What Playable Ads Are and How They’re Changing the Way Users Provide In-App Feedback

Introduction

As it stands today, the discovery of apps is rapidly shifting toward user experience. Prior to downloading and installing an app, users want to first see and touch the product. Playable ads have become one of the premier and leading interactive ad formats within the mobile ad ecosystem. Interactive and native ad formats — including video or rich-media ads — often achieve 2 to 3 times higher engagement than static banner/display ads. Due to this high level of user engagement, users have come to expect a level of transparency and hands-on interaction. Based on these expectations, playable ads are changing how they are utilized in the mobile ad ecosystem—providing marketers and developers with the ability to collect early sentiment data prior to users downloading and installing an app. In addition, when marketers and developers pair mobile attribution data with playable ads using a solution like Apptrove, they will better understand which functionalities and features users will appreciate the most, well before they make the decision to download and install an app.

Why are Playable Ads the Most User-Friendly Source of Collecting Feedback on Apps?

Playable Ads provide users exactly what they have requested: an authentic, in-depth preview of your App before installation. When someone plays with a playable ad, they choose to participate in what are essentially the main functions of your app without being forced into it, resulting in the most natural reaction to the feedback being collected. The experience closely resembles how they would feel using your app, thus helping the user quickly identify what the value of your app is to them as well as how well/accurately it meets their needs.

Behaviorally, users feel empowered when given the opportunity to “demo” prior to committing to an app or game. This feeling of control lessens apprehension when downloading (anxiety), leading to greater involvement with the content. Users who enter through the original funnel of acquisition have a chance to come in and check out what is available at their own speed, i.e., giving them complete access to information and not having to wait until they have “committed” to the app/game. Also, the transparency provided to users allows for a clear understanding of what the app/game will be used for, thereby decreasing the likelihood of negative churn in the first few login sessions after downloading the app/game.

By providing users with a micro-experience prior to installing the app/game, playable ads enable marketers to identify early indications of sentiment—curiosity, excitement, hesitation—so marketers can better forecast user behaviour after install. The ability to gain insightful pre-install data that resembles actual in-app data allows marketers to produce more intelligent products from the beginning.

Why Feedback from Playable Ads is Better Quality than Traditional Flows

Traditional forms of feedback, like surveys, pop-up messages or rating prompts, have limitations that rely on when a user is prompted for feedback, a user’s emotional state, or how much time and patience a user has to complete a survey. Playable ads do not depend on these conditions, as they allow users to interact with the concept of an app prior to downloading and installing the app, allowing for the collection of data based on a user’s true interest as opposed to a forced response to a survey. In fact, industry findings show that playable ads can deliver up to 3× higher conversion rates and 30–40% better retention than traditional ad formats, highlighting the stronger intent and more reliable behavioural signals they generate. The use of playable ads provides you with much higher quality qualitative data, such as “Do users understand what the app does?” Plus, you have quantitative metrics to analyze, like the average time users engaged with the concept and how many users completed a play test of the app concept.

Another reason for the higher quality of feedback is that you will be attracting users who have a higher intent to download your app, i.e. those who relate to what you are offering, rather than random clicks. As a result, your feedback loop should be much cleaner, less random and way more actionable. The data provided allows you to quickly assess what works, what confuses potential users, and what areas of your feedback loop you need to improve before you begin to onboard actual users.

User Experience Through Playable Ads & Their Impact on Expectations

The primary benefit of playable ads is providing users with an instant insight into the main benefits that your app provides to them. After a user interacts with a playable version of your app, they will create an immediate impression of how that app will feel once it’s installed. For a user, this little interaction gives them the opportunity to see what will happen as they progress through your app. 

Due to the way that expectations are shaped through gameplay, playable advertisements provide a new type of communication tool that eliminates the need for promises, and a user’s expectations about what to expect once they install the app, thus decreasing the possibility of uninstalling the app early on. When users enter your app having an idea of what they will encounter when they install, they will be much more confident, prepared, and eager to further explore what else your app has to offer. 

