User Acquisition reports and market data
Documents
🤖 Building a UA reporting agent live, in 15 minutes by Matej Lancaric
Automating weekly user acquisition (UA) reporting is a highly effective strategy for mobile gaming consultants and growth marketers to reclaim time spent on manual data consolidation.
- Automating weekly UA reporting via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows growth marketers to connect AppsFlyer data directly to AI platforms like n8n, Claude, or ChatGPT to eliminate manual data consolidation.
- The technical implementation requires generating an AppsFlyer API token, configuring an MCP-compatible client, and integrating an OpenAI API key within an automation tool.
- UA managers can use open-source AppsFlyer templates to automate executive summaries and spend cap alerts without needing advanced coding skills.
UA Monthly #2: AppLovin's Social Network, Google Fee Cuts & Unity Vector
Unity is aggressively challenging the current user acquisition landscape by introducing D28 in-app purchase ROAS campaigns powered by its Vector engine.
- Unity is testing D28 in-app purchase ROAS campaigns using its Vector engine, moving beyond the industry-standard seven-day optimization window to better identify high-value players.
- Google has reduced Play Store fees from 30% to 20% for new installs, providing developers with marginal improvements in unit economics and increased bidding power for user acquisition.
- AppLovin is exploring expansion into e-commerce and social networking to secure first-party inventory, though analysts view this as a high-risk departure from its core B2B ad-tech expertise.
MDM Podcast, Season 7, Episode 11: Understanding Unity's Vector (with Felix The)
Unity’s Vector platform represents a strategic evolution in mobile user acquisition by leveraging the company’s dual role as a game engine provider and an advertising network.
- Unity's 'Vector' advertising product leverages engine-level runtime data to improve user acquisition performance by providing high-fidelity, sequential event signals that are superior to traditional, often fragmented, software development kit (SDK) data.
- Unity is shifting from fragmented machine learning approaches to 'massive unified models' that allow for better autocorrelation, covariance, and causal understanding of user behavior across the advertising ecosystem.
- The company is prioritizing generative AI tools that focus on improving Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) rather than just increasing creative volume, ensuring that advertisers do not simply shift costs from production to marketing without performance gains.
How to leverage incentivised rewards for high value UA | Nicholas Bloom from Exmox #PGConnects
The incentivized user acquisition (UA) sector has emerged as a significant force in the mobile gaming industry, currently accounting for approximately 30% of the total UA marketing share.
- Exmox, a rewarded user acquisition platform, facilitates high-LTV traffic by incentivizing users with cash rewards to complete specific in-game events, currently accounting for approximately 30% of the total UA marketing share of voice.
- Exmox plans to triple its UA spend in 2026 to $300 million, following a $100 million spend in 2025 and a doubling of its internal headcount from approximately 60 to 120 employees.
- Rewarded UA platforms require users to opt-in to tracking to function; this acts as a necessary trade-off for users to receive rewards, as the platform must verify in-game event completion via MMPs in real-time to trigger payouts.
OpenClaw 101: Automated Content Creation with AI
OpenClaw functions as an advanced agentic AI framework designed to achieve full automation of digital workflows, specifically targeting high-volume content creation for platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
- OpenClaw enables the creation of autonomous AI agents that can perform complex, multi-step workflows like managing end-to-end content pipelines for TikTok and Instagram with minimal human intervention.
- AI agents operate using 'skills'—modular, downloadable sets of instructions that allow the agent to execute specific tasks such as video editing, web searching via MCP (Model Context Protocol), or data analysis.
- Persistent memory allows agents to retain context over time, which users can manually review and edit in local files to correct errors or refine the agent's behavior.
🚀 Last Asylum Review: Is this the next Kingshot moment in 4X gaming?
Last Asylum: Plague represents a strategic evolution in the mobile 4X genre, synthesizing proven engagement mechanics from industry leaders like Whiteout Survival and Kingshot into a highly optimized, accessible experience.
- Last Asylum: Plague generated $4 million in its first month and is projected to reach $5 million in monthly revenue, positioning it as a top-tier competitor in the 4X genre.
- The game maintains a consistent volume of 200,000 daily downloads, with particularly strong performance in high-lifetime-value markets including Japan and South Korea.
