Thriving in a Privacy-Driven Era: The Future of In-Game Advertising

The mobile gaming industry continues to experience unprecedented growth, with Adjust's 2021 data revealing significant increases in sessions, installs, retention rates, and time spent in-app compared to 2020. This upward trend is particularly notable given the substantial growth witnessed in 2020 due to the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. As a result, in-game advertising has become an essential component of mobile growth strategies, with mobile games projected to capture approximately 61% of the gaming market share by 2022, up from 52% in 2021. The ability of skilled user acquisition teams to find, target, acquire, and retain users while adapting to privacy changes and post-IDFA challenges on iOS is a key factor in this success. Initially, average opt-in rate predictions for iOS 14 were as low as 5%, but the current industry-wide opt-in rate at Adjust stands at 26%, with games showing a promising 31% opt-in rate as of Q1 2022. Breaking down the data into sub-verticals, hypercasual and action games have achieved opt-in rates of 39%, while racing games have reached 40%. For some individual titles, opt-in rates have exceeded 70%. These high opt-in rates have contributed to the rise in gaming revenue, providing marketers with a significant amount of data to work with, including deterministic data and next-generation predictive solutions for analyzing SKAdNetwork data sets. In-game advertising has become a compelling option for mobile marketers, with the mobile games market generating $7.4 billion from player spending in December 2021 and eight mobile games achieving their biggest year ever in 2021, each generating over $1 billion. Securing opt-in is a crucial first step in any post-IDFA strategy, and once a pool of engaged users is established, there are multiple ways to work with the consented device-level data received. The success of the mobile games vertical highlights the importance of strategic user acquisition teams, which have had to adapt to a new focus on user privacy. Agility and flexibility are now more essential than ever, requiring a balance between automation and creative, data-minded UA teams. In a post-IDFA world, success on SKAdNetwork relies heavily on leveraging conversion values to understand user behavior, measure campaign performance, and optimize for growth. The key is identifying events that occur within the first 24 hours post-install, which can be indicative of future events, and assigning a conversion value to these events. Mobile game publishers have the advantage of using the Identifier for Vendors (IDFV), which is still available on iOS and allows for cross-promotional campaigns and accurate attribution data. In-game ads come in various formats, and matching the right ad with the right users and moments in-game is crucial. Data can inform which players are more likely to engage with specific ads and at what points in the game each ad type works best. As the gaming industry continues to adapt to the challenges of advertising on mobile, measurement will be key to evolving alongside the industry and staying ahead of the competition.