Some things just go together–peanut butter and jelly, burger and fries, Bert and Ernie, and puzzle games and mobile devices. Puzzle is one of the most prominent game categories that translates perfectly to touchscreen devices. For instance, the touchscreen interface mimics the tactility of a jigsaw puzzle and the physics of a block puzzle.
If the Puzzle category in the Chartboost Network was a jigsaw puzzle, it would be marked at expert level. The Puzzle category is highly competitive and takes an outstanding creative to stand out from the pack, but that’s what we’re here for. In this month’s Top Creatives series, we connected all the pieces, stacked all the blocks and popped all the bubbles, to find the common best practices among the top performing creatives in the Puzzle category with superb impression-to-install conversion.
Finger on the Screen
How do you play mobile games? With your fingers, of course. The inclusion of a finger in a puzzle creative was commonplace among the top performers. The addition of a finger emphasizes the action a player would take in a game if they were to click-through and download. Wooga executed the use of a finger in this creative above for its match-three puzzler Jelly Splash.
Pushing the Right Buttons
How can you deny a button that’s screaming out for you to push it? Many of the top creatives in the Puzzle category in September featured a large call-to-action button. Potential players are enticed to click-through creatives that feature call-to-action phrases such as “Play Now,” “Get Free” and “Play Free.” Below, XIMAD’s creative for Magic Jigsaw Puzzles includes a call-to-action button with the phrase “GET FREE!”.
The 3 C’s of a Match-3 Creative
Colors. Characters. Charm. Those are the three C’s that embody a top creative for a match-3 puzzle title. It just so happens that a match-3 puzzle game’s vivid color palette lends itself to an eye-catching creative. So as a rule of thumb, choose a wide range of colors for your creative, and showcase a game’s character. The final ingredient for a powerful creative is charm. Many of the top creatives were so charming, it was hard to resist tapping on something so darn cute. Disney harmoniously blended the three C’s in its Frozen Free Fall creative below.
Stay tuned to the Chartboost Blog to find out what we analyze in next month’s Top Creatives series. Want to read all of our past articles in the Top Creatives series? Head here.