How to research the mobile games market in 5 steps with Ad Insights

Creative research is one half of the picture. The other half is market research: knowing where your genre is heading, which titles are gaining ground, and where the whitespace is hiding. Without that view, even the best creatives are aimed at a market you only half understand.

This guide walks through how to use Ad Insights, available with MarketIQ Pro, as a complete market research workflow. We'll follow the typical journey from broad market scan to actionable competitor breakdown across five features: Top Charts, the game profile, Download and Revenue Data, Ad Distribution, and Similar Audience Apps. Each section pairs a feature with a worked example, so you can see exactly how each step builds on the last.

Why market research matters

Most studios know their direct competitors. Far fewer have visibility into the wider market: the fast risers, the genre-adjacent titles, the studios setting trends two genres over that will reach yours next quarter. That blind spot is where mistakes get made: greenlighting a game in a saturated category, missing a regional opportunity, or burning a soft launch on the wrong audience.

A structured workflow fixes that. Ad Insights gives you five capabilities that, used in sequence, take you from a top-down scan of your market to a granular breakdown of any competitor's strategy. The studios that win are the ones who do this research before they commit, not after the campaign underperforms.

Step 1: Scan the market with Top Charts

The first move is broad. Top Charts lets you explore high-performing apps across downloads and revenue, surface store rankings, and spot what's promoted across major networks. It's the fastest way to identify standout titles in your space and see who's earning the impressions.

For your studio, the first step is to filter Top Charts to the casual simulation category, set the region to your core markets, and sort by revenue to see who's monetizing best. Then re-sort by downloads to see who's pulling the most volume, because the two leaderboards rarely match perfectly, and the gap between them tells you something about the genre's economics.

What you're looking for: which studios dominate the top 50, how many new entrants have broken into the top 100 in the last 90 days, and whether the leaders are diversified portfolio studios or single-hit wonders.

3 signals to look out for:

1. The gap between download leaders and revenue leaders. When the top of each list is different, it tells you the genre has room for both volume plays and premium plays and which strategy your studio is better suited to.
2. New entrants in the top 100. A title that wasn't on the chart 90 days ago and is now climbing fast usually points to a fresh mechanic, a new monetization model, or an underserved audience.
3. Studio concentration at the top. If five studios own the top 20, the category is consolidated, and breaking in is hard. If 15 studios share the top 20, there's room for newcomers, and your studio has a viable path.

Step 2: Spot a game worth investigating

Top Charts gives you the lay of the land. The next step is zooming in on one title that stands out: a fast riser, a consistent top performer, or an outlier whose success isn't obvious. Click the name, and you're inside the game's profile, ready to dig deeper.

3 signals to look out for:

1. Fast risers vs steady performers. A fast riser tells you what's trending right now. A steady performer tells you what works long-term. You probably want to study one of each.
2. Mismatches between download and revenue rank. Strong revenue with mid downloads usually means a tight whale economy. Strong downloads with mid revenue usually means an IAA-led model. The shape of that mismatch shapes your monetization brief.
3. Unfamiliar studios in the top ranks. A name you don't recognize sitting near the top is either a rising studio worth tracking or evidence that the genre's bar to entry is lower than you assumed. Either way, worth a closer look.

Step 3: Analyze performance with Download and Revenue Data

Inside the game's profile, Download and Revenue Data shows estimated performance over time: enough to read the trajectory of a title. You can see how a game's downloads and revenue have shifted, compare monetization models, and use App Comparison to benchmark multiple games in one view.

Let's say you pull up download and revenue charts for the past 182 months. Maybe you can see that the rising title went through a soft launch in Southeast Asia six months ago before scaling globally; its download curve has the classic ramp-then-plateau shape of a successful scale-up. Revenue trails downloads by about 30 days, which is normal for a sim that monetizes through long-tail IAP. You can then add two more titles via App Comparison (the category leader and one mid-tier competitor) to see how all three trajectories compare.

3 signals to look out for:

1. The shape of the curve. A clean ramp suggests a successful soft launch and a confident global push. A sawtooth pattern suggests a studio testing variants. A plateau means the game has found its ceiling.
2. The lag between downloads and revenue. A short lag (under 2 weeks) points to fast-monetizing mechanics like ads or starter packs. A long lag (30+ days) points to commitment-based monetization (battle passes, deep IAP, subscriptions).
3. How the comparison set diverges over time. When three games in the same category have wildly different trajectories, it's a signal that audience preferences are splitting (and one of those splits is where your opportunity sits).

