Re-engagement Pt.1: GoogleAds ACe 101

For the past couple of months, my primary focus has been re-engagement for one of our City Building titles (next to iOS14 of course). And I thought it would be worth dedicating an entire post to the newly added GoogleAds ACe campaign type. This post will be the kick-off of a series of posts in which I’ll share my learnings and findings regarding re-engagement. In this post I’ll cover a number of requirements for ACe to get you started, varying from deeplink requirements to audience creation, hoping this will post save you a lot more time than I spent on it.

At the moment of writing this post, I’m actually not sure whether ACe is still in beta or already accessible to everyone. If it’s still in beta then I would definitely recommend reaching out to your Google rep to get you on the whitelist as soon as possible. This brings me to the list of requirements in order to run ACe successfully.

Requirements:
- Whitelisted Google Ads account for ACe
- Firebase or MMP integration
- Dynamic and/or static audience list
- Deeplinks without redirects
- Creatives (re-engagement theme)

Whitelisted Google Ads account for ACe
Before getting whitelisted for ACe, it’s good to keep in mind that in some cases it makes more sense to create separate GoogleAds account. For me the main reason is to separate accounts based on its goals. Therefore we not only have separate accounts for each title, but also between campaign types: tROAS, tCPA and now also ACe. This way we’re also able to set a different conversion windows for each account. tROAS uses a ROAS goal based on a 7 day window, while for tCPA we are willing to include conversions up to 14 days after installation.

If you’re uncertain whether your Ad Account is whitelisted for ACe, then you can easily check so by creating a new ‘App promotion’ campaign and see if ‘App engagement’ as a campaign subtype is available:

Firebase and/or MMP integration
Obviously, you’ll need either Firebase or an MMP in order to track conversions, similar to when you are running a tCPA or tCPI campaign. However, for ACe it also recommended to use a Tracking Partner for dynamically populating the audience of users that have become inactive. In the example below, we’ll be using Firebase, but the same goes for any MMP.

Dynamic and/or static audience list
When considering starting a re-engagement campaign, you’ll first need a good understanding of which users you’d like to target. Which criteria do these users need to meet before being flagged as a ‘inactive’ user and how would we like to segment these inactive users. Segmenting will allow us to apply different bid strategies for each segment based on their expected LTV. For the sake of this example I’ll focus on two types of inactive users:
- Inactive payers that haven’t played within the last 14 days
- Inactive non-payers that haven’t played within the last 14 days.

So in order to create a dynamic list, which automatically targets the users in the example above, we’ll need to set up a few rules in the Audience Manager (Tools & Settings > Audience Manager). In my experience, and also the main reason why I’m writing this post, is that the audience creation is quite tedious. Fortunately, at the moment of writing this, there’s a ‘Simplified audience’ tool in beta that will replace the current creation process.

Until then we’ll need to manually create these audiences. First we’ll need to create a list of users that were active for the last 14 days. This list will function as an exclusion list, since we’d only like to include inactive users. You can easily create this list by going into the Audience Manager, hitting the plus sign, and select ‘App users’, using the following setup:

Next, we’ll need to create a list of payers to either include or exclude from the audience based on its segment. Make sure to first lookup the event name for purchases, by going to Tools & Settings > Conversions. For this title, which is using Firebase, the conversion event is called: ‘in_app_purchase’. For creation we’ll also select ‘App users’, using the following settings:

In order to create the dynamic audience we’ll need to combine the created audiences either as an inclusion list or exclusion list. This can also easily been done through the Audience Manager, but instead of selecting ‘App users’, we’ll use ‘Custom combination’. For the Inactive Payers audience we’ll need to exclude the ‘active users within the last 14 days’ and only include ‘all payers’. For the Inactive Non-payers, we need to exclude both of these audiences and only include the audience: All Users of Game ‘Your Appname here’. This audience is automatically created by GoogleAds and should already be available in the Audience Manager.

Now that we created the dynamic audiences, it’s helpful to also upload a static list of inactive users, both split by payers and non-payers. The reason for this is because the dynamic audiences will only start populating 14 days after the audience is created, without including users that became inactive prior to the audience creation.

Once you created the static list of advertising IDs of users that have become inactive, then you can upload it via the Audience Manager by selecting ‘Customer list’, and select: ‘Upload Mobile Device IDs’.

It’s worth noting that both the static audience and dynamic audience can be added to the same campaign. If preferred, you can even use one campaign for multiple segments, by creating one Ad Group per segment.

Deeplinks with redirects
When creating the ACe Ad Group you’ll notice that it asks for a deeplink App URL, which you don’t see when you create your regular tCPI or tCPA campaign. And since it’s mandatory to have a deeplink, there is currently a beta for running ACe campaigns without deeplinks. Keep in mind that this also means that you can use a different deeplink per Ad Group.

It’s important to note that Google doesn’t support deeplinks with redirects, and therefore doesn’t support Branch, AppsFlyer, Onelink, Tunelinks etc. For that reason, we created iOS Universal links and Android deeplinks, which are supported.

Creatives (re-engagement theme)
I believe that deeplinks and creatives for re-engagement purposes deserve their own post, yet I’d like to highlight what you can do today, even if you’re not running re-engagement yet. For us to determine which deeplinks give the best results, was through creative testing. By creating, for example, four identical video creatives that show four different rewards at the end of the video. It’s a fairly simple test that would shed some light on the best performing reward. In our City Building example, it might make more sense to reward our inactive payers with a free building, rather than offering them cash or gold. Whereas our non-payers need cash or gold to progress.

Final notes
While all of the above hopefully gets you started on creating your first ACe campaign, there are a few things to point out. Your bid strategy will mainly be depending on the audience size. If the audience size is rather small (<200k) then Google advises to target on session_start rather for example purchase. Where the minimum campaign budget for tCPA is 20 times the tCPA goal, for ACe it is actually times 15. Lastly, everything wrote down here today is likely to be already outdated by tomorrow. Always feel free to reach out if you have any questions or remarks.