Transforming App Marketing in a Post-Cookie World: The Impact of Creative Optimization

Presented by AppsFlyer

App marketers are currently navigating significant challenges, including shifts in consumer behavior, heightened signal loss, and the effects of a macroeconomic downturn. In recent years, they have adapted to new privacy regulations like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and Google’s Privacy Sandbox, discovering innovative strategies to measure campaign success.

“The bottom line is, how do you profitably grow your business in this environment?” asks Yevgeny Peres, EVP of Product Strategy at AppsFlyer. “We must rethink measurement, decision-making processes, and the critical nature of optimizing creative to tackle these challenges."

To address this, the costly creative production process—encompassing testing, optimizing, and iterating—must be integrated with AI to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and amplify creativity through data and analytics.

Creativity Meets AI

With rising pressure to deliver results and fewer options, creative advertising has become the primary focus for marketing teams, according to Peres. The costs associated with the creative testing process can escalate quickly—from thousands spent per ad to analyzing multiple creatives simultaneously to determine performance.

“Creatives need to do more than impress; they must outperform their predecessors," he emphasizes. "Historically, success was largely based on intuition and guesswork."

Understanding not just the performance but the reasons behind an ad's effectiveness is crucial. This insight allows teams to adapt quickly and strengthen their best-performing creatives, while underperforming campaigns can be deactivated or reworked, minimizing wasted spend and facilitating quicker turnaround on successful creatives, which is vital for combating creative fatigue.

This is where AI—referred to as "creative intelligence" in AppsFlyer's new product, Creative Optimization—can play a pivotal role, enabling marketing teams to make smarter decisions more rapidly.

Creative Optimization automatically analyzes creative assets, breaking them down into key variables and assessing their performance throughout the user journey—from engagement to revenue generation. The tool identifies underperforming elements that need replacement and informs the development of future creative cycles.

“It’s the synergy between human intuition and the precision of technology powered by AI,” explains Peres. “AI enhances human creativity and inspiration, providing data-driven insights and fostering collaboration between marketing and business intelligence.”

How Creative Intelligence Transforms Marketing

In the past year, AppsFlyer has collaborated with over 100 companies across sectors like gaming, fintech, ecommerce, and entertainment—partnering with industry leaders such as Zynga and fintech firm Dave to develop and test Creative Optimization.

“We've seen partners increase ad spend by up to 300%, along with significant improvements in key metrics,” Peres shares. “This includes a 50% rise in ad click-through rates, a 30% drop in cost-per-install, and a 100% increase in customer retention and revenue KPIs.”

Moreover, by streamlining administrative tasks in the cross-functional creative process, teams—including Dave's—reported an average savings of 10 hours per week.

With less time spent on tedious reporting, creative teams can focus on developing original ideas and content.

“Every department has unique goals—marketing is profit-driven, while creatives may produce work that never sees the light of day,” he notes. “When teams utilize a shared dashboard to visualize campaign successes, it fosters internal collaboration, demonstrating the creative team’s value and expediting feedback loops that impact the bottom line.”

Explore more about how intelligent creativity and Creative Optimization can enhance performance for app marketers in a post-cookie landscape.

Most people like

Find AI tools in YBX