Playable advertisements allow only the users who show genuine interest to interact with your app; therefore, these users tend to be much more motivated to act on the offers that you make through your app. Because these users entered your app with an understanding of how their pre-install experience compared to what was actually happening within your app when they installed it, they are much more likely to spend more time in your app and provide better feedback during the initial stages of their experience. Ultimately, a user finding a connection to what he has seen before he entered your app will help your retention rate (the most important metric for long-term viability) due to the fact that more engaged users will spend more time in your app.

What elements of Playable Ads are driving higher engagement?

Engagement with playable advertisement types of advertisements is reliant on accessibility and on the delivery of immediate gratification to the user. Once you simplify the design of your interface (UI) and eliminate as much of barriers as you are capable of, and you are showcasing the core benefit (value) of your application and why it’s different from anything else, your prospective users are comfortable with your content nearly immediately, even if they have never interacted with your app.

The sense of accomplishment that accompanies achieving instant rewards (for example, completing a mini-challenge, unlocking a feature, or reaching a milestone) motivates users to continue exploring. Narrative methods also help assist users. Even the most basic storytelling, for example, including a call to action (CTA) will help users understand what they need to do next, without overwhelming them with too much information. Together, these elements make your playable advertisement intuitive, immersive, and representative of the actual experience found within your application, leading to deeper engagement and higher installation rates, and substantial constructive feedback at a later point in time.

Playable Paid to Play Campaigns as Integral for Understanding how Series Feedback Strategy Works Within a Mobile Environment

Instead of being a means of acquisition where advertisers can display an app through a playable ads experience and ideally convert for an app install, Playables are now used to gain insight on a prospective user prior to installing by providing an advertisement where the prospective user will demonstrate behaviours similar to how they will likely behave once they install your app.

Through the interactions that a user will have with an experience (as opposed to simply viewing an ad or landing page of a mobile website), developers will now have a better understanding of their target audience and where the developers can look to improve their engagement with their current users; they will also be able to gain insight into the type of content that a user finds engaging.

Increased user demand for the next generation of interactive discovery experiences has been well documented, with recent data showing that 43% of consumers prefer interactive video content over traditional video formats. This preference is driven by the fact that interactive formats feel more genuine and provide more information, making playable ads an excellent resource for brands that wish to improve upon their current in-app feedback strategy.

To gain insights into how to enhance your onboarding experience for users after installation, you will want to look at the interaction depth, completion path, and hesitation points within your playable ad. By analyzing these factors beforehand, rather than waiting for your users to leave after installing, you can improve your onboarding experience by optimizing your messaging, simplifying UI steps, or highlighting key features that users want most right away.

By utilizing this strategy, you will develop an onboarding journey that is closely aligned with your users’ expectations and will increase the likelihood of ongoing user engagement, boost conversions to achieve higher session durations, and reduce user attrition over the long term. Finally, when combined with guidebooks like mobile app growth, the data generated from these analyses can be transformed into repeatable strategic decisions.

Utilizing Playable Ad Insight to Make Improvements to Your Mobile Application

The information derived from playable advertisements will provide you with insight regarding what kind of products people want to purchase prior to experiencing the user’s problems with your app. Data derived from playback ads gives you user insights to build a better onboarding procedure that focuses on what actions are most familiar to the User. An action being intuitive means you can create a more fluid user experience by focusing your attention on these actions during the onboarding process. Playable ad data can also indicate where the user has questions or issues and may therefore need to be simplified. 

Additionally, early indications of user sentiment related to their curiosity about your application features or frequent interactions with a specific element can guide you as you develop the first-time user experience. Creating a more personalized onboarding path for users can result in a smoother and faster onboarding process, because they already have an awareness of what they are doing.

Continually refining your product based on the user’s play-through data allows you the opportunity to reduce any friction in using your app. By providing clarity and relevancy in user interaction with your app will encourage users to continue using your app from day one.

Feedback Loop for Constantly Improving Your App with Playable Ads

Playable ads provide a constant channel for delivering user feedback. Each user interaction—a swipe, a tap, a hesitation or a completed action—will provide you with a real-time behavioural indicator of how your users are engaging with the key components of your application. All of these interactions occur prior to installing your app, so you’ll have early insight into how users find aspects of the playable ad intuitive and where they may experience confusion when they get into the app itself. 

