OREANDA-NEWS. November 25, 2015. Lights are up in the high streets, trees are being draped with tinsel in shopping malls, and determined parents are limbering up to out-muscle rivals and grab the latest electronic gadgets on the shelves. These days, that means smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices.

With Christmas fast approaching, there’s one thing this means for gaming advertisers: increased competition driving higher prices.

Each year more and more advertisers compete to reach potential customers in the festive run-up, and advertising seasonality trends clearly reflect the competitive surge, where the margins of a gaming company can shrink, and heavy optimization is needed to guarantee acceptable ROI.

But as the festive season quickly draws to an end and the remnants of the turkey have filled the last sandwich, people become acquainted with their new phones and tablets. Year after year we see that January is the most cost-effective month to acquire mobile gamers at scale, at a rate higher than any other month.

So, as you get started planning your campaigns for this January, here are some key features that will enable you to maximize your acquisition efforts on Facebook and Instagram during the post-holiday season.

Test The Facebook Audience Network

With the Facebook Audience Network your campaigns can effortlessly reach users beyond the ecosystems of the core Facebook and Instagram mobile apps, while still employing Facebook’s sophisticated targeting technology.

According to Facebook, Audience Network publishers now represent 6% of total time spent in mobile apps, which is a 20x increase in publishers from a year ago. This increased scale is coupled with the continued rise of Native ads, where your creative fits seamlessly into the native experience of publisher’s apps. The higher adoption of this ad format - which now accounts for the 80% of Audience Network impressions according to Facebook - has led to substantial upturns in campaign results.

These ads work; also according to Facebook, a majority of mobile app install (MAI) advertisers saw CPIs equal or better than News Feed and better lifetime value (LTV) than the newsfeed.  If you don’t include the Audience Network in your mobile app acquisition strategy you’re missing out on increased reach and significant increases in performance.

Use Lookalike Targeting based on your best customers

Lookalike targeting is quickly overtaking targeting based on keywords and interests to become the most common audience type in gaming user acquisition advertising. With a finite number of gaming keywords becoming saturated, gaming advertisers have been driven to Facebook’s advanced lookalike technology to help find the right users.

Create Lookalikes from your own first-party data: those who have installed, those who are the most engaged, and high value depositors. Experiment with Lookalike nesting to test the varying degrees of similarity on offer. Then, allow Facebook to find similar users unreachable by keywords, and see your CPIs decrease as a result. Salesforce Active Audiences can help securely automate the process of building audiences based on your first-party data.

Run Three Different Types Of Creative

On Facebook and Instagram, there are three creative types available for app user acquisition: images, videos, and the carousel ad unit. It’s important to continually run all three, assess the results, and shift budgets accordingly.

According to a number of our mobile gaming clients, the two most successful creative types at present, and ones to ensure that you have prepared in advance of January, are carousel and video ads. Both of these have outperformed static images recently.

With carousel ads, your brand showcases 3-5 images at one time in a single ad, and you can use unique deep-links to direct users to different parts of your app from each image. Take advantage of this unique ad unit by being creative. You can utilize the five images for a wide and panoramic landscape of your game’s setting, showcase all the characters of your game in different squares, or convey a story and place the images in a sequence to get your game’s narrative across.

Use video in the same way, and tell a concise story to keep users interested throughout the clip. Facebook videos auto-play without sound to ensure positive user experience in the feed. As a result, the most effective videos captures the attention of your audience with striking visuals and descriptive on-screen text in the first few seconds.

It’s also important to consider that videos on Instagram auto-play and auto-repeat. This permits you to experiment with cinemagraph style videos; images that appear static at first glance but catch the eye with moments of movement.