How to spot winning creative trends with Ad Insights

Creative is the single biggest lever in mobile UA. The targeting, the budget, the bidding strategy all matter, but a strong creative will outperform a mediocre one every time, on any network. The good news: you don't have to invent winning creatives from scratch. The market is full of them, running right now, and Ad Insights gives you a way to find them, study them, and learn from them.

This guide walks through how to use Ad Insights, part of MarketIQ Pro, to uncover the creative trends shaping your genre, decode why they work, and turn that intel into briefs your design team can run with. Each section pairs a feature with concrete examples across different genres, so you can see exactly how to apply it to the game you're working on.

Why creative research matters more than ever

Mobile players see hundreds of ads a day. Attention windows are shrinking, networks are getting more competitive, and the cost of a creative miss compounds fast; wasted spend, slower learnings, fewer iterations before your budget runs out.

The teams winning at UA right now share one habit: they study the market constantly. Not just their direct competitors, but adjacent genres, emerging mechanics, and the creative patterns popping up across the top charts. Ad Insights is built to support that habit, with five capabilities that take you from a vague hunch about "what's working" to a clear brief grounded in real performance signal: advanced filters, Creative Group, Playable Ads, Smart Creative Recommendations, and Image or Video Search.

Filter like a pro: Narrow down to the ads that actually matter

Ad Insights gives you both keyword search and structured filters, and the magic happens when you combine them. Free-text search lets you look for the specific mechanic, hook, or trend you're chasing. Filters let you scope it to your market, your players, and your monetization model.

Here are the filters worth knowing:

• Genre: match-3, hyper-casual, midcore RPG, simulation, casino, idle, and more
• Ad format: video, playable, image, rewarded
• Game monetization type: In-App Purchases (IAP), In-App Advertising (IAA), or both
• Ad network: over 100 to choose from
• Engagement metrics: sort and filter by reposts, comments, and likes
• Audience: narrow by gender and age
• Platform: iOS, Android
• Region: country or geo group
• Date range: time-bound your search to recent activity or historical trends
• Growth analysis: spot creatives that are accelerating in impressions before they peak

The trick is layering these to surface ads that actually map to your situation. Here's how that might play out in practice.

Say you're marketing a match-3 puzzle game. The genre is saturated with fake-fail and "save the dog" hooks, and you want to understand how top performers are using them. Filter by genre (match-3) and ad format (video), layer on IAP monetization to focus on creatives optimized for spenders, set a date range of the last 60 days, and narrow by region to match your target market. Then keyword search "rescue", "satisfying", or "oddly satisfying" to see how top performers are framing emotional stakes in their first three seconds.

The growth analysis filter is worth a particular call-out. Instead of looking at what's already at the top, it surfaces creatives climbing fast, meaning you can ride a trend on the way up instead of chasing it once it's peaked.

3 signals to look out for:

1. Repeated hooks across the top of your filtered results. When five different studios are running variations of the same opening three seconds, that's market consensus — and your starting point.
2. The gap between the top performer and everything else. A massive engagement lead from one creative tells you there's an unsolved problem the rest of the market hasn't cracked. Worth studying closely.
3. Sudden shifts in growth analysis week-on-week. A creative that wasn't on the radar two weeks ago and is now climbing fast is usually riding a fresh trend. Get in early.

Build smarter campaigns with Creative Group

A single great ad rarely wins on its own. What actually drives results is the sequence — the cadence of formats a player sees over the course of a campaign or funnel. Should you lead with a polished video and follow with a playable? Open with a static image and re-engage with a rewarded ad? Stack two playables back-to-back?

Creative Group answers these questions by showing you how top-performing studios sequence their creatives across formats. You can see which combinations are running in market right now, how they're weighted, and what the overall campaign structure looks like across networks.

Take a hyper-casual launch. Creative Group will often show top performers leading with playable-first sequencing, a quick interactive demo to qualify intent, followed by video reinforcement on second exposure. If your team is debating whether to invest in playables, that pattern is the evidence you need to make the call. You'll also see how those playables are weighted relative to image and video across networks, so you know whether to lean playable-heavy on AppLovin and ironSource and reserve video for Meta and TikTok, or balance formats more evenly.

Use Creative Group as a planning tool. Before you write the brief, look at how the top three studios in your genre are sequencing their formats. If they're all converging on a pattern, that's market consensus you can borrow. If they're diverging, that's a sign of an open testing window where your team can find an edge.

3 signals to look out for:

1. The opening format. What's running first in the sequence: playable, video, or image? That's the format the market believes does the heaviest lifting at the top of the funnel.
2. Format weight per network. A top studio leaning 70% playable on AppLovin but 70% video on Meta tells you to brief format-specific variants from day one, not retrofit at upload.
3. Whether competitors are converging or diverging. Convergence is a safe bet you can borrow. Divergence is a testing window and your chance to set the next trend.

