We activated gaming audiences as an audience layer. Here’s what changed.
Buying gaming media based on app type is a proven approach. Sports games, puzzle games, and action titles attract engaged players, and placing ads in the right environments still matters. The question wasn’t whether app categories perform. The question was whether layering gaming audiences on top of those environments could unlock incremental performance.
Across a series of campaigns spanning multiple verticals and formats, Unity layered gaming-based audiences through Unity Audience Hub, powered by Optable, on top of category-based buying and compared performance to category-only activation.
What we saw
Interactive formats (Playable & End cards)
- 290% lift in CTR and 193% lift in engagement when gaming audiences were layered on top of category-based placements, compared to leading third-party audiences¹
Public sector, genre-based targeting
- 140% lift in engagement using Sports and Action audiences layered on relevant game categories²
Performance improves with scale
- Engagement lift increased from 140% to 169% within two weeks as more campaigns layered gaming audiences into live campaigns³
Brand campaigns across categories
- 32% lift in CTR and 25% lift in engagement when gaming audiences were layered into campaigns for categories that have historically struggled to scale performance in gaming⁴
Why this matters to marketers
Game categories and app environments still drive engagement. Layering gaming audiences on top adds another level of precision, helping you reach the right people within the right environments. This approach helps make gaming easier to plan, test, and scale alongside your other programmatic strategies.
If you’re looking to unlock the value of gaming audiences within your programmatic strategy, Unity can help.
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What is Audience Hub
Unity Audience Hub blends federated, privacy-first insights from Unity’s ads ecosystem with trusted third-party data sources. Powered by Optable, Unity Audience Hub delivers curated, high-intent audiences to brand marketers, who can then build custom audiences and activate them across Unity’s mobile app and game inventory and even beyond, on channels like CTV through our partnership with Roku.
Sources:
1 and 4 - Source: Internally available data. Disclaimer: Results from a single campaign comparing Audience Hub-augmented targeting to standard app-based contextual targeting, June 2025. CTR (click-through rate) measures the percentage of ad impressions that resulted in a user click. Engagement rate measures the percentage of users who took an explicit action within the ad unit, such as interacting with a playable or tapping an end card. Individual campaign results may vary.
2 and 3 - Source: Internally available data. Disclaimer: Results from a single campaign comparing Audience Hub-augmented targeting to standard app-based contextual targeting, June 2025. Engagement rate measures the percentage of users who took an explicit action within the ad unit, such as interacting with a playable or tapping an end card. Individual campaign results may vary.