Advertising reports and market data
Documents
State of the Market 2023: An Annual Analysis of App Market and Advertising Activities
The 2023 market analysis evaluates global mobile advertising performance, concentrating on the two dominant operating systems, iOS and Android, and the leading social platforms that drive ad spend.
- Video advertising is the primary revenue driver, experiencing a 37% growth on Android and a 16% increase on iOS during 2023.
- Facebook and Instagram remain the dominant platforms for social advertising, serving as the primary channels for broad audience reach and engagement.
- Android is outpacing iOS in video ad adoption, demonstrating a significantly stronger growth trajectory for video-based marketing strategies.
When you Said 'Attribution', did you Mean 'Contribution'? - Maor Sadra & Hadar Telem, INCRMNTAL.
The shift toward a privacy-centric digital landscape has rendered traditional user-level attribution increasingly unreliable, necessitating a transition in how gaming companies allocate marketing budgets.
- Marketers must shift from deterministic user-level attribution to incrementality-based contribution analysis to account for the erosion of data accuracy caused by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and privacy manifests.
- Budget allocation should be determined by measuring the actual incremental value a channel provides to total market performance, rather than relying on potentially duplicated or skewed attribution data.
- Companies can identify cannibalization by comparing total conversions against paid traffic, revealing instances where increased ad spend fails to generate a net lift in overall installs.
Winning the Game: Leveraging Contextual Bandits for Creative Optimization - Joseph Iris, Persona.ly.
Contextual bandits represent a sophisticated evolution in machine learning for creative optimization within the mobile gaming industry.
- Contextual bandits, a subset of reinforcement learning, outperform traditional A/B testing by dynamically allocating traffic to creative variations to minimize exploration costs while maximizing performance goals.
- Contextual bandit algorithms improve upon standard Thompson sampling by incorporating additional data layers—such as user behavior, app context, and creative metadata—to tailor ad delivery to specific audience segments.
- Machine learning models can automatically identify creative preferences for different user cohorts, as demonstrated by an Alien Invasion campaign where idle and RPG players were served distinct, game-relevant creative mechanics without manual intervention.
Leveraging Data Analytics for Game Advertising & Marketing - Summer Liu, SocialPeta.
This analysis of global game advertising trends throughout 2023 highlights a significant increase in user acquisition activity, characterized by a 49% year-over-year growth in active advertisers.
- Active game advertisers grew by 49% year-over-year in 2023, with publishers producing an average of over 150 creatives per advertiser annually.
- The demand for constant content freshness is high, as new ad creatives accounted for more than 80% of total output in the second half of 2023.
- Video remains the dominant advertising format at 70% of all creatives, with the majority of these assets lasting 30 seconds or less.
How to create authenticity in video advertising | Itai Raveh from Uplifted
The modern digital advertising landscape is undergoing a significant shift away from high-production, cinematic commercials toward authentic, user-generated content (UGC).
- Advertisers are shifting from high-production cinematic commercials to authentic, user-generated content (UGC) to combat consumer 'ad blindness' and skip rates.
- Following iOS 14 privacy restrictions that limited behavioral data, creative assets have become the primary mechanism for targeting specific demographics.
- Brands can effectively target audiences by producing a high volume of diverse creatives featuring varied topics, ages, and backgrounds, allowing the content itself to act as the targeting filter.
Panel: Mobile Gaming Revolution: Tackling UA Challenges & Pioneering Future Opportunities.
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a critical transition as traditional reliance on device identifiers and probabilistic matching becomes increasingly untenable.
- The mobile gaming industry is shifting away from device identifiers and probabilistic matching toward a privacy-first architecture to comply with mandates like the Digital Markets Act.
- Adopting Consent Management Platforms can increase eCPMs by 10% to 120% by enabling access to premium brand-advertiser budgets.
- Publishers must integrate technical solutions such as Google Consent Mode and Apple’s SKAdNetwork to mitigate policy-driven disruptions and maintain measurement capabilities.
Click is not a Click: Measure the True Value of Your app Campaigns - Ben Jeger, Moloco
The modern mobile app marketing landscape faces a significant measurement crisis characterized by the decoupling of user intent from recorded engagement metrics.
- Traditional click-through rates (CTR) have become unreliable due to the widespread practice of automated background click-firing, which artificially inflates engagement metrics to maintain attribution in privacy-restricted environments.
- The 2021 introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework accelerated the decoupling of user intent from recorded engagement, forcing marketers to rely on flawed data that obscures actual campaign performance.
- Ad networks and publishers are incentivized to prioritize volume over quality, leading to deceptive creative practices like fake 'X' buttons and interstitial loops that degrade long-term user retention.
Keynote: A New Era for Mobile Gaming - Noam Zada.
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a period of intense competition, characterized by an oversaturated market with over one million titles on app stores.
- The mobile gaming market is currently oversaturated with over one million titles, necessitating a shift from traditional user acquisition to deep community engagement for long-term growth.
- TikTok serves as a primary driver for gaming discovery, with 82% of its one billion monthly active users engaging with gaming content on a weekly basis.
- Gaming has evolved into a cultural force that integrates with film, music, and lifestyle, resulting in trillions of annual views for gaming-related content on social platforms.
Keynote: Earning Incremental Revenue From Audio Ads
Audio advertising represents a strategic evolution in game monetization, providing a non-intrusive revenue stream that integrates seamlessly into ambient in-game environments.
- Audio advertising is projected to transition from a supplementary revenue source to a core component of the gaming ecosystem within the next year.
- To maintain user retention and gameplay flow, industry standards recommend capping ad frequency at two to three ads per session.
- Technical implementation requires audio pass-back and volume detection tools to ensure ads reach a 30% audibility threshold without disrupting background multimedia.
3 life changing UA tips from 2023, how to revert ad apocalypse? Review Radar vol 3 (#95)
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural adjustment, characterized by a shift toward rapid creative iteration and the optimization of monetization stacks in response to declining ad performance.
- Regulatory and platform changes in 2023 caused eCPM drops between 15% and 45%, necessitating a shift toward more aggressive monetization and creative optimization.
- Integrating hyper-casual mini-games directly into core products helps align creative assets with gameplay, effectively reducing user churn.
- Publishers can increase total ad impressions by up to 20% by embedding placements within live-ops events that offer progression speed-ups rather than resource-based rewards.
The State of AAA Game Advertising
The analysis demonstrates that 2023 marked a peak in AAA game advertising, with live-service titles such as Fortnite commanding the highest spend (US$57 M) and blockbuster launches—Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III—each exceeding US$25 M. YouTube remained the dominant channel (35% of spend), yet…
- AAA game advertising peaked in 2023, with top live-service titles like Fortnite spending US$57M and major launches including Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III each exceeding US$25M.
- YouTube remains the primary advertising channel at 35% of total spend, though publishers are increasingly diversifying into Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram to reach broader audiences.
- Activision Blizzard and Epic Games led the market in 2023, each allocating over US$70M to U.S. campaigns for both new intellectual properties and established franchises.
Liftoff Report: Mobile Ad Creative Index 2024
The report presents a comprehensive analysis of mobile ad creative performance across four key app verticals—gaming, e-commerce, finance, and entertainment—for the period January 1 2023 to January 1 2024.
- Gaming ads utilizing video or playable formats are over 20 times more likely to drive installs compared to banner ads.
- Native ads represent the most cost-effective acquisition channel, averaging a $1.80 CPI across the analyzed verticals.
- E-commerce apps achieve the highest install-to-action (ITA) rates exceeding 30% through native and banner formats, which also maintain the lowest acquisition costs between $2.57 and $3.23.