Chart Watch, January: Mobile Game Ad Spend Rankings Hold

The mobile game ad spend rankings for January did not shift much from where they ended 2024. Ad intelligence trackers show the same names anchoring the top of the spend charts through the month, and the top ten as a whole barely moved.

Who led the mobile game ad spend rankings

Survival and kingdom-builder 4X titles remained the heaviest UA spenders through January, a position they have held for several months now. Puzzle held its download lead through the month, with the category's usual mix of match-based and block-clearing titles keeping their place near the top of the install charts even as overall category growth stayed modest. Portfolio-style live-service titles that have been live for several years continued to appear near the top of both spend and revenue lists, a reminder that longevity, not novelty, is still the dominant pattern at the top of the charts.

One genre observation

The 4X and survival category's continued dominance of the spend charts, rather than the download charts, is the more interesting signal. These titles are not necessarily driving the largest install volumes; they are absorbing a disproportionate share of ad spend because their cost per install and lifetime value both run high enough to sustain aggressive, testing-intensive UA campaigns that most genres could not justify at the same budget.

What it means for buyers

A UA team benchmarking its own CPI or spend efficiency against "the market" this month should be careful which market it is comparing against. Benchmarking a puzzle or casual title against the spend intensity of the survival and 4X leaders will produce a misleading efficiency comparison, because those titles are optimising for a fundamentally different lifetime value curve. The useful comparison is always genre against genre, not category against category, and January's rankings are a reminder of how wide that gap between genres has become.

Chart watch returns next month once February's mobile game ad spend rankings settle.

Related archive reading

• Chart Watch, February: Mobile Game Revenue Rankings Hold
• Chart Watch, October: Mobile Game Ad Spend Charts