Achieve your business goals with Facebook Gaming
Brendan Tinnelly of Facebook Gaming analyses how real-money gaming companies can partner with Facebook to achieve their goals
In recent years, we’ve seen a number of key changes in the real-money gaming (RMG) space. Covid-19 has accelerated online activity, the evolving ads ecosystem has placed greater emphasis on privacy protection, and a changing regulatory landscape has opened up new markets and placed greater emphasis on player safety.
We’ve also witnessed strong growth, as savvy advertisers have shifted budgets away from under-performing channels, while taking steps to ensure they’re marketing responsibly, as we move towards a model that preserves personalised advertising and respects players’ data privacy preferences.
As the largest social media platform globally1, Facebook presents an interesting opportunity to utilise this growth and tackle this changing landscape head on. Over 60% of people who have expressed an interest in real-money gaming discover brands via social media2, while one in three with an interest in real-money gaming have clicked an ad on Facebook or Instagram3. With all this in mind, we’ve prepared a guide to help you get started.
The basics of buying
Facebook has over 10 million advertisers across a range of industries4, so the range of products and solutions available can be quite daunting. With that in mind, we’ve outlined some of the broader concepts when it comes to buying.
Liquidity
Ensure your activity is structured in a way that maximises liquidity and gives Facebook’s delivery systems the flexibility to deliver the best-possible results for your objectives. Ensure your campaign objective matches your business KPI, and utilise features such as Campaign Budget Optimization, Placement Optimization and Lowest Cost Bidding to allow greater scope for delivery.
Creative
Creative is often overlooked as a lever of performance buying. Ensure your creative message is captivating and capitalises on your brand identity, while serving a healthy mix of formats, from static image and video, to more interactive formats such as carousel and polling ads.
Market responsibly
Ensure your content is appropriately age- and geo-gated, compliant with all relevant guidelines, and utilise features such as Custom Audiences for Exclusion and our Brand Safety controls to ensure your advertising is not targeting vulnerable users or appearing in inappropriate contexts.
Our guide will inform gambling businesses or firms about these controls and tools, helping them to implement campaigns responsibly, while helping to protect people who use our services.
Advanced practices
Once you have a handle on the basics of buying, you may want to explore more advanced tactics which we would recommend for mature, sophisticated advertisers. Below, we’ve outlined some of these tactics and how they apply to your campaigns:
App and web
In running campaigns for each of app and web destinations, you can reach new audiences and drive incremental conversions, rather than focusing on a single destination.
Dynamic ads
Some advertisers are seeing success with our Dynamic Ads product, which allows you to automate much of your UA buying, allowing our systems to surface the most exciting products to users, without the need for you to manually segment your targeting.
Branded content
Many advertisers have partnerships with other brands, from media companies to sports teams, to celebrities and influencers. Explore using our Branded Content functionality to activate these partnerships on Facebook.
The ‘test and learn’ approach
Perhaps the biggest piece of advice for advertisers is to instil a rigorous test and learn mindset when it comes to performance marketing activity. With an industry in constant flux, it’s important to get clear, reliable results on what’s working, so your activity will remain best practice as the landscape evolves. This means cleanly structuring tests and testing only a single variable at a time, with enough scale and investment for statistically significant results.
Partnering with Facebook
Facebook Gaming works with advertisers of all sizes that can legally operate in the markets in which they wish to advertise. Any interested operators, affiliates and other commercial partners can apply for approval to promote content on our platform. As well as obtaining the necessary approval, those wishing to run performance marketing are advised to integrate with Facebook SDK or an approved Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) for mobile app activity, and with the Facebook Pixel for web activity. This will allow them to more accurately measure and optimise your activity.
Whether you’re a new advertiser looking to launch your first campaign, or you’re looking for advice on growing an existing one, we’re on hand to guide you through each step of the process. For more information, check out our RMG specific webpage here.
- Global Web Index data, February 2021
- Global Web Index data, February 2021
- Global Web Index data, April 2021
- Facebook third quarter results, October 2020
Supporting and protecting at-risk and vulnerable people across Facebook’s apps and technologies is important to us. As such, we’ve made significant progress to expand our advertising controls. Our guide will inform gambling businesses or firms about these controls and tools, helping them to implement campaigns responsibly, while helping to protect people who use our services.
Brendan Tinnelly is a product manager, global gaming business, for Facebook. Having spent six years advising on the paid media strategy for some Facebook’s largest advertisers across Console and real-money gaming, he is now a product marketing manager, helping shape our product roadmap to better support the needs of gaming advertisers globally.