YOUKU boosts exposure and downloads during key
drama premieres.

Each year, YOUKU rolls out a lineup of flagship dramas. To boost the visibility of these dramas and drive user growth and conversions, the team leveraged ad placements across the App Store for different stages of promotion. When launching new dramas, Today tab ads helped the team scale exposure on the front page of the App Store, while Search tab ads allowed them to further increase consideration of their app. With search results campaigns, the team focused on their core brand and industry keywords to capture brand traffic from multiple channels, efficiently converting potential audiences.

“The premiere is a key moment for drama promotion, and an Apple Ads strategy with multiple placements helped us rapidly boost buzz, achieve high-quality acquisition, and grow in-app revenue during this phase,” says YOUKU iOS User Growth Lead Cheng Qian. For example, the week after the premiere of the drama In The Name of Justice, the team’s multi-placement strategy successfully increased the app’s impressions by 692 percent, with their brand keywords driving a 270 percent increase in new-user downloads.

After a drama finished airing and moved to the app’s on-demand content library, the YOUKU team prioritized search results campaigns to maintain steady visibility and post-install conversions. With these keyword campaigns, they continued investing in their brand terms as well as the high-performing industry keywords identified during the premiere phase. “In always-on campaigns for titles in our content library, our search results brand campaigns delivered high conversion efficiency, helping us reach high-intent audiences with low costs,” says Cheng. “During this phase, we also leveraged Search tab ads in addition to search results ads to influence people’s download intent before they narrowed in on specific searches.”

To boost more interest and engagement when releasing new dramas, the YOUKU team created eye-catching creative featuring key characters or storylines in advance of their premiere campaigns. For example, during the launch of the TV drama The First Frost, the team customized custom product pages with deep links to create search results ad variations, and set the same pages as the tap destination for their Today tab ads. “We tailored creative for our search results brand ads, and synchronized updates to our product page shown in organic results. This allowed us to showcase a variety of trending drama content to people searching for youku, efficiently capturing brand traffic during peak moments,” says Cheng.

After users tapped the ad and downloaded the app, they landed on The First Frost’s playback page with a deep link, ensuring a seamless drama-watching experience. “Drama-themed custom product pages helped us capture user interest and increased our tap-through rates. Deep links further improved the ad experience, post-install conversion efficiency, and viewership of our key series,” says Cheng.

When promoting the popular drama series The Legend of Zang Hai, the team used video assets in their search results and Today tab campaigns for the first time. The assets featured group portraits of the characters and highlighted the lead actor on the cover, giving the audience a vivid impression of the story. Video ad variations for this drama had a 17 percent higher conversion rate than their default search results ads.

“By using custom product pages and deep links across multiple ad placements on the App Store, we were able to showcase drama content prominently on the front page and before and after people searches. This significantly shortened the user path to in-app viewing, enabling us to efficiently reach audiences interested in long-form videos and increase purchase rates,” says Cheng.

To improve overall performance and optimize their marketing strategy, the YOUKU team leveraged various Apple Ads insights and continuously ran campaign tests. For example, they tested the impact of setting their campaign type to “Reach All Eligible Users.” “We discovered that, due to the clear download intent among App Store visitors, reaching all eligible users allowed us to cover a larger potential audience and capture more new-user downloads. For this reason, we enabled this setting for all subsequent campaigns across ad placements, resulting in higher campaign efficiency,” says Cheng.

For their creative strategy, the team tested different combinations of custom product pages and deep links built around their drama content. They closely monitored key performance metrics, such as ad taps, downloads, and in-app purchases. They identified high-performing creative to scale their strategy and accumulate insights for future planning.

With search results ads, the team enabled broad match for high-performing keywords and leveraged Search Match to continually discover new relevant terms. In addition to focusing on their brand and core industry terms, they tested other types of keywords based on audience interests. For example, during the promotion of the drama series The Double, they tested cross-category keywords that the show’s core viewers might be interested in. They aligned these keywords with ad variations highlighting relevant creative and deep links to effectively reach and convert more potential paying customers.

“According to custom analysis of our campaign performance provided by the Apple Ads team, we found that search results brand ads drove notable growth in overall incremental conversions, giving us the confidence to continue investing in our brand keywords throughout every phase of the drama promotion,” says Cheng. “We monitored our account performance continuously, together with insights and features provided by Apple Ads, to flexibly test and adjust our campaign and in-app content strategies. This not only allowed us to keep reaching new users, but also generated valuable insights for the long-term promotion of our drama series.”