80/20: How to Extend the Life Creatives

Want to Extend the Life of Your Winning TikTok Creatives? Apply the 80/20 Rule

TikTok has become the darling of social media and is revolutionizing the way brands  connect with their audience. With the exponential rise of advertising spend on TikTok, creatives are destined to fatigue at some point. In a recent webinar with Mobile Action, App Guardians’ Head of Creative, Peter Jung, shared some insights on how to extend the life expectancy of a winning creative on TikTok. 

Here’s what he had to say:

Mitigating Creative Fatigue on TikTok

To be clear: There is no way to avoid creative fatigue completely. Once you have ad money spent on a certain creative (typically $6-10k) — and with a finite number of ad impressions — the creative is destined to fatigue at some point.

There are ways to extend the life of your winning creatives. But first, what constitutes a winning creative on TikTok? According to Jung, he looks at two key KPIs — Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Click-Through Rate (CTR) — to define what’s a winner or what isn’t.

In terms of CTR, mediocre creatives have less than 0.5% while OK ones have +1%. If you hit the audience with the right creatives, i.e. winning creatives, CTR can go up to 2-3%+

As for CPA – it depends on which vertical you are in — but winning creatives spin out a positive ROAS (2-3x). With TikTok, even above 5x is possible due to its viral nature.

To prolong the life expectancy of these winning creatives, Jung recommends applying the 80/20 rule. 

Let’s break it down…

 

The 80/20 Rule Part 1: Make Minor Changes 

Making minor changes: this is the 20% of the 80/20 rule . Minor changes have a significant impact on increasing the life expectancy of winning creatives. This especially true when you follow user interaction or behaviour data. 

“The approach here is to think about the 80/20 rule, with 20% being minor changes you can make to the winning creative,” says Jung.

Minor changes include:

• Copy changes
• Using different user-generated content (UGC) creators
• Applying different colors 
• Including different call-to-actions

These changes can help keep the creative fresh and engaging for audiences, without the need for a complete overhaul.

The 80/20 Rule Part 2: Create New Concepts and Angles

The majority of the work — that is, 80% —  lies in developing new creative concepts to demonstrate the selling points of the app. Jung suggests that new creative concepts should showcase a new perspective in the first three seconds  to grab the viewer’s attention.

When making TikTok videos or ads try different ways to tease a secret, tell a story, teach and educate, and empathize with the viewers – the more unique it is, the better.

Creating something completely new can be challenging, but if it’s not different enough, it simply won’t work. “It can’t be similar to the past winning creative or it is likely to fall into the fatigue trap again” advises Jung.

 

To summarize, TikTok is a highly competitive platform, and creatives are no exception. Winning creatives will eventually suffer from creative fatigue, resulting in a decline in performance. To extend the life expectancy of a winning creative, remember the 80/20 rule.