2024 Mobile Growth and Monetization Report

In this year’s Unity Gaming Report, we shared that user growth continues for mobile gaming and studios are testing new growth strategies in addition to existing tactics to adapt to the changing gaming industry.

Adapting to market and industry fluctuations is no easy feat, but knowing the trends and benchmarks for user acquisition (UA), in-app purchases (IAPs), and in-app advertising (IAA) can help arm your team with data-backed insights to inform efficient optimizations and grow your game.

Discover how to optimize your resources and maximize your return on investment with the Unity Grow data in this report. Whether you’re looking to allocate your budget more effectively, increase repeat IAP transactions, or engage users through thoughtful ad monetization, you’ll find valuable insights to help you achieve your goals and boost your bottom line.

Diversification is key

CPI campaigns are still in the mix, however, advertisers are diversifying their budget allocations, with ROAS and event-based optimizers taking more of the pie year over year. While CPI campaigns can help unlock scale, using different campaign optimizers is a powerful way to find players who are meeting your quality benchmarks. Campaign optimizers can serve as a powerful tool to find players that are more likely to have value beyond initial app install.

Percentage of spend per campaign types - Unity Ad Network

Percentage of spend per campaign types - ironSource Ad Network

Over the last two years, advertisers across both the ironSource and Unity Ads networks have shifted budget allocations to further diversify their campaign strategies by leveraging optimizers like ad revenue, IAPs, and hybrid ROAS. We also see both target cost per action (tCPA) and target cost per event (tCPE) campaigns gaining traction¹, signaling that advertisers are looking to go even deeper with their campaigns, seeking out players who are more likely to complete specific actions in their games.

When we look at ROAS optimizers, using D7 targets as a benchmark, the top game genres by spend are still mostly focusing on ad revenue optimization. However, hybrid optimizers are a close second across all genres². Optimizing for both IAA and IAPs helps create a more stable and resilient strategy that adapts to different user preferences and market conditions. Hybrid campaigns are becoming more popular as game genres increasingly create blended economies relying on both IAA and IAPs.

Looking at the top five game genres by spend in the U.S., each one is diversifying spend across multiple campaign optimizations. Event campaigns like tCPE have also started to surface in Puzzle (3%), Strategy (8%), Casino (2%), and Arcade (4%)³, signaling that these genres are looking to center their UA strategies even more squarely on finding quality users.

Top 5 events that developers most commonly choose*:

1. Completing a level

2. Registering for a free trial

3. Making in-app purchases

4. Watching a certain number of ads

5. Achieving a significant milestone in app

* Based on ironSource Ads data

How do you choose an event to target and what’s the logic behind it?

Start by choosing an action in your game that is often achieved by high-quality players. This can be an action like making a first in-app purchase or engaging with a certain amount of ads. We recommend choosing an action that your top 5–20% of users with the highest LTV complete within the first seven days of gameplay. Choosing an event within this range ensures that you are targeting a meaningful action performed by a valuable segment of users, while also providing flexibility in event selection. This prevents aiming towards an event that is too rare. Bear in mind, however, that the deeper the event goes into the gameplay, and the more time needed to achieve it, the more conversion rate (CVR) will drop, and it will take longer for the campaign to optimize accordingly.

Leveraging the benefits of diversifying your UA optimization strategy applies just as much to offerwall as it does to video networks.

As a rewarded marketplace, the offerwall allows advertisers to run various event-based campaign optimizations tailored to specific player engagement behaviors. Let’s look at some of those campaign optimizations:

Campaign optimizations are only one piece of the puzzle. Diversification is just as important when looking at your ad format mix within your campaigns, since each variety such as video, end cards, and playable ads engage people differently.

Formats such as playable ads are highly effective for driving stronger engagement and conversion rates, since the format is interactive, often delightful, and critically gives players a sense of how your game operates. Let’s take a look at the genres benefiting most from playable ads:

Knowing the IPM benchmarks per genre can help gauge how competitive your user acquisition playable ad campaigns are⁴. If you aren’t hitting the benchmark for your genre, consider these best practices for creating playable ads:

Maximize IAP revenue

IAP plays a crucial role in driving game revenue, but converting players into payers can be challenging. However, once a player makes their first purchase, the likelihood of them making additional purchases increases significantly. Understanding how to map IAP products through your games’ stages can help you effectively drive repeat purchases.

