🧠 MVP UA template: How to set up your Meta campaigns for Success by Matej Lancaric

Speaker 1 Start with like free ads, so three different concepts.

Speaker 1 I have this like core loop with gameplay, fingers, whatever else, like tooltips, like the regular stuff, which is around gameplay but can be slightly altered.

Speaker 1 You know, you can use memes, you can use AI hooks, you can use whatever the fuck you want. Just don't overcomplicate it.

Speaker 2 It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
Mate drops, knowledge made of gold and ice. Felix with ads making those coins rise.
Jack up designs, worlds chasing the sky.

Speaker 2 We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew. Talking UA adverts and game design too.
Mateish, Felix, Shaku, bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Speaker 2 But KUA, master, eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.
Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jackups crafting realms lift us to the highs.

Speaker 2 Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Hello everybody, this is Matie Ancharic and this is another great solo episode. And honestly, it's been a year since we started doing this.

Speaker 1 And funnily enough, the first ever solo episode recorded was in this room and it was a complete failure. But as you know, us, we keep

Speaker 1 doing things. But we heard your feedback, we changed things a little bit because the idea was us playing games.
And

Speaker 1 while we play a game, we actually talk about an interesting topic. But then you said, you know, fuck this.
We want to hear more. You know, you use presentations, whatever else.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, we started doing that. So thank you very much for the support for the whole year.
I hope you learned a lot. We definitely learned a lot.

Speaker 1 And we are going to keep bringing these episodes for you, I hope, for another year. So today,

Speaker 1 I'm going to talk about a very interesting topic. Again, it's all interesting.
And then since it's me, it's going to be UA and UA related. And I have a presentation.
Woohoo! How fancy? How fancy.

Speaker 1 And then I'm actually going to go through step-by-step campaign build-up. Okay, guys.

Speaker 1 So look, step-by-step guide how to launch successful meta campaigns because I released an MVP setup, which I think is very important when you're starting with the campaigns.

Speaker 1 And you've been asking about this for so long. You start with the campaigns, but like...
where should you start?

Speaker 1 So I'm going to talk about the Facebook site and I'm going to talk about the in-app purchase campaigns and in-app ads and campaigns.

Speaker 1 Because I just released, if you want to have like the full guide, like step-by-step in a written form, I'm going to share the links in the show notes, but I want to go through this presentation and then actually build the campaign in this episode with you.

Speaker 1 and then we'll see what happens. So, again, so I'm going to talk about the preparations and tracking, obviously, what can we use for targeting, how to think about the budgeting side of things.

Speaker 1 Also, going to talk about the creative strategy and the execution, and what kind of different creative concepts you can

Speaker 1 start with. Also, I mean, if you didn't watch the previous episodes about creative trends, you should definitely watch that episode.
But anyway, so let's start with the preparations and tracking.

Speaker 1 And obviously, I'm going to go through the the campaign buildup after the presentation so always always super super important you need to have everything ready in your kind of data pipeline and set up so you need to integrate either facebook sdk or firebase ideally both or an mmp sdk it's yeah either it's singular airbridge up slayer it just honestly doesn't matter but you have to have it in your app or in in your game and not only integrated and obviously tested before you start spending money but you need to have event tracking and event tracking meaning as i as i have here you need to be able to track installs and attribute it into the different channels of course we are starting with facebook only now but also additional events because you want to run purchase oriented campaigns and target payers so you need to be able to target payers as well so that's highly recommended I mean this is just like very like minimum viable setup but and this is where it gets interesting because this not only works for in-app ads games or like ad monetized games, this can work for any other game, even IIP games.

Speaker 1 And I'm diving deep into this topic in my usernets very soon because this is what everybody is calling now signal engineering.

Speaker 1 And you know, you want to send multiple different events into the UA channels to get different types of users. And I'm very proud of this, but I'm going to call this what you send is what you get.

Speaker 1 So the good old Visivik, it's what you see is what you get, kind of editor within the websites. This is again, what you send is what you get.
So, I'm very fucking proud of myself.

Speaker 1 Hopefully, not anyone came up with this term before. But you need to kind of combine different events to get different types of players.
And you or users. In this case, you know, you have all these

Speaker 1 different combinations of events tracked and sent back to Facebook. So, for example, here I want to see who actually achieved three days and at the same time spent in the game at least one hour.

