Operating Brief: UA Budget Planning After Earnings

Two networks reported Q2 2025 results on the same day this week. AppLovin's advertising revenue came in around $1.259 billion, up 77% year on year, with Q3 guidance of $1.32 billion to $1.34 billion at an 81% adjusted EBITDA margin. Unity's revenue was about $441 million, down slightly year on year but ahead of expectations, with its Ad Network up 15% sequentially and now 49% of Grow. Most of what gets written about a week like this treats the numbers as a verdict on which company is winning. UA budget planning after earnings needs a narrower question: what, specifically, changes in a media plan because of what was disclosed, and what stays exactly as it was.

Separate the signal from the story

An earnings call is written for investors, and its framing serves that audience. Growth rate matters to a shareholder in a way it does not directly matter to a UA lead choosing where next month's budget goes. The number that does matter to a buyer is capacity and direction: is a network's inventory and automation improving fast enough to justify shifting spend toward it, and is that improvement durable or a one-quarter artefact. As we noted in AppLovin Unity Q2 2025 Earnings: Two Diverging Paths, one company's growth is coming from a maturing ad model at scale while the other is mid-turnaround. Those are different bets for a media plan, even when both headlines read as "beat expectations."

UA budget planning after earnings: a four-line review

A practical operating brief converts each earnings report into four lines, reviewed before the next budget cycle locks.

• Confirm or challenge current allocation. If a network's growth is coming from the same mechanism a buyer is already using (in AppLovin's case, Axon-driven automated bidding), the result is a reason to hold or nudge allocation up. If it is coming from a segment a buyer has no exposure to, it is not yet a reason to act.
• Check guidance against the buyer's own campaign calendar. AppLovin's Q3 guide implies continued CPM pressure through the quarter. A team planning a Q3 launch should model that pressure into their CPI targets now rather than discovering it mid-flight.
• Flag where the story is early, not proven. Unity's Ad Network share of Grow moving to 49% is a meaningful shift, but one quarter of sequential growth on a rebuilt model is a trend to watch, not yet a reason to move a large share of spend off a network with a longer track record.
• Note anything structural, not just financial. A result that includes a product or policy change, not only a revenue line, deserves separate follow-up regardless of the headline number.

Worked example: a mid-size hybrid-casual budget

Take a hypothetical UA team spending $400,000 a month, split 55% AppLovin, 30% Unity, 15% other networks, ahead of this week's results. The Aug 6 numbers alone are not sufficient grounds to change that split; nothing in either report reverses the assumptions the split was built on. What they are sufficient grounds for is two smaller actions: setting aside 5 to 8% of the Unity allocation as a test budget against the newer Ad Network placements described in the results, with a four-week window to judge CPI and retention against the existing baseline before committing more; and building a Q3 CPM buffer of 5 to 10% into the AppLovin line, reflecting the guided margin and growth trajectory rather than the prior quarter's average cost. Neither move is a reallocation. Both are the kind of small, reviewable adjustment that an earnings result should actually produce.

What the calendar adds to the calculation

None of this happens in isolation from the rest of Q3. Budget planning after earnings has to sit alongside the seasonal CPM curve that is already moving independently of anything a network discloses, and alongside the production cadence a creative team can actually sustain if a test budget is approved. A UA lead who approves the Unity test line above without checking whether the creative team has spare concept capacity to feed it is setting the test up to fail on creative starvation rather than on the network's own merits, which produces a false negative that then gets remembered as "we tried that network and it didn't work."

Where teams overreact

The most common mistake after a strong network earnings report is treating it as permission to consolidate spend faster than the underlying product change justifies. A network's revenue growth reflects its aggregate advertiser base, not any single campaign's fit with that network's inventory and audience. The second common mistake, as covered in Summer CPM Seasonality and Planning the H2 UA Budget, is forgetting that Q3 seasonality is already pushing CPMs up independently of anything a network discloses, which makes it easy to misattribute a cost increase to a platform shift when part of it is simply the calendar.

Turning the brief into a habit

The value of this exercise compounds if it happens every earnings cycle rather than once. A team that keeps a running log of what each quarter's results actually changed in their allocation, separate from what the headline implied, builds a much better sense of which network's guidance to trust over time. That log is more useful heading into Q4 planning than any single quarter's growth percentage, because it shows which companies' stated direction has consistently matched what buyers saw in their own accounts afterward.

The habit also protects a team from a subtler risk: reacting differently to the same underlying fact depending on how it was framed on the call. A network describing a metric as an "inflection point" and one describing the same magnitude of change as "encouraging early progress" are not necessarily reporting different realities, only different investor-relations choices. A budget review grounded in a written log of prior quarters' actual outcomes is far less susceptible to that framing than one relying on whoever on the team happened to listen to the call live and formed an impression from the tone of the language used.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• Creative Volume Needs After an Ad Network CPI Reset
• The Ledger #21: A Settlement and Earnings Week Roundup