Can Meta recover leadership in mobile games advertising?

One of my predictions for mobile gaming in 2026, published earlier this month, is that “Meta aggressively pursues growth in mobile gaming advertising.” I provide support for that prediction in the piece, but it’s worth unpacking the idea in more detail: not just Meta’s impetus for focusing on that business, but also the background on why Meta ceded growth in mobile games advertising to other channels and what Meta has done — and is likely to do — to recover it.

In my predictions piece, I point out that the mobile gaming vertical was historically viewed internally at Meta as its fifth region, meaning the category was as consequential to the company’s advertising business as entire geographic regions (and was important to view in isolation, given the broad geographic dispersion of mobile gaming studios and their idiosyncratic advertising needs). Meta’s ability to target and optimize mobile app install campaigns was disproportionately impacted by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy, which reached majority scale in July 2021. For more background on why that was the case, see The App Tracking Transparency recession (January 2023) and, more specific to the mobile gaming advertising use case, IDFA deprecation: winners and losers (October 2020).

In that latter piece, I assess the potential impact of ATT (which hadn’t gone live yet) across what I called “Self-Attributing Networks” (large social media platforms that sell owned inventory and manage attribution in advertisers’ apps through SDKs, eg., Meta) and “Broker Ad Networks” (traditional ad networks that connect advertisers with publishers and principally support mobile gaming advertising, eg., AppLovin). In that piece, I argue that these broker ad networks relied minimally on the IDFA (which was effectively deprecated with ATT) for targeting and could utilize other data, such as the device IP addresses, for measurement. I expand on the use case of the IDFA in mobile gaming advertising in my long-form podcast essay, Understanding AppLovin. From that episode:

Again, IDFA-indexed data was certainly layered into targeting decisions, but by-and-large, contextual relevance was likely to be a more meaningful input to targeting. The IDFA was useful for aggregating data at the cohort level to understand how well that contextual targeting worked at delivering outcomes. The IDFA in this use case isn’t applied to building behavioral histories of individuals for targeting, but rather for understanding whether advertising Game A in Game B tended to produce more average revenue per user than the advertiser was paying in CPI. In other words: the IDFA was used to get a sense of the average value of a user in one game when they were introduced to it by an ad from another game.

Meta was far more reliant on the IDFA for targeting — which is the nexus of value in digital advertising — than these broker ad networks, and, per the chart above, was disproportionately impacted by its removal, particularly for mobile games advertising. And while mobile games advertising was certainly an important source of revenue for Meta, its remediation strategy, which I outline in Meta’s Renaissance, was principally oriented toward the eCommerce category, which is its largest advertiser vertical.

So, how has Meta indicated that gaming is a renewed focus? In my predictions piece, I point to several initiatives that seem primarily aimed at mobile app install advertising. The first is Meta’s reintroduction of its Advanced Mobile Measurement (AMM) program in July 2025. AMM allowed Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs), the measurement solutions upon which nearly all app advertisers rely for attribution services (the history of this category is fascinating; I cover it briefly in The coming war between Apple and Facebook), to transmit user-level conversion data to advertisers. Meta discontinued this program in October 2021, ostensibly to comply with ATT, but reintroduced it last year as part of what I’ve described as a broader privacy shuffle across the digital advertising ecosystem.

AMM provides mobile app install advertisers with deeper granularity in the conversion data used to construct the lifetime value predictions (“pLTV”) that guide bids. This is important because increased granularity in a monetization environment that features right-skewed distributions, such as mobile gaming, almost certainly leads to higher bids for the audience segments that generate the most revenue. Fittingly, Meta also released LTVision, a product aimed at helping advertisers better estimate user lifetime value, in 2024, and it introduced a “pLTV postback” field (“Value Optimization for Non-Purchase Events“) in beta in 2025. Finally, while not exclusively applicable to the category, mobile gaming sees outsized benefits from the incrementality optimization product Meta introduced in Q4 2024, which I discuss with Meta’s VP of product in this episode of the podcast.

My sense is that Meta could accelerate these efforts to great effect in 2026 to regain momentum in mobile gaming advertising. First, the mobile gaming market has returned to growth, and it’s an attractive category to pursue. Second, due to its scale of cross-domain behavioral data and mature optimization stack, Meta is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the “signal engineering” trend that began in earnest in 2024, wherein advertisers explicitly engineer product events to measure correlation with user LTV. Meta’s pLTV postback directly facilitates that workflow, and Meta’s AI-enabled targeting and optimization infrastructure is structurally advantaged in deriving value from substantive, net new advertiser quality signals. Additionally, I believe that Meta can offer gaming advertisers a number of value-added tools related to creative production that would unlock a meaningful amount of incremental spend on that channel.

One consideration with Meta’s efforts here is whether they would capture market share from other advertising channels in the space. Mobile gaming, perhaps more than any other advertising category, is driven by efficient user acquisition spend: because cohorts tend to recoup quickly, mobile gaming advertisers are generally not budget-constrained and mostly pursue the “Waterfall Method” for budgeting, as I describe in Optimization models in digital advertising. In practice, and in the long run, this means channel-level budgets are set based on capacity and not relative ROAS; an advertiser spends as much as possible on each channel, subject to performance standards. In other words: if Meta’s product improves from an efficiency or ROAS standpoint, a mobile gaming advertiser is more likely to expand its overall budget than to shift budget to that channel from another. In this way, platform improvements are expansionary and not zero-sum.

Of course, the counterargument to that idea is supported by what I identified earlier in this very piece: that Meta’s decline in mobile gaming gave way to growth across other channels in the immediate aftermath of ATT. But my belief is that the various broker networks’ experiences following ATT are explained by two other factors:

• Systemic advertiser underinvestment in those channels prior to ATT. Many advertisers could have spent more on those channels prior to ATT but were over-reliant on Meta simply because it was an easier channel to integrate with and scale.
• Firm-level strategic decisions that impacted revenue opportunities. AppLovin acquired MoPub in October 2021 (the same month that Meta shuttered AMM); Unity and ironSource merged in 2022. It can’t be said that the broker network category saw uniform benefits from ATT, since each company responded differently.

That said, I believe that any improvements Meta engineers to its mobile gaming advertising business should benefit the entire ecosystem. This is a function of Meta’s role in mobile gaming advertising relative to that of broker ad networks: broker ad networks expose ads for games in other games in a closed loop, whereas Meta can show gaming ads to people who may not already play games. Further, games tend to avoid exposing ads to high-value players, creating adverse selection issues; because Meta doesn’t compete against its advertisers, it faces no such reservations. I unpack these topics in more detail in The economics of mobile gaming advertising.

This is expansionary: Meta has the capacity to recruit net new players to the mobile gaming ecosystem, whereas broker ad networks merely serve to move existing players between titles. This effect, if Meta can deliver significant improvements to its mobile gaming advertising product, could generate further tailwinds to mobile gaming’s growth.