Reaching a relevant audience is one of the most challenging objectives of the UA race. Here we share our successful case of creating UGC ads for Ya Games in Brazil. You’ll find inspiration to generate some ideas and where to start thinking of making UGC ads on your own.
UGC ads for user acquisition: Where to start?
When we started working on the project, Ya Games’ only successful case was an intro video with the main USPs.
UGC Ninja‘s approach is based on a detailed analysis of the market and applying best practices from the market. It was different at that time because the product by Ya Games – a web catalog of casual games is unique and has only a couple of competitors. Our research gave us an exciting result – no UGC ads in the niche were used. So we changed the direction and went to the niche of casual games we knew very well. The problem we solved was to show the audience that Ya Games has a wide range of games to suit any taste. The starting point was to see what types of ads are popular in the gaming niche in Brazil and what organic patterns are used at the moment and combine this knowledge to represent the product benefits.
UGC ads as a metrics improvement tool: What to focus on?
UGC Ninja uses creative ideas to solve clients’ challenges. In the case of Ya Games, there were two main goals: improve the click-through rate and day seven retention rate. Translating it into the UGC language means that videos should have catchy intros to engage viewers and show the actual product to form realistic expectations.
There are also three standard rules to be remembered:
- mention your product not later than the 5th second
- show the product’s appearance (screencast, phone-in-the-hands footage, etc.)
- stick to the pattern problem → solution
Research stage: how to define best practices?
While performing research, we discovered that just a few companies are operating in this niche of online game catalogs. And none of them had successful UGC creatives. Mostly motion videos or banners were used in performance campaigns.
At that point, we decided to imply our knowledge of the closest vertical – gaming. For the test, we chose three typical UGC ad patterns for games:
- let’s play
- review
- sketch
These types always work well and quickly show the gameplay in combination with real emotions.
Armed with another insight that good ideas work in different markets, we made a list of best references from the US market to base our opinions on.
So there were three criteria to reach success with the 1st pack of UGC ads:
- best mechanics from the gaming vertical
- authentic Brazilian creators
- dynamic & attractive gameplay
Production & bonus
I will cut the production details, but I want to tell you about the bonus concept we decided to add while writing the ideas. We knew that memes always work well and speak the same language as the audience.
So we created an additional video with just gameplay combined with copyright-free video memes.
Results & best performers
While the whole pack performed at the level of benchmark or outperformed it, the best performers of the group were let’s play & review videos:
They combined several factors:
- easy-to-get hook part
- highlighting product benefits
- gameplay parts showing the main USPs: the variety of games and the fun of playing
Whether you like it or not, UGC-like ads are the best way to engage your audience and alienate from straightforward ad patterns users are already allergic to.
If you’re about to try UGC for your product, do not hesitate to stick to the basic and well-tried patterns combined with your best-performing non-UGC ads.
