Facebook AAA: How to analyze Automated App Ads by country and creative simultaneously

Facebook automated app ads (AAA) are smart and useful ads that take elements of creative you supply, mix and match them according to Facebook’s secret alchemy of advertising success, and automate the process of targeting, delivery, customization, and even — if you wish — setting budgets.

There’s one small problem.

You can’t analyze everything you might want to.

While you can pull country stats and you can pull creative stats at a high level, you can’t pull them together down to every asset in those ads. And other dimensions like platform and sub ad network or DMA (designated market area) are also difficult if not impossible to slice and dice with those granular creative and campaign variables. Essentially, that means that while Facebook’s AI knows what rocks and what sucks in your marketing campaigns … you don’t.

And you might want to know.

That creative analytics insight might inform smarter thinking on your part in terms of what you feed the beast for further on-platform optimization. It might also guide your course in additional off-Facebook marketing or PR. And you might just want to know because, like most performance-oriented mobile marketers, it’s your data and you want it.

Thanks to Singular, now you can.

Facebook AAA and dynamic assets

Facebook’s Automated App Ads creates multiple versions of your ads based on text and images you provide. It’s called dynamic creatives — you might know it as dynamic creative optimization — and each dynamic creative is assembled with a number of assets: an image, a call to action, a blurb.

“Facebook is saying, look, just set up a few simple campaigns,” Singular product manager Evyatar Ram says. “You don’t need 50 campaigns. Just set up a couple of campaigns, let us know what you want and we’ll take care of all the optimization.”

Over time, Facebook will get smarter and smarter about showing the most persuasive ads with the best combination of assets to potential app users. And Facebook will also suggest audiences that make sense based on their interests and activities.

Facebook’s AI monitors your ads’ performance closely.

Each asset, or element of the creative whole, gets assigned credit for successfully attracting attention and impelling action, or blame for failing. If something isn’t working — your call to action is on mute, or an image doesn’t capture attention — Facebook will let you know, and you can replace it, kicking off additional rounds of optimization.

There is a challenge, however.

“When they’re exposing the data about how these different assets are working … you can get the data per asset, but you can’t get additional breakdowns together with that,” says Ram. “So, if you want to know a country and asset, or if you want to know a publisher platform, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or any other platform that Facebook has together with assets, you can’t.”

You’ll get information about overall performance, but most Singular clients want granular data on assets and geographies, or other dimensions by geo.

Enter Singular interpolation: assets by geos for AAA

The solution Singular built is simple. Like other ad networks and media partners clients work with, we pull all your data, straight from your account. You don’t have to pre-decide how you want to consume that data; it all gets pulled.

For example, we might have a creative element that is being delivered in multiple countries:

And we might have a record of three assets in that creative:

All of that data is straight from Facebook, 100% accurate, 100% as it was delivered to designated audiences. The question that remains unanswered, however, is what assets were delivered to the various geographies and therefore contributed both to your costs in those geos and your results.

And here’s where the interpolation comes in:

“So what we do is we actually pull the data twice,” Ram says. “We pull it once broken down by country, for example, and let’s say it’s between the U.S. and Canada and the cost is 70/30. So we remember that 70/30 ratio, and then we go and we pull the data again by asset. And remember, we can’t pull asset and country together … otherwise we would just do that. So now we have it, that data broken down the cost data broken down for these different assets. And what we do is we impose that same 70, 30 ratio that we saw when you pulled the data by country.”

After interpolation, each asset is split assigned to a country in such a way to keep the proportions correct in terms of cost per country but also other metrics, like impression volume per geo, ensuring the data is as accurate as possible. It’s not hard data based on actual recorded activities, but it’s representative of what happened and how your ad campaigns were delivered.

The result is you can pull your Facebook AAA asset level data and analyze it however you choose, and this feature is now turned on for all clients.

Singular and creative optimization

Singular has enabled creative optimization for years, including creative clustering across ad partners and detailed, granular information on the impact of creatives on ad performance.

That’s getting even more critical now that the major advertising platforms are increasingly black boxes optimized by large datasets and artificial intelligence engines that automate the process of ingesting advertiser dollars and outputting optimized, targeted marketing messages. Creative is increasingly the major level app marketers have to impact success — and some are even starting to target via creative.

“Country for creatives is super important because we know that different creatives work differently in different countries,” Ram says. “And when we came up with a solution, I think the reaction has been really positive.”

Understanding exactly how your creative performs — and what optimization is possible — is crucial information for your creative teams and user acquisition leaders to test, measure, and optimize future improvements.

And it’s always nice to have that data yourself for your internal models to crunch and correlate.

Learn more about Facebook AAA and creative optimization

Interested in finding out how you can analyze and optimize creative elements even when they’re in Facebook AAA or Google App campaigns (formerly UAC or Universal App Campaigns)?

Grab a slot to chat, and we’ll be happy to walk you through it.