1.83% of users convert on IAP during their lifetime, and 28.81% of those users will make at least one additional purchase, meaning approximately one in three IAP purchasers will repurchase⁵. In the 2023 Growth and Monetization Report, we shared that 77% of all players who have ever converted to IAP have done so within the first two weeks. While initial IAP conversion is hard, those who do convert are much more likely to repurchase, so it pays to invest in trying to drive those initial conversions.

26.47% of those additional purchases will happen within 30 days of initial purchase. 1.37% will repurchase within 31–60 days, and 0.46% within 61–90+ days. IAP strategies need to anticipate and facilitate repeat purchases within this time frame, and not just work to drive long-term sporadic spending. It is much easier to estimate who will be paying in the future (and when) if you know who has paid in the past.

Let’s take a look at the most effective IAP products according to game stage:

Looking at the conversion rates of each IAP product type according to game stage, ads removal (7.0%), subscription (3.7%), and starter bundles (3.1%) are effective for early game, while currency (24%, 24.3%) and limited-time event/sales (16.3%, 16.9%)⁶ are strong mid-late game motivators.

What is an in-game economy?

An in-game economy is the system within a game where players earn, spend, and trade various currencies, items, and resources.

If rewards for regular gameplay are not compelling, a player is unlikely to be retained. If the rewards are too generous, they will be less likely to consider IAPs and/or IAA to supplement their progress.

Similarly, if promotional rewards are too high, players will expect the same value from app progression and IAPs. Engaged players will closely examine the balance between earned and spent rewards to maximize their time investment.

Key elements of a strong in-game economy:

• Players feel that the rewards they get are worth the time and effort they put in, whether they get those rewards from playing the game normally, watching ads, or buying things in the game.

• Players are clear on what the different currencies in the game are for and how they help them move forward in the game.

Games with higher IAP revenue also have higher rewarded video (RV) impressions, indicating that users want to engage with rewarded videos when they need additional resources. For games in the 50th percentile of IAP revenue per monthly active user, there are 3.5 rewarded video ad impressions per user each month (IMPMAU)⁷. A strong in-game economy will drive IAP and IAA engagement together.

IAA engagement and depth is increasing worldwide

With IAA engagement rising, knowing what types of rewards users engage with most, and where to place them for maximum visibility, will help create efficiencies in your ad monetization strategy, yield better engagement with your users, and ultimately, generate more revenue.

Chart 3.2 shows that Word (38.4%), Role Playing (37.6%), and Casual (36%)⁹ are the top three genres with the highest rewarded video engagement. It’s a close race between genres for rewarded video engagement, so no matter your genre, it can pay to leverage rewarded videos in your game.

Providing context-sensitive ad placements like when a user runs out of resources such as lives leads to 38.1% of users watching¹¹. Having visible, contextual ads offering rewards that users really need in the moment not only generates high ad engagement, but more importantly fosters a positive user experience, which can benefit you in the long run.

Knowing the rewards that drive the highest rates of engagement can help you better understand what motivates your users. Gacha (31.1%), additional moves (30.5%), and daily rewards (30.3%)¹³ drive the highest RV engagement.

This could be because gacha uses a randomized reward system, keeping users engaged through the possibility of obtaining different rewards, while additional moves provide users with progression opportunities they are looking for in the moment, and daily rewards offer incentive to return to the game.

Knowledge is power, and the more you A/B test elements of your monetization strategy, the more you can make informed decisions. There are countless variables you can test, so we looked at what people are using A/B testing for most.

Bidding leads the pack (77.1%), with developers testing bidders to find the most return on their ad inventory, followed by adding or removing specific ad networks (51.9%) and testing country-specific pricing optimization (41.2%)¹⁴. Tools like A/B testing provide developers with both transparency and control over their monetization strategies, helping them make educated optimizations.

Average Users’ LTV

Advertisers continue to look for ways to scale faster, reach users who are more engaged from the start, and retain more users with high LTV. Our data shows that users acquired through the rewarded marketplace in an offerwall have deeper engagement, stronger retention, and LTV that scales faster than users acquired from other ad formats.

