Brutally Honest #149: Useful Stuff About UA in the Post IDFA World

This industry newsletter by Matej Lancaric provides strategic insights into mobile user acquisition (UA) and creative testing for 2024 and 2025. The primary thesis emphasizes a shift toward agility in creative evaluation, arguing that traditional benchmarks—such as requiring 100 installs or 5,000 impressions to judge an ad's viability—are obsolete. Instead, the findings suggest that creative performance is binary: an ad either gains immediate traction or fails, allowing for rapid iteration and scaling after minimal initial spending.

The scope of the analysis covers the global mobile gaming market, with specific mentions of developers in Türkiye and titles like Trainstation 2, Idle Lumber, and Color Block Jam. Data points highlight the success of the latter, which is reportedly generating over $250,000 in daily revenue through a combination of in-app purchases and advertising. The methodology relies on professional case studies and anecdotal evidence from UA operations, noting that high-performing creatives can decrease cost-per-install (CPI) by up to 40% and significantly improve return on ad spend (ROAS).

Key conclusions focus on the integration of AI in advertising to streamline production and the effectiveness of "altered gameplay" in puzzle game creatives to drive engagement. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that adding new creatives to existing campaigns does not disrupt the learning phase but rather serves to boost overall performance. The document concludes with a survey of the current labor market, listing numerous open UA and marketing roles at major industry firms such as Scopely, Zynga, and Supercell.