Playable ads: Your hidden advantage

Playables are one of the highest-converting ad formats in mobile, and one of the hardest to produce. Designing them well takes craft, iteration, and a clear sense of which mechanics actually translate into a 15-second interactive demo. Ad Insights gives you a head start with a dedicated Playable Ads section containing more than 30,000 playable creatives you can interact with in real time.

This is different from watching video ads. You're playing the same demo a prospective player would, which lets you study onboarding, difficulty curve, CTA timing, and friction points all in one sitting.

Take a casual simulation game: farm, restaurant, or build-a-base. The trend in playables for this category is currently around "choice" mechanics: let the player make a tap decision that has visible consequences, then push install. Open the Playable Ads section, filter to the top sim titles in your tier, and play through 10 to 15 of them in sequence. Within an hour you'll have a clear instinct for what works in your category. And you can brief your design team with named examples instead of adjectives.

The point of the Playable Ads section isn't to copy. It's to build pattern recognition fast enough that your team's first playable doesn't waste a sprint discovering what the rest of the market already knows.

3 signals to look out for:

1. The first three seconds. How is the core mechanic taught? The best playables get the player interacting before they realize they're being onboarded.
2. The difficulty curve. Top performers almost never let you fail. Watch how the design rails you toward the satisfaction beat without breaking immersion.
3. CTA timing. Is it triggered by a tap, a win moment, or a fixed timer? The pattern across top performers in your category tells you when conversion intent peaks.

Smart Creative Recommendations: Learn from the games closest to yours

The cleanest signal in creative research comes from titles that are genuinely similar to yours: same genre, same monetization model, same player demographic. Smart Creative Recommendations pulls every creative from those similar titles into a single view, so you don't have to hunt across multiple game profiles to build a complete picture.

Search any game or app, and you'll get an overview of every image and video creative associated with that title and its closest peers. From there, you can spot winning patterns at a glance: shared hooks, repeated framing, common color palettes, similar voiceover styles.

The clearest moment to lean on this is a soft launch. Run Smart Creative Recommendations on the three closest analogs to your game, for a cozy farming sim, you might pull recommendations off the biggest farming sims in your tier. The pattern that emerges across all three is the safest creative starting point for your soft launch, and the proven formula you can A/B against your team's original ideas.

3 signals to look out for:

1. Hooks that repeat across all three analogs. A hook used by every comparable studio in your tier isn't a coincidence; it's the proven entry point for your audience.
2. Visual treatments that cluster. Shared color palettes, framing choices, and voiceover styles point to what the genre's audience already associates with quality and trust.
3. The outlier in the set. One title doing something nobody else is doing is either ahead of the trend or about to fail. Worth a closer look either way.

Image and video search: When you've seen something and need to find it

Sometimes the spark comes from a creative you've already seen. Whether  on TikTok, in a competitor's recent campaign, in a screenshot a colleague sent over Slack. You don't have the title. You don't know the studio. You just have the image or the clip.

Image or Video Search solves that. Upload the asset and Ad Insights surfaces matching or visually similar creatives from across its library.

Picture this: someone on your team spots a viral idle game ad on TikTok with an unexpected number-stacking mechanic that's racking up views. Nobody knows the studio behind it. Screenshot the video, drop it into Image or Video Search, and within seconds you'll identify the advertiser, find the original creative, and surface every variant of the hook your team should study before briefing your own version.

This pairs especially well with Smart Creative Recommendations. Use Image or Video Search to find the seed creative, then jump to Smart Creative Recommendations to study every creative from the studio behind it.

3 signals to look out for:

1. The original vs the remixes. The version with the earliest run date is usually the source. Everything else is iteration; useful, but secondary.
2. How many studios have copied the hook. Heavy imitation means the trend is mature and crowded; light imitation means there's still room to enter early.
3. The studio behind the seed creative. Once you've identified them, their other creatives are your next research target; same team, same instincts, often the same playbook applied across titles.

Put it all together: A weekly creative research habit

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

1. Monday: Scan the growth analysis filter in your genre to flag climbing creatives
2. Tuesday: Open Creative Group for your top three competitors and check whether sequencing has shifted in the last 30 days
3. Wednesday: Spend 30 minutes playing through five new entries in the Playable Ads section
4. Thursday: Run Smart Creative Recommendations on a new analogue title to widen your reference pool
5. Friday: Pull your findings into a shared doc and brief one new creative concept based on a pattern you spotted

Compounded over a quarter, that's 12 to 15 fresh creative briefs grounded in real market signal. That's how a creative engine gets built.

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 at UA aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who learn fastest from what's already working.

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