Speaker 1 Or I want to get the event which says, or like it's it fires as soon as a player spent 30 minutes, but at the same time spends $5, achieved the level 20 and made two purchases and watched five ads or wi-for ads.

Speaker 1 So you can see all these different combinations. Ideal scenario is you try to do this within first 24 to 48 hours to be able to act quickly and get as much data as possible.

Speaker 1 So like what should you start with? Well, usually in these budgets are something that I always kind of start with.

Speaker 1 Again, up to you, but I wouldn't go below 100 per day because then it's just going to be all over the place, especially with purchase optimized campaigns.

Speaker 1 But let's say to kind of you can have some kind of data, but the first setup I always try to target the whole world, basically US as a standalone, tier one or and the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 On iOS and trying to do a kind of combination of US plus tier one,

Speaker 1 you can do it on iOS on Android as well, up to you, but you know, you have more data points. I'm now kind of not really looking into scan anymore because aggregated even measurement is the way to go.

Speaker 1 Although I still see some kind of discrepancy

Speaker 1 between

Speaker 1 what I see on Facebook and what I see in App Store Control, Connect, but I mean, welcome to 2025. Then that was what I'm starting with with purchase-oriented campaigns.

Speaker 1 If I have this ad monetized game, then the setup is slightly different.

Speaker 1 I'm starting with the up-to-event optimization combination of the events like I mentioned, tutorial, complete, or the combination of the events level 10 and play 30 minutes or level 30, something which kind of identifies the user as engaged user or engaged player and then building some kind of data points to be able to go to the value optimized campaigns and Adross-based campaigns.

Speaker 1 In ideal scenario, you run both. Depends on the actual like monetization split of your game, if it's 50-50 or if it's 70-30.
But still, still, for iOS, I know it's in the beta right now.

Speaker 1 Facebook, you should definitely give me that beta access for some of the games I manage, Wink, Wink. But if you don't have that, then you won't be able to run the other ads campaigns on iOS yet.

Speaker 1 So, what you do is you basically go for the up event optimized campaigns and then just do these

Speaker 1 combined events or something,

Speaker 1 some events that are kind of suggesting that these players are engaged. Therefore, they are watching more ads.
So, I go.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about the kind of tier one and what does it mean?

Speaker 1 Usually, this is what it means for me: US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea and Japan, and then the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 But obviously, if you have data, then you know, for example, if you're Italy, Spain, France, or whatever else is performing well and you're monetizing well in these countries, they just put it into the tier one.

Speaker 1 And then you can go even below that. You can go tier two, there's another mix of play, uh, mix of countries, and then the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 And always have the whole world covered, at least from the start. Then you can narrow down the different campaigns and different geos afterwards.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, what can you basically use for targeting? Obviously, broad targeting, which works kind of well. But also, even, I mean, there are like these different kind of times and changes over time.

Speaker 1 Five years ago, even think the lookalike still

Speaker 1 one of the top shit in the UA.

Speaker 1 Different type of purchasers, top purchasers, like purchases with value and whatever else. Not that sexy anymore.
I'm kind of still experimenting here and there with it.

Speaker 1 But anyway, it's still pretty good, but you need to get data.

Speaker 1 How do you get data? Well, you can run interest targeting, which also is kind of deprecated. It's not really the thing anymore.

Speaker 1 But I mean, even if you use the strategy or RPG or casual type of interest and kind of genre interest, it's still better than broad targeting. Although we can kind of debate that

Speaker 1 nowadays, creative is the targeting. Well, yes and no, you still need to send more, like more data points.
And let's say, for example, for a soft launch, you go with broad. It's basically everybody.

Speaker 1 So you need to help the algorithm to learn because then it takes ages and a lot of budget until you see what exactly works. So let's say you're running a mobile app install campaign.

Speaker 1 Instead of going to

Speaker 1 broad broad targeting, you free install campaign, you kind of use the interest and they'll be build it from there. You then go for app, event optimize.
But that's a

Speaker 1 topic for a soft launch episode, which is actually live on this channel. So you should definitely check it out.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 what should you do with the budget and pacing, and what can you kind of expect? You need to set some rules and goals and

Speaker 1 like how you move forward. So for the first seven days, I mean,

Speaker 1 let's just be calm, keep the plan budgets in learning, and don't really like, don't really jump the gun and just increase the budget all over the place.

