Meet them where they are: Using market research to inform your game ads targeting

Once your game is published, you're always looking to grow your player base. But it's not just about quantity, it's about quality. Acquiring users who genuinely resonate with your game is vital to building a sustainable, loyal player base. Finding the right audience quickly is crucial when acquiring new users. The faster you identify your core players, the more efficiently you can allocate your marketing budget, maximizing ROI and attracting high-quality players likely to stick around.

So, how do you identify these users, and how has targeting evolved to meet new challenges?

The shift in targeting: How privacy changes reshaped the landscape

In recent years, user acquisition targeting has undergone a significant shift. Changes to Apple's Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) policy introduced a new reality for mobile marketers, affecting the ways you can reach and track players across devices. Since IDFA now lets users opt out of tracking, this change lowered the accessibility of granular data about individual users, leaving UA managers to adapt and find new ways to reach their audiences.

Where you could once rely on third-party data to understand who and where your potential players were, you're now more focused on first-party and aggregated data insights. This raises the importance of knowing exactly where and how to target users effectively and efficiently.

What data matters now?

With these changes, it's time to turn to alternative sources and strategies to inform your targeting. Here's what you need to focus on:

• Demographic insights: Knowing who your players are (age, gender, interests) helps you understand who's likely to download and play your game.
• Geographic data: Regionally-based data provides context on where your players are and the cultural relevance of your game's themes and mechanics.
• Engagement patterns: DAU and retention data for competitor games reveal not just who's playing, but who's actually sticking around, which is what matters for LTV.
• Ad placement: Learning where your competitors are placing their ads and on which networks can guide your ad placements to reach a similar audience.
• Creative performance: Observing what creative strategies perform best across regions, demographics, and platforms gives insight into how to craft ads that resonate. We covered this in greater detail in our guide on spotting winning creative trends.

Find your game's audience in the right place

Identifying and targeting your audience in the right places can significantly improve your UA campaigns. When you know exactly where to find your audience, you save time, budget, and effort, making UA not only faster but more effective.

Data-backed targeting helps you connect with users predisposed to enjoy your game's genre and style, which translates to higher engagement, lower churn, and increased user stickiness. It also enables you to optimize your ad spend, avoiding the trial-and-error that eats budget without moving key metrics.

Pinpointing your audience with Ad Insights

Ad Insights, the competitive intelligence tool inside MarketIQ Pro, gives you a powerful way to understand exactly where your audience is and where they're most likely to engage with your game. Here's how you can leverage Ad Insights data to refine your targeting:

• Explore competitor ads: Look at your competitors' ads for similar games. This gives you an idea of what's working for them in terms of creative messaging, format, and frequency.
• Check targeted regions: Ad Insights shows you which regions games are advertised in. By analyzing these trends, you can identify the best regions to target with your campaigns and avoid those with limited performance potential.
• Analyze ad network distribution: Ad Insights provides insights into which ad networks specific games use. If successful games in your genre all appear on a particular network, that's a strong indication it's worth including in your strategy.
• Understand audience engagement: DAU and retention data help you separate games that acquire many users from games that keep them, giving you a clearer view of which competitors are worth benchmarking against.
• Top media channels: Knowing where ads appear, whether in social media, search, or other platforms, helps you understand where your audience spends their time.
• Decide on the language: Checking languages in regions (especially those with multilingual populations) provides clues on the correct language and tone for your ads.

What happens when targeting is just right

When your targeting hits the mark, everything clicks. Players see relevant ads and become much more likely to install, engage with, and stick with your game over time. This level of stickiness is critical for a few reasons:

• Increased retention and LTV
• Efficient monetization
• Stronger community building

By using data-driven insights to find and connect with your ideal players, you're not just acquiring users. You're building a sustainable community that will drive your game's success in the long term.

Take it further

Targeting is one lens of a broader market research practice. Two follow-up guides worth reading:

• How to research the mobile games market in 5 steps with Ad Insights walks through the full workflow, from top charts to competitor breakdown to audience overlap analysis.
• How to spot winning creative trends with Ad Insights covers what to look for in the creatives themselves once you've identified who's worth studying.

Ad Insights is part of MarketIQ Pro. Start a free trial to explore the full toolkit.

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