The UA reading list: reports and benchmarks that matter

A UA team's reading list has three layers, and they do different jobs. The annual state-of-the-industry reports from mobile measurement partners and market-intelligence firms sit at the top. Beneath them are the quarterly earnings and platform updates from the ad networks and engines the team actually spends through. At the bottom sit the narrower benchmark reports, which give a rough sense of where a studio's own numbers sit against the wider market. None of them is a source of numbers to plug into a forecast. They're context: a way of judging whether a studio's own results are unusual, and of spotting where the market is heading before it shows up in the studio's own dashboards.

Which annual reports should a UA team read?

Two reports earn blocked-out time each year. The first is the mobile measurement partners' state-of-gaming style report; AppsFlyer and Adjust both publish annual editions built from aggregated data across their client base. The second is the market-intelligence equivalent, principally Sensor Tower's State of Mobile and its games-specific editions. They see different things. An MMP's report comes from attribution data it actually processes, which makes it strong on install volume and paid-to-organic ratios; it also reads retention patterns and creative-format share well. A market-intelligence firm's report comes from store-level modelling and third-party signal estimation, so it's strong where the MMP is blind: download and revenue rankings, genre-level trends, the competitor-level detail that client-only data can't show.

Read both against each other rather than picking one as authoritative; that's the single most useful habit a UA team can build from this list.

Which quarterly and monthly reports matter?

Read the quarterly earnings of any ad platform the studio spends meaningful budget through, and read them in full, or at least the shareholder letter and the guidance commentary rather than the headline revenue number. For most game studios the relevant three are AppLovin, Unity, Digital Turbine. A platform's own account of where its growth is coming from (which ad format, which vertical, which region) tends to arrive before that shift shows in any single studio's account performance, since one studio is a small sample of a platform's total demand. Monthly or near-monthly market-share reports, the kind that track which titles led downloads and revenue in a given month, are a different animal. Over several months they're useful for genre-level pattern spotting. Month to month they're noisy and often unreliable, and no single month's ranking deserves much weight.

What are MMP state-of-gaming reports specifically good for?

An MMP report is the best available source for creative-format trends, such as how playable ads or video have shifted as a share of total creative volume, and for broad directional claims about paid-to-organic ratios or session behaviour across a large aggregated base of client apps. It isn't a substitute for a studio's own cohort data. The aggregate mixes portfolios that differ in genre, in spend level, in geography, and a studio's own retention or payback curve can sit well above or below it for entirely normal reasons tied to that studio's genre and monetisation model. Treat the headline figures as a statement about where the whole market is moving. That's useful in planning conversations with finance or leadership about where the industry sits. It is not a target for a specific game.

How should market-intelligence reports be read?

Reports built on store-level estimation rather than direct measurement, the kind that produce download and revenue rankings and total market-size figures, are best read for trend lines and relative rankings, not absolute numbers. Two well-regarded market-intelligence firms can and do publish different absolute figures for the same market in the same period, because their modelling methodologies differ; the gap doesn't mean one of them is wrong. The direction each report shows over consecutive editions is far more reliable. Are installs growing or shrinking? Is a genre's revenue share rising? Are ad-supported titles gaining or losing share of downloads? A studio's own internal data should always be the primary input for its own decisions, with these reports as the sanity check on whether it is moving with the market or against it.

How do you avoid misapplying a benchmark?

The most common misuse of any published benchmark is treating an aggregate figure as a target for a specific game, when the aggregate came from a portfolio of titles whose genre mix and spend level and monetisation model all differ from the game in question. The second misuse is methodological. A benchmark published from an MMP's attributed data gets compared against a studio's own number built from a network's self-reported figure, and the team reads the mismatch as a real performance gap when it's a definitional one. The safest way to use any benchmark is to note its source and the population it describes, and its methodology where that's published, then ask only whether a studio's own trend is moving in the same direction as the benchmark's, not whether the absolute numbers match. A benchmark that disagrees with a studio's own data is far more often a sign to check the comparison than a sign the studio is underperforming.

A related trap is timing. A report published mid-quarter often describes a period that ended weeks or months earlier, and a fast-moving shift in cost or platform behaviour can have partly reversed by the time the report reaches a UA team's reading list. Note the period a report actually covers, not its publication date, before quoting its figures in an internal planning document. A benchmark that was accurate for the quarter it measured can still mislead a team planning the quarter after.

It also helps to build a short internal habit around this reading list rather than treating each report as a one-off event. A brief note after each major release (three or four lines: what changed since the last edition, whether the studio's own numbers track with it or against it) compounds into a useful internal record over a year or two. That record ends up worth more than any single report. It's the one document that connects published industry benchmarks to a specific studio's own trajectory over time, and that comparison is the only one that should inform a real decision.

Related archive reading

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

• How to Read AppsFlyer's Annual Gaming Benchmarks Report
• Annual and quarterly UA budget planning