Advertising reports and market data
Documents
Seizing the First Party Data Opportunity in Mobile Games Advertising, Fernando Pernica, Nefta.
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a challenging transition into a privacy-first era, characterized by stringent regulations and the widespread adoption of opt-out mechanisms.
- The mobile gaming industry has seen a 35% decline in in-app purchase revenue following the implementation of recent privacy-first regulations and opt-out mechanisms.
- The loss of traditional identifiers has caused significant drops in advertising revenue and eCPMs, forcing advertisers to struggle with effective user targeting.
- Large industry conglomerates are responding to privacy shifts by creating siloed, opaque data environments that prioritize their internal optimization over publisher transparency.
ASA & CPP Playbook for Mobile Game, Ian Pernia, AppTweak.
This analysis examines the strategic application of Apple Search Ads (ASA) and Custom Product Pages (CPP) to optimize mobile game growth.
- Aligning Apple Search Ads (ASA) with Custom Product Pages (CPP) significantly improves conversion rates by matching ad creative directly to specific user search intent.
- While default product pages often yield higher tap-through rates due to broad appeal, CPPs consistently outperform them in the critical transition from impression to install.
- The analysis is derived from a large-scale dataset encompassing over 20 million keywords and 6 million applications.
Gamelight: Power of Game Recommendation Apps, Valentina Bailly & Kathleen Sherman, Gamelight.
Gamelight operates as a rewarded game discovery platform, functioning as an ad network that connects mobile game publishers with users through personalized recommendations.
- Gamelight’s AI-driven recommendation platform delivers an average 40% increase in day-seven retention and return on ad spend (ROAS) for its publishing partners.
- The platform functions as a rewarded discovery engine that utilizes behavior-based incentives, such as coins for reaching milestones, to drive sustained user loyalty rather than short-term extrinsic motivation.
- Gamelight operates as a first-party data owner, requiring explicit user permission to track app usage data to ensure compliance with privacy standards like ATT and IDFA.
Delivering Performance Advertizing Outcomes at Scale Beyond Traditional Media Platforms.
The advertising landscape is shifting as hardware manufacturers, or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), emerge as significant alternatives to traditional big tech platforms like Google and Meta.
- Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are emerging as a major alternative to traditional big tech platforms, with the OEM software industry projected to reach $600 billion within five years.
- Affinity Global acts as a strategic intermediary, providing a unified layer to manage ad delivery and technical integration across fragmented OEM ecosystems like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo.
- The platform provides access to one billion global users, including 500 million daily active users on the web and over 100 million on mobile apps.
How to Advertise Hybrid-Casual Games in 2024
The hybrid-casual gaming sector has emerged as a strategic evolution for developers transitioning from hyper-casual models, which often suffer from low lifetime value (LTV) and retention challenges.
- Hybrid-casual games should target a revenue split of 40% to 50% from in-app purchases (IAPs), with the remainder derived from in-app advertising to balance monetization between spenders and casual players.
- Success metrics have shifted from hyper-casual CPI benchmarks to long-term ROAS and LTV, with day-30 and day-60 ROAS serving as the primary indicators of sustainability.
- The Asia-Pacific region is projected to dominate the market, accounting for approximately 64% of total ad spend revenue in 2024.
2023 Insights Report: Marketing Trends in Indian Mobile Games
The 2023 Insights Report on Marketing Trends in Indian Mobile Games provides a comprehensive analysis of the advertising landscape within the Indian mobile gaming sector.
- The Indian mobile gaming market saw an 86% year-over-year increase in monthly active advertisers during 2023, signaling rapid sector expansion.
- Despite the surge in advertisers, the average volume of monthly ad creatives per advertiser dropped by 51.7%, indicating a shift toward more efficient and targeted production strategies.
- Android dominates the Indian market with 3.4 times more advertisers than iOS, and Android-based advertisers produce an average of 36 more creatives per month than those on iOS.
Sustain Creative Excellence to Drive Enduring Growth with Amit Pande & Jen Donahoe
The modern digital marketing landscape, particularly within the mobile gaming industry, necessitates a shift toward creative-first strategies to engage a global audience characterized by short attention spans.
- Advertisers must prioritize native-feeling, vertical short-form video content to capture user attention within the critical two-to-three-second window.
- Over 80% of advertisers are now tailoring creative assets specifically for short-form environments, frequently utilizing influencer partnerships to increase authenticity and engagement.
- Creative assets serve as the primary fuel for machine learning engines, requiring the upload of maximum-volume, diverse asset sets to optimize performance across Google’s inventory.
The Art of Achieving Peak Performance with John Wright, Jennifer Donahoe & Di Weng
This discussion outlines a strategic framework for mobile game development and user acquisition, emphasizing a lifecycle-based approach to achieving peak performance.
- Modern user acquisition relies on automated bidding strategies, such as value-based bidding and ROAS optimization, to hit specific day-three or day-seven performance goals.
- Game development follows a four-stage lifecycle: MVP for core loop validation, Alpha for testing long-term retention with four to six hours of content, soft launch, and hard launch.
- Monetization strategies have shifted from pure in-app purchases (IAP) to hybrid models that capture revenue from both paying users and ad-engaged players.
Level Up: AI Powered Mobile Gaming Growth with Google's Katie Funk & Belinda Langner
Google’s product leadership highlights the integration of artificial intelligence across the mobile gaming lifecycle, positioning AI as a critical multiplier for user acquisition, creative optimization, and monetization.
- AI-driven value-based bidding, such as Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS), has replaced manual campaign management to better align user acquisition with specific revenue goals like in-app purchases and advertising.
- Voodoo achieved a 58% increase in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by implementing AI-optimized bidding strategies tailored to their specific monetization structures.
- Google’s AI-powered creative tools, which include automatic video reorientation and asset generation from static images, deliver a 16% performance uplift in campaign results.
The Measurement Crisis (in mobile UA) | #1 of 5 in State of Measurement Series
The mobile user acquisition landscape is currently undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the deprecation of device identifiers like IDFA and the implementation of stringent privacy regulations.
- The deprecation of device identifiers like IDFA and stricter privacy regulations have rendered legacy last-touch attribution models obsolete and unreliable.
- The industry is experiencing a measurement crisis marked by fragmented data, declining performance metrics, and longer payback periods for marketing investments.
- Incrementality testing using holdout groups is now the primary method for isolating causal installs and determining true return on investment.
Türkiye Game Market 2023 Report
The 2023 Türkiye Game Market Report provides a comprehensive analysis of a resilient and evolving gaming ecosystem navigating significant economic volatility and geopolitical instability.
- The Turkish gaming market generated $580 million in revenue in 2023, supported by a player base of 47 million people.
- Approximately 90% of games produced in Türkiye are exported internationally, with titles like Royal Match demonstrating the country's capacity for world-class content.
- The industry is strategically shifting away from hyper-casual mobile titles toward more sustainable business models, including hybrid-casual, indie productions, and PC/console development.
Q1 2024 Digital Market Index
In the first quarter of 2024, the mobile gaming market showed a clear shift away from hyper-casual titles, which experienced a year-over-year decline of more than ten percent across all major platforms.
- The global digital gaming market reached $23.7 billion in Q1 2024, a 4.2% year-over-year increase driven primarily by subscription models and live-ops monetization.
- Top-tier publishers consolidated their market position, capturing over 45% of global digital game sales as mid-size and indie developers faced increased pressure from rising user acquisition costs.
- Mobile gaming trends shifted away from hyper-casual titles, which saw a decline of over 10% year-over-year, in favor of niche sub-genres offering deeper mechanics and social interaction.