User acquisition for mobile games, with the creative made in house.

What a mobile game UA agency does

A user acquisition (UA) agency buys paid installs for a mobile game across the ad networks, and is held to what those players are worth: installs, retention, payers and return on spend. The work is setting goals and budgets per network, supplying the creative each network needs, and reading the results in the measurement partner every week.

Flixr runs and reads paid media on AppLovin, Meta and TikTok, puts a creative lead inside the client's ad account, and makes the creative itself: UGC and creator video, playables, end cards and the pages they lead to. Clients come to us for either half, the media or the creative, and most end up with both, because the ad decides the audience on today's networks.

The networks, and what each one asks of you

Every major network now buys toward a goal you set and leaves most of the targeting to its own models. What changes between them is the goal menu and the creative they run on.

Network	What you set	What it says about creative
AppLovin	Competitive goals "in-line with your profitability targets"; a daily budget that delivers at least 15 to 20 conversions a day; "a single, global budget"	"the majority of AppLovin's inventory is video-based"; use "a mix of video, playable, and static assets"
Meta	Advantage+ app campaigns: 1 campaign, 1 ad set, multiple ads	Formerly Automated App Ads; uses "machine learning and automated systems to drive more results for your app install ads"
TikTok	App Promotion objective: drive installs or retarget existing users, then an optimisation goal (installs, or an in-app conversion such as purchase)	Ads are built in Ads Manager after the goal is set
Unity	Install (CPI, the default), ROAS target, Event (retention is one option), Creative testing	Creative testing campaigns give "each creative pack a fair opportunity to serve impressions"
Google	App campaigns across Search, Play, YouTube, the Display Network and Discover	You supply "text, images, videos, and HTML5 assets"; Google tests ad combinations and serves the best

Sources for each row are AppLovin's support centre, Meta's developer docs, TikTok's help centre, Unity's docs and Google Ads Help, all linked in our sources list.

Our order, for most games: AppLovin first, then Meta, TikTok and the other networks your game buys on. Our side-by-side on the first two is in AppLovin vs Meta Ads.

How creative and media interact

Read the table again and the pattern is plain: the advertiser sets a goal and a budget, and the network's model decides who sees what. The one input left with real range is the creative. That is the argument in the networks know your users better than you do, and it is why a UA team that cannot supply new creative every week stalls.

In practice the creative has to cover several jobs at once. A playable for Metacore lets the player try the game inside the ad. A creator video like Activision's Free Space or Dream Games' Against the Clock sells the game through a person. Motion work like Warner Bros Games' Sheepstealer Outrun Split Screen shows the game world. Live action like Zynga's NBA Pro Gamer Moves stages an idea. Each reaches a different player, which is what we mean by new audiences. How many you need is in how many creatives you need for AppLovin.

MMPs and measurement

A mobile measurement partner (MMP) is, in Singular's words, a "third-party marketing measurement and attribution company" "that collects, organizes, and presents data from marketing campaigns." It is the neutral place where every network's claims are reconciled, and where we read results.

iOS. Apps need the App Tracking Transparency framework if they collect data and share it with other companies to track people across apps and websites. On iOS 14.5 and later, Apple's docs say the advertising identifier returns all zeros if the app has not requested authorization or the user declines. Install attribution without that identifier runs through Apple's own frameworks. Apple's SKAdNetwork page now says to use AdAttributionKit for app ad campaigns on the App Store and alternative marketplaces. Under both, the device sends postbacks to the ad network; Apple sets a postback data tier "to help ensure crowd anonymity"; the advertised app updates a conversion value as the person engages, across three conversion windows; and the signed postback "doesn't include user- or device-specific data." For installs, up to five other ad networks receive a non-winning postback.

Android. The advertising ID is "user-resettable, and user-deletable", and once deleted, apps asking for it "will receive a string of zeros." The Play Install Referrer API gives the referrer URL and the timestamps of the referrer click and of when the install began. Google announced on 17 October 2025 that it would retire the Privacy Sandbox Attribution Reporting API on Chrome and Android, citing feedback and "low levels of adoption."

What that means for a game, in our view: iOS results arrive as postbacks whose detail depends on a privacy tier and carry no user-level data, so creative decisions there are made on coarser signals. Both are read in the MMP, next to each network's own reporting, and judged on payers and return, not on clicks. When a channel's credit looks too good, test it: is AppLovin incremental or taking Meta's credit.

The weekly loop

The ad is the output; the system is the product. Signals come in: your results, your ad library, your rivals and category, and what we have learned across clients. The loop runs every week: brief, make, launch, read, log. Flixr Studio, our own tool, tracks every ad running in a category on AppLovin, Meta and TikTok, how long each one lasted and what replaced it, and calls the winners by what the networks keep funding rather than by what got clicks; it has read over 40,000 ads across 195 markets. We make video, creators and UGC, motion, playables, end cards and statics from the same brief, from 7,600+ creators ready to brief, with generative AI where it earns its place and cast actors where trust has to land.

What to expect in the first month

An engagement starts with read-only access to your results and ad accounts, so we are judged on the same numbers as your team. The first month is spent moving in: reading 90 days of your ads one by one, a gap analysis of what works and who you do not reach yet, then the first three hypotheses go live and the logbook opens.