Bigo Live

Bigo Live Sees 20% Lower CPI and 12% Higher IPM with Liftoff UGC Ads

Bigo Live is a global social live-streaming platform and one of the fastest-growing Singapore technology companies. With Bigo Live, users can broadcast in real-time to share life moments, showcase their talents and interests, interact with new communities, and send virtual gifts. The platform currently has over 400 million users worldwide and continues to scale.

The Challenge: Finding Quality Users With Ad Creative that Stands Out

As a long-time partner of Liftoff’s, Bigo looks to scale globally by attracting and retaining high-quality users who are more likely to spend and stay active on the app post-install.

Attracting the right users presents a constant challenge in a competitive industry. Streaming apps tend to run similar ad creatives, making standing out in a crowded market difficult. This competition is compounded by privacy policies around the globe (including IDFA deprecation) that make it difficult to run hyper-targeted campaigns.

Although Bigo Live offers in-app purchases to its users, the full picture for conversion is more complex. Bigo measures success using a mix of down-funnel metrics, including IPM, CPI, retention rates, and ROAS.

The Solution: UGC Ads that Know Their Audience

Working closely with Bigo, Liftoff’s Creative Studio team settled on a strategy for UGC campaigns. After thoroughly analyzing Bigo Live’s existing audience and testing with interactive and static ads, Liftoff’s creative team found that female profiles that reflect the app’s existing UI resonated much more with their target audience.

The liftoff team then selected creators who fit creator personas and performed well across similar app verticals and with similar target audiences.  

By developing UGC ads with creators who fit the app’s look and feel, they tapped into a winning formula. In particular, audiences embraced ads featuring influencers talking directly to the camera, showing off the app’s features candidly and in an approachable way.

Users who feel a personal connection to influencers sharing their experiences on the app are more likely to install—and stay engaged post-install.
Selfie-style videos that directly address the user resonate more with audiences.
By adding a scrollable template, ads can feature multiple UGC videos, allowing users to interact with them as they would in their social media feeds.
Showing off app UI and in-app features can make ads more convincing.

Initially, UGC ads were used in English campaigns to increase traffic and attract as much of the target audience as possible, but as the campaigns scaled, Liftoff worked with non-English-speaking influencers to adapt the strategy to local markets. 

The Results: New Audiences at Lower Costs

Liftoff’s creative team helped Bigo diversify their ad campaigns across several markets. While many live-streaming apps run similar ads, UGC creatives gave Bigo ads an edge by tapping into the existing audiences of local influencers.

This led to improved performance across multiple campaigns:

  • UGC creatives with Liftoff lowered CPI by 20%
  • UGC ad creative also saw a 12% higher average IPM and brought in more than 50K new iOS users for Bigo Live campaigns in Q1 of 2024.

As Bigo continues to grow their business globally, the partnership with Liftoff has become an essential part of their user strategy.

“Liftoff is the expert at UGC production. Liftoff UGC is experienced in developing local concepts and managing creator filming. Their UGC campaigns are top-notch in quality and helped us lower iOS CPI and attracted a high volume of iOS users.”

Zhi Yin, Ad Operations Director at Bigo

Interested in supercharging campaign performance with UGC? Contact us.