This week we introduced 2 new visuals in AdIntel that are focused on the studios and what a better way to celebrate them then with a new blog post.
Top 10 Studios by Budget
Let’s start with this one first. In the image below you can see who they are. It’s interesting to see the diversity here. We have casino companies, casual studios, hyper-casual, reward apps and even ecommerce. CPIs range from $0.8 to $5.19 and the spread of IPM is even bigger – from 3 on the lower end all the way to 44.3 on the higher end.

Top 10 Studios by Paid Installs
Here the picture is quite different actually. We can see that hyper casual studios make the majority of the list with only 3 exceptions. We can also see that most of the CPI values are below $1 and IPMs are mostly above 20.

Number of apps promoted by each studio
Another observation here is that the studios who dominate on the paid installs front tend to have more promoted apps compared to studios who dominate on the budget front. Here is an example of VOODOO with quite a lot of apps promoted. This list actually goes on beyond the screenshot below.

The one thing they all have in common
While these studios specialize in different genres and have a widespread of CPI values and IPM. They all share one thing – a huge investment in creative production. Some of them have “just” hundreds of creative variations while others have over 1,000. Either way, to make it to the top these days studios need to develop a lot of creatives. To do so without a dedicated competitive intelligence tool would seem almost crazy.

The importance of creative production
Before we wrap up I want to touch on an important point that is directly connected to the paragraph above. The fact that successful studios have hundreds if not thousands of creative variations is not a coincidence. Studios that want to grow fast these days are putting up to 15% of their marketing budget into ad creative production and often up to 20% of the team will be directly involved with that. This trend has been going on for more than a year and is one of the most important trends in app marketing these days. There are a few reasons for that. First – the tasks of creating targeting rules and setting up bids has been mostly automated by the buying platforms and by 3rd party tools. This means that it’s hard for a studio to beat the competition by having superior targeting or smarter bidding. Another effect of the algorithmic nature of the media buying is that an ad with superior performance rises to the top faster than ever before. An ad with superior performance not only sucks inventory from all the the other ads of the same advertisers but also it sucks inventory from similar apps who tend to be targeted at the same audience. So the recipe for finding an ad with higher performance is simple:
- Produce as many variations as possible
- Use an ad intelligence tool to get ideas from top performing ads used by other advertisers
See it in video
If you don’t like reading – here is the entire blog post in a video. Enjoy!
The best tool for ad intelligence
If you want to inspect all the creatives and get performance KPIs for pretty much all the advertisers that matter AdIntel is the tool for you. You can try it out for free for 7 days with no commitment with just a few clicks. You can literally be playing around with the platform in less time that it took you to read this paragraph.