- Developers are increasingly utilizing AI for 70% to 80% of creative asset generation, enabling rapid iteration and the deployment of thousands of targeted advertisements.
Measuring the long-term effects of brand advertising (with Carl Mela and Ross Link)
Modern marketing strategy faces a significant crisis as the accessibility of direct response metrics incentivizes firms to prioritize short-term sales and discounting over long-term brand equity.
- Modern marketing measurement often prioritizes short-term direct response metrics like clicks, which can erode long-term brand equity and lead firms to mistake promotional discounting for sustainable brand growth.
- Effective brand measurement should focus on two key indicators: baseline sales volume (representing brand power) and price elasticity (the ability to raise prices without losing customers).
- Marketing mix modeling should be used to optimize for long-term profit rather than just top-line revenue, as agencies often have misaligned incentives to maximize spend rather than margin.
MDM Podcast, Season 7, Episode 7: MDM Mailbag #7 (with Matej Lancaric)
The mobile gaming industry is undergoing a structural shift toward web-based onboarding and direct-to-consumer payment strategies to mitigate the impact of platform-level tracking restrictions and high app store fees.
- Mobile game developers are increasingly using web-based onboarding and shops to bypass the 30% platform fees charged by Apple and Google, though major companies remain hesitant to fully move their monetization stacks due to security concerns and the difficulty of auditing web-based transactions.
- Artificial intelligence and no-code tools have drastically shortened production cycles for high-quality video and playable ads, allowing developers to deploy new creatives in as little as one day using pre-built templates.
- The effectiveness of mobile measurement partners (MMPs) remains debated, with smaller studios often lacking the internal resources to manage complex data attribution, leading to a reliance on internal dashboards built on top of Firebase and Looker.
🚨📢 Breaking News: Apple AI money, rewarded roll-up, mobile funding wave
The mobile gaming industry is currently defined by three major trends: the indirect monetization of generative AI, a resurgence in venture capital funding for game studios, and the consolidation of rewarded user acquisition (UA) platforms.
- Major industry players are prioritizing control over distribution infrastructure, evidenced by NCSoft’s $202 million acquisition of a 70% stake in Just Play and Nazara Technologies’ $100 million investment in Blue Tile and Best Play.
- The mobile gaming industry is undergoing a consolidation of rewarded user acquisition firms, allowing companies to build proprietary ecosystems that bypass traditional ad networks.
- Apple is projected to generate nearly $1 billion in annual revenue from third-party generative AI applications by collecting 15% to 30% commission fees on subscriptions through the App Store.
BITKRAFT Summit Day 2: Scaling Today's Consumer Apps with Dani Tran, Xiang Shen, Mark van Ryswyk
This discussion explores strategies for scaling consumer applications and games by integrating engagement loops, data-driven development, and nuanced market positioning.
- Validate product concepts early using CPI testing, gameplay video analysis, and retention metrics before committing significant development resources.
- Design monetization strategies that align with the user journey starting from the first seven days of engagement, as product development and business models are inseparable.
- Navigate the post-IDFA landscape by leveraging advanced ad technology and performance marketing to identify and target high-value user cohorts.
Influencer Marketing in mobile games actually explained by Marion Balinoff
Influencer marketing in the mobile gaming sector functions most effectively when treated as a performance-driven channel rather than a branding exercise.
- Treat influencer marketing as a performance-driven channel with a specific goal of achieving a 25% increase in daily organic installs.
- Concentrate campaign activity into a three-day window to generate the momentum necessary to trigger algorithmic recognition in app stores.
- Prioritize YouTube over other platforms because direct links in descriptions and pinned comments minimize friction and maximize conversion rates.
The Prosperous Society, Part 1: The Primacy of Distribution
The digital economy is undergoing a fundamental structural shift as generative artificial intelligence collapses the marginal cost of software and content production toward zero.
- As generative AI reduces the marginal cost of software production toward zero, the primary economic constraint shifts from production capacity to distribution efficiency.
- Human attention is a finite, non-scalable resource; as AI enables a massive increase in product volume, competition for this attention drives up the cost of customer acquisition.
- Economic savings gained from cheaper AI-driven development are frequently competed away, as firms must reallocate those funds into distribution and marketing to remain visible in a crowded market.