Speaker 1 I think what you can do, and it's here like after that, I mean, if you see after three or five days, you are getting somewhere and the numbers are getting better, you can start scaling or like increasing the budget by 20-30% every three days, but only if your other KPIs are kind of looking good, which means ROAS, if you increase the budget, then the CPI, if it goes crazy or not.

Speaker 1 Usually, when you increase the budget, the CPI spikes a little bit and then comes down. I mean, there's kind of like these rules, like you don't really exceed the budgets for the revenues.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is the old, old kind of saying that you usually try to target this.

Speaker 1 Up to you, but I kind of

Speaker 1 try to have this in my mind. So, like, what should we start in terms of the creatives? And like, how to go about it.
So, start with like three ads. So, three different concepts.

Speaker 1 I have this like core loop with gameplay, fingers, whatever else, like tooltips, like the regular stuff, which is around gameplay but can be slightly altered.

Speaker 1 You know, you can use memes, you can use AI hooks, you can use whatever the fuck you want. Just don't overcomplicate it.
Start with three concepts that add variations.

Speaker 1 Variations can be again a different hook, it can be different length, it can be different sound, different pace. All these different things, it's just an iteration.

Speaker 1 So, let's start with nine nine different ads. If you need help, I can show you my creative template as well.
So you can then go from there because this is also something that

Speaker 1 I will show you, or just this is something I will add into the show notes. So what I'm always talking about these different concepts.
So you can start with near-dead experience.

Speaker 1 There are some examples, obviously, AI hooks, which are super important. Ugly ass that you kind of record yourself with wherever.
We have these different things that we tried.

Speaker 1 3D interviews are super popular these days. All of these different examples, you can also slap a wall of text on the video, which kind of is a very easy, easy iteration.

Speaker 1 Like it's really popular within apps and some games as well. You GC or creator generated content, not only talking heads, but actually videos.
Yeah, like why? I should play these videos, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, we can try to see. This is kind of the example of the creator generated content.
We have all of these different things.

Speaker 1 It's not only all in talking head anymore, so that's why I'm talking about it. And there's like the beams, obviously, which can work quite well.

Speaker 1 Ideal scenarios actually works with the sound, but who gives a there you go.

Speaker 1 So, all these different things work really well, and then you can also use the dev-generated content, like developer-generated content, because I made kind of build this game app, whatever.

Speaker 1 So, people usually resonate with

Speaker 1 the guys or whoever actually build it. So, that is

Speaker 1 those those are a few examples that you can check.

Speaker 1 If you need that template, it's going to be in the show notes.

Speaker 1 So, but yeah, like what should what should we do on a day-to-day basis? Don't overcomplicate stuff. The work of the UA manager is not always changing something.

Speaker 1 There are days where you check the numbers and you do exactly nothing and it's completely fine. Right?

Speaker 1 Because if you start doing millions of things and changes, you're going to fuck up all the campaigns. Don't do it.
You check the CPIs, whatever you wanna see, and the KPIs and the goals.

Speaker 1 You check it in the morning. You check it in during the day and then in the evening, and that's it.
And even if even if everything is fine, then you just don't do anything.

Speaker 1 If something goes wrong, then again, cut the worst part and refresh creatives and leave it for another three days. Like don't do it every day.
So again, like what should we do? Step like day by day.

Speaker 1 So first days, first three days, again, nothing that like really major. Check the campaigns after we go live.

Speaker 1 Then monitor, you add creatives and watch the, you try to make sense of like the CPI versus LTV equation.

Speaker 1 Or if you set the benchmarks, if your day one, day two, day three, ROAS is 10%, but your goal is 20%.

Speaker 1 Then you need to act and you need to change creatives, you need to change the campaigns a little bit.

Speaker 1 If you meet the goal, you know, you can then at the end of like the first week start adding the budgets. Then you go from you know the creative refresh ideal scenario now.

Speaker 1 After the first week, you have the nine creatives, you already try to brainstorm the new ideas and go from there.

Speaker 1 Same thing, you go from the app event optimized purchase campaigns that I mentioned in the in the in the setup to value optimized campaigns and try to test it out against each other.

