Top 4 Alarmy Ad Success Formulas You Can Copy Right Now

Insights from Testing Alarmy's Performance Ad Creatives

Here are two ad creatives made by the Alarmy marketing team this year. Which one do you think performed better?

The Alarmy marketing group tests performance creatives on a weekly basis. After running these weekly tests throughout Q3, we were able to define our very own "ad creative success formula." I'd like to share a few of these with you today. As you read on, you'll naturally figure out the answer to the question above :)

1. The Intro Hook is the Absolute Baseline

There are two main types of hooks: visual hooks using images or videos, and message hooks using copy.

While there are countless ways to create a visual hook, the methods that worked best for us were handwriting on an iPad, showing a clear Before & After, and utilizing characters.

For message hooks, bringing up a Pain Point & Solution proved to be highly effective. The key here is to be specific so the target audience can truly relate.

2. Find the Expressions That Actually Work

Ad efficiency can shift drastically depending on how you express a specific feature of the app.

In Alarmy's case, one of our surefire wake-up features is the "mission." While the most popular mission among active Alarmy users is actually "Math," the one that gets the best response in ads is the "Shake" mission. Perhaps because the sight of someone violently shaking their phone instantly grabs attention, creatives featuring the shake mission almost always performed well. In fact, there was a time when we exclusively used the shake mission in our ads.

But then we started wondering, "What if there are effective ways to express our other missions in ads, and we just haven't found them yet?" So, we started running various tests on the other missions as well. Slowly but surely, we began discovering the expressions that worked for each specific mission.

For the Typing mission, the response was pretty lukewarm when we built the creative around "motivational quotes." However, when we swapped those out for visually frustrating phrases like "뷁웲꿽" (complex Korean characters) or emojis like "🏄‍♂️❌🛝"—making viewers immediately think, "Wow, that's going to be hard to type fast"—the efficiency skyrocketed.

3. Maximize Reality

When we successfully captured the raw, realistic feel of an actual situation, the response was generally positive across all countries.

For Alarmy, the actor's sheer panic, long-take filming, natural conversations, and the actual in-app flow were the key elements that brought out this realism. When we effectively incorporated these into the creatives, we saw excellent efficiency.

4. Abstract Keywords X, Concrete Keywords O

Performance was noticeably better when we appealed with phrases like "heavy sleeper" or "will definitely wake you up," rather than keywords like "refreshing morning," "fatigue," or "sleep inertia." Mentioning "oversleeping" also proved to be much more efficient than mentioning "being late."

From the viewer's perspective, I think a direct, concrete solution they can get in the near future simply resonates more deeply than an abstract value they might achieve somewhere down the line.

Keeping these success formulas in mind, can you guess which of the two ads I showed earlier performed better? It's the second creative 💁🏻‍♀️

• Intro Hook (Message): The copy "Alarmy pisses you off so much it definitely wakes you up" (Mentioning the specific Solution that it will definitely wake you up)

• Working Expression: A mission featuring a phrase that looks incredibly hard to type fast

• Reality: Contains the actor's sheer panic, a long take, natural conversation, and the actual app flow

• Concrete Keyword Mention: "definitely wakes you up"

Wrapping Up

There have been a lot of benefits to stacking up these success formulas weekly and organizing our insights quarterly. It's incredibly convenient to have our insights and lessons visible at a glance when producing creatives internally, and sharing them with external agencies has allowed us to produce a higher volume of performance creatives with a much more stable hit rate.

But the insights are still piling up even now! As we test various creatives, we sometimes encounter cases that completely shatter our existing formulas. I'll be back later with fresh insights to share ⏰