State of Creative Optimization: 2025 Edition

Since the last post in this format was well received, I thought it would be interesting to also share my key takeaways from the new State of Creative Optimization report by AppsFlyer. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many different app categories over the last years, and the behavior of creatives varies significantly across them.

Here are my key insights, along with real experiences:

1️⃣🏆 Constant creative testing is key: I’m not reinventing the wheel here—creative testing has become increasingly important due to changes in algorithm behavior and the faster burnout rate of creatives.

Regardless of your app vertical, if you don’t build a creative production system that allows for constant refreshes with a good volume of new concepts, your campaigns will quickly experience ad fatigue, leading to a drop in performance. This point is well supported by the report: both gaming and non-gaming apps have increased creative volume by 8% and 22% YoY, respectively.

2️⃣🎮 Gaming apps retain winners longer: As highlighted in the report, in gaming apps, the top 2% of creatives drive 53% of spend, compared to 43% in non-gaming apps. I see this firsthand with one of my gaming clients: campaigns don’t experience ad fatigue even after spending on the same creatives for over a month while in productivity apps for example, I see a completely different story as creatives can get fatigue in less than 10 days.

3️⃣💘 Dating apps don’t have a dominant hook: I recently worked with a major dating company spending over $1M on TikTok, so I can personally confirm this insight. On dating, there is one special condition that does not happen in other categories: You need to split the advertising per gender as the motivation and engagement of women and men with the app are totally different. Most of your revenue will come from men, but without women using the app, they won’t spend money.

Naturally, this also means using entirely different creatives for each gender. From my experience, men usually respond better to casual dating content where the creator’s appearance plays a role, while women are more attracted to hooks that position the app as a place to find a serious relationship. (Surprised? Probably not.)

4️⃣💸 Finance apps thrive on testimonial-style UGC: I currently work in this category, and it’s quite straight: showing real people sharing personal success stories with your app is far more engaging than simply demonstrating how it works.

There’s a simple reason for this: when someone is looking for a finance app, the most important factor is trust in the service. They assume they’ll figure out the platform if it’s worth using.

Creatives are gaining more and more importance and having these insights is just priceless. Kudos to Appsflyer team and also to Meta and dentsu as they are also contributors to this great report.

Check out the report and let me know what conclusions that you could draw from it!