While using the same continuous testing and experimentation as you would with in-app flows, you can use ongoing A/B test loops to assess different iterations of your playable experience. By testing small changes (like button position/placement, timing, difficulty of challenges and/or clarity of UI), you can determine how those small variations influence user behaviour. You’ll be able to quickly identify areas of friction by reviewing metrics such as the number of misclicks made, the length of time spent taking specific actions and the most common drop off points from the playable ads. 

And all of this data will be auto-generated by the users, with no need for them to fill out product feedback or answer questions. They’re just playing games. This means that your app will be able to be continuously improved, in real-time, as you create it. You won’t have to wait until your app launches to find and fix areas of opportunity; you’ll see them early on, you can validate potential solutions quickly and you’ll design an app that reflects how users actually behave.

Action You Can Take to Align Playable Advertising Data with In-App Feedback

To effectively utilize insights from playable ads, you must associate the behaviours of users in the playable ad with the behaviours you anticipate from users inside your full application. Therefore, if you see that users complete a particular behaviour in the playable version of your application but are having difficulty replicating that behaviour while using the full-version app, this likely implies that improvements may be required to the onboarding process or user interface of your full-version application. To create this alignment, the first step is to establish clearly identified events that you will track. This includes tracking of the taps, the completions, the amount of time used and the hesitation points (areas where users get stuck) located inside the playable ad and also located inside your application.

Next, segment the users into groups based on their behaviours instead of demographics. This approach to behavioural segmentation will allow you to look at similarities and differences between the behaviours of high-intent users that came from the playable ad versus the in-app sales journey so that you can derive a better prediction of who will retain, convert or churn from your application once they download it. Finally, you should utilize the insights obtained to fine-tune your product development road map. You should focus on where to improve your full-version application, based on the areas of friction identified by the experiences of the users when playing with the playable ad, so that your full version application can develop in a manner consistent with the experiences that users have when using the playable ad.

Final Thoughts

Playable Ads are quickly becoming one of the best ways to discover your users’ preferences and dislikes, even before they have gone through your entire onboarding process. The advantages of Playable Ads are twofold in that they help bridge the gap between marketing and product development and turn every interaction your user has pre-install into a form of feedback for you to use in improving your product. Rather than relying only on post-install questionnaires or delayed data, you can instantly learn about the things that users like and dislike, the things that are causing confusion, and what motivates them to take the next step.

When you incorporate the type of knowledge derived from Playable Ads into your product development process, you will be able to create a user experience that is predictable, intuitive, and true to your users. Furthermore, a strong alignment between acquisition and retention will allow you to have a better-structured app in terms of the experience from the very first engagement through to long-term retention. If you are interested in finding out more about how to create a smarter and more user-centric feedback system for your product(s), please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to show you how teams are using Playable Ads to make better-informed decisions.

FAQs

1. What makes playable ads more effective than static creatives for early user understanding?

With Playable Ads, Users experience a gameplay simulation of the App and gain a much better understanding of the value the App Provides. In addition, Playable Ads lessen the amount of confusion Users will have after implementing an app, leading to more accurate data on what early Users perceive to be the App’s true benefit.

2. Why do playable ads lead to better in-app feedback collection?

Playable ads attract users who are genuinely interested in the product, thus allowing them to collect more accurate, behavior-driven feedback from those users after they install the app. This results in a cleaner connection between what users expect from the app before they install it and how they feel about the app after they have experienced it.

3. How can playable ads help you identify friction points before launching new features?

Playable ads provide insight into how users interact with the app, at what stage they abandoned interaction and when they exhibit the most caution while using the application. Through the use of playable ads, you will have the opportunity to identify and address any UX problems before you distribute any updates to your entire audience.

4. When should you integrate playable ads into your product feedback cycle?

Playable ads should be integrated into the product feedback cycle when you are testing new features, soft launching your app, or redesigning onboarding flows you want to ensure you get actual feedback from real users on their experience prior to making any significant changes to your product based on customer impressions.

5. What insights can you derive from user behavior inside playable ads?

The engagement depth of an ad tells you how deeply users went. The preferred actions, hesitation taps, and feature understanding indicators show the types of actions users perform when using your app. Using these insights, you can get an idea of how you need to design your app.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/what-are-playable-ads-in-app-feedback/
via Apptrove