The latest “Performance index” recently published by Appsflyer provides a comprehensive snapshot of the mobile advertising market based on massive traffic data analysis on 6 B installs for 5,500 apps from 250 ad networks in the period January – June 2017.

 

Methodology

 

The main metrics that the report uses to rank the ad networks are:

Volume ranking – total number of clean (fraud free) installs they generated

Power ranking – number of clean (fraud free) installs normalized with a quality score that depends on retention and average sessions per user

ROI index – based on the Return of Investment for those networks reporting both cost and revenue. So, the data for this index is reduced to 40 M installs from 50+ networks from 800+ apps.

 

Takeaways

 

Not surprisingly for anyone working in the industry, Facebook and Google dominate both the Volume and Power rankings placing consistently at first and second place for both gaming and non-gaming categories.

In the gaming category, Unity Ads is a solid third on both indexes, thanks to the wide distribution of Unity platform among game developers, while Apple Search Ads grew considerably from the previous report, ranking now third and fourth in power ranking for universal non-gaming and gaming.

Source: Appsflyer Performance Index V Edition

Interestingly, Apple Search Ads ranked in first place in the ROI index for iOS. Overall, Apple Search Ads had a 30% higher ARPU and 40% lower price than other networks.

When it comes to delivering ROI, Facebook and Google also showed their consistent strength, with more than double the revenue and roughly the average cost (vs. other networks in the index), and thus ranking #1 and #2 spots in the Android ROI Index, respectively. With 50% more revenue generated and 20% lower than the average cost, Facebook reached the #2 spot in the iOS ROI Index, while Google came in 3rd.

 

The dominance of the social and search big players was far more pronounced in non-gaming than in gaming. In fact, their share of installs in non-gaming was 70% higher than their share in gaming. When looking at operating systems, their share on Android was almost 50% higher than on iOS.

Source: Appsflyer Performance Index V Edition

Another interesting signal is the growing importance of video ads networks, confirming the importance of the medium, especially in the gaming category, where three video-only network appear in the top 10 power ranking: Unity Ads at #3, Vungle at #7 and AdColony at #8. It should be noted that Chartboost (#6) and Applovin (#5) also serve rewarded video ads in their mix, although they are not exclusively video ad networks.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the number of networks chosen by non-gaming app marketers was almost double the number of gaming ones. When looking at the top networks (minimum 500k installs), the ratio further rises to nearly 2.5x. This can be explained by the fact that gaming is more global in nature, and therefore directs marketers toward networks with global inventory. Non-gaming, on the other hand, is more local in nature, as marketers have to differentiate the channels including both local and global media partners.