By engaging with offers they’re interested in, offerwall users earn rewards when they reach a specific milestone in another game, sign up for a subscription, make a purchase, or complete a survey. Because they are required to complete an action relatively “deep” within the advertised app or game in order to receive their reward, a user acquired through an offerwall generally shows much higher retention and LTV.

When compared to users acquired through RV and interstitials, users acquired through offerwall have 100% higher LTV on D7, 52.1% higher LTV on D30, and 15.8% higher LTV on D60¹⁵.

Retention

In the early stages of gameplay, users obtained through offerwall also have higher retention rates than users acquired from other ad formats. When compared to users acquired through RV and interstitials, users acquired through offerwall have 45.8% higher retention rate on D1, 86.1% higher retention on D7, and 71.7% higher retention on D14¹⁶.

Multi Reward Cost Per Engagement (MR-CPE) campaigns that feature diverse offers with a stronger emphasis on deeper engagement during early gameplay are creating more value for both advertisers and users. Here, users complete multiple actions or events within one offer to earn in-app currency. These rewards encourage them to stay in games longer and unlock more revenue potential for advertisers. Our data shows that MR-CPE offers that involve 7–10 steps are especially popular among users.

Offering rewards at multiple steps is a key advantage of MR-CPE campaigns. This means users don’t have to commit to reaching the end of the funnel in order to receive rewards. Instead, users can still have a positive experience by earning rewards along the way even without completing all steps in the campaign.

Out of all top-performing offerwall MR-CPE campaigns, 24.2% have 3–6 steps, 37.3% have 7–10 steps, and 23.2% have 11–14 steps¹⁷.

Diversifying offerwall UA with Daily Reward CPE campaigns

Daily Reward Cost Per Engagement (DR-CPE) campaigns bring high-quality users back to an app day after day at scale, with the ability to earn more rewards as they complete tasks. Designed to complement MR-CPE campaigns, which typically appeal to more advanced users, DR-CPE campaigns engage a new customer segment of casual users with shorter, quicker, and more frequent rewards like finishing a level or winning a battle. Rewards are capped each day, encouraging users to keep coming back to earn more rewards as they progress further in the game.

DR-CPE campaigns are driving increased conversions and higher ROAS among audiences that prefer short challenges with fast and frequent rewards. Casual users who typically only engage with video ads are recognizing the value offerwall can bring. These shorter tasks can yield as much or even more rewards for minimal time and effort.

MR-CPE step types that encourage reaching a certain level within a limited time frame are more popular among advertisers. A progress bar shows how close users are to the next reward and inspires them to keep going. These steps continue to encourage deeper gameplay and higher-level completion while boosting LTV beyond install.

Among the advertisers utilizing MR-CPE campaigns, 63.5% implement level achievement steps, 45% use task completion steps, 30.2% integrate in-app purchase steps, and 26.4%¹⁸ incorporate steps involving app engagement or tutorial completion.

Unsurprisingly, tasks with lower friction, such as tutorial or level completion, yield higher conversion rates. Task completion rate starts to decline when steps become more complex. Lower-friction tasks like tutorial completion have a nearly 100% completion rate, whereas more involved tasks like level achievement steps have a 33.3% completion rate.

Steps which involve engaging with multiplayer features have a 26.8% completion rate, and event completion steps have a 21.8% completion rate. Sourcing resources steps have a 17.5% completion rate, inviting friends steps have a 8.9% completion rate, and making an in-app purchase has a 4.2% completion rate¹⁹. While it’s not shocking that fewer users will complete steps like making an in-app purchase, this doesn’t mean you should count them out. While scale may be low, user quality may be much higher, especially given the other data in this report around repeat IAPs once the first purchase is made.

For high-friction tasks like IAPs, lower conversion rates can mean higher cost for advertisers to shoulder. As a result, running an efficient campaign that also maximizes scale tends to involve a mix of event types that allow advertisers to optimize both spend and reach.

To optimize reach while still attracting high-LTV users, advertisers should consider adding high-friction events like completing an IAP with lower-friction tasks like tutorial completion²⁰.

For publishers looking to optimize their monetization mix, offerwall plays an important role in boosting overall ARPDAU and generating growth. Offerwall unlocks the ability to monetize a wider audience, including reaching users who may not initially convert in IAP-based games.