Step 4: Break down their ad distribution strategy

Performance data tells you what happened. Ad Distribution tells you how it happened. This is where Ad Insights gets to the strategic core of competitor research, showing you the ad networks they rely on, the regions where they're winning, and the audiences they're targeting.

Three lenses are worth using:

• Ad Network: which networks they're spending on, weighted by share. Useful for identifying networks you haven't tested yet, or seeing where your existing buys overlap with the competition.
• Country and Regions: where they're winning impressions. Tells you which markets they've localized for and which they're ignoring; a clue to where regional whitespace might exist.
• Audience Analysis: gender and age breakdowns of their reach. Especially powerful in early ideation, because it tells you who's actually engaging with the genre, not who the studio claims to target.

You can pull Ad Distribution for the rising title and, for example, see that 80% of its spend is concentrated on AppLovin and Unity Ads, with almost nothing on Meta. You can also see the title indexes heavily on women 35–54 in the US and UK, a more mature audience than the studio expected for a casual sim. That changes the brief: their next game shouldn't compete head-on with a younger demographic.

Two lenses to choose between when you pull the data:

• The Impression Estimate Index shows data based on where creatives appeared on devices only - the cleanest read of in-market activity.
• The Creative Index includes both devices and ad libraries, giving you a broader view of what's been distributed even if it hasn't surfaced on a tracked device.

3 signals to look out for:

1. Network concentration. When 70%+ of spend sits on one or two networks, that's a deliberate strategy, not a default, and it tells you where the competition believes performance comes from.
2. Regional outliers. A market where a competitor is heavily winning impressions but you barely operate is either a localization opportunity or a market they've already locked. The next data point, local revenue trend, will tell you which.
3. Audience whitespace. When the entire category indexes on one demographic, a near-adjacent demographic is often underserved. This is one of the most powerful signals in early ideation.

Step 5: Identify other games with overlapping audiences

The final move opens the aperture again. Similar Audience Apps surfaces other games and apps your target audience is also engaging with, many of which won't be on your radar yet, and many of which sit outside your immediate genre. Teams at Voodoo rely on this daily to spot hidden competitors and emerging titles before they show up in Top Charts.

You can run Similar Audience Apps on the rising title and discover that its audience overlaps heavily with a cluster of word puzzle games and lifestyle apps, not with the obvious casual sim competitors. That's a major signal: the audience for this category isn't where your assumptions placed it. The brief for their next game shifts again: you now want to study the word puzzle leaders for monetization mechanics, and you want the visual style of your sim to feel adjacent to lifestyle apps, not other sims.

3 signals to look out for:

1. Overlap with adjacent genres. When your target audience also engages heavily with a genre you didn't expect, your real competitive set is bigger than you thought, and your creative reference pool just expanded.
2. Repeated apps across multiple competitor lookups. If three top titles in your category all share overlap with the same five outside apps, those five apps are your audience's true center of gravity. Worth studying their mechanics, their UX, and their monetization.
3. Hidden competitors. Titles that don't appear in Top Charts for your category but show up consistently in Similar Audience Apps are often pulling your audience's attention without your noticing. Adding them to your tracking list early pays off later.

Put it all together: A weekly market research habit

The studios getting the most out of Ad Insights treat market research the same way they treat creative research: as a weekly habit, not a quarterly project. A simple workflow that compounds:

1. Monday: open Top Charts in your category and scan for new entrants in the top 100
2. Tuesday: pick one fast riser and dig into their game profile and Download and Revenue trajectory
3. Wednesday: break down their Ad Distribution across network, region, and audience
4. Thursday: run Similar Audience Apps on the same title to find adjacent opportunities
5. Friday: pull your findings into a shared doc and flag any signal worth acting on; a new market entry, a network worth testing, an audience segment worth briefing

Compounded over a quarter, that's 12 to 15 fully researched competitor profiles plus an evolving map of where your genre is heading. Combine it with the weekly creative research habit and you have a market intelligence engine running in 90 minutes a week.

Getting started

Ad Insights is available with MarketIQ Pro. Existing GameAnalytics users can add it to their account and start using these workflows the same day. New here? Start a free trial and see how the market researches itself.

The teams that win in mobile aren't the ones who guess fastest. They're the ones who know the market deepest, and turn that intel into the next bet.

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