Destryoing The Myths: You have to change push creatives often (10)
Destryoing The Myths: You have to change push creatives often
Often you read that you have to change your push creatives once a week, every x weeks or whatever because otherwise your performance will suffer.
From my own experience it´s a little bit different...
Just kidding, it´s completely different.
The truth is that I am using exactly the same creatives for most of my campaigns and for long time already.
To be more exact, I have exactly ONE icon that I use for 95% or so of all my campaigns.
Yes, you read right; exactly one icon.
The only exception where I use other icons is when I run campaigns for specific verticals.
There is one other vertical where I use the same icon just with a very small variation to make it a better match for that one vertical.
Then there are verticals like dating or browser games where I use other icons but I don´t run many campaigns there so this has no real impact on the overall stats.
Now let´s talk about big images.
Without any further words I just tell you the way it is, I never use big images apart from some specific exceptions.
Same as with icons, in 95% or so of all my campaigns I don´t use big images.
I only use it for more visual verticals like dating or games but apart from that I never use images.
Another exception is that some platforms require to use big images.
But guess what, then I just use the icon as big image as well 
From time to time I test without big image vs with big image but only on long running campaigns, first tests are always with icons only.
For title and descriptions it´s obviously a bit different but there I also have my templates for each vertical that I use over and over again.
To summarize it, I have push creatives that I use for several years already without changing them at all or only with very minor changes when the campaigns require it.
Yay, cool, but that´s just gerenal stuff. We still can´t run single campaigns without changing the creatives, right?
Wrong!
It´s true that the text above was more about push creatives in general but it´s also true on a campaign level.
I have push campaigns that are running for about 1 year and I never changed the creatives there.
Yes, you read it right.
I have push campaigns that run for one year with exactly the same creative.
It happens that I "change" a creative to get a little traffic boost but then I don´t use different creatives, I just use the same creatives again to get some new traffic.
Even campaigns that generate $xx.xxx-$xxx.xxx in revenue run very stable for months or a year with exactly the same creatives.
So from my experience I can say push creatives don´t get saturated and that running the same creatives for long time doesn´t have to result in bad performance.
Maybe that´s different for others so please let me know if you have similar experience or if you really have to change your creatives regularly to keep your performance.
For me personally I can say: Mystery -> Destroyed
Would have loved to see some of your magic stats to get an idea what you are talking about 
With high volume push camps I have seen a similar pattern. Sometimes I could run camps only with one creative + text for several months in several geos (with translation).
These camps were very similar to pops camps. Only difference was the creative. But WL / BL procedures were also no different.
For DE SOIs (never really made it there) it was opposite.
I couldn't get that high volumes. Creatives seemed to burn out after a few weeks.
Once I asked traffic source. They confirmed my observations and gave me an idea what creative ctr should be possible
Changed / adjusted my creatives and was "happy" for another 2 weeks or so.
But yeah... I have tried many different angles icons and stuff... in the end things that worked were all quite similar within a vertical.
I can´t show much about creative splittesting and the resulting performance to prove my point because I simply don´t really do creative splittesting anymore
But I just checked and my currently longest runnig campaign that is still active started on 05/01/2021 so it´s running for 9 months already.
In all the time I didn´t change the creative or anything else, it´s exactly the same setup from 05/01/2021 till now.
And even when I started the campaign the creative wasn´t new, it was exactly the same creative that I used over and over again already for many other campaigns in same vertical.
Here you can see some stats for the campaign when it started:
And here are some recent stats:
You can see that the performance didn´t get worse at all and is really healthy although the campaign is running for 9 months without even touching it and without making any changes at all.
Maybe also interesting to say that it´s a CPA Goal campaign so I didn´t have any manual work with it, I just created it and that´s all.
It´s also a direct linked campaign although we all know that direct linking doesn´t work anymore
Now you could say "Ok, but $8k revenue and $3.4k profit in 9 months isn´t much" and generally you are right but then you should know that (as always) my tracker shows about 10% or so less ROI than it really is and additionally this is only 1 campaign in my tracker and 1 campaign in the trafficsource where I target 1 country, 1 device, 1 connection and 1 activity level.
I run that offer in several countries, all connection types and all activity levels so you can imagine that it adds up a good bit.
At this very moment I have more than 80 active campaigns for that offer alone but I add new ones regularly and old ones dry out so that there are always enough campaigns running.
Of course not all of these campaigns are winners but they all run with exactly the same creative (in different languages) and that creative was used before already as well.
I also tested many different creatives before I came to my conclusion but since then I usually don´t test different creatives anymore and just use what´s already proven to work.
I am also 100% aware that I probably could squeeze few % more ROI out of my campaigns when I would split test more creatives but it´s not worth it for me.
In the end there´s no guarantee that testing other creatives will result in a better ROI, it can even end with lower ROI when the other creatives are not doing good so that they get the overall performance down.
But even when the new creatives result in few % more ROI it still takes time to run the tests and I prefer to spend that time to rather test more offers that could result in new campaigns that bring much more profit than 5% more ROI on a running campaign.
I couldn't get that high volumes. Creatives seemed to burn out after a few weeks.
Once I asked traffic source. They confirmed my observations and gave me an idea what creative ctr should be possible
Changed / adjusted my creatives and was "happy" for another 2 weeks or so.
About creative burn out after few weeks, I have campaigns running in smaller geos where the same creatives work for several months without seeing any decline in performance.
Of course there are campaigns where my observation is wrong and where changing creatives more often can work better but for my main campaigns I stick with the good ol´ 80/20 rule and work with the stuff that is proven to work good instead of trying find new things that could be a bit better.
I also test completely different things here and there but in the end I always end at the stable and longtime performing things that are proven hundreds of times.
Apart from the LP CTR they look like pop campaigns.
Have experienced similar pattern / stability. Following camp was running for several months on a very broad WL with only one creative.
They only thing I did was cutting out non performing WL zones every once in a while.
Same here, even i don't change my Push traffic creatives.
I keep it same from start to end.
Also, if you have 1000+ campaigns running, it's impossible to update/refresh creatives(on monthly/weekly basis).
That´s also a reason why I keep my stuff as simple as possible.
What about the situation when you look at the GEOs? Is this working across the board or do you see some GEOs where keeping the icon/creative fresh would have more of an impact compared to the rest?
I'm asking because in dating there are some GEOs that are more sensitive to creative freshness than others, sometimes the difference can be pretty significant.
Originally Posted by matuloo
I even had campaigns running that way for several months in small geos like AT, CH, DK, SE on desktop traffic where volume usually is lower anyway.
Maybe I also just don´t know if there are specific geos where I have to change the creatives more frequent because when I run a campaign and performance drops after some time I just test it again with the same creatives.
If it doesn´t work I just move on so even when there are such geos the chances are good that I wouldn´t notice it.
But as I said, so far I run all my campaigns (apart from more visual verticals) that way in many different geos and will continue to do so because it just works
Originally Posted by twinaxe
One more thing about creatives, for me it´s also more important to have a strong CTA and not much information about the offer in the description than filling the description with information but at the cost of not having a good CTA.
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