According to our data, monthly ad revenue per converter for offerwall exceeds that of RV. When compared to IAP, offerwall’s monthly ad revenue per converter is lower, but remains significant. Offerwall’s monthly ad revenue per converter of $4.04 garners a healthy 30% of the $13.27 IAP earns. Meanwhile, the average monthly ad revenues per converter for the same performance category was $0.15 for RV²¹.

Successful offerwall monetization strategies prioritize discoverability and currency sales. The wording used on offerwall entry points can directly impact whether users engage with the ad format. As an example, offerwall entry points emphasizing the word “free” have a 4.8% higher open rate than those without the same terminology²². Because the start of the funnel serves as a critical foundation for the rest of offerwall monetization, maintaining a high open rate shouldn’t be overlooked.

When making your offerwall visible in main UI screens, location is key. Apps that feature prominent offerwall placement are seeing stronger discoverability. Similar to many game features, prominence in a game UI’s main menu leads to increased engagement and also serves to remind users that offers are available.

Diving in deeper, games that have their offerwall entry point in the lobby or the main UI screen have a 5.9% better open rate than those that do not (21.1% vs. 15.2%)²³.

For games with strong virtual economies, offerwalls may be harder to find. With sophisticated and complex virtual economies come more screens, pages, and/or modes, making it difficult for users to find an offerwall entry point. As a result, users can forget to engage with them. That’s why utilizing pop-up messages or dialog boxes to direct users to an offerwall improves discoverability across the board.

As part of currency sales promotion, pop-ups can also be segmented to reach specific user types, like casual users and/or non-payers. When thinking about pop-ups, publishers should also consider utilizing messaging with deep linking to the offerwall. This ensures that any traffic generated by a user clicking on the pop-up is directly routed to your offerwall.

Currency sales are limited-time promotions that give users the chance to earn more virtual currency than usual for every offerwall offer with which they engage. By promoting initial engagement with offerwall, currency sales are inspiring a growing number of users to engage with offers they may otherwise have ignored. This strategy leads to periodic boosts in revenue throughout the year.

In terms of currency sales, conveying special promotions through clear, compelling, and discoverable messages is critical. Because these sales trigger spikes in revenue throughout the year, games with strong offerwall monetization strategies tend to run 1–2 currency sales monthly²⁶.

Conclusion

The Unity-backed data outlined in this report serves as essential building blocks for your app’s success. By focusing on the strategies and tactics that have proven effective for other apps in your genre, you can allocate your resources more efficiently, maximize your return on investment, and plan your ad monetization strategies accordingly.

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About Unity

Unity (NYSE: U) is the world's leading platform of tools for creators to build and grow real-time games, apps, and experiences across multiple platforms, from mobile, PC, and console, to spatial computing. For more information, visit Unity.com.

For more information about Unity Grow, visit unity.com/grow.

Forward-Looking Statements

This publication contains “forward-looking statements,” as that term is defined under federal securities laws, including, in particular, statements about Unity's plans, strategies and objectives. The words “believe,” “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “continue,” “intend,” “expect,” “plan,” “project,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If the risks materialize or assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. Further information on these and additional risks that could affect Unity’s results is included in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which are available on the Unity Investor Relations website. Statements herein speak only as of the date of this release, and Unity assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this publication except as required by law.

About the data

The data in this report is drawn from the Unity Cloud, Unity Ads, Tapjoy, and ironSource as data sources, including games made with Unity that are sending events through the platform.

We take data privacy seriously and have omitted and anonymized information from this report that would individually identify any single game, developer, or publisher. Games are broken out into publicly available categories as defined on the iOS and Google Play stores where available. Although we also include outside sources of information, the data shown in the charts and graphics is original to Unity. In addition, we are grateful to those members of the industry whom we interviewed for this report, many of whose contributions are quoted throughout.

Here’s how we’ve classified the different markets:

Tier 1 (T1): Includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. These are countries with considerable purchasing power.

Tier 2 (T2): Includes Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Ireland. These countries have very high levels of English comprehension but slightly less purchasing power than T1.

Rest of world (RoW): Includes countries not listed as T1 or T2.

Global: Includes all countries across T1, T2, and RoW.