to batch-design the icons for the entire year.
Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization)
at 10:27 in two & a half gamers session #38 - Q4 Admon pro tips, Survivor.io clone Heroes vs. Hordes, TikTok SPC
💎 AdMob’s bidder artificially ramps up traffic to new placements for 3 days to see how performance works. There are risks in doing this (don’t do this all the time), but the day before Black Friday is the best time to add new placements.
Felix Braberg (Head of Ad Monetization)
at 14:40 in two & a half gamers session #38 - Q4 Admon pro tips, Survivor.io clone Heroes vs. Hordes, TikTok SPC
And before I leave, something to keep in mind on SEO for startups, especially valid when you do not have product/market fit:
“A lot of startups should NOT do SEO” - Eli Schwartz (Growth Advisor and SEO Strategic Consultant)
See you next time. Stay savvy!
⛏️ Sylvain
🔗 sources:
How Startups Should Think About SEO from Shopify's Former Director on The Breakout Growth Podcast
two & a half gamers session #36 - Google AdROAS campaigns, Admon Exchanges, Survivor.io update
two & a half gamers session #38 - Q4 Admon pro tips, Survivor.io clone Heroes vs. Hordes, TikTok SPC