Speaker 1 If if value optimization wins, like yeah, just go full on into the value optimization because that's going to bring you more wealth.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 then keep in mind, you're not going to optimize for purchases when your game is ad-monetized. You're not going to stack

Speaker 1 five, ten different campaigns in one geo because that doesn't work. You really don't have like ten small campaigns with like 20 or 30 dollars each.
It's not going to work because it's too low.

Speaker 1 You're not going to

Speaker 1 send enough data towards the UA channels. I know it can be really daunting,

Speaker 1 but allocate some budget for testing. I usually try to have like 5,000 budget per month just to see what works.
I know it's for some of you

Speaker 1 basically a lot.

Speaker 1 But usually, if you're in this stage and you're trying to get the first campaigns live, you need to have like 5, 10, 15K allocated for these first kind of

Speaker 1 months because

Speaker 1 you don't, you just don't know what works yet. So, if you have questions, ask in the comments, go into the Slack channel.
Or, uh, yeah, I think I think that's it. That's it.
That's pretty much it.

Speaker 1 So, now what do what are we gonna do? Now, we are gonna go through the campaign setup. But before

Speaker 1 doing that, I'm gonna show you the events example. So, I was talking about the different combinations of events and whatever else, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 Here, for example, we have the identification of plants, diagnosing a plant. There's a subscription, obviously.
And now

Speaker 1 it's going to be interesting. It starts to get interesting.
Fire an event when

Speaker 1 the user identified five plants. Or, like another event, an example example, firing event when the user did a yearly subscription and identified five plans.
Then there's

Speaker 1 diagnosed five plans and then whatever else. So there's so many different combinations.
Yearly subscription can identify plans, and whatever else.

Speaker 1 So, this is what you should aim for, and there is no limits.

Speaker 1 Although, you see, like here, all these events are just not firing that many times, which is going to be very tough to use in the campaigns.

Speaker 1 But here, the planned yearly subscription and identification of five, it's not bad. Here, this also works quite well, okay.

Speaker 1 So, let's just go here. Let's create a campaign.
Let's just go a promotion. Let's see.

Speaker 1 Let's see, let's see, let's see. Testing campaign.
Testing campaign. Yeah.
So let's do

Speaker 1 file 150. Let's just go for the

Speaker 1 plan. Okay, there you go.
And then

Speaker 1 we can just use it as a

Speaker 1 US plus tier one. And we definitely want to go for the different events that I have.
Yeah, like you have an impression, purchase, share, whatever else. But I actually want to go for exactly this.

Speaker 1 Let's say plan a weekly subscription and identify two ads. Uh, two ads.
Identified two plans. There you go.
So, all of this is set.

Speaker 1 Now, we don't go to Slovakia, obviously, because I'm from Slovakia, but nobody cares about Slovakia, but we do care about the US and we do care about the United Kingdom, and we do care about Germany, Germany, and we do care about Japan as well.

Speaker 1 We care about Canada, Canada. So, you get the point, right? You get the point,

Speaker 1 me, placements, whatever else, platforms, blah blah. So, all of this you want to use.
Don't want iPads or iPods because this is only

Speaker 1 and I just want to get rid of the skippable ads, which nobody knows what it is, but it really drags down the performance. Okay, so US tier one

Speaker 1 up

Speaker 1 event optimized campaign weekly plus two plans identified perfect. Okay, so here we go.
This is what we need. We have the everything we want.

Speaker 1 Okay, and now we just go with creatives. I mean, we can just test.
Yes, all of this is fine. Multi-advertiser ads, no.
All of this

Speaker 1 AI bullshit stuff from Facebook. Get rid of it.
Okay, so. Let's just go video.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Awesome.
Yeah. So I'm starting with the 9 to 16 usually.
And then after I see what works, then I'd adding the 1 to 1 and 4 to 4 to 5. There you go.
Whatever. That's fine.
Install. Yes.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Also, no details, not multi-image, no visual, not text improvements, no video effects.
I don't really want this. There you go.
And then

Speaker 1 you hit publish. And there we go.
There we go.

Speaker 1 If you have any questions, our dear listeners, about Facebook, about UA, about this minimum viable setup, please let me know in the show notes, not in the show notes, in the comment section and the video.

Speaker 1 Join the Slack channel. If you want to buy my soft lingerie book ebook, please do so.
You're going to support all of this and the great videos

Speaker 1 we are doing at the moment. So, thank you guys for listening.
Please, again, if you have any comments, share them with us. See you next